When you’re writing, sometimes surprising things spill out. This little prose poem was completely spontaneous; it didn’t follow any plot line nor was it the product of any forethought. It came from a moment of pure presence with what I was doing. I looked at it on the screen, slightly amazed, and decided to leave it in.
Sandra Shaw Homer has lived in Costa Rica for almost 30 years, where she has taught languages and worked as a translator and environmental activist. For several years she wrote a regular column, “Local Color,” for the English-language weekly, The Tico Times.
Her creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry have appeared in a number of print and online travel and literary journals, as well as on own blog, WritingFromTheHeart.net.
Her travel memoir, Letters from the Pacific, received excellent Kirkus and Publishers Weekly reviews; a brief inspirational memoir, The Magnificent Dr. Wao, is available as a Kindle Book; and a second travel memoir, Journey to the Joie de Vivre, details two Atlantic crossings on cargo ships as well as a swing through Europe.
I’m so excited for you to connect with Sandra, check out her writing and her books, and follow along as she continues to remind us of our connection to nature, and its power to transform our experiences.
I’d love it if you’d introduce yourself, what you do, and what you’re working on.
Having lived in Costa Rica for almost 30 years has given me an opportunity to discover what I value most. At one point I helped found and worked with three environmental non-profit organizations and headed the county environmental commission. This was long before the climate crisis was on anybody’s radar, and our efforts were directed at saving the Lake Arenal watershed from illegal development. We had some important successes, and I realize now that what we were doing did have implications for our climate future.
How did you get started?
But I’m really a writer! And that’s one of the reasons I moved to Costa Rica – to find a quiet place where I could start looking within to my creative self and do what I had always wanted. I’ve always been a writer – for other people, clients, environmental causes. But I knew that somewhere my own story was percolating inside, and I wanted to get at it.
What inspired the work that you’re doing?
Interestingly, the environmental work I did inspired my writing, so that my book, Evelio’s Garden, is a lyrical exploration of the environment as well as a memoir, my personal story.
What is your biggest passion? Do you feel like you’re living your passion and purpose?
My biggest passion now is to help others connect to the natural world in ways that will move them to work to save it. And, yes, after a lifetime of work and discovery, I feel as if I’m living my dream.
What is your joy blueprint? What lights you up, brings you joy, and makes you feel the most alive?
A good first sentence. Whatever you’re writing has to start with a good first sentence. For me, they usually come out of the ether – I may not even be thinking of a particular poem or writing project. But once that first sentence lights up, the joy of it carries me forward. There are lots of things that bring me joy: water, mountains, clouds, trees. But that first sentence taps into an inner creative self that just wants to sing.
How do you live intentionally? Are there tools/resources/practices that you rely on to help you stay mindful and grounded?
Weather permitting, I always sit outside at the end of day to watch the sunlight climb up the eastern trees, the vultures swooping as high as the clouds, the wind singing, my cat trying to squeeze into my car through the partially open window. These are precious moments in which I am conscious of how grateful I am.
What would your younger self think about what you’re doing now?
She’d probably understand, since those sunset moments were special to her too. But she was too angry to feel grateful.
Do you have a go-to mantra or affirmation?
A simple “thank you,” directed to the universe for whatever moves me. I read once that the only proper prayer is one of gratitude, and I’ve taken that to heart.
What is your biggest dream?
I hardly dare to think of finishing the novel I started so many years ago. I’m old now. I want to continue to live in peace in this beautiful rural setting in one of the most beautiful places on the planet. I want to feel that I’ve led a useful life and be grateful for all the many gifts I experience every day. A Laughing Falcon calling in the wee hours just before dawn. The monkeys howling in the sunset. The stray cat that’s showing up every day for dinner. My loving friends. My sister and her family. Too many gifts to count. My dreams are simple now, things to be grateful for, that’s enough.
To learn more about Sandra and her work you can visit her on Facebook, Amazon , on B&N and on Powells.com.
Joy Corner is an interview-style blog series brought to you by Seek The Joy Podcast. Our mission continues to be a desire to share your stories, truths, joys and inspiration in your words. We invite you to join our corner, and share your joys, passions, and moments of inspiration as we continue to seek the joy, together. Join this series here
Listening, Fromm argues, is “is an art like the understanding of poetry” and, like any art, has its own rules and norms. Drawing on his half-century practice as a therapist, Fromm offers six such guidelines for mastering the art of unselfish understanding:
I have admired and loved Erich Fromm ever since I read his The Art of Loving, the most sane and humane treatise on love I have ever encountered. The parallels he draws in The Art of Listening make perfect sense to me. And I reflect that an author must be capable of listening to and loving his characters. Otherwise, they will never seem real.
January is turning into a busy month. Today my poem “Tropical Rain” appeared in Sky Island Journal. The editors of this relatively new on-line journal have been wonderfully supportive of my writing, so I’m grateful to be able to highlight their existence.
