Lisa Lenard-Cook: An Extraordinary Writer and Teacher, an Extraordinary Woman

My friend Lisa Lenard-Cook died on May 22, at her home in Albuquerque with her husband, Bob, by her side. She had fought ovarian cancer for almost two years, and at one point we thought she had it beat. But it came back with a vengeance last fall, and she ended up spending 40 days in the hospital. She went home in January, but in March she sent her friends a note none of us wanted to read.

"I know it's been a while since you've heard from me, but there hadn't been much to report, except that I wasn't recovering as quickly as we'd hoped. Now we've learned that the abdominal discomfort I've been experiencing...is because of tumors run rampant....

"This morning I was admitted to Rust Medical Center in Rio Rancho, but after talking with my doctors, & with hospice, we headed back home late this afternoon. As I am unable to eat, & have lost a great deal of weight already, this isn't going to drag out for long...

"I'm sorry the news isn't better. I knew what I was up against from the outset, & I know you all hoped for a better outcome. But I'm 63 years old, & have lived a good life, thanks, in part, to each of you.

"Thank you for your love, caring, prayers, & yes, cussing. Love you all. ~L"

Lisa posted something similar on Facebook that week, and one more post a week or so later.

I met Lisa when I was the owner of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. I was looking for new workshop leaders to add to our faculty, and my friend and workshop leader Catherine Ryan Hyde suggested Lisa. We hit if off instantly. Not only was she an amazing novelist (her books include Dissonance and Coyote Morning), but she was one of those people who has a gift for teaching and inspiring others. She was an extraordinary instructor, and the writers she coached and edited absolutely adored her.

She continued with the conference until last June, when she was in remission and came to Santa Barbara wearing scarves and wigs, always exhibiting her sense of humor and resiliency. She had pushed back against the cancer and forced it into remission in barely nine months.

In the fall of 2014 I moved to Santa Fe, and spent a night with her and Bob in their lovely home in north Albuquerque. Last August, Rob and I had dinner with them on our way to Santa Fe, and toasted the apparent triumph over the cancer. Sadly, it was not to be.

I will miss her ready smile and generous spirit, her love of literature and words and her dogs and the New Mexico landscape, and her absolute commitment to the writers she shepherded over the years. Rest in peace, sweet friend.

A memorial service will be held at 4 p.m. June 11 at their home in Albuquerque. If you want to attend, let Bob Cook know, at bob.d.cook@gmail.com.

And if you'd like to remember her in a special way, please consider donating to one of these wonderful organizations, which she loved:

Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary, Ramah, NM: https://wildspiritwolfsanctuary.org/index.php
Animal Humane NM, Albuquerque, NM:  http://animalhumanenm.org
Ovarian Cancer Research Fund: http://www.ocrf.org

On the Move Again

I'll miss this view from our deck in Summerland, which we've called home for a little over a year.

Re-entry after coming home from Hedgebrook has been hectic and all-consuming. My week on Whidbey Island allowed for writing and reflection, thank goodness, especially after a two-week trip to France, during which I got news that my younger sister had died. It’s been an emotional time. Now I am in the middle of moving again, to a new home across town.

We have only about four more days to pack before the move. And it won’t be long after I'm settled in that Rob wants to begin renovation. I imagine I will be spending a lot of time in the relative peace and quiet of a coffee shop once that starts. It’s never a dull moment with Rob, for whom life is all about the journey.

As I wrote from Hedgebrook, I’m going to stop posting excerpts of my memoir while I revise it. Meanwhile, I’ll write more blog posts about our trips to Ireland last fall and France last month. Travel is a marvelous way to get to know oneself better—and of course your significant other. Both trips have been incredible learning experiences—for both of us. Our next “trip” will be a home renovation…stay tuned!

In the Willow Cabin, Day Seven

I go home tomorrow. And all I can say is one week at Hedgebrook—or really any writing retreat—is never enough. One barely gets settled into a new routine (and catches up on her sleep) before she has to head back home to reality.

Nevertheless, it’s been a lovely experience. I have gotten some writing done, perhaps not as much as I wanted, but enough. I have met some amazing and talented women. And we have been blessed to work with the poet and social justice advocate Carolyn Forché, whose keen insights and encouragement have allowed us to see the ways we can improve our own work while at the same time being inspired.

I did not get to see an owl (at least not yet). Though several of the women here have. We have seen the bald eagles drifting on the winds above the fields across the street. We had a terrific storm the other night, complete with pounding rain and howling winds and a power outage—that was fun. I did take a walk down toward the sound, but turned back when the chill wind started to blow so hard I had to lean forward to walk.

There are journals in each cabin (my cabin is Willow), where women who have stayed here over the years have left little bits of advice or encouragement or poems or, even in one case, a CD with recordings of the frogs at night, which I downloaded. I was delighted to discover I know several women who have stayed in this particular cabin over the years: Hope Edelman, one of my mentors at Antioch Los Angeles and author of, among other books, Motherless Daughters; Marsha Rosenzweig Pincus, poet, teacher and one of my AROHO sisters whose one-woman show “Chalkdust” was produced in Santa Fe last year; and Wendy C. Ortiz, another Antioch peep whose memoir, Excavation, came out last year to rave reviews.

Other women who have stayed here include Kathleen Ross, president of Heritage University (1999), and the poets Amy Pence (1989) and Sharon Hashimoto (1996). Another woman from Santa Barbara stayed here in 1990: Kate Smith Passy, whom I don’t know.

The sound in front of Hedgebrook Farm is, inexplicably, called Useless Bay. Somehow, I know I will write about that someday.

