"Wells weaves more of the magic that made her a bestseller. . . . Chock-full of Southern charm and sassy wisdom . . . it benefits from a hearty dose of Wells's trademark charisma. . . . [Calla's] sure to be a crowd-pleaser thanks to her humble aspirations, ever hopeful heart and perserverance no matter what fate throws at her."
—Publishers Weekly
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Welcome to my new front porch! We erected it to reflect that I've written a new, stand-alone book, The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder, with a wholly new character. I've grown my imagined Louisiana world to include La Luna, the small river town where Calla Lily is born, and where her mother lifts her up as a baby to be blessed by the Moon Lady, the feminine face of the Divine, who will guide Calla all her life.
The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder is a book about coming of age, about mothers and daughters, about what it's like to grow up in the Jim Crow South. It's a book about the love between a girl and a boy, between a woman and a man, and the love among best girlfriends. It's a book about Calla Lily Ponder as she grows into her soul.
I hope all of you—readers who've just met my work, and Ya-Yas who have kept the campfires burning for ten years at Ya-Ya.com—will invite Calla Lily into your hearts as you did the Ya-Yas—with passion, fierceness, and humor.
Together, let's hold hands as we write and read our way sane in a world which needs 84,000 Blessings.
Dear Sweet Community,
It is always interesting to learn the titles that are proposed, and often used for foreign titles of my books. For instance, the Swedish title of THE CROWNING GLORY OF CALLA LILY PONDER will be “The Healing Hands of Calla Lily Ponder.” I like the way this focuses on Calla’s gift.
We all have gifts. I love hearing the expressions of a person’s gifts. Care to share what you perceive to be your main gifts — or perhaps to observe the gifts that others in our lives bring to the world?
Keep on dancin’ in the kitchen!
84,000 Blessings,
Rebecca
Posted
February 28th, 2010
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Posted
February 8th, 2010
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Kneel and pray, Colts! SAINTS GO MARCHIN’ IN AND MARCHIN’ OUT . . . winners!! GAUX, SAINTS!
Rebecca, Louisiana Girl
Posted
February 6th, 2010
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The sun broke through on Thursday, and my sweet husband and I headed out to the tip of the peninsula where the old lighthouse stands. What a place to look out at the water! Sometimes I pinch myself and shoot up a prayer of thanks that somehow I ended up here in the Puget Sound community. Not only did I discover I was a writer, I found the love of my life, and discovered the love of a place other than that which I grew up. To love two places as I do — here and Louisiana — is sorta like having two lovers, and yet remaining true to each. Oh, yeah.
Posted
January 27th, 2010
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Dear Ones,
Please. Stop for a moment. Let’s all of us breathe in, let our bellies be big, like Buddha belly, like we’re pregnant belly. Big belly is good when we breathe. Let us clear all the useless mess out of our minds — all the things that do not matter, all the things that suck our energy. Things that push on us to buy, buy, consume, consume. Breathe.
See them. See those who suffer. They are everywhere. In our country, according to the last thing I read, ONE out of every EIGHT people need some kind of assistance to have enough food to eat. Suffering. We have to hold onto joy at the same time that we witness the suffering. But right now, the suffering of our brothers and sisters in Haiti is great. They have suffered so much already. I have wondered in the past about a place that has had so much suffering heaped on it, and now the earthquake.
For a long time now, I have focused my donations and thoughts on the people who were wounded or killed — and the living that are still wounded, traumatized, or homeless. I do not like the way the government or the Red Cross dealt with the disaster in my homeland. But now is the time for me to widen my heart and my vision further, while never forgetting (like much of our news media does) those who still suffer from Katrina. Am I alone in having questions or blinders on the way we give to those who suffer?
Let’s don’t allow ourselves to grow narrowed by our own lack of focus, or numbed by the news and its love for sensationalism. None of these are the story. The story is simple: How do we take care of our brothers and sisters who are suffering the most, at any given moment? It might be within our own family. That is the closest and most important care. But if we can, we must widen to hold the family that is all of us. Let’s give as much as we can. For most of us that means giving money. Clothes and supplies are good, but from everything I can tell, money is better.
Thank you. Bless you. Laugh when given the chance to, keep your hearts open, and remember: dance in the kitchen!
Love,
Rebecca
International charities are just beginning to ramp up their efforts in Haiti. If you’re looking to give money to help these relief activities, I’ve looked around, and compiled a list of some of the larger, established international aid organizations responding to the disaster:
American Jewish World Service
AmeriCares
CARE
Catholic Relief Services
Direct Relief International
Doctors Without Borders
International Committee of the Red Cross
International Rescue Committee
Mercy Corps
Oxfam
Partners in Health
The Salvation Army
Save the Children
UNICEF
World Food Programme
Some organizations accepting donations by text message:
American Red Cross: You can text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to American Red Cross relief for Haiti, charged to your cell phone bill.
