I’ve recommended Theo of Golden to everyone I know, with this sense of urgency: stop whatever you’re doing and read this book.
So when my sister-in-law had turned the last page and both scolded me for not revealing the impact the book would have (I won’t give specific spoilers) and in the next breath thanked me for recommending it, she was eager to visit the coffee shop and see the portraits that became the inspiration for the book. Fountain City Coffee is an hour from our family farm in rural Georgia, so we made plans to take our husbands (who are brothers) and go to the coffee shop on Sunday, February 15. Though we’ve been to or through Columbus, Georgia on many occasions (my own brother was born there), we wanted to see it through the lens of this amazing book – the art on the walls of the coffee shop, the Riverwalk and adjacent bike shop where Theo and Ellen go for a ride and talk about the bird nest on the bank, and the little bookstore.
It was a stroke of magnificent timing that my writing friend Sally Donnelly of Arlington, Virginia sent me the link to Katie Couric’s interview with Allen Levi, the author of Theo of Golden in the comments on her blog post. I’d hoped to watch it but had an event with my in-person book club in my home that evening and couldn’t watch the live interview. Sally knows what a fan I am, and it was simply the best Valentine ever to watch that interview. I’d hug her if she were here!
I’ll be taking plenty of photos and maybe even doing a few recorded clips as well, and I’ll plan to blog about this experience on Tuesday morning. As I write, the rain is pelting down in heavy waves on this 48-degree morning here in rural Georgia, so I hope it has blown over by the time we make our jaunt west to the state line that divides Georgia and Alabama. If you’re having the same weather we are having, it’s a great day to run by the bookstore on the way home from church and grab a copy of this book and then sink down into a chair by the fireplace and devour it!
Gayle Sands of Maryland is our host for the first day of the December Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com. She inspires us to use photographs to inspire poems today. You can read her full prompt, along with the poems of others and their responses, here.
Gayle inspires us to walk into a photo and to be present in the photograph in some way—as a bystander, as one of the individuals in the photo, or as someone coming upon the scene. She says, “Use the photo as your starting point and open your senses. What do you see and/or hear? Is there something you can taste or smell? What sensations do you feel? Is there any movement? What thoughts come to your mind as you engage with the photo? Vintage photographs are a good source of inspiration.”
Come sit right here by me if you’re a reader. Settle in, pour a cup of coffee, and let’s have a book chat. I want to hear what stories have kept you reading this year, and how your reading has inspired new adventures.
I’ll go first. Right now, I’m reading Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson, which will be the January 2026 pick for our Kindred Spirits book club. It has me on the edge of my seat at every new twist and turn. I especially like that the setting is taking me back to our trip to Woodstock, Vermont in November of 2024, where we had one of the best breakfasts I’ve ever had in my life, complete with Vermont maple syrup that was made from the trees on the property where we were staying. A friend and member of the Kindred Spirits book club recommended Woodstock as a stop on our trip after NCTE last year, and we used her exact trip itinerary from a trip she’d taken with her daughter in planning our own. While my husband and I were in Woodstock, we took some time to go exploring a few back roads while we were there, and I have some of the setting assigned to places we saw, such as the famous bridge. It’s hard to imagine that a crime like the one in this book could happen there, but where there are humans, there will be crime. This book inspired me to wrap up in a blanket I bought from the Vermont Flannel Company while I was there and to pull up the photos from that amazing trip and add them to the new digital photo frame my daughter sent us for Christmas. Oh, to go back there!
The Kindred Spirits dive into exciting fiction, and this group tends to gravitate toward thrillers. Once we’ve finished reading a book, we plan some sort of adventure to go along with what we have read so that we allow our reading to inspire new discoveries. You can see our reading choices and adventures from 2025 here. We’ll be meeting December 19 to put the first six months of our 2026 list together. I’d like to ask for your favorite book recommendations. Please help us out ~ which books have you read recently that you savored, and what made you fall in love with them? Also, have you ever been part of a reading retreat where everyone reads a few books and then drives an hour or two to a mountain lodge for a weekend to talk about those books, read more books, sit by the fire, eat delicious food, visit a spa, and shop in the stores on the town square? We’ve heard of those retreats and are thinking of trying one sometime this year, so we’re all ears for your most exciting book experiences as we plan a few slices of life.
