Category Archives: Personal

Happy Pride 2021

Posted on June 5, 2021 by Gabriella West

Pride comes but once a year! This month we are emerging from a pandemic. It feels like we ought to be joyous and yet there is more anxiety in the air than joyousness, for the most part. (Although on June … Continue reading →

Posted in creativity and its discontents, LGBT, Personal | Tagged ADHD, Apple, audiobook, Barnes & Noble, connecting the dots, Covid, Daniela Acitelli, Gay Pride Month, Google play, June, passings, Pride, Smashwords, time of grace, women's lives | Leave a comment

A Final Word on Blake Bailey

Posted on May 29, 2021 by Gabriella West

You can’t keep a bad man down. That’s what sprang to mind when I read on Twitter yesterday that Blake Bailey’s infamous biography of Philip Roth, unpublished by Norton, had been picked up by Skyhorse Publishing and will be rushed … Continue reading →

Posted in creativity and its discontents, News, Personal, Writing | Tagged academics, alcoholism, biography, bisexuality, Blake Bailey, decline and fall, double lives, Eve Crawford Peyton, fathers, Lusher, Philip Roth, publishing, Rape, Scandal, Skyhorse Publishing, sons, The Splendid Things We Planned, Valentina Rice, W.W. Norton | Leave a comment

It’s Spring!

Posted on May 2, 2021 by Gabriella West

And that’s always exciting. This was what my kitchen looked like last month, with the fruit trees outside in the terraced back yard pressing in at the window. Things are greener now. The cedar waxwings are taking their last bites … Continue reading →

Posted in creativity and its discontents, Personal | Tagged abuse, billie eilish, Blake Bailey, British Vogue, fashion, feminism, Matt Gaetz, sexuality, spring, teen girls, women | Leave a comment

In these dark days…

Posted on December 19, 2020 by Gabriella West

In “times of trouble,” as Paul McCartney put it once, we all need a little Beatles reminiscing. Here’s Paul looking back on his friendship with John and George. https://www.npr.org/player/embed/945390087/945578848 And… Smashwords started its End of Year sale early this time! … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal, Self-publishing, Writing | Tagged 2020, paul mccartney, sale, Smashwords End of Year Sale | 1 Comment

Happy Thanksgiving 2020

Posted on November 26, 2020 by Gabriella West

It’s a quiet, chilly, blustery day here. While the Covid news is obviously very bad, I’m trying to find good signs amid the bad ones. So here’s a good one: Claire the Scottish Deerhound won the top prize at the … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal | Tagged Covid, medieval romance, National Dog Show, New York Times, thanksgiving | Leave a comment

Big Fires Everywhere…

Posted on September 9, 2020 by Gabriella West

“Extremely dense & tall smoke plumes from numerous large wildfires, some of which have been generating nocturnal pyrocumulonimbus clouds (fire thunderstorms), are almost completely blocking out the sun across some portions of Northern California this morning.” –Climate Scientist Daniel Swain … Continue reading →

Posted in Health, News, Personal, San Francisco | Tagged air quality, California, climate change, fires, Oregon | Leave a comment

Coronavirus Dispatch #3: It’s Surreal

Posted on April 11, 2020 by Gabriella West

I’m going to keep these short, as none of us have a lot of bandwidth these days. But yes, it’s surreal. We have gone over 20,00 deaths in the U.S. as of today. In a few days, it will be … Continue reading →

Posted in News, Personal | Tagged 2020, California, coronavirus, deaths, Hart Island, Ireland, life after this, Medium, pain, pandemic, Return to Normal, surreal | Leave a comment

Coronavirus Dispatch #1

Posted on March 19, 2020 by Gabriella West

Here’s how it started, at least the official story, from a site called CIDRAP (Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy) that I just happened upon today on the web: “As suspected, a novel coronavirus has been identified in some … Continue reading →

Posted in Health, News, Personal, San Francisco | Tagged alienation, Bay Area, California, capitalism, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis, death, empathy, fear, friendship, global pandemic, loss, nature, shelter in place, shortage, society, surreal, tests, Trump Administration, uncertainty | 1 Comment

Happy Holidays…

Posted on December 16, 2019 by Gabriella West

Somehow, it’s mid-December. This year does feel especially Christmas-y, if only because the weather is decidedly wintry… and the sister of a school friend, whom I have not seen since I was twelve, volunteered to send me a Christmas pudding … Continue reading →

Posted in Editing, Personal, Writing | Tagged backlist, breaks, Christmas, Christmas Pudding, Happy Holidays, novels, Smashwords End of Year Sale, writing, Year of the Rat | Leave a comment

Loma Prieta Memory: Reading Pinter by Candlelight

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Gabriella West

(Note: I lived through Loma Prieta in 1989, which is now, incredibly, 30 years ago. The first section of this essay was written in 1999, on the 10th anniversary of the earthquake.) I’d been in San Francisco for a little over a … Continue reading →