Clichés

  • By Camille Sherman

    What is the scientific process

    Of transforming a thing

    Out of reverence and relevance

    And into cliché

       

    Is it a simple question of quantity

    The stomach ache that follows

    Empty candy wrappers

    Fanned out before tiny costumed bodies

     

    Is it great expectation

    A push for originality

    An inner motor disdained

    By what’s been done before

     

    Perhaps boredom or impatience

    A haughty bristle at the suggestion

    That there is something new to gain

     

    We’ve seen it all before

    Said it all before

    Thought it all before

     

    But when no one is looking

    And we sneak a furtive glance at the stars

    Or steal the scent of a passing flower

    Or well at the first notes of a love song

    Our sweet clichés will rise again

    Unoffended that we were too cool

    To remember why they were worthy

    Of perpetual repetition

    To begin with

    Camille Sherman is a professional opera singer from the Bay Area. She trained at The Boston Conservatory and the San Francisco Conservatory of music, and served as an Artist in Residence at Pensacola Opera and Portland Opera. She currently lives in Portland, where she continues to sing and develop artistic projects with local artists.

  • By Julie Wilder-Sherman

    Goodbyes can come in so many forms. 

    There’s the long goodbye. The short goodbye. The swollen goodbye and the thin goodbye. The brittle goodbye and the overwrought goodbye.

    Short goodbyes can be quick for so many reasons. You don’t like someone, so you want to get away. You love someone too much and each moment of your parting makes you feel worse. Short goodbyes can occur because you’re ready to move on. Or you’re afraid. Or you’re late for an appointment. Or you just don’t like situations that drag on and on. Short goodbyes can be a brisk hug, a handshake, or even dropping someone off at the curb at the airport.

    Long goodbyes can be swollen with tears. They can get wet and messy and sweaty. Long goodbyes can leave puffy eyes and red noses. Long goodbyes can have kids tugging at their parents’ coats, rolling their eyes because the adults are taking too long. Or they can be kids grasping at their parents’ coat, clinging, begging and screaming to not be let go.

    Goodbyes to friends as we move away. Goodbye to children as they grow up and step away from you and into adulthood. Goodbye to parents as their souls complete their journey on earth and leave the dimensions we understand to go on to the ones we don’t.

    Goodbye to dishes and dining room sets that were purchased for weddings then sold after divorce.

    Goodbyes to pets who trusted their lives to you, then went over the rainbow bridge to dog heaven. Or the kitty ranch. Or the goldfish ocean. Or hamster haven.

    Goodbyes to what we know, what we want and can no longer keep. To what we no longer love or use or need. Goodbyes are realizing that when it was with you, it served its purpose and its work is done.

    San Francisco native Julie Wilder- Sherman is a long-time resident of Petaluma, California. She began reading books at an early age, encouraged by her mother, who would allow her to take books to bed when she was as young as two-years- old. Julie would “read” them until she was ready to go to sleep. To this day, Julie reads every night before turning out the lights.

  • By Caitlin Cunningham

    What is your obsession with shoes? 

    You have so many, many pairs of shoes!

    Boxes and boxes of shoes. 

    You have red shoes, blue shoes, teal shoes, pink shoes, silver and gold shoes, yellow shoes and black shoes. 

    So many black shoes! 

    Ones for staying in or going out, for dancing the night away, for long skirts or short skirts, or walking the dog.

    You have black shoes for every possible occasion!

    And this isn’t even counting all the boots. High ones, low ones, dressy ones, casual ones, ones for hiking, ones for the snow and ones just for rain. Boots galore!

    And all your shoes are even separated by seasons! Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall.

    And clear plastic boxes for each pair, neatly stacked in rows according to color and season. Your shoes are more organized than your taxes!

    Oooh! Can I write off all my shoes?

    Caitlin Cunningham lives and works in Petaluma, CA. She is an educator working with high school students who have mild learning disabilities. She especially loves helping students with math and writing. She has two adult children, a son who graduated from Iowa State with a history major and a daughter who is currently a pilot studying aviation and aeronautics at the University of North Dakota. She started writing with Jumpstart years ago but stopped when her husband became ill. After his death in 2020, she returned at Marlene Cullen’s urging. Returning to the Jumpstart group has been a supportive and therapeutic environment for resuming her writing and escaping her grief.

  • By Cheryl Moore

    I had been looking forward to the beginning of 2021; 2020 had been such a sad year, then January 6th happened. Chaos and uncertainty filled me.

