Author / Lorna Reese

Posts by Lorna Reese

The Promise

By Lorna Reese

A month before she died, Joan Lassiter asked her best friend Phyllis McGowan to marry her husband Jerome after she was gone. They had no children and he would need looking after, she told Phyllis. Promise me, she pleaded.

Now at the memorial reception at Phyllis’s house – Jerome said his house down the block still smells of sickness — Phyllis is putting away a plate of cheese and cold cuts when she senses more than hears Jerome’s voice in the living room go quiet. Most guests have already left or are busy gathering their things and she has begun cleaning up. She doesn’t know the remaining visitors but is familiar with Jerome’s unusually sonorous voice. It always carries.

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Not Exactly a Bang

By Lorna Reese

Once upon a time, way back in 2000, a trio of writers on Lopez Island in Washington State, so taken by the number of other writers on their island home, came up with the idea of starting a Writers Guild. The undertaking was inspired by a comment from Alie Smaalders that “Writers grow on the trees on Lopez.” I was one of that trio. Alie and Laurie Parker were the others.

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This Issue Dedicated to Alie Smaalders
October 21, 1923 – March 12, 2018
SHARK REEF Cofounder, Writer, Literary Citizen, Mentor Extraordinaire

By Lorna Reese

This is the story of how SHARK REEF came to be and of the remarkable woman, writer and friend, who modeled what it is to be a writer.
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“Writers grow on the trees on Lopez,” Alie Smaalders announced to me in our early days together in the late 1990s. It did seem true. Memory is hazy at best but in my mind’s eye, I still see fellow writer Laurie Parker and me stopping on the wooden library steps

Continue reading… "This Issue Dedicated to Alie Smaalders
October 21, 1923 – March 12, 2018
SHARK REEF Cofounder, Writer, Literary Citizen, Mentor Extraordinaire "

Everything You Wanted to Know

By Lorna Reese

It was one of those steamy July days in Minnesota when hair expands to twice its normal size and clothes get damp and sticky right after you put them on. My dad’s stomach cancer surgery had been two months earlier. Now I was driving my folks to see the oncologist in Dad’s prized red Ford pick-up. During the eight short blocks to the clinic, he sat as unmoving as a stone. But his pain

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A Northwest Passage

By Lorna Reese

My favorite book when I was eight was the Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore. Into my teen years, the memory of that tale conjured up long stretches of sand whiter than I’d ever seen and enormous, deep blue waves that curled up and over and heaved themselves down onto the shore and out again. I lived in a small town in central Minnesota. There were lakes

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My Dirty Little Secret

By Lorna Reese

A beautiful young woman, Lily Grimaldi, is delivering her first baby on the kitchen floor of her grandmother’s old farmhouse in the country. Helping her is hunky first love and former husband (and uncle) Holden Snyder. Damien Grimaldi, her current and third hunky husband — and the father of the baby — is enormously jealous of Holden.

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