First up on my To-Do List: Find my Photo Idaho

My podiatrist sent an e-reminder to my Pixel. I have an appointment tomorrow where the techs cut my toenails I can't reach and the doctor comes in and gets an update on the state of my feet. Footcare is important to the elderly, even if your walking time is limited due to not being able to walk on your own and sometimes roam around on an e-scooter. 

The e-reminder asked me something I hadn't heard before. "Please bring your Photo Idaho." 

I like ID almost as much as I like WY, MT, CO, and UT. I was born in CO, spent 33 years working in WY, ands have traveled extensively in UT and MT. But no physician's e-assistant has ever asked me for my Photo Montana. 

This AI-generated message may have been powered by big Artificial Intelligence barns they've been building around the West, the ones bringing so much prosperity to small towns, even fairly big spots like Cheyenne, WY, the capital city, where I once worked. I hear that Microsoft wants to build a huge AI barn in Cheyenne with promises it will not slurp up all the snow melt and will provide a gazillion good-paying jobs. 

Before tomorrow, I will have to find my Photo ID. First stop, the potato cellar. Must be down there with the spuds.

In the mood for a Bulgarian gardening book?

I stumbled upon Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov. His latest book is “Death of the Gardener.” I’d been reading books about gardens. First, I listened to the memoir “In Kiltumpur: A Year in an Irish Garden” by Niall Williams and Christine Breen. Then I read on Kindle “First waiting for the impending frost on a North Carolina garden. It features an Frost,” which is a magical-realist YA romance by Sarah Addison Allen about apple tree that blossoms in winter and throws its apples at people he/she/it doesn’t like. Allen also wrote “Garden Spells” which is on my list of Books I Discovered On Kindle That Surprised The Heck Out Of Me (BIDONKTSTHOOM). Allen’s new book will be out in the fall. She writes on her web site that she’s been battling cancer. Cancer comes into a household and changes everything.

Gardening is more than a metaphor for me. I am, or was, a gardener, with Sungold tomatoes and pole beans out back and petunias and four o’clocks in the front. I once tripped and fell head-first into the front garden. It was getting toward autumn and I might have been there until the first frost arrived if the local preacher hadn’t been walking his dog nearby. He is a small man, a cardiac patient too small rescue me from the garden. He roused my tiny wife and she roused our burly neighbor Marco and they set me upright on the porch. My wife asked the obvious question: “What were you doing?” My reply was typical: “Getting a closer look at the coneflowers.” At the time, she was undergoing chemo for breast cancer. She needed a laugh, or so I thought.

But back to Gospodinov’s book. It’s magnificent. A short book about the death of his father the gardener in the town of Y is Bulgaria. It is rich with empathy and sadness but laced with humor. Wit, you might say, humor that doesn’t call attention to itself. The best writers have the gift.

I cried, though, as his father faded away. G is unrelenting of the portrait of his father, a young man who went to the Balkan War and then was a failed entrepreneur and then an aging magnificent gardener at his modest house in Y. The writer gets me to care so much for this simple human who lived a dynamic family life despite his many failures during life under the Bulgarian commissars. There’s no pity here just plenty of attempts to understand. The writer attaches no blame to his father’s stern ways. Most importantly, there is no exploration of how this complicated man completely fucked up his life. You know, those Tales of a Dysfunctional Family that once filled the U.S. book charts.

There are plenty of those in the U.S. In my 21 years of writing and blogging, I may have written some. I apologize, Dad and Mom, as I had yet to have the grumpy wisdom of an aging father.

What does it take to write like Gospodinov of Bulgaria  and Williams of Ireland? I had to write a million words before I had the skills to write with any sort of wit and wisdom. Just to understand what propels their writing took me seven-and-half decades. I am so sad sometimes about my status as a disabled old man, a man who survived a widowmaker heart attack at 62 and a bout with septicemia at 73. A few months after I fell into the petunias, I underwent a spinal fusion that was supposed to help me walk again but did not. I still require a walker or scooter to get around. Poor pitiful me, as the ironic Warren Zevon song goes. Woe, woe, woe is me.

As I read Gospodinov, I kept thinking of my family members, ones that I had criticized in my mind and in print, usually in fiction. The fog began to clear. I thought about the richness of people’s lives, the sorrows and the joys.  Why are we what we are and what imprint do we leave? What can I write about that only I can grasp? My purview is mine alone.

I ponder all of these things. And write.

Gospodinov’s appreciation of his parents’ generation was summed up in James Woods’ New Yorker review of the book (11/10/25 issue):

In 2023, [Gospodinov’s novel] Time Shelter won the International Booker Prize. In the new book, that good fortune is autofictionally transformed into this: “In May the novel I had dedicated to my mother and father won a big prize. On that London night, one of those few quickly jotted-down phrases in English was about the two of them, now quietly crying with joy in a little south-eastern town, I said, ‘Indeed, our pretty phrases stand upon their stooped shoulders.’” 

Stooped shoulders? That’s on my mind as I write today.

Irish Catholics have been holding the line against Nativists for a long time

I read some Irish-American history this morning on Michael Fox's Substack. "The Irish Catholic 'Rock of Erin' that held the line at Gettysburg" tells this story: 

"The Irish Catholic immigrants who defeated Pickett's Charge and held the Union line at Gettysburg were the same people American nativists were burning out of their churches and deporting as paupers."