You can read my poem here: https://www.skyislandjournal.com/issues#/issue-11-winter-2020/ . Please remember to scroll down to my photo/bio and click on the poem there. And thanks.
Thanks to the Internet, I don’t have to move out of my chair to have a publicity tour for Evelio’s Garden: Memoir of a Naturalist in Costa Rica. In fact, this one was conducted from my sister’s house in Washington State, where I visited for the holidays.
Sherri was a good interviewer and we had an interesting conversation about what makes a writer. I encourage you to tune in on January 16 at 3:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. That would be 4:00 in Costa
Rica, so simply count backwards to get to, Toronto, say (where the hell is that, anyway? I am spatially challenged). Once it’s live, of course, you can tune in on line anytime you feel like it, so I hope you enjoy.
All best wishes for the New Year.
After so many years, and so much waiting and dithering around, putting the manuscript in the hands of professionals made it happen — whoosh! December 1st it was on Amazon (and as a Kindle Book), Barnes & Noble (also as a Nook Book) and Powells.com. With increasing demand on line, it will also make it into bricks and mortar stores.
Enter the enchanting world of the northern highlands of Costa Rica, where the author begins a memoir, tracing the seasons and closely observing the natural riches around her. But Evelio, who helped build their house, interrupts with an idea to plant an organic garden on their property. Although her husband has already agreed, she is wary, suspecting Evelio will pull her into the daily ups and downs of his project. This is exactly what he does, creating an often funny, always frustrating, and ultimately rewarding counterpoint to her own work, such that the two inevitably intertwine on the page.
Over the course of a challenging year of unpredictable weather and the depredations of wild animals and toxic chemicals, their friendship grows as Evelio teaches her about the rural sustainability of Costa Rica in decades past. But stresses over the garden and a serious health detour churn up the author’s long-buried memories, forcing her to try to make sense of her past and opening her up to profound personal change.
Evelio’s Garden is a lyrical meditation on cultural values, friendship, aging, loss, and, ultimately, the healing power of the natural world.
“The conversational prose is rich in detail about the wide variety of trees, flowers, fruits, and vegetables that blanket the area, and there are some wonderful stories about various wildlife that Homer has encountered. A vignette in which she creates a makeshift bridge for a band of monkeys is particularly delightful . . . . A remembrance that effectively captures one woman’s connection with nature in Central America” — Kirkus Reviews
“To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote as she contemplated the art of seeing. To listen takes time, too — to learn to hear and befriend the world within and the world without, to attend to the quiet voice of life and heart alike. “If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing,” Pablo Neruda wrote in his gorgeous ode to quietude, “perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves.”
This inspiriting, sanctifying power of listening is what writer Holly M. McGhee and illustrator Pascal Lemaître explore in the simply titled, sweetly unfolding Listen — a serenade to the heart-expanding, life-enriching, world-ennobling art of attentiveness as a wellspring of self-understanding, of empathy for others, of reverence for the loveliness of life, evocative of philosopher Simone Weil’s memorable assertion that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”
Evelio’s Garden: Memoir of a Naturalist in Costa Rica is coming in September (as soon as I have a few reviews to put on the back cover). Published by Atmosphere Press, a small collaborative publishing house, it looks almost too good to be true.
I had let it slide for a while (ten years???) after contacting a zillion agents who were not thrilled — although some said it was beautifully written — because in the hurly-burly world of major publishing, a small, even beautiful, book needs a lot of extra work to become its own little profit center.
Even after all the work editor Allyson Latta had put into it, I still lacked confidence after so many rejections, but something stirred me when I saw a call for submissions by Atmosphere Press in a publishing newsletter. After I had jumped through so many hoops with the agents (send first and third chapters; send first five pages and a marketing summary; send synopsis of no more than 300 words, etc.) all this press wanted to see was the manuscript!
Well, that was just too easy, so I sent it — what the hell? — and a few days later I had a note from the publisher, Nick Courtright, a well-known poet in his own right, saying they would like to take it. I was flabbergasted: this was really too easy. So I hemmed and hawed for a few days (was that weeks, Nick?) until agreeing to go forward.
Nick put me in touch with one of their editors, with whom I had an excellent few weeks of working together — he liked it! — and I was beginning to feel a little jazzed. So, here it comes:
More later!
Jorge Luis Borges
“A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
“I find my position as a poet today a curious one… For a long time I have maintained that the poet’s affair was the individual human soul, the story of it in one man, in my case the transforming of personal emotions into written events. Now it has become impossible to guard one’s soul — death to do it — we are forced to read the papers, and yet I still believe that our job is somehow or other to be above the mêlée, or so deeply in it that one comes through to something else, something universal and timeless.”
May Sarton
