What a midwife does, how she learned to do it, and why are topics most women probably find intriguing. I just finished reading a review copy of Beacon Press’ The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife’s Memoir by
Patricia Harman. It’s her first book, and readers will be immediately drawn in by her warm, personal voice.

I was fascinated to see that this non-fiction memoir was every bit as entertaining and poignant as the novel I loved a few years ago called THE MIDWIFE. Harman’s book is, of course, set in fairly contemporary time – her career began in the American hippy communes of the 1960s and 1970s.

As a baby boomer, I identified with that era and with her journey to now – when she is past middle age, still working hard to keep the financial end of her business on track, and torn between desires to retire and get out of the stress of owning a business and her love of serving her women patients. If you pick up this book, you’ll keep reading, because it’s much like listening to a friend tell her story over a cup of coffee.

Occasionally, Harman’s writing style gets in her own way. She flips, often in a single paragraph, from present to past tense and back. Sometimes it happens within a single sentence, and though an artful device if used carefully, it can, and does become confusing enough to pull the reader out of the story and into critique mode. Still, if you can pass by that flaw, you probably zip through the book in a few days and be glad you read it.

There are many, many memoirs from midwives. The subject lends itself to story telling. What can be more dramatic that a pregnancy – even a normal one? And if you add risk, bad partners, daughters in trouble, and women who can’t quite make the step from child to mother, the drama grows. This book has all those elements and is unique in its own ways.

Harman and her husband practiced together for many years, and she tells her story honestly. The  reader sees into the reality of being a medical provider – insurance issues, business management getting in the way of patient care, and personalities interacting on the job. But through it all are the stories of women. A cancer patient – one you don’t quite expect. A teen who keeps trusting her drug-addicted boyfriend until her life unravels in tragedy. A woman who wants help with a problem that many practitioners would refuse to get involved in.

This is a good, light read. It flows through a dozen or so lives, including Harman’s, with surprises along the way. It provokes a variety of emotions in the reader and delivers the promise every memoir should make. The Blue Cotton Gown tells one midwife’s story in a way that make her readers empathize, sympathize, and wish they might have gone down that path.

Read more:

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More book reviews at OnText

Discovery Channel Dinosaurs!

Slow down your holiday hysteria and gather around the flat screen with your family for some delightful Television programming. The Discovery Channel has new dinosaur programming that starts December 6 at 8 pm Eastern.

Dinosaurs fascinate all of us and it’s been some time since there was anything new about the dinosaurs either on pay TV or broadcast. I just previewed a four-part series from Discovery Channel which is worth seeing– Clash of the Dinosaurs.

Pop some corn or order up a pizza -

This is a family event. I tested the shows on a three year old boy, a three year old girl, and a four year old boy-genius.

All three of them were spell-bound. They didn’t flinch at the dinosaur eating another dinosaur themes, they just wanted to know if dinosaurs eat people. I answered unqualifiedly that that had never happened and never would. We had a nice discussion of when dinos lived, why they aren’t here any more and if they cause bad dreams (they did not, for us).

I also shared Clash of the Dinosaurs with a group of teens and other adults, and they loved it. Here’s why - the animation and special effects are nicely updated and positively thrilling. There’s quite a bit of repetition - scenes do double and triple duty in the programs, but the production must have been expensive and they wanted their money’s worth. Overlook that, and you’ll enjoy seeing the physiology of dinosaurs.

What’s different here is the biological information - you’ll see musculature, bones in action, how tissue is distributed through those huge bodies. There’s lots about reproduction, how eggs survive, and all about daily life of the animals.

Meeting Ankylosaurus — an herbivore specifically designed as a killing machine — was thrilling. He’s 30 feet long, has three layers of armor, and eyelids made of bone. Don’t even think you or your kids know all there is to know about dinosaurs! We learned a lot and had a terrific time. Highly recommended.

The series: Four parts - two per night on Sunday, Dec 6 and Sunday Dec 13 at 8 pm. 7 Central, of course.

Read more excellent articles:

Where to donate your old computer hardware

Overcoming PTSD

Most women would jump on a legitimate work-at-home opportunity. Are you willing to learn a set of  professional skills and then work hard from home? Ghost writing may be for you. I warn you - ghost writing isn’t easy. The rewards? Set your own schedule. Work from where ever you choose - at home, your boat, a vacation locale. I’ve done it for years and so has Claudia Suzanne - the world’s most prolific, respected ghosts. Cash in on her secrets - this isn’t a sales pitch, it’s a clue.