This speaks of the earlier iteration of MAGA as the Nativists of the Know-Nothing Party. A well-written account by Fox that I haven't fact-checked but will in due time. It's a rousing tale, made me proud to come from a long line of Irish-Catholics from Roscommon and elsewhere. I've been blogging about the Know-Nothings past and present for awhile now and Trump has added fuel to their fire that never went out just went underground like those fires that burn in old Pennsylvania coal fields. 

Read it yourself. A good way to celebrate this Fourth of July weekend that belongs to all of us.

In case you missed it, June was Nuclear Family Month but just in Tennessee

Amongst all of the semiquincentennial bashes in June, the big beautiful Algae Deflecting Pool hoopla in D.C., the U.S./Israel vs. Iran matchup in the Persian Gulf, and big FIFA goings-on across the norteamericano continent, I missed an important announcement.

June was Nuclear Family Month. So said the Tennessee Legislature, the GOP part. Irked by all the nonsense about Pride Month, the LGBTQ+ Pride Parades and the colorful Pride crosswalks (the ones that goon squads paint over in the dead of night), I neglected to celebrate my nuclear family.

According to the Tennessee Lege, lawmakers of a certain stripe signed off on a resolution that says “one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children” are “God’s design.”

According to a June 6 article by Anita Wadhwani I just read in the Tennessee Lookout, Tenn. Gov. Bill Lee signed the bill in April and it carries no punch to ban anything with rainbows or men wearing eye shadow. It carries the “symbolic weight” of a “government endorsement of only one type of family unit despite a wide diversity of families living in Tennessee including single-parent, grandparent, and LGBTQ+ families,” wrote Wadhwani.

Should Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis decide on something similar, he will have a big problem. Not with me but with thousands of others. I know DeSantis works overtime to please Bubba and Bubbette voters. Mr. Harvard Grad posits himself as one of them. But right now he’s busy executing a backlog of criminals in the state prison system. His Alligator Alcatraz did not go over well and he’s mightily pissed. Rumor has it that he plans to make every Floridian walk around with the “Welcome to the Free State of Florida” banner tattooed on their foreheads. Might look nice on some people.

But GOP state governors have nothing to fear from me. I happen to have a nuclear family right here in the wildlands of Tomoka Station, Fla. One husband (me), one wife (my wife), one son (son) and one daughter (daughter). We can check those boxes. I also come from a nuclear family with the appropriate credentials. My grandparents were all Nuke Family types and so were my descendants going back a century or two possibly all the way back to Adam and Eve if there were such a nuclear pair that parented sons Cain and Abel. Cain slew Abel, becoming the first murderer featured in The Good Book that the Christian Right demands students read instead of Fahrenheit 451.

It’s now early July and I haven’t seen any statistics what the Tennessee bill has wrought. Not much, I suspect. Christian Nationalist blowhards are just that, their efforts filled with much sound and fury, signifying nothing. They hurt people, the ones they hate, with a furor that brought us Trump and the likes of Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem. Haters.

BTW, “nuclear family” is an odd term. My father built silos for nuclear missiles in the West. I lived 33 years next to the biggest nuke base in the U.S. I have strontium-90 from 1950s nuclear tests in my bones. There are lunatics out there with nuclear capability. There have been nuke plant meltdowns in Ukraine and Japan and the U.S. to contemplate.

Nuclear is nothing to imitate.

The return of Saturday Morning Garden Blogging (thanks Daily Kos)

I now am on Substack. I did it on accident. One day I was roaming around the web, checking out sites, and suddenly I had my own Substack. You can reach it here.

I'm new on Substack but have been blogging on Blogger for 20-plus years. I say 20-plus because I registered with Blogger in January 2001 but didn't see a reason to use it until 2005 and then regularly in 2006. I was Wyoming's designated blogger at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. I was politically active in person and online in those days. I lobbied John Dean (Howard's bro) to be Wyoming's pick in his search for a liberal political blogger from every state. It wasn't a hard choice as there were so few bloggers of the liberal stripe, so few bloggers of any stripe, that the pick in Wyoming was pretty easy. I knew a great prog-blogger in Wheatland, about 50 miles north of Cheyenne, and in the university town of Laramie; heavenly Jackson had a few. You can read my blogs from what now seems like The Good Ol' Days if you search August 2008 on my site. 

And now, Substack. I like the name. It has sort of an undersea feel. I like the term blog, too. It comes from weblog as in a log written on the worldwide web. My first contacts with fellow bloggers turned up a lot of young people writing about their high school and college hijinks. I was long past interested in hijinks. When I returned the the blog in 2005, the political wars were in full flight and I joined in. Was it fun. And hairy at times. Many of my fellow bloggers in the West were of the Rush Limbaugh stripe, fans of the late Breitbart whom I met when he tried to crash Netroots National in Minneapolis in 2011. On my blog sidebar, I once listed the blogs I followed, many of them in the West. It would be instructional to look at that old list.

My blogging was only interrupted by ennui and two brushes with death -- a Widowmaker heart attack in 2013 and an almost toxic septicemia in 2024. The heart attack was the worst. A terrible surprise that caused me to not read a book for almost an entire year. I had never been an invalid before. All that rehab. People treated me differently, as if I now was made of glass and could shatter at any moment. But that was more than 13 years ago and I'm still here. 