A street scene of Woodstock, Vermont
My husband sits by the fire of the Woodstock Inn as we wait to eat dinner
My second favorite shop in Woodstock, where I bought our favorite blanket (the bookstore was my favorite)
Ornaments made by Joy, bearing our group name and holding a miniature version of each of the books we’ve read this year
Last night was our first annual Kindred Spirits Book Club Christmas Party, and six ladies celebrated a year of reading 11 novels and one month of daily poetry with dinner and dessert, games, gifts, and laughter. We even chose our first book of 2026 (Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson) as we picked our seats for the movie The Housemaid, which we will see together later this month as a book-related adventure.
Our book club came as a granted wish of one of our reading sisters who had been attending a book club sponsored by one of our community partners when we were grant recipients of an initiative to build literacy in schools and communities. This community partner experienced a change in its leadership when its organizer took a different job, so our book club sister Janette came up with a brilliant idea. She suggested that we pick up the pieces and read the books that were purchased, and then, to preserve the integrity of the grant, to fill the Little Free Libraries with these books once we finished reading them and having our meetings.
At first, we weren’t sure whether a book club would take root, but we took Janette’s idea and extended an invitation in January 2025 to read a book and meet at our local coffee shop a few weeks later to discuss it. We found some universal book club questions and were thrilled when six of us came to talk about it. By the time we finished the first couple of books, we had enough momentum to choose books not provided through the grant to continue the club all year. Fast forward to December, and we’re still going strong.
We were not all diehard readers when we embarked on the journey. A couple of us knew we needed books – – and adventures that are sparked by things we’ve read – – but what we didn’t know is how much we needed each other. We’re a classic example of an eclectic group of women with different reading tastes, in different stages of life, with a range of life experiences. But we’re drawn together by books that unify us and common themes that allow us to share our own perspectives. And when human hearts find the right books and the right space, they bond as readers with a sweet kinship. Like us, they are Kindred Spirits.
This morning, I celebrate a year of reading with Janette, Joy, Jill, Jennifer, and Martina. Here are the books we’ve read in our club this year, in order, along with the adventure we shared (a few of us belong to other reading clubs, but here is our list):
January – The Beautiful and the Wild by Peggy Townsend
Emerald Chandelier Tea Room Brunch
February – Mother-Daughter Murder Night by Nina Simon
Mexican Restaurant Night
March – The Wedding People by Alison Escape
Cake Tasting
April – The Last Flight by Julie Clark
Airport Dinner with a bag of 3 things we’d bring if we changed identities
May – First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston
Played Two Truths and a Lie
June/July – The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
Made Indoor S’mores
August – The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
All wore green on an outing
September – One Tuesday Morning by Karen Kingsbury
Shared 9/11 Stories of Survivors and Victims
October – Regretting You by Colleen Hoover
Dinner and Movie Night
November – The Housemaid by Freida McFadden
Dinner and Movie Night
December – The Book Club Hotel by Sarah Morgan
Christmas Party
Selected Poems for National Poetry Month
Wrote poetry
(Full Disclosure: Not all of us liked or would recommend all of these books to others – but in true book club spirit, we stayed the course and kept turning the pages).
In our first book of the year, a character was always making tea, so we visited a tea room for a Saturday morning brunch. At our party, we played the Left, Right, Across game with the story below (feel free to modify and use it for your own book club), and each of us took home a mismatched teacup and saucer in the bag that ended up in front of us. We played Mad Libs, had a wrapped book swap, and had a gift exchange as well, and we can’t wait to see what 2026 brings!
Don’t miss the photos of our book club through the year under the story.
A Book Club Christmas Party
It was the evening of the annual Christmas Dinner party as members of the book club arrived and settled in right on time for what was left of the day. Last spring, with books left over from a grant, they stacked their hands right together in a huddled pledge to read across the year. They’d started right away with The Beautiful and the Wild, Mother-Daughter Murder Night, and The Wedding People, which left them all wanting more adventures like tea parties and movie outings and even driving slap across the county to the airport with packed bags. They shared what they’d take with them as they sat across the table after reading The Last Flight. They even read across genres that included poetry. They had some books left, so they dove right straight into First Lie Wins, The God of the Woods – which they read across the summer months – and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, each reader thinking secretly of one or two of the books, “well, geez, that’s one I might have left out of the lineup” right before starting the next books ~ One Tuesday Morning, Regretting You, The Housemaid, and The Book Club Hotel. Eleven books across the span of the year, and here they were right at the table, celebrating all their different tastes in reading while gathering each month to read books they may have left out of their own lives except that they yearned to be right there discussing books together with their reading sisters, appreciating how their reading tastes, though often a mixed and mismatched bag, revealed all those moments of having just the right book at the right time because that’s what books do – they unify. Each realized, across the span of the year, that reading together is just the right medicine for the soul. In the perfect spirit of solidarity, they clinked their cups before heading right back home already dreaming of the next gathering, and as each guest left, they felt right at home in their book club family, where they fit snugly and belonged, as precious and interesting as fine mismatched china.