    Since the trouble at the nation’s capital, I’ve made an abrupt change in my paintings. Instead of the landscapes and fanciful trees from a nearby park, my usual work, I’ve been painting abstracts to capture the oddity life has taken.

    I start by drawing straight lines across a canvas then I add curves. I step back and study these charcoal marks and try to find some pattern, some way of organizing the geometric spaces I have created. It may take a day of looking.

    My color palette is usually blue, blue-violet, and purple with accents of peachy orange and pink. The contrast of light and dark pattern is important.

    I am not interested in making great art; I don’t expect to like every piece. My goal is to have fun, to play, to forget the troubles of the world and just spend an hour or two enjoying myself.

    Cheryl Moore grew up in the Midwest, then lived in San Francisco to finish high school and attend college where she studied biology. During the late sixties and into the mid-seventies she lived first in Sweden for a year, then for four years in Iran where she served as librarian in a small research library for wildlife biologists.

    Nature and science have always been among her interests. After returning to the U.S., she moved to Petaluma and has dabbled in writing stories.

    Since retiring from employment at Sonoma State University, she has taken up painting.

  • By Kristin Cikowski

    I suppose that if you are going to have a house, it should be a small enough house so that you can hear everyone at the same time. This is why I love my house  My bedroom sits just across the hall from the kitchen, which, at night, is a passageway for the light that comes from the lamp that sits on the table next to my dad’s arm chair in the family room. The family room is where the TV is located, and is not to be confused with the living room, which does not have a TV, and instead, has the teapot with the crane that is flying over the blue water and creamer that goes with it. They sit next to the wooden fisherman with his delicate fishing pole and line, and the sofas that we cannot jump on even though they have an extremely busy pattern that wouldn’t show the slightest dirt.

    My best friend Becky just moved to the new housing development across town, and her new house is very big.  It has two stories. Two stories! It’s huge. It also has a bathroom with just a toilet for the guests to use while they are being entertained downstairs. Now, if we lived in a two-story house, the light from the lamp that sits on the table next to my dad’s arm chair in the family room would not make its way into my room, and I think I would find it hard to fall asleep at night  I suppose I could use my Yogi Bear night light, but my Dad told me to stop using it for a while after he found me cleaning it in the bathroom sink. It was rather dusty, and the slide that sat on the top, projecting Yogi’s face onto my ceiling, was a little out of focus  I didn’t really understand his objection because he is always so insistent that my room stay tidy, but when he explained that water and electricity didn’t mix, I forgave his abrupt volume change.

    This house, this house looks like the perfect size. Even though people always want bigger houses, I always think that would spread people out too far from one another, and it would become lonely. Like the houses that my parents walk through once a year at The Street of Dreams. The Street of Dreams. Every year, they build these humongous houses in a swanky neighborhood. It is never in our town, because our town is not swanky. It is usually closer to Portland, the city, because as you get closer to the city, the towns get swankier. My town has sheep, and goats in the front yards.  It is not swanky. But, every year, they build these humongous houses with all these fancy features, like an intercom that you can use to speak to someone on the second floor. My mom could push a button in the kitchen to tell us that dinner was ready as we sat in our rooms on the second floor. So fancy. And they all have pools. I would love to have a pool  I honestly don’t know how long we would be able to swim though because it’s cold, and it rains all the time. 

    You should be able to hear people in the house, to make sure they are all still there. I can easily hear if the front door opens when my mom or dad returns home from work. If I was upstairs, in my bedroom, and my mom came home from work, she could be inside the house for at least an hour before I would even notice.

    Kristin Cikowski resides in Novato with her husband, two energetic boys and an overly anxious dog. Writing has always been an escape, and when the pandemic forced everyone into their homes, she remembered a writer’s workshop that a friend had mentioned months before. Kristin has used writing as a therapeutic tool and is able to continue that custom thanks to her weekly Zoom meeting with a handful of strangers who provide her encouragement and motivation to write on.

  • By Luci Hagen

    Finding triumphs through tribulations in the past school year:

    When I began this project, I found it nearly impossible to try and describe in 650 words how drastically COVID has affected every part of my life. I hope that by focusing on the unique positives these unprecedented circumstances have presented for young folks like me, rather than the obvious negatives, I can help the community understand our perspective just a little bit more.

