Monet and Venice
Remembering Venice …
“Venice is sinking. The whole city is slowly dying. One day the tourists will travel here by boat to peer down into the waters, and they will see pillars and columns and marble far, far beneath them …” —Daphne du Maurier
Venice: You will miss it forever, take any opportunity to see it again, and it will speak to you in a different whisper every time.
That’s why Claude Monet, who visited Venice only once, painted it again and again. That’s why I’ve returned. That’s why I’ll take any opportunity to reflect upon ‘the city of dreams,” why I’m planning to visit an exhibit at the San Francisco’s de Young Museum, co-organized with the Brooklyn Museum and dedicated to Monet’s Venetian cityscapes. That said, a preview of some of the works on view concerns me. Monet’s take on Venice seems to be … well … very Monet: an image of something fading from view, something caught in the moment of its passing … like a flower, like a garden of flowers, like the blossomy surround of his home in Giverny.
I’ve been a Monet fan since elementary school, but I’m concerned since I’m an even bigger Venice fan and, for me at least, that ancient city is so textured, so full of intrigue that it vibrates.
Marianna Marlowe is a Latina writer exploring issues surrounding gender identity and cultural hybridity. She holds a Ph.D. in Literary Studies as well as a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Washington, and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley. Author of two memoirs published by She Writes Press, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where she is at work on a third book.
When Carmela Donitella, youngest of a large Sicilian-American family, discovers someone is blackmailing her father who wants to open an orphanage, she enlists the help of her four older sisters, aka the Sister Mob.
literary anthologies on France, Italy, Mexico, and Greece. She has written for many publications, including National Geographic Traveler, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times and her short fiction has placed in the Kurt Vonnegut, Zoetrope, and Katherine Anne Porter contests. 
PROLES themes resonate today: 
“A disturbingly topical tale about a young spiritual drifter (Simon Bussbaum), thrown in with a group of disenfranchised males brutalized by cultural, educational, personal, and political neglect. “Proles” refers, of course, to “proletariat” and that’s not the only connection to “1984”, Orwell’s brilliant and now-we-can-say prescient masterpiece.
Joan Virginia Allen doesn’t just talk about dynamic aging—she lives it. As a retired elder law and estate planning attorney turned dynamic aging life coach, memoirist, and publisher of the online “Dynamic Aging 4 Life Magazine,” Joan is committed to changing the narrative around aging.
biomechanist Katy Bowman—a groundbreaking work that has helped people worldwide to experience greater physical mobility and vitality as they age.
Laurie McAndish King is an award-winning travel writer and photographer with an eye for the quirky. Her subjects include 20-foot-long Australian earthworms, an Ivy League astrophysicist’s explanation of how flying saucers are powered, and finding the perfect site for watching eagle sex. King’s essays and photography have appeared in Smithsonian magazine, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Travelers’ Tales’ The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Lonely Planet’s The Kindness of Strangers, and other magazines and literary anthologies. Her three books of travel essays—insightful, poignant and often quite funny—are available from Book Passage: 
Join us as we celebrate the life and work of writer, traveler and centenarian Ethel Mussen, who passed away this year, a few years ahead of her 104th birthday. Some of us had the pleasure of her friendship, of knowing and traveling the world with her. Many of us have been delighted by Ethel’s travel tales published in the Wanderland Writers anthologies and elsewhere.
We have fond memories of Ethel Mussen, the world-traveling centenarian who—when she wasn’t out and about sharing her life stories, her wisdom and her the wide-eyed enthusiasm for ideas, people, places, good works and life in general— lived high on a hill above Berkeley.
our lives. Brilliant. Highly recommended.” 