With a carefully timed slide show of her photographs of Bulgaria backing her up, Bistra Hristova last night had us enthralled as she told us about growing up in the Balkan Mountains steeped in the country's folk music, costumes, rich history and customs, and breathtaking beauty. And then she blew our socks off: she began singing in the complex style of the Balkans --music clearly influenced by nations to the east, some of the vocal techniques absolutely foreign to western m

I have a question I hope you writers will answer for me. Do you have a mechanical muse? If so, I'd like to know about it. I have one I've been riding for -- can it be? -- almost a decade now. No, I don't think I've written any stories about motorcycling, but we don't write about our muse, we write because of our muse. To some extent. Or am I off track here? Are the euphoria and sense of adventure my iron steed delivers not to be considered the whisperings of a muse, but

Bistra Hristova is a first generation Bulgarian American. She has lived in the USA for almost 20 years now but she is still deeply connected to her Bulgarian culture. Bistra's brief presentation Sense of Place will create a sense of place for Bulgaria through Bistra's personal photographs, through stories and folk songs. While we watch and listen, let's contemplate on the importance of place in our search for personal/artistic/literary identity. Here are some initial question

When I started out writing I was just a kid, and I did everything with pencil or pen on Big Chief tablets. Tablet, in this case, refers to a pad of lined newsprint; no electronics involved. Having watched me fill hundreds of tablet pages with stories, poems, and even some “novels,” my mother admonished me, when I was about ten years old, henceforth never to write on anything of lesser quality than real notebook paper, and to use ink, not pencil. The implication was that my wr