Kathy Boles-Turner

Ramshackle Houses & Southern Parables (Excerpt)

Yesterdays We drive with the windows down Letting sticky August fingers tangle our hair. Ribbons of dust and gravel wave alongside Miles of spent cotton rows. Ramshackle houses, eyeless and idle, Stand guard over engine block boneyards. Rusted fenders and cinder blocks shade old dogs Sniffing out a familiar stench. We drive past bent neighbors, […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

I Want: A List

I want to start taking photographs like this again, the featured image by Nitish Kadam who shares on Unsplash. The pretty yellow flowers featured on the generationkathy header were captured by my sister who is an awesome photographer. She does landscapes for pleasure and portraiture for business and pleasure. I have a Nikon that sits in […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

Checking for Connection While Writing and Wanting

“You write the loveliest letters!” That’s one of the most heartfelt compliments I ever received from an older woman in my life. Her son and I were planning to get married, he was in boot camp and I was hundreds of miles away working two jobs to save up for the wedding. I figured she […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

One Day At A Time, One Decision, One Step, No Room For Regret

Regret just wastes time and energy best spent on learning. I’ve made more than a few mistakes, but the best thing I’ve done so far is spend time seeking out information. That whole try try again thing in and of itself is a very rich learning experience. Most important lesson learned as of yet: I […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

You Could Just Tell Me, Really

Listening to so many podcasts featuring writers of every known genre that have traditionally published in the past fifty years, one would think it possible to encounter a writer willing to share the real horrors of querying agents. Oh sure, they all give some hint that it was time consuming or tough. Except for those […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

First Week of July Writing, Reading, Joining, Quitting

Featured image by Tonya Boles

by Kathy Boles-Turner

The Witch Elm by Tana French and Do You Really Know Yourself At All

Truth is there’s darkness lurking. The unmeasured capacity for pain and shame, selflessness, self-preservation, and great voids of unanswerable questions. Or, answers that might be better left alone. People are mysteries, even unto themselves. I’ve always marveled over that old phrase usually employed with a sheepish or dumbfounded tone: “I lost my temper”. Well, maybe the more truthful […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

Good Cardio and Intuition

Yesterday as I went out to my car thunder rumbled in the distance. Just after steering onto the main road, about fifty yards or so away, what I saw coming toward me didn’t look like a wall of rain but a shiny curtain of silver pebbles falling from an almost sunny sky. Falling in such […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

Reading In My Future Haven

Imagine a room with pine plank floors and inset shelves painted a lush white, nine feet tall, three feet wide, six inches apart, running the length of a room on either side of a broad picture window. On each shelf there are of course well used books from every era of modern literature, spines of […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

A Week of Reading Binges & Good Customer Service

Yesterday I met a man who by way of introduction told me he was born in 1938 and his first job paid fifty cents per day. In customer service this sort of thing happens frequently. Some folks just want to stir up conversation, state their opinion or ask someone else’s to measure the contrast. Sometimes […]