Claudia Suzanne

I’ve worked at home for three decades, successfully, and am always on the look out for job opportunities that women can use long term to make a living while raising a family or enjoying personal freedom. Four months ago, I met a phenomenal writer, Claudia Suzanne. She has written more than 100 books - fiction and non-fiction, but you probably don’t recognize her name. That doesn’t bother her.

What does a ghost writer do?

Ghost writer Claudia, well-known in the publishing industry and master of a satisfying income, says:

1. A ghost is a writer who reads an author’s manuscript, writes an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses, then presents professional recommendations to the author. The goal: to get the manuscript attention and respect it deserves upon submission. The ghost must learn to evaluate from a positive point-of-view.
2. The ghost, with the author, refines and polishes a manuscript so it pleases the author and meets professional standards. The ghost may simply do a thorough edit, or rewrite most of it, with author-input. The ghost must learn how the publishing industry ticks, effective editing, and how to maintain any author’s voice.
3. The ghost puts together a professional quality proposal package for the author to submit. The ghost must learn what agents look for.
4. The ghost gets paid. A lot. The ghost must learn how to be worth it.

How to learn the right way to market yourself as a ghost

I signed on to audit Claudia’s 14-week ghost writer training program. Audit, as in she waived the tuition so I could report to you women. Two weeks into the program, I was so impressed with her teaching, her knowledge, and the value of the class that I paid the tuition. Claudia has fueled new, lucrative careers for hundreds of students. Her past students have branched into editing, small press publishing, novel writing, and lots of other fields.

If you need a new career and have experience or solid skills as a writer - you could do a lot worse than investing in this ghost writer certification training. The pace is like a master’s level college program - the work serious and multi-layered. Weekly class time is three hours; homework is at least five hours. The “classroom” is a telephone conference call each week - an extremely effective distance learning method. Claudia’s style is warm, professional, serious.

If you take the certification training and meet completion requirements, you’ll earn the only ghost writing certification in the industry. You’ll learn how to find customers, set rates that reflect your level of expertise, and how to make a name for yourself in the business, even though your name may never appear on a book’s cover.

Ghost writing is one of the fastest growing careers. As the changing publishing business lets more people publish writing cheaply and quickly, more people want to write books. But many understand they don’t know how. They are willing to pay for help. You can put yourself in the hands of one of the most respected ghosting experts and learn to provide that expert help.

Read the details about ghost writing certification training.

Read more:

A review of Claudia’s course

This morning, anyone caring to tune in could be subjected to Sarah Palin and Oprah Winfrey at the same time. Sarah is hawking her new book because it will make her a ton of money. Oprah is hawking anything she thinks will support her flagging viewership - and right now that something is probably Sarah Palin.

You can’t turn to any medium right now and not get Sarah and Oprah, Oprah and Sarah. Sara in short shorts on the cover of Newsweek. There’s presidential material. Oprah, thank goodness, not in shorts. Don’t kid yourself. Sarah is not presidential material, nor is she interested in being president of anything. She’d probably quit in mid term. She is interested in a couple of million bucks that will come from the sale of this book. Why will the book sell? Ya got me.

But it will. In a time when Pulitzer Prize-winning writers are unemployed and long-respected publication go toes up, this gunk will sell so Sarah Palin and her co-writer(s) pd their bank accounts. Perhaps it’s just another indication that the demand for quality writing is giving way to junk content. Perhaps just salacious curiosity. Ms. Palin, like her never-quite-made-it son-in-law, trashes lots of people in her book. Readers like seeing people trashed.

As for Oprah - she’s just getting really scary. She books anyone who is controversial, difficult to look at, tragic, or slimy. Then she either grills them or hugs them, depending on what her handlers tell her will make for a better audience reaction.

I used to like Oprah for her sort of rogue, er, maverick, positioning. Now, she’s just stale. Sarah? I’m embarrassed for her each time she opens her mouth. I can do without both of them - and I did, choosing reruns of Jerry Seinfeld over Oprah’s show this morning. What was it Letterman said? Something about the Mayan prediction of the end of the world in 2012 being linked to any possibility that Sarah could be president. Whew. Could you tolerate the simpering and giggling for four years? What a thought. Bring on the Mayans.

Take a moment to check out my guest post at HealMyPTSD.com for PTSD and Invisible Illness Awareness Week. I was invited to do a guest column because two of my family members are dealing with PTSD. It’s really tough to cope with an illness or condition that is invisible. There are physical symptoms, but often, people chalk those up to some other cause. HealMyPTSD is a valuable website by people who have knowledge and great concern.

