Recent work
At the same time, I'm still writing essays and poetry, my first love.
I plan to reanimate my blog soon, too.
Creative writing is a great job in the time of COVID, but I am planning to get back out there soon to start reporting on America's terrible divide, and all the angry feelings that estrange us. Like my character Eten -- and of course, my older sister Randy Forsberg, who was a stellar force for world-peace -- I believe in tolerance, peace, and love, differences without vitriol, disagreements without violence.
What wrecks us, though, is propaganda masquerading as journalism and lies propagated through social media. These days, everyone believes something different. How can we come together with diametrically opposed facts? Democracy depends on the fourth estate, and I believe it is up to us, the journalists, to win back the trust of the American people.
Since last summer, I've enjoyed devoting myself to a new science fiction trilogy, THE SAMSON PROJECT. Book One is finished and I'm now looking for an agent/publisher while I start on Book Two.
THE SAMSON PROJECT
BOOK ONE: LIBERATION
BOOK TWO: DESOLATION
BOOK THREE: CONFLAGRATION
THE SAMSON PROJECT, Book One, Liberation, is about fourteen-year-old Eten who has grown up in an underground "pod" with her four younger brothers and sisters, unable to go to the surface because of a nuclear event. The children, who are in the military and are sworn to fight terrorists, have unusual "skills," such as telekinesis. Little by little, Eten begins to discover the truth about herself and her family, the military and the world. By the end of Book One, the close-knit siblings have liberated themselves from the pod, but are torn apart by circumstances.
In Book Two, Desolation, finding her brothers and sisters becomes fraught with danger as Eten discovers that her beloved eldest brother, who escaped the pod as a child, has become a terrorist. She must unite her siblings once again and convince them that peace, not power, is the path to a better life and a better world.
Book Three, Conflagration, picks up a thread introduced in Book One: Alien beings, searching for their lost explorers who crashed on Earth decades previously, begin an invasion. Eten, by now a teen peace-advocate, must go to war. But the greatest shock comes when she discovers her own hidden link to the seemingly vicious
extra-terrestrials.
I spent last year as a general assignment and crime reporter for The Daily Freeman, a local newspaper.
from Chronogram
Pandemic
Easter and
the Passover are gone.
In isolation, each day
I rise again, my brow
a lintel on which the names
of the dead are written in
light: Mother, father, sister,
brother, husband,
first born son.
In the garden, the Lenten
roses bend toward the earth
and, where last night’s rough wind passed
over them, the tossed cups of daffodils
cluster, unable to hold
a drop.
I do believe Elijah is coming.
The faces of my friends
on Zoom pixilate as they speak
of masks and growing their own potatoes.
How are you, they ask.
I am well.
Yesterday, after the last day
of my last job was done, I longed
to speak to my sister again,
to tell her how it is now, how
her daughter is recovering
from Covid, how
I am filled with grief but also
expectation,
how I walk my solitary drive
where the trees creak and the spring
air rushes to fill the space between
buds, delicate
as alveoli,
how that morning, a bird
sang its love song at my window,
how each night
I leave the door open.
— Celia Watson Seupel, 2020