Many of my prog-blogger colleagues have given it up. I haven't checked out my favorite rabble-rouser site Daily Kos for many moons. I just did and it's still kicking ass and its home page is stylin'. Have to get there more often. I clicked on a link to the Saturday Morning Garden Blogging group and spent too long reading about the tomato harvest and swooning over tomato photos. Let me repeat some tomato varieties listed by correspondent VerdantC: Gourmandia, Sweet Apertif, Heartbreaker Vita, Ochre Heart, Pink Stella. SMGB goes back to 2011. I stole the title for my blog that same year, back when I was a blogging gardener. Something so sensual about tomato blogging. I miss it, both the selection and growing and harvesting and blogging. 

I have photos of me and my wife Christine posing on the summit of Trail Ridge Road around that time. I am wearing a Daily Kos T-shirt. I once was a correspondent. Those were the days. I can still log in. The guidelines for submissions have changed. It's more formal. I may just have to get back on board. 

Does Daily Kos have a Substack? It does not. It maintains its own platform on WordPress. Sometimes you see Daily Kos blogs reposted on Substack. I will look for them. 

P.S.: Just found that the next Netroots Nation conference will be in Denver, July 8-10, 2027. I may have to return. 

The new Know Nothings tell the same old story

Read an excellent op-ed today in America The Jesuit Review, "The new know-nothings? Anti-Catholic political rhetoric is making a comeback." The writer is Anna Keating. Under a big photo of Secretary of War and Christian Fascist Pete Hegseth, she begins this way:

President Abraham Lincoln once said of the Know-Nothing Party, founded in 1844 and dissolved in 1860: “If the Know-Nothings get control, [the Declaration of Independence] will read all men are created equal, except negroes, foreigners and Catholics.”

As she notes, the Know Nothing Party shriveled up and died in 1860  but its attitudes have not. 

We are seeing a resurgence of anti-Catholic outbursts in the U.S. with the rise of the Trumpists and the outspoken nature of Pope Leo, an Irish-Catholic priest, then cardinal, now pope on the world's billion Catholics. Read Keating's article for the details. She writes about how fundies would stop her when she was growing up in Colorado Springs "and try to 'save' us." There also was this:

In fact, the Klu Klux Klan targeted my Catholic immigrant ancestors in the panhandle of Texas by burning crosses in their yards.

My grandfather, Martin Hett, an immigrant from County Roscommon, told us how the resurgent KKK burned crosses in his Irish-Catholic Denver neighborhood in the 1920s. My mother, Anna Marie Hett Shay, told us how she and her sister, dressed in their St. Francis Catholic School uniforms, had to run away from the South High School kids who chased them calling them "dirty Catholics" and "Catholic rednecks." This latter one was a new one on me. Grandpa explained (in his droll Irish way) that immigrants from Ireland were prone to red necks due to their fair skin and most jobs they could get in America were harvesting crops, digging ditches, and building railroads. Grandpa did not seem to bear any ill will toward these Know Nothing shitheads. But he had already been through hell and considered Colorado public school kids "small potatoes" when compared to his life as coal miner, railroad worker, and big fella who could take care of himself. 

I've written a bit about American Know Nothings. This has pissed off a few Republican friends who insist they are not Know-Nothings who get all sorts of news from FOX and right-wing talk radio. 

Know Nothings and the KKK play a role in my new novel, “Zeppelins Over Denver.”

For a look back at one of my blog posts, see Donald Trump's Know-Nothing attitude would have doomed my Famine Irish ancestorsere.

Note the images that go along with it, cartoons of Irish immigrants as apes and drunkards. Those depictions tell a story that is as old as America.

P.S.: One of my first published stories was “REV,” about a fundamentalist Christian army marching across Arabia to whip an army of fundamentalist Muslims. I will see if I can dig it up.

In the local library stacks, find a book or two by Shay

Several weeks ago, I dropped off two of my books to the Volusia County Library in Ormond Beach. My favorite library now than I’m a Volusia County resident again, this time in Ormond Station in Ormond Beach. During my early years in the area, 1964-78, I lived in Ormonmd Beach, Holly Hill, and various locales in Daytona. I asked the friendly woman at the desk if the library was interested in stocking copies of my two books. I am a local author now, have been since August 2024 when Wyoming got shut of me.

The Ormond branch does such a great job of featuring local authors and now I’m part of the collections. It includes my historical novel, “Zeppelins Over Denver,” and my first collection of short stories, “The Weight of a Body.” Several of the stories are set in a place a lot like Daytona (Go Green Wave!) and there’s also a scene in another story set in Gainesville where I graduated from UF in 1976 (Go Gators!). The others are set in Colorado, Wyoming, and Maine. I spent decades of my working life in the Rocky Mountain states and visited Maine a few times.

I naturally did a library search for myself and came up with my books and mention of a few others with “Shay” in the listings. I have met several women during the last decade or so by the first name of Shay. I don’t know if it’s a thing or not. I doubt if I would recognize a thing if it was staring me in the face.

There was one listing that caught my eye. From the Harlequin Western Romance Anthology 2017 comes this reference to a romance with a Shay in it:

THE COWBOY'S TRIPLE SURPRISE The Hitching Post Hotel by Barbara White Daille Bachelor cowboy Tyler Buckham is stunned to learn Shay O'Neill is pregnant with triplets. Even though he wants to do right by Shay, the thought of being a daddy has him running scared.

That’s a pretty good teaser and I may check out the anthology to see how it ends. I also am intrigued by the title. In Cheyenne, where I lived and worked for 31 years, there was a landmark hotel called the Hitching Post Inn. It was a cross between an old roadside motor inn and a sprawling bunkhouse). It was a big gathering place, a local favorite for weddings, arts events, and political rallies. If you wanted to catch one of the state legislators on neutral ground, the Hitch saloon was the place. I wondered: does the author have Cheyenne roots? Probably not. The term “hitching post” is very western and I’ve probably been in a dozen places with that name during my travels in the west.