While we’re at it, let’s visit some of my favorite posts over the years of compiling WomenDayByDay and Ontext:

A guest post from Thistle Farm, where women work to fix the hugely challenging problems in their lives. This one is terrific.

Women who read us honor their military loved ones for Memorial Day.

Proof that Jesus was a woman, and other funny stuff.

The courts are failing to help battered women.

22 ways to earn aliving at home - work at home

Basing marriage on positive thinking

Dr. Phil and the drunken teenage girls

Half dozen good ways for women to enter the blogsphere

Light therapy for pregnant women

There. That’s a little journey through the last few years of Women Day By Day. It’s rewarding to spend time digging up great information for my readers and empowering women to manage some of the things we face everyday. I’ve really loved finding guest writers to do a post here and there this year. Let me know if you know someone with something important, funny, or entertaining to tell us. Write me — maryan at ontext.com

My sister, Bonnie, got all fired up about a new book, actually a series of books, called Eat This Not That. These little books are one sneaky way for you to change your nutrition, and I am not kidding. I bought one of the books in the Eat This Not That series about a month ago and witnessed a miracle.
I bought Eat This Not That! Supermarket Survival Guide: The No-Diet Weight Loss Solution by David Zinczenko and Matt Goulding (Paperback - Dec 30, 2008). I spent a couple of hours reading it and found it amusing, informative and motivational. I wanted to go out and do what they recommended. So I did.

At the end of the book, which is a quick reading volume full of lists, bullets and quick tips, there is a one-week menu plan that covers lunches and dinners. It has a shopping list and recipes. Anything that makes one of my chores simpler is high on my list of yes items.

I copied the menu. Did the shopping - spent 30% less than I would generally spend. I followed the menus about 85% for a week. And I made my picky, finicky, nose-turned-up-at-anything-remotely-healthy spouse eat the food. I mean, what choice did he have?

So. He raved about every single meal. There’s the miracle. The menu plan is based on doing a bunch of prepping and cooking on Sunday, then combining planned left overs and fresh ingredients into new dishes all week. We went out to dinner twice during the week - moderate meals, both. He preferred the stuff I was making at home.

End result — he lost a couple of pounds without even being aware of it. I lost three. No sweat, no thinking, no obsessing. We ate great food, spent less money and enjoyed reading the book out loud at lunch each day.

It sneaked up on us and made some little, pleasant adjustments to how we eat. I’m headed out to the store to do yet another week of ideas from this series. My sister has passed the book to me, my son, her daughter and several friends. It’s almost a pandemic. And it’s very cool.

From Nintendo Wii Sports Resort to Libby Hellmann’s latest novel - here’s a collection of interesting links and tidbits today. By the way - Wii Sports Resort comes out this weekend - great family activity.

An interview with Maryan Pelland - how funny to be on the receiving end of questions.

I just discovered, Eat This, Not That, the latest nutrition book series and love it. I encourage you to check it out. Yes, I know it’s from Men’s Health Magazine. It reminded me how much I love pesto and sent me running to the grocery store to get some pinenuts so I can make pesto with my garden basil. Can’t wait!!

Health news for women - something to check with your doc about. If your body mass index is over 30, oral contraceptives may lose effectiveness for you, according to a Reuters report. The study results were not consistent, but there needs to be some attention paid to how medications react in larger bodies, since most Americans have larger bodies.

They say the economy s turning around. I don’t know if that’s true or not but it never hurts to be ready. Blackvoices.com has an in depth video blog entry about women purchasing real estate. I found it interesting - give it a look so when the market turns, you’ll be ready to make your smartest move.

Nintendo is releasing a new game series this week called Wii Sports Resort. It has added technology and a lot of physical activity. Since women are the biggest group of Wii buyers, thought I’d give you a headsup.

In a program geared toward financial empowerment of women survivors of domestic abuse and in support of women in abusive situations, ClicktoEmpower.org has a poll that you can participate in. They have a list of four charities partnered with Allstate - click the one you like best. The charity with the most votes will get a $10K grant from the Allstate Foundation. It only takes a moment - may be worth a click.

And lastly, let me recommend a book I just finished. For mystery fans - of even just good book fans, try Libby Hellmann’s Easy Innocence - I really enjoyed it. Set in Chicago’s North Shore Suburbs, it deals with teen prostitution and how much we take the wholesome aspec tof our communities for granted.