Review - Anne Lamott's Help Thanks Wow

My God box

Anne Lamott’s new book, Help Thanks Wow, The Three Essential Prayers, is a sweet, moving guidebook to what Lamott considers the three most important prayers one can utter. I love Anne’s books. Her Bird by Bird has been on my bookshelves for many years, and I especially enjoyed Traveling Mercies. One doesn’t have to be religious, or even particularly spiritual, to appreciate Help Thanks Wow, as Anne mentions in the introduction. You only have to believe that something is bigger than you, and that if you ask for help and express gratitude, things will happen in your life that will make you say “wow.”

What I love about Lamott is even though she is a firm believer in Jesus, she also knows that neither she nor Christianity (or any other organized religion) has the answers. In fact, she says, no one does, and if they try to tell you they do, they’re delusional.

Anne Lamott's Help Thanks Wow

She had me close to tears with the first section on “Help,” because what she describes is so perfectly the human condition. We all go through difficulties, and most of us will not be spared life’s harshest experiences. But, she says, just uttering the simple entreaty, “help,” can shift things within us, can allow us to give over the suffering to something bigger than we are, and that can make all the difference in our ability to handle whatever we face.

“Most good, honest prayers remind me that I am not in charge,” she writes, “that I cannot fix anything, and that I open myself to being helped by something, some force, some friends, some something. These prayers say, ‘Dear Some Something, I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t see where I’m going, I’m getting more lost, more afraid, more clenched. Help.’”

And then, she says, let it go.

Lamott says she has a “God box” that she puts her prayers into, then closes the lid and lets whatever universal power is out there take care of it. It could be anything, a glove box, a crayon box. I like this idea.

For my birthday last week, a dear friend gave me a lovely wooden box with the tree of life and birds carved into the top. I have made this my God box (I just mistyped God as Dog – that works, too).

I also especially believe in the second prayer, “Thanks.” Gratitude is a powerful emotion, and I can attest to its ability to shift perspective. Every day I mindfully say thanks, for everything, and more often than not something even more serendipitous or fortuitous comes into my life. 

The final prayer, “Wow,” is a wonderful expression and acknowledgement of how wondrous life is.  Look around. You will always find something, even if it’s just a tiny hummingbird flitting around a bottlebrush tree – to be amazed about. Wow.

Help Thanks Wow is a slim volume – I read it in about an hour or so – but it packs a powerful message. And with the world we have today, it’s a message many of us need to hear.

Writing on the Stunning Northern California Coast

Near the Sea Ranch Lodge

I've just returned from a week up at Sea Ranch, north of San Francisco on the rugged Mendocino coast. It's stunningly beautiful there, and a balm for the soul. For the past three years a group of women writer friends and I have decamped together for a writing retreat, and two of those years have been at Sea Ranch.

It was once a sprawling working ranch, but was developed in the sixties with homes on vast plots with weathered siding and surrounded by natural grasses. The ranch stretches for about 13 miles along the coast, with homes scattered from the coastal bluffs and up to the hills across Highway 1. We stayed in two houses near each other, and walked on the beach and hiked through the tree-studded property. We wrote and talked and read each others' work. It was just what the doctor ordered, and I came home refreshed and relaxed and ready to tackle all the work I had left behind.

I also dropped my daughter off at her friend's tiny studio in Oakland. The two of them have plans to work and pursue their music and art, with a brief break to go to Burning Man in August. It is the first time she has struck out on her own when I have felt that she is prepared and ready to create a new life. I am very proud of her. For those of you who know about her blind kitty, little Maya-Roo is with her and Anna in their tiny place. So far all is well and they are happy. And so am I.

Deer outside our front windows. They visited us every day. This couple had two babies with them.

We had several days of fog, but mostly it was sunny and warm.

New Books from Willow Rock Authors

Two of Willow Rock’s authors have new books coming out, and a third is writing a sequel to his successful nonfiction book on investing.

Just out from Moodbooks Publishing is Michael Scott Hanrahan’s environmental thriller The Last Extinction. Biologist Christina Larson finds herself pulled into a mythic and epic journey to save the last of six sacred animal species denoted in an ancient relic unearthed in the Amazonian jungle. If she doesn't, it will mean the end of humanity as we know it. The Last Extinction is available as both an e-book and as Moodbooks’ brand-new enhanced e-book, which features beautifully animated illustrations and sound. You’ve never seen another book like it!

Michele Wolfe has been offered a contract to publish her novel, The Three Graces. College juniors Jessie, Isabel and Sara become linked in friendship by visits to hidden places only they can see. Together on a trip to Hearst Castle in California, an earth-shaking encounter with a stunning statue in the gardens binds them to the spirits of the Three Graces, Brilliance, Joy and Bloom. Under the weight of school and family problems, the girls grow to be fast friends as they struggle with who they are and what direction they should go in life. Through the gift of pendants, The Graces seem to be guiding them. But will they be able to help the girls overcome all the roadblocks along the way? You can read more about The Three Graces and Michele here. And watch for more news about the book in coming months.

Meanwhile, Kevin Bourke is working on a sequel to his 2012 book, Make Your Money Last a Lifetime, which is available in paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon. Using stories from his own experiences as a financial planner, Kevin provides excellent advice on everything from asset allocation to how to deal with the fluctuations in the stock market to handling your grown children’s requests for money. Kirkus Reviews called it “An eminently readable, authoritative little book that offers sensible advice about major financial decisions.” See what others say about this great how-to book on making your resources last as long as you do.  Kevin’s sequel will be titled Make Your Money Last a Lifetime – for Divorcees.

I am proud to have worked with all three of these exceptional authors. Check out their books today.