I looked up Daille and she lists her home as “the Southwest” so that probably means Arizona and there is a Hitch out in the desert somewhere and probably doesn’t refer to my Hitch which was torn down a few years ago and replaced with an extended stay hotel.

I encourage local readers to check out my books from the library and write a review on the site if you’ve a mind to. Now excuse me as I go out and prowl the Local Authors and Large Print sections at my favorite library.

Journey into "Raymond Custy's Garden of Worldly Delights"

This is the opening of a story included in "The Weight of a Body," my first story collection. It was first published by Ghost Road Press at its tiny office on Evans Avenue off I-25 in Denver.  I dropped by on a summer day in 2005 to pick up the first copies hot off the press. I was dying to show off the books. I delivered the first copy to my uncle. I owed him a visit. His reading was mostly focused on the Denver dailies sports pages -- he was an athlete and a coach -- but he congratulated me and said he'd read it. I then drove back the 95 miles to Cheyenne to share the news with my family. My favorite story is set in a Florida beach town where I spent some of my youth. It has some basis in fact. I did grow up as the oldest kid in a big Irish-Catholic family. My brother and I walked to the beach to surf. My father was a reclusive sort but who can blame him?

I share this as a teaser to my story collection. I have another one in the works but the first one still has some zing. That's the author speaking. Anyway, to read more click on the cover image in the right sidebar.  The collection goes for $14.99 but if you're as dedicated a Kindle reader as I am, you can get a bargain. Check it out.

Raymond Custy’s Garden of Worldly Delights

            In June of 1967, when I was almost 16, my father checked out for a year. Locked himself in his room. Threw away the key. No messages. No contact of any kind. It was as if he died or decamped to Tahiti, only worse, because I could walk down the hall past that locked door and hear London Philharmonic symphonies blasting from the hi-fi. A cough might erupt from behind closed doors; the whisper of slippered feet. Sometimes a thin blue stream of cigarette smoke escaped from the room and formed a cloud in the hallway. If I was alone, I would stand in the midst of the cloud and inhale, hoping that the smoke might be the bearer of some singular message from my dad, the hermit.

            This hermit lived surrounded by eleven children, one wife, two dogs, a cat and a cage full of hamsters. On the brilliant June day my father bolted the door, the family queued up to coax him out. My mother went first. "Raymond Custy!" she yelled. "You come out of there right this minute!"  She waited, arms crossed, bare feet tapping on the wooden floors. I could hear the cars passing on the street, on their way to the beach. I could even hear the slap of the waves on the sand two blocks away.

OK people, it's all true, every single bit and byte of it

This photo arrived in my inbox on the same day that "Disclosure Day"
arrived in theaters nationwide. Coincidence? You decide.

How a book does -- and doesn't -- get published

Part of my life as a blogger is updating readers as to my whereabouts (I've always wanted to blog this word). Most of the time, I'm in my home office at the PC, typing madly. There are big windows to watch passersby pass by, most of them neighbors in Tomoka Station, Fla. There are lots of kids in my neighborhood, many new arrivals being pushed around by proud parents. Kids on bikes, some motorized but most the old-fashioned pedal kind. Groveside is a new branch of a five-branched development. I see many service trucks: lawn services, fencing companies, contractors building various add-ons: fancy stoves and refrigerators to replace the boring ones the houses came with. Toilets, too, as we got basic toilets  but tall and big and disabled people needed something better.

I have a lot to see, many things to distract me from the jobs at hand. My main job now is promoting my new book. It is no easy task. Best-selling writers have big-time publishers in NYC, companies that handle a book's editing, production, distribution, and publicity. That's what all writers wish for, an advance and a contract for a book to write and revise and then transmit to the publisher. Then it's on to the next book. Or maybe a croissant and a cup of Java. 

That was what the world was like when I first started writing in the 1970s. When I finally penned a sci-fi postapocalyptic novel of my own in the 1980s, I went to a writers conference and sought an agent. I became a pest. Finally, Ray Powers of the Marje Fields Agency said send me a few chapters and quickly disappeared. The next week, I polished some intro chapters on my manual typewriter and a short plot description and sent it off to Ray. He told me to finish the manuscript and send it. 

I will bet you a chest filled with doubloons (or maybe bitcoins) that he thought I would never finish. Many writers don't, you know, especially when they find out how hard a task it really is. But I had a secret weapon. I was born to write and was always hard at it. I don't know why this is. It's beautiful. It's a curse. I am happiest when writing in a journal or pounding away at my keyboard. I have tried to escape into the military, academia, the corporate world. But I keep returning to writing. 

My novel, "Zeppelins Over Denver," took me ten years to write, revise, and find a publisher. My critique group guided me along the way. I got an M.F.A. in creative writing. My CSU profs and fellow student writers were terrific and brutal. I was on a mission from God, as the Blues Brothers put so well. How else to describe it? In the end, though, that's what it takes., You have to possess a missionary zeal to do this. You have to write and quit writing and write more and despair and then write more. In the end, I finished a found an iconoclastic press in Detroit run by a friend, poet/prof/performer M.L. Liebler.

