Some Writers I Appreciate

I am beginning this blog by writing about other writers, specifically writers who have been significant influences in my life, some I have met in person, and others only on the written page.

One of them is Parker Palmer, writer, lecturer, teacher. I met him at a pivotal time, when I spent three months at Pendle Hill, a Quaker Community in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. Parker has written ten books. My favorites are Let Your Life Speak, largely autobiographical, and A Hidden Wholeness where he writes about the power of a third thing that can invite the shy soul to reveal itself.  

Parker introduced me to the writings of Thomas Merton who had died in December 1968.  Hmm…in 1968 Maja’s dad and I had returned from Lower Kalskag, Alaska, to live on Noe Street in San Francisco. I have a shredded copy of Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation with many underlined sections, a major one being Merton’s words about salvation. He writes that we co-create with God our true identity, a work that can be filled with anguish, risk, and many tears. I remember my relief at reading this definition of salvation—such a distance from my childhood fears about not being saved. 

Mary Daly I met only through written words. I was living in San Francisco with Maja in the house on Twentieth Street, divorced, searching, not yet connected to the Unitarian church where I found my mentor Katherine. There was a bookstore on Castro near Eighteenth. Maja and I would walk the half block to Castro and down to the shops, past Harvey Milk’s camera shop on the east side and one more block to the bookstore where we would hangout for hours. I found books for Maja and for myself. I read most of Daly’s Beyond God the Father in that book store, intrigued to think there might be God beyond the Father. It was 1974 and Daly’s book had come out the year before. 

Then there is Denise Levertov whom I did not discover until I was an old woman. More about her later.

November 2025