In the cellar of 1828 Coffee Company, where we hold most of our monthly discussionsKindred Spirits Book Club From L-R: Jennifer, me, Martina, Joy, Jill, and JanetteAt the movie Regretting You after reading the book by Colleen HooverChristmas Gifts and mismatched teacups and saucersAt the Emerald Chandelier Tea RoomAt The Emerald Chandelier Tea Room after reading our first book of 2025At our Kindred Spirits Christmas Party, 12/5/2025
The tree is up – all we need now is a Christmas wreath!
Today we’ll go hunting for a new wreath to go on our exterior garage wall and one for the back door. It’s the best way to spend a Saturday – seeking wreaths! We’ll have one of our grandsons along to help, too, and we can’t wait to spend the day with him.
Last year, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, we rented a car in Boston to make a loop through Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts following the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Convention I was attending at the time. As we left Kennebunkport, I spotted what I thought was a fruit stand on the side of the road. It looked a lot like where, in my rural Georgia county, we would pull over and buy watermelons or tomatoes. But as we neared, I could see that the people who were gathered around the long tables were not tenderly squeeze-testing tomatoes or thumping watermelons. They were creating fresh wreaths using the greenery stacked in piles on tables behind them.
A wreath-making stand! There is still a part of me deep inside that craves this L.L.Bean-style wreath that is all made of fresh evergreen and so natural and simple that it would rival any wreath that feels the need to proclaim Christmas in any other way than through real live nature, just greenery and berries. So it just might be that we find a wreath frame and some zip ties and twine and wire. It just might so happen that we take our little hacksaw and sharp camping axes and put on our hiking boots and go to the back side of the property and gather evergreens that we cut fresh to put on the frame and make one ourselves, New England style.
It would do my heart a lot of good to make a wreath with our grandson today. But we’ll have to be careful to watch for the elusive lellow bear if we trudge out into the woods. He’s out there somewhere…..
I never laugh as much as when our book club gets together! The books we read and the times we spend talking about them are a balm for my soul.
People have asked me how we “do” our club, because there are so many ways to structure a book club. First, we decide on a book based on someone’s recommendation. We’ve already picked dates through the end of summer and have marked them on our calendars so we guard our time. We sent out digital invitations so we don’t plan any other meetings by accident. Priorities.
Once we know our book and our next meeting time, we read and try not to talk about it with anyone reading it so we don’t give spoilers. Our regularly scheduled gathering spot is our local coffee shop, where they have all the best coffees, a few food items, and the best downstairs couch circle anywhere in town – the kind of leather couches you slide down deep into and wonder if you’re ever going to be able to get out once you get in. The kind with a big coffee table in the middle so there’s room for mugs and plates and stacks of books. We go there and pull out our general book questions as a discussion guide. Sometimes we use questions designed specifically for a book – – like at our most recent gathering, when I’d forgotten to bring the list of universal book questions. Another group member pulled up a set online that we discussed.
The part so many book clubs don’t “do” that sets our club apart is the action part. Every member of our club has a streak of adventure dwelling in our hearts, so we like to think of something the book inspires us to want to do, and then go do that thing. For example, in The Beautiful and the Wild, one of the characters was always drinking tea. One of our members found a local tea room and went for brunch to try different teas, even trying on all the hats and a pair of gloves, too. In The God of the Woods, the characters ate s’mores, so we met for appetizers at the home of one of our members and made s’mores. Having the adventure part adds to the experience of any book, because we do things we wouldn’t ordinarily do on any normal day of our lives. We stay young.
Our latest book, Colleen Hoover’s Regretting You, was released as a movie this month, so we made it our October selection and met for dinner and a movie. We spent as much time discussing the movie and the differences between the book and screenplay, and we were still talking in the dark theater when the manager came in, turned on the lights, and said he was “surprised” to see us there. He was shutting the place down. We were just glad we didn’t get locked in the movie theater overnight. We imagined the headline with humor and horror: Local School District Employees Earlier Reported Missing Found Locked in Local Theater Overnight.