The Ridgeway Press of Michigan publishes books that others don't and I'm one of them. Thank you Ridgeway and M.L He's published tons of books of poetry and essays. His most recent is a memoir with this title: "Hound Dog: A Memoir of Rock, Revolution, and Redemption" from University of Wisconsin Stevens Point's Cornerstone Press. Did you know that university presses publish many wonderful books? Go buy one today. 

Meanwhile, if you're interested in my book, you will have to go to Amazon and look me up on my author page at http://amazon.com/author/michaeltshay. I am at work on an author's page on BookBub which should be the place to go once I'm finished with the design. 

One more thing: I don't make much money from an Amazon purchase. And Ridgeway is not set up for buying books. But you can find me on Venmo at @michael-shay-28 or 307-241-2903. Send me $35.22 and put the mailing address and who to sign it to in Notes. Then, I will put it in a padded envelope, take it to the p.o., send it on its way and pray that it gets there in these times that USPS seems to run with all the efficiency of the governmental agency in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil." Keep your fingers crossed. As you probably know, Amazon is run with the efficiency that we used to expect from USPS. Packages go right to my door. The delivery man even rings to bell and scampers back to his Amazon Prime truck and drives away at a prudent speed. 

I decided to look up Amazon Founder and Blue Origin mastermind Jeff Bezos on Wikipedia. I was surprised to find that he was born in Albuquerque (I was conceived in Albuquerque!) to a teen mom and a Danish unicyclist (my father sold Armour meats and my mom was a registered nurse). During his high school years in Miami, Bezos attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida, my alma mater (English major, class of '76). A local newspaper reported that in his graduation speech, Bezos "hoped that humanity would eventually move heavy industry and large populations into space while preserving earth as 'a huge national park.' "

Think about that when you order an air fryer at deep discount from Amazon. Or a book.

Readers are beginning to have questions and comments about the novel...

I should have done this a long time ago but today I created an author page on Book Bub under Michael T Shay. The road to writing and editing a book ends with a book that needs readers, surprisingly enough. I thought my blog and in-person marketing would be sufficient. But it's not. While I get the new site up and running, please feel free to ask any questions or make any comments about "Zeppelins Over Denver" here. I can answer your questions on this public forum or via e-mail or by letter. Please ask me to respond via letter! I am a lifelong writer of letters and receive so few these days. Many circulars about metal roofs and new-car sales and restaurant openings. But few letters. Thrill me!

Via Audible, I spend a year in an Irish garden

On my June 1 post, I talked about buying on Audible "In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden." I mentioned that I don't listen to many audiobooks as my vision remains fine and I love reading. There's a little message inside my head that says: "Audiobooks are for endless drives across Wyoming." During my 25 years at the Wyoming Arts Council, I made many drives across the 98,000-square mile state and listened to cassettes, disks, and, briefly, on one overlooked Spotify intro subscription in a state auto. 

So many great memories of Janet Evanovich (perfect to distract a keyed-up driver on I-80 winter drives), a dozen Wyoming-based mysteries by C.J. Box and Craig Johnson, an odd Chuck Palahniuk novel on the way to Sheridan (weird scene in a swimming pool), and one perfect summer drive to Jackson with geological landmarks discussed in John McPhee's "Rising from the Plains." Kurt Vonnegut's "Galapagos" got me all the way from Cheyenne to Salt Lake City. 

So here I am, taking a break from the printed page and listening to the wonderful voices of Niall Williams and Christine Breen on Audible. Twelve months in an Irish garden. I am transfixed. My Irish roots and life-long gardening interests are both addressed. In "March," an Irish priest dropped by the narrators' little patch of land in County Clare, and conducted mass in the garden. Neither Niall or Chris are active Catholics (more the fallen-away variety) but both agree and it's glorious. 

But there was something about it.

Quote from Chapter 4, April

"The moment of spring sets everything within me tremoring."

I've felt it in Wyoming. 

March is filled with wind-whipped snowstorms. April's beginning can be much the same. But there is a day when I step out to sun and calm. I look at the garden. A few bulb plants bloom. It's still six weeks before I put seedlings in the ground. 

But it's the light of those early April days that transform me. Every day the light stretches out to those long summer days. On June 21, the western sky is still lit at 10. I love and fear that day as days start to get shorter until it's dark at 4:30 in late November, even at Halloween the kids gets started going door to door before 5.

I have felt the tremoring Williams describes. Here in Florida, it is calmed by the coming of heat and humidity. By June 6, the tremoring has given way to sweat and sunburn.

So what does a novel set in 1919 Colorado have to do with the Detroit of the 1960s?

My historical novel, Zeppelins Over Denver, was released in early May by The Ridgeway Press in Michigan, Detroit to be exact.

The novel, set in the Colorado of 1919, doesn’t have much to do with either Detroit or Michigan, but its life has a lot to do with a couple of determined Detroiters. It’s the press co-founded by M.L. Liebler, a poet and author whose resume is about five miles long. As he writes about in Hound Dog: A Poet’s Memoir or Rock, Revolution, and Redemption (Cornerstone Press), he’s a Detroit native, a resident of St. Clair Shores his entire life. He was there to experienced the rise of Motown and the Detroit rock scene that flourished in the 1960s, 1970s and beyond.