Yele Haiti: You can text “YELE” to 501501 to automatically donate $5 to the Yele Haiti Earthquake Fund, charged to your cell phone bill.
I am not endorsing or vouching for any of these groups. The list is just a starting point for you and your own research. There are a number of online tools available for evaluating charities and making donations to a broader range of NGOs, including
CharityNavigator.org
NetworkForGood.org.
Posted
January 16th, 2010
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Angels at my kitchen door guard from all evil spirits! The great thing is that angels never get tired. I know that yours are all around you.
84,000 Blessings,
Rebecca
Posted
January 12th, 2010
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 Rebecca Wells walking Mercy in the Park
Dahlin’ Hearts:
I can hear the fire works starting, coming through the woods. It’s wet and rainy here in the Pacific Northwest, but I stepped out last night, and it was so clear that La Luna shone through achingly clear. I find myself thinking about the term “being broke.” It means so many things. Financially. Brokenness of the heart. One time a woman who had come to clean my house accidentally broke a statue of an angel from Mexico. This little angel statue meant a great deal to me, but not as much as this woman. She had come into my life and told me about plastics and how they could outgas chemicals and how that could be toxic. She was one of many people pointing me in the direction of healing. She cried in front of me. ”I’ve broken your statue,” she said, “I’m so sorry.” I told her it was not a big deal. ”It is a big deal to me,” she told me. I forgot about it. I went away. At that point in my life, I was going away a lot from my home. I was traveling, and I left my home behind, and did not know how important it was to keep in deep touch with my family.
When I came home, the angel statue stood on the kitchen table, miraculously restored. A note was next to it. It read, “Angels understand repair.” These were beautiful words, and to me they are true. The fixing of the angel statue was not a miracle, but rather the meticulous, painstaking work of someone who knew how to work with her hands so deftly you could scarcely detect the fissures.
Sometimes things break up because they need to. I had a friend once in New Orleans who inspired a character in THE CROWNING GLORY OF CALLA LILY PONDER. He took an abandoned lot and turned it into one of the most beautiful courtyard gardens in the city. Whenever any of us was going through a bad time, he invited us over to bring over old plates or cups that had chips or cracks in them. He’d show us how to break them into smaller pieces. There was a huge release in breaking up these pieces. It felt good to break them up. Some items that had once held such power in my life had to be broken in order to turn into something new. Before long, the courtyard “floor” was filled with the tiles that we’d all broken up. Broken pieces of the past that made a new path.
I was raised a Catholic. While I am not a practicing Catholic, I often read and study Catholic writers. The monk, Thomas Merton is one of them. I have been meditating on the quote below since I read it some time in the early 1990s. I suspect that its central idea has sneaked into my writing; I only hope actual phrases haven’t. That’s the way it is when you study someone closely, but not closely enough.
Now, on New Years Eve, I think about broken things, and how they might get fixed. Broken economies, broken objects, broken hearts, broken vows, broken backs, broken ties. This last one is the one that hangs so heavily around me tonight–the broken ties between brothers and sisters. Living in a country that is waging two wars. The sadness of ties broken between us and so many of our brothers and sisters, human, animal, trees, sun, and climates (for anything that was once whole can be broken), the broken hearts of mothers and wives and husbands and little ones who are dying, both on battlefields and at home, because of war.
I live far from the balmy climate that brought “T-shirt New Year’s Eves.” I have my hat on in my study, and my dog at my feet. I feel warmly toward you for coming to see what I might write here. I am blessed.
May this new year be balanced between what needs to be broken in order to be fixed, and that which needs to be fixed in order to become whole. We will be faced with so many decisions. May we choose love.
Here, some “seeds of contemplation,” from Thomas Merton:
“As long as we are on earth, the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because this love is a resetting of a body of broken bones. Even saints cannot live with saints on this earth without some anguish, without some pain at the differences that come between them. There are two things which men can do about the pain of disunion with other men. They can love or they can hate. Hatred recoils from the sacrifice and the sorrow that are the price of this resetting of bones. It refuses the pain of reunion. But love by the acceptance of the pain of reunion, begins to heal all wounds.” Thomas Merton
84,000 blessings,
Rebecca
Posted
January 1st, 2010
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Posted
December 21st, 2009
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Hey Y’all,
Here’s a pic that my sweet husband, Tom, a professional photographer ( www.thomasschworer.com ) took from a walk along the Dungeness River just near the entrance to Olympic National Park here in Washington State. We’ve done a lot of hiking and river floating on the Olympic Peninsula. I’ll never forget the time that Tom fell overboard with his old Roleflex camera while bird watching. His camera was around his neck, and our friend Donna jumped in to try and save it! Ah, life! Love it!
