Sylvia Patience, Author

On July 31st I wrote about the possibility of Vision Recycling losing the contract to recycle Santa Cruz County green waste into garden mulches. I’ve just received the following by email from Vision: This past Friday the 13th John Preisly the head of Public Works in Santa Cruz called Tom Del Conte to re-negotiate Vision’s… Read more

I’m sorry to say I just learned the East of Eden Writers Conference, which was to take place in Salinas in September, had to be canceled this year. I looked forward to attending for the first time. The conference was another casualty of the slow economy. The city closed its community center and the registration… Read more

For those of you interested in studying midwifery or lactation consulting, or in becoming doulas, there is news at Aviva Institute, the online school where I teach. Aviva is in the process of a reorganization with some new leadership and procedures to improve the running of the school. One of the changes is the announcement… Read more

I previously blogged about the Vision Recycling programs for recycling kitchen and garden waste for Santa Cruz County. My Master Composter class was hosted at the Vision facility at the Buena Vista landfill in Watsonville and given a tour. Since then the kitchen scrap composting has been outsourced to another county and the Ecocomp that… Read more

Mary Kole on her Kidlit site wrote on July 21st an article entitled “Do Unpublished Writers Have to Blog?” She makes some good points and basically her answer is “no”, unless you have something to say. She has echoed some of my feeling that I don’t want to post things on my blog that are… Read more

I am reading John Gardner’s THE ART OF FICTION and, in spite of his academic style and extremely long paragraphs, I’m gleaning some excellent writing advice. I’m less than half way through the book, but I want to post this sentence: “Slowly, patiently, with the patience that separates a Beethoven from men of equal genius… Read more