He pursued an advanced degree with the vigor he brought to music and poetry. His title at Wayne State University is professor of English and Labor Studies, a one-two punch that shouts Detroit. It has been my good fortune to work with M.L. in the literary arts world, mostly through the YMCA Writers Voice Project. It was launched from New York’s West Side Y (now at the the Central YMCA of New York) by the late Jason Shinder. It has been a facet of Y programming across the U.S., in places as far-flung as the Cheyenne Family YMCA in Cheyenne, Wyo., where my wife Christine supervised the program. Sadly, the Writer's Voice program Chris supervised vanished when the Cheyenne Y closed last year. A sad day on the lone prairie.

As coordinator of the literary program at the Wyoming Arts Council, I enlisted M.L. as a judge for our literary fellowships and had the pleasure of driving him across that vast state and introducing him to The Legend of the Jackalope as well as a batch of very fine poets and writers. M.L took me on when I was failing to find a publisher. I will be eternally grateful to him for that. He was ably assisted by WSU student and editor/designer Brandon Wade. I will have more to say about this as time passes and I look for ways to lift up this blog.

Meanwhile, excuse me while I figure out intriguing ways to promote a book published by one of America's stalwart small presses. It was launched by the Ridgeway Press and Artist Collection 52 years ago. Its roots are deep in the Detroit alternative arts scene. Here's a description taken from Detroit's Book Beat:

Ridgeway Press & Collective is one of Detroit’s vital independent literary-artistic forces. With weekly online meetings, shared vacations, and a screwball newsletter, this band of creatives has remained together, loyal to the call of Ridgeway Dada. 

There is happiness aplenty (and sorrow) in This Is Happiness

This is happiness.

This is happiness.

This is happiness.

So says Christy, one of the characters in Niall Williams’ novel, “This Is Happiness.” Christy rides his bicycle with our protagonist and narrator Noel (Noe) Crowe in Faha in County Clare, Ireland. It’s the spring of 1958. Christy is an electric man, sent to the village to sign up people for “the electric,” the miracle of electricity finally coming to rural Ireland. It takes a while for Williams to reveal the man’s true purpose, to apologize to a local widow, Annie Mooney, for leaving her at the altar 50 years before. Christy finds shelter with Noe and his grandparents, Doady and Ganga.

Noe, 17, learns of the man’s mission and vows to help and therein lies the heartache and happiness of the tale. Noe fled to his grandparents’ house after his mother died, he quit the seminary and found himself at loose ends with his father in Dublin. For Noe: “All that had stitched me into this life came undone and I couldn’t escape the feeling that folded against my back were wings that had failed to open.” I don’t know of a better description of being 17 in Dublin or Faha or Daytona Beach, Florida. Anywhere.

This is my first Williams’ novel and I was entranced by its first lines, “It had stopped raining.” The reader finds that Faha is a soggy, boggy place, not accustomed to sunny days that stretch on forever and make life intriguing. It stops raining the Wednesday of Holy Week and the sun stays, as if the Good Lord himself willed it on the most sacred time of the Catholic year.

The writer’s style is beguiling, filled with his Irish voice and there is no stopping the reading once you’ve begun. You even begin speaking like the characters after awhile. You’re hooked. The ending can’t be predicted. You’re along for a joyful, sometimes heart-rending, ride.

Ann Patchett promoted the novel on one of her “New Book Friday” sessions from Parnassus Books in Nashville. I love her books so anything she suggests gets my attention. I am Irish-American, my grandfather came as a lad from County Roscommon with his own sad story that took him all the way to his 90^th birthday. He was a serious man yet kind, the man who always brought ice cream to our house. When I lost my college scholarship, he sent me a 20-dollar bill every month. That was happiness!

There is an Irish voice in literature. You know it when you hear it. Filled with words and humor and sadness. You could say that about writers from other traditions. Jewish writers, for instance, know a bit about dark humor. But literature has a strong Irish voice and that’s what you hear in Williams. He  lives with his wife Christine Breen and their pets in a renovated cottage in west Clare abandoned in 1910 when Chris's grandfather left for the U.S. 

This Is happiness. Keep saying it while pedaling your beat-up bicycle through the heather in County Clare or wherever you may be.

This Is Happiness.

Postscript: Checking out Williams' web site, I entered his world and his wife's. Listening to a snippet of their book, "In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden," I decided to buy the audiobook. I don't listen to many audiobooks but this one combines the voices of the writers with gardening and a view of rural Ireland in 2021. How could I resist?

A breakthrough by any other name

Shawn Rossiter wrote a review in 15 Bytes magazine of The Nomad Literary Magazine’s new "Breakthroughs" issue. During our Zoom "flash-reading" on May 19, editor Rachel White noted that the review was accurate but not entirely complimentary. Here's how it opens:

THE NOMAD’s Issue 4, “Breakthroughs,” is more about the through than the break. There are few explosive moments, not many trumpet blasts. Instead, the issue gathers fiction, memoir, lyric essay, prose poem, and poetry—fifty-four pieces by twenty-seven writers—around breakthrough as passage, as a moving through.

15 Bytes is a publication of the Artists of Utah in Salt Lake City. The Nomad is based in Bountiful, Utah. Rossiter goes on to describe some of the stand-out Nomad pieces. Rossiter had praise for Shari Zollinger's piece which she read at the May 19 event:

Shari Zollinger’s “Found” gives the issue one of its purest formal breakthroughs. The essay enters “psychedelic space” through a microdose on the morning of an eclipse—Alice falling through, the red pill and blue pill hovering at the edges—and searches backward along memory’s “thread-gauzy timeline” for a self left waiting in a Taipei hospital. The strangeness of the piece, its Alice-and-Matrix layering, its eclipse-as-wormhole logic, enacts a consciousness genuinely working at the borders of what language can hold. What is found is not restored intact. Instead, the abandoned self is allowed to burn, scatter, and become movable. “It was okay to let a piece of me die,” Zollinger writes. “It was okay to blow away.” Her author’s note makes the connection explicit: the piece itself emerged from a breakthrough into the lyric essay, “at the crossroads between breakdown and breakthrough.” Form and subject meet as the essay’s fragmented, luminous movement enacts the kind of healing it describes.

