Sylvia Patience, Author

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Mary Kole on her Kidlit site wrote on July 21st an article entitled “Do Unpublished Writers Have to Blog?”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

I discovered that Zoe Woods, the main character in Wandering Time, is a fan of fifties music and especially loves Fats Domino’s Blueberry Hill. You can now listen to Fats playing and singing this song on the Kids’ page. Read more

Okay, these are totally unrelated topics as far as I know. I haven’t posted for a while because I don’t want to bore people by blogging about my personal life. Yesterday, however, was a big day. The culmination of months of saving the best tidbits of my garbage to put in the worm bin. (The Read more