84,000 blessings,
Rebecca
Posted
November 29th, 2009
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Dahlin Dears–
My sweet husband and I are joining close friends for Thanksgiving dinner. We gather for drinks beforehand, helping in the kitchen, listening to John playing his dulcimer, kidding around as we set the table, pulling cornbread dressing out of the oven, and making phone calls to out of town family.
One of us says a short grace before we begin our feast. After enjoying the fabulous food that each of us has brought to the table, we move on to dessert. Nans will make one of her famous toasts that runs on so long we all start groaning. Ian, who is almost four, will decide to start his Jackson Pollack painting again because sweet potatoes make such good art supplies. Everything is not out of a romantic Norman Rockwell/Martha Stewart fantasy. A glass of red wine will spill on Wendy’s new winter white sweater. Somehow, several clumsy moments will intrude and interrupt a good story. But bascially we are all good-hearted, even inside our narcissims. And pecan pies and pumpkin pies abound! We eat dessert slowly, and, one by one, as we have for years, we begin to speak aloud what we are most grateful for. I learn so much about my friends, about what is really important to them, about what their needs are that have been filled. This kind of group dessert prayer is as rich to me as any of the foods on the table. The prayer is a kind of food itself, a nourishing of our souls, as we sit back, some of us closing our eyes to listen.
What am I thankful for this year? Whew. It will take some time to list, but let me give it a try.
I’m grateful for:
* Returning health.
* Being able to walk.
* Being able to stand in the kitchen long enough to make a veggie burger
* Breathing without help from an oxygen tank.
* Having my arm free from a PICC line than sent big-gun antibiotics into my body
* Being able to stand more and more lightly
* Seeing the leaves
* Summer dinners on the porch with friends, for the first time in a decade
* More laughter in the house
* Girlfriends who come across the country to visit
* Talking to my mother on the phone every day
* Having a new book come out
* Walking onto a stage without any help!
* Being able to read from CALLA LILY to an audience.
* For the first time, being strong enough to walk out into the pasture and hand-feed molasses oats to our old sheep, Mister Lonely.
* Dancing, oh, yes, dancing out of the blue by myself in the kitchen and in the sun room, with my husband, our bodies remembering steps we knew so well ten years ago, and are only now returning. All these things represent healing, my body and soul and the generous Universe loosening Lyme disease’s vicious grip.
I am grateful for this moment, this “holy now,” sitting at my desk in this small aerie upstairs, looking at the tall Douglas fir trees which ring the land we’ve been given to steward.
I am grateful to be able to step outside my pain, and remember the thousands and thousands of people suffering from the disease that took me down, and from which I am now rising. I think of all those who do not have food for Thanksgiving dinner, or, if they do, may be too ill to walk to the table. I think of babies and their mothers who cannot feed them or change their diapers or get them health care. I am grateful for the breath that breathes me, right now, moment by moment, the great Good, breathing in and out.
So We’ll sit around the fire afterward. And the day will not be perfect. My friends will not be golden. Nor will I. But we will be perfectly imperfect as we look at one another, and lean back into the warmth.
From one pilgrim to all of you,
Happy Thanksgiving!
and
84,000 Blessings,
Rebecca
P.S. A recipe to follow.
Posted
November 26th, 2009
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Suzanne McHone 
Betty Beck 
TRACEY TYLER 
Ann 
Shirley 
Niki Akbik 
Sue Green 
Elizabeth Douglas 
My youngest son got married this past Saturday in La Manzanilla Mexico. I had saved “Calla Lily” on my Kindle all this time to read at a special place and part of my life. So, in my free time this weekend, I made this precious book a part of the wonderful event that we experienced. I am very glad that Calla traveled with me and was at La Manz with me. The wedding was very simple and sweet with only immediate family there. Four of my new DIL’s uncles and her dad have houses there so all of us stayed with the family. It was a magical weekend and one I will always remember. Somehow it was made even more special and magical because of being able to read Calla Lily during my rest times. Thank you so much for this wonderful addition to my RW collection. I anxiously and breathlessly look forward to your next book. Hurry!! Hugs from one of your most ardent Alexandria fans.
I just finished reading Calla Lily, you are the greatest