That's the key to Rossiter's interest and I thank him for the attention. As a retired arts administrator, I respect anyone's desire to be part of an arts non-profit. It is a constant struggle. Funding comes from a State Arts Agency (SAA) or Local Arts Agency (LAA), sometimes a Regional Arts Organization (RAO), which is Creative West in Denver. Also memberships and subscriptions and any local funding the org can muster. 

The National Endowment for the Arts is in there, either through one of these agencies or directly, with applications to the NEA. For those of us paying attention, all of these entities have been under the gun since Jan. 20, 2025. Funding is tight. Some private foundations have stepped in to relieve shortfalls.

All of this is important. I may not have the exact lay of the land because I've been retired from day-to-day arts-funding functions for 10 years as I wrote and published a historical novel. I also still submit to lit mags via Submittable or directly to places where I know editors, such as The Nomad. Thanks Rachel and her business partner, the traveling poet/musician Ken Waldman, now somewhere in Texas. 

The poets and writers on our May 19 Zoom gathering all have interesting stories to tell. Their ages and backgrounds are revealed on the Nomad web site, and their stories are their own to tell. The challenge is to make it interesting for the reader. In a way, every poem and story is a breakthrough for the author. Every literary magazine is a breakthrough into imagination. 

THE NOMAD Literary Magazine takes a trip from Bountiful to Zoom tonight

Two of my short stories are included in "The Breakthroughs" issue of The Nomad Literary Magazine based in Bountiful, Utah. I've been submitting work to The Nomad since its first issue which became a print book. The project was launched by traveling writer/musician Ken Waldman (I just spoke to him -- he was traveling near Terlingua, Texas, which he said was remote and pretty cool) and Utah-based writer Rachel White. Rachel does most of the editing work as Ken travels coast-to-coast. Ken was a frequent visitor to Wyoming and he always stopped to see me in Cheyenne when I was the literature coordinator at the Wyoming Arts Council. While a trip to Bountiful was just a short jaunt across the Rockies from Cheyenne, I relocated to the edge of the Florida wetlands and couldn't be farther away from my old stomping grounds of WY/CO/UT. It's a good thing we'll be releasing the issue and reading our work on Zoom tonight at 7 p.m. MDT, 9 p.m. EDT. Free. FMI: THE-NOMAD.eventbrite.com

Want a signed copy of "Zeppelins Over Denver?"

Title: Zeppelins Over Denver

Author: Michael T. Shay

ISBN: 9781564390905

Price: $30 list, $35.22, signed and mailed

Print length: 426 pages

Format: Paperback

Publishing date: May 5, 2026 by The Ridgeway Press of Michigan

How to order: Venmo $35.22 (book plus USPS Media Mail shipping) to Hummingbird Minds Press on Venmo (307-241-2903); put address and name for signing in notes. It also is available on Amazon and at your favorite bookstore. My new favorite is Novel Tea Books in Ormond Beach, a place with comfy chairs and a distinctive selection of teas and munches. It is accessible for those of us in walkers, rollators, and e-scooters. I suggest using a rollator for the ramp in the back and for the quaint spaces inside. There's also a cool front porch with only two steps that can be managed easily.

BTW, when Ingram Spark was uncertain about pub date, I did a test order with Ann Patchett's Parnassus Books in Nashville (I'm reading one of her "Friday Favorites" now) and Books & Books in Miami, originator of the fantastic Miami Book Fair. It took about ten days but books arrived safely. 

Zeppelins Over Denver is a historical novel set in 1919 Colorado 

July 1919. Irish immigrant Patrick Hott and U.S. Army nurse Frannie Lee meet on a train going west through Colorado. He's a lung patient headed for the West's healing climate and she's off to an assignment at a new army hospital outside Denver. As they strike up a conversation, neither realizes that the train is hours away from a disaster that will upend their lives and bring them together to face new dangers as America tries to forget The Great War and race into the "Roaring Twenties." Inspired by his maternal grandmother's war diary and years of research, Shay gives readers a new look at Colorado's post-war boom that also saw the rise of the KKK, a "Red Scare" prompted by fear of Bolsheviks, and labor strife fueled by the infamous Ludlow Massacre

 Michael Shay’s work has appeared in High Plains Literary Review, Nomad, Colorado Review, Owen Wister Review, Poetry Hotel, Flash Fiction Review, WyoFile, Silver Birch Press, Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams from Coffee House Press, and Blood, Water, Wind, and Stone: An Anthology of Wyoming Writers. He was co-editor of the Pronghorn Press anthology Deep West: A Literary Tour of Wyoming. He’s a graduate of Father Lopez High School, Daytona State College, and University of Florida. He earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Colorado State University. Michael worked as an arts administrator for 25 years, promoting the literary arts for the Wyoming Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. He and his family live in Ormond Beach, Fla.