Our next book is The Housemaid by Freida McFadden. The movie comes out December 19, and of course we all have our Regal apps for movie tickets up and running and have booked the date. We’ve decided to leave after the credits finish rolling – – just in case.
Today’s host at http://www.ethicalela.com’s Day 2 of the September Open Write is Allison Berryhill of Iowa. She teaches high school journalism and is a frequent host of amazing prompts in our writing group. Come read more about Allison and her full prompt here, as she inspires us to write a retelling poem.
I chose to rewrite my favorite childhood poem, Overheard on a Salt Marsh by Harold Monro, as a Shakespearean Sonnet, a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter, where the rhyme scheme is ababcdcdefefgg, with ten syllables per line. Here is the original poem:
Overheard on a Saltmarsh
Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?
Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?
Give them me.
No.
Give them me. Give them me.
No.
Then I will howl all night in the reeds,
Lie in the mud and howl for them.
Goblin, why do you love them so?
They are better than stars or water,
Better than voices of winds that sing,
Better than any man’s fair daughter,
Your green glass beads on a silver ring.
Hush, I stole them out of the moon.
Give me your beads, I want them.
No.
I will howl in the deep lagoon
For your green glass beads, I love them so.
Give them me. Give them.
No.
– Harold Monro (1879 – 1932)
***. ***. ***
Here is my Shakespearean Sonnet:
Nymphs Don’t Play
a goblin glumphed upon a marsh nymph fair
far through the pluff he’d glimpsed a glow of green
This month, I continue writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. I’m continuing this month so that I can experience the entire deck of prompts. Today’s prompt asks us to describe broccoli to someone who has never seen it before.
This month, I’m writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. Today we’re inspired to think of a character and write about him/her/them, telling who they are.
Top o’ the mornin’ to ya! I took a spur-o’-the-moment trip south to visit my family as my brother and sister in law and I try to help Dad tackle some tasks he can no longer do on his own. Chemotherapy has zapped all of his strength, and we (and others) continue to try to help where he will allow it – which is not nearly enough for any of us to feel satisfied, but that will take the luck o’ the Irish and a lot of prayer to change. He’s testy with us, seems skeptical, and wants to be left alone. He’s made it quite clear.
Before my brother and I visited him, I had a little extra time to check out the Ace Garden Center on St. Simons Island, Georgia, and I’d spied a little leprechaun in the robust fairy garden section that I’d planned to go back and get after visiting with Dad. I was there to look for spider plants, known for improving air quality by giving off oxygen in their transpiration process. But leave it to fairies to lure me down the aisle of wonder and intrigue. While I don’t have a dedicated fairy garden, my whole front porch is filled with fairies in their own plant container homes.
Imagine my delight when my sister in law, Jennifer, asked me to swing back by the house after visiting with Dad. She’d known just the medicine I’d needed – – a little fairy magic to cheer me up! She’d read my blog yesterday morning and beat me to the fairy section, choosing the perfect assortment of fairies – and the leprechaun – to sit on the edge of my shamrock plant as a gift – – making them so much more meaningful. Each time I look at the leprechaun, I smile. And what she didn’t know was that I would have picked the fairies dressed in green – – for an extra sprinkling of Irish fairy dust!
When I opened the gift, a black nose appeared out of nowhere – – JoJo, one of their black labs, sensed the magic and joined the fun, studying this leprechaun and his trio of fairy friends, as mesmerized as any dog has ever been. Her fixation on them – even trying at one point to take the leprechaun by the beard and run off with him – lightened the mood and made us all laugh.
Sources say that there are no female leprechauns, and that these little magical creatures are the unwanted children of the fairy family – – grouchy, closed off, and untrusting. With their stubborn, curmudgeonly, cranky attitudes, even leprechauns need someone to show them some love – trouble is, they have a hard time accepting it.
I have reasons for understanding the close relative of the leprechaun in folklore – the Clurichaun, drunk and surly beings who are known for clearing out entire wine cellars. And I must admit: I, myself, a mere human, along with my brother and sister in law, had broken into some wine over the weekend. But let’s be real – – the leprechauns drive them to it.
There comes a time in life when all children can do is clap if we believe in fairies, to envision Mary Martin as Peter Pan rallying us along, to hope the lights don’t fade too quickly.
Common Threads 