    At the beginning of quarantine and as distance learning first began, I was already struggling to keep up in school. I was at a loss for motivation to do anything, and any semblance of order in my life was out the window. The only constant in my schedule was that every night in the first few months, starting at 11 pm until around two or three am, I would practice writing on my computer. At first, I’d journal my day, or write poetic rants, but gradually I decided to concentrate my work on something bigger. I discovered an 8th-grade screenplay project on my old computer. I noticed the writing, plot, and characters were all unclear and poorly written. So I took it upon myself to reconfigure the screenplay into a short novel worth reading. Night by night I furiously typed until my fingers grew tired from keeping up with the words that flew through my mind. Eventually, when the first month passed since restarting my story, I’d managed to write around fifty pages of work, more than I’d ever been able to accomplish sequentially in my life.

    I kept tweaking my story, but slowly realized I’d never be satisfied with it until I could be taught by an experienced educator on how to make my writing better. This prompted me to take an English class at the junior college over the summer, for I knew I’d have plenty of time as all my other summer plans were canceled because of the pandemic. Thankfully, I was able to excel in that class. Upon returning to online school in the fall, I found it yet again an arduous task to stay on top of my work for all except two classes, those being English and Journalism.

    By this point, I knew writing would be the only thing I’d be motivated to do in school, so I took that knowledge and ran with it. I became invested in the project of our school newspaper, The Hounds Bark, and wanted our articles to reach as many people as possible. So I contacted the local newspaper, The Healdsburg Tribune, in hopes of a partnership to increase the number of readers our paper was receiving. Through this interaction, I was offered an internship at their paper. Since then I’ve been writing articles for them with my friend, Elise Thompson, one of which landed the cover of the January 14th issue. If I hadn’t had the time to take up creative writing on my own during those first few months of quarantine, I might’ve never taken my passion for English as far as I have now.

    So I think what not many people have spoken about is that through this abundance of time and need for self-motivation and responsibility, students have been able to find out what they can easily get excited to do and what they cannot. For some people that is music, exercise, photography, gardening, reading, really anything that they full-heartedly enjoy. We have had so much time to self-reflect and discover our true strengths and weaknesses as people, an opportunity that hardly any other generation has been able to receive. With this newfound understanding of ourselves, we’ve been able to try and find ways to improve ourselves. And better yet, we realize what really matters to us, and have developed a greater appreciation for life’s little joys as well as things we never knew we’d have to live without.

    Published in the March 2, 2021 issue of the Sonoma County Gazette, “Finding triumphs through tribulations in the past school year.”

    Luci Hagen is a 10th grade student at Healdsburg High School in Healdsburg, California, where she lives with her parents, her younger siblings Lola and Cayson, her scrappy mutt named Nigel, and her orange tabby named Leia. Though she appreciates her studies and has a deep passion for writing that she hopes will lead her someplace significant, Luci also loves to create art, listen to music, act in musicals, and has currently been trying to learn guitar and how to play golf. Above all, she enjoys spending time with her family and has made it a personal goal to fill her high school years with as many bizarre and exciting experiences with her friends as possible.

  • Increscent Moon

    By Su Shafer

    Starless, Starless Night

    I gaze up, surprised to see

    The moon looking down

    Not at me, she is watching

    Something far over the horizon,

    Her face radiant with golden pleasure.

    Maybe she is looking at tomorrow,

    The baby day, still pink and new,

    Gently urging it forward as it crawls along

    dragging its giant blanket of light behind it.

    Her smile is serene and comforts me,

    Standing alone in the night,

    The quiet space between today and tomorrow.

    I feel oddly hopeful as I go back inside.

    If the moon is beaming,

    Tomorrow must be a better day.

    Su Shafer is a creative writer and fledgling poet who lives in the Pacific Northwest, where flannel shirts are acceptable as formal wear and strong coffee is a way of life. There, in a small Baba Yaga house perched near the entrance to The Hidden Forest, odd characters are brewing with the morning cup, and a strange new world is beginning to take shape . . .

  • By Amie Windsor

    A girlfriend and I recently fell in love with a song titled, “Golden G String.”

    “I legit never thought I could fall in love with a song called that, but I totally have,” she texted me.

    I knew exactly what she meant. The title of the Miley Cyrus track makes me want to cringe. But that’s kind of the beauty of it, because Cyrus’ lyrics are all about understanding femininity and how to harness our female power amid a world dominated by men. Read a few of the lyrics:

    “Yes, I’ve worn the golden G-string   Put my hand into hellfire
    I did it all to make you love me and to feel alive

    Oh, that’s just the world that we’re livin’ in
    The old boys hold all the cards and they ain’t playin’ gin
    You dare to call me crazy, have you looked around this place?
    I should walk away
    Oh, I should walk away
    But I think I’ll stay”

    It has 1000% been on repeat in my earbuds while driving around Sonoma County, delivering copies of The Sonoma County Gazette.

    As we celebrate Women’s History Month, I can’t help but think about where we’ve come as women and how far we still have to go as a society.

    This pandemic ripped open the instability and injustices of our culture and country, and women, like many other minorities, have been strewn across the floor like spilled coffee beans or rice.

    Nobody is there to pick us up. There’s no container or safety net. 

    And that’s scary and frustrating. But it’s also liberating and gives us a chance to build our own safety net. To say, “if you want the rice and the coffee, you need a place to keep it safe, protected, cared for and rested. You can’t open it up, let it scatter on the floor and expect it to fend for itself.”

    Cyrus also writes: “Maybe caring for each other is too 1969.” As someone who ‘s also in her 30s and didn’t get to live through the hey day of the hippies, I get it. I long for a society where we can lead with compassion and seek to understand rather than to be understood. 

    It takes work. And I know I’m part of that work. So, as Miley sings, “I think I’ll stay” and be part of that work.

    Originally titled “I am woman, hear me roar,” in a March 3, 2021 email.

    Amie Windsor is the publisher of the Sonoma County Gazette. She lives in Sebastopol with her husband, two young daughters, dog, cat, and seven chickens. Amie got her start in Sonoma County as a reporter for the Independent Coast Observer. She moved to Sebastopol in 2015 when she became a reporter for Sonoma West Publishers.

    In between her time as a community reporter and publisher of the Gazette, Amie also served as the Field Representative to Supervisor Lynda Hopkins and was involved with Social Advocates for Youth in their development team.

    In the oodles of free time she has, Amie enjoys baking pies, writing about motherhood and drawing with chalk in her driveway.

    Pick up a copy of the Sonoma County Gazette in your neighborhood newsstand.

  • By Ken Delpit

    “Just write.”

    It sounds so simple. It seems so wrong, and yet is so right. Planning and preconception have their places, certainly. But it really is OK, and better, to just write. Leave behind the pressures, the impediments, the anxieties. Put aside your doubts, your fears, your insecurities. Just write.

    Let it go. Let it flow. Write without knowing what comes next. Let yourself be surprised by yourself. Don’t peek beyond the current thought. Deal with the moments in front of you, around you, within you. Don’t make it happen. Let it happen.

    Just write. It sounds so easy. And it can be. When the shackles are discarded, one’s pace can go from stumbling to walking, and from walking to running. The bottleneck can move from its usual place, the mind, to the fingers, which are suddenly unable to keep up.

    But “Just write” as a guiding convention is fraught with detours and traps, many of them inconvenient, some of them debilitating. For one, the proper amount and degree of thinking spent during writing is an elusive and changing target.

    Bolting forward with absolutely no forethought is good for loosening writing muscles, both physical and mental. Proceeding freely can lead to discovery within, and of, oneself. Arriving at thoughts that one did not realize one had can be unnerving or frightening. But it can also be exhilarating and joyous.

    Often, however, a little bit of imagining and conceiving can transform your writing from warmup activity to something with potential to be more than exercise. And therein lies the dilemma. When to plunge ahead. When to pause and think.

    Just write. Or, just write, think for a bit now and then, and then just write some more. It’s a tricky balance. Tend too much toward the pensive, and one is right back where one started, at the writer’s-block starting blocks. Cast away too much thought, and one flirts with gibberish.

    For myself, I find that pauses are most useful when they do not occur up front. Let it go, to start. Find a stride. Hear a voice. Surprise yourself. See what lurks in your unknown. Then, when you discover something worthy of a lull, welcome the reflection. But don’t linger too long. It’s a fine balance, alright. Be alert for helpful interludes. But mostly, just write.

    In his writing, Ken Delpit sometimes contends with voices. Finding “the” voice for a piece can render one immobile before starting. Even finding “a” voice among several can lead to cafeteria-buffet indecision: How to pick when they all could work? In times like these, Ken finds Marlene Cullen’s advice to “Just write” helpful. Then, it’s not a matter of finding just the right voice. More, it’s going with whatever voice you hear now.