Contact: michaelshaywyo@gmail.com; hummingbirdsminds.blogspot.com; Michael Shay on Facebook

Writers talk books on a rainy May evening in Ormond Beach

The rain waited until I rolled myself inside the Novel Tea Book Shop in Ormond Beach. In Central Florida, we’ve been waiting for rain since last summer and it seems to be returning. Two days ago, the wide-eyed forecasters on the Weather Channel predicted a Tuesday deluge to cross the state. The clouds appeared but the rain was more a whisper than a monsoon. But yesterday, it came down.

I was in a comfy chair inside Novel Tea for the Wednesday evening Writers Haven. It was billed as a chance to hang out with other local writers to exchange tips and stories, the kind we were working on and the kind you tell about writing’s daily travails. An interesting group arranged around the snack table and living room-style reading room. Me, a novelist and short story writer; a striving sci-fi writer; a guy with copies of the cover of his dark fantasy novel due out this summer; a young woman writing a film script; two romance writers; a writer/editor for two local motor-sports magazines (an illustrator, too, as he’s the shop’s artist-of-the-month); and a woman “between projects” chosen by staff to be the moderator.

I sipped an Earl Grey Moonlight iced tea. The tea was Earl Grey with orange, blue sunflowers, and natural flavors. I drank it and chipped away at a monster chocolate chip cookie that I shared with my son Kevin. I shared the story of my new historical novel set in 1919 Colorado, as foreign a land to Floridians as Florida is to Coloradans (do I have that right or is it Coloradoans?). I had copies with me. Four were signed copies to my sister-in-law Nancy and her three adult children. I slipped her the books while nobody was looking and she slipped me the cash which I could use on any number of novels or teas or giant cookies. I also slipped a copy of my novel to Stephanie Gonter, one of the shop’s co-owners. I brought along my book of short stories. I am on a mission to monetize my writing journey, no easy task for us small-press-published authors.

One of the more interesting conversations was on A.I. Many self-published authors are avoiding A.I. writing yet they also employ A.I.-designed covers. Angel Lowden, the store’s other co-owner, worked the counter. She said that she and other booksellers are on the lookout for A.I. covers and usually won’t accept them in their book stock. The cover is hugely important these days and she suggested getting a professional to do the job. My daughter Annie designed the “Zeppelins” cover. She’s an artist and marketing ace and gave her dad a special deal.

Novel Tea is everything an indie should be. It’s located along a leafy street on the main floor of an old two-story house. It features a big front porch with easy chairs. Inside are overstuffed chairs and many, many books. There is a food bar and a bar-bar that serves beer and wine. Some in the gathering jumped right into happy hour. I am a teetotaler these days so Novel Tea’s specialties and their huge array of leaf teas add to the allure of its name. The play on words is nice too. I noted the shop features an array of craft brews including those from Ormond Brewing Company which is on the other side of the tracks on the line that serves Ormond Station. In reality, there is no train to Ormond Station but me and my neighbors are working on it. The shop’s next big event is June 3 with Boozy Books at the brewery. Here are details from the web site:

Our Summer Boozy Book Fair returns on June 3rd from 5 PM to 9 PM at Ormond Brewing Company.

Browse books from Novel Tea Book Shop, shop local authors and artisans, and enjoy a relaxed evening with a drink in hand. Whether you’re building your summer TBR, looking for a unique gift, or just want a fun night out, this is your spot.

We’ll have:
Local authors and book signings
Handcrafted goods from local vendors
Books for all ages and interests
Ormond Brewing featuring your favorite brews

Come out, support local, and celebrate the start of summer with us.

Free to attend. Bring a friend. 

It’s wonderful, really. Support local. Stephanie stressed that she and her partner are always looking for fun new ways to sell books and teas. I am now local but didn’t sign up in time for Boozy Books. Next time…

Note on accessibility: From the street, Novel Tea appears inaccessible for those of us using walkers, rollators, and e-carts. But it's very accessible. Parking on the east side of the building is ample (mind the cats!) and there is a ramp inside the entrance located near the artist studio. Staff will rearrange chairs to accommodate.

DNC in Denver 2028?

A DNC exploratory committee visited Denver last week to see if it's the best place for the 2028 Democratic National Convention. Other possible 2028 locations include Boston, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. 

I covered the 2008 Dem convention in Denver as an embedded blogger with the Wyoming delegation. Why not return to those glory days, when Barack Obama was the nominee and all set to move into the presidency (twice) while the GOP plotted to never let anything like that ever happen again. And look what they did. Just take a look around and see what they did to guarantee themselves a Democrat-free future, a democracy-free future. Use search bar to find my DNC Denver 2008 posts.

This was then...

Denver August 2008

Wrong shipping date confuses book buyers and me too

I was flummoxed (yes, flummoxed) to see my historical novel "Zeppelins Over Denver" listed for pre-order on Amazon.com with a shipping date of Nov. 19. On the product page, a May 5, 2026, pub date is listed and that is correct. At the same time, I was holding a copy of "Zeppelins" in my hands, wondering why an entity such as Amazon, which can speed a supply of Dude Wipes to me overnight, wants readers to wait until almost Thanksgiving for my first novel. I have alerted the site's problem-solvers and hope for a quick solution. I mean, the book is worth waiting for, might even make a great holiday gift, but I may be an old man before that comes around. Pause for fact check: I am an old man now, typing this with the same four fingers I used on typewriters and keyboards since the 1970s when I was putting my first words to paper. Yes, paper. So, if you are anxious to read a novel set in 1919 featuring characters out of The Great War in Europe, leave a comment and I will sell you a copy and mail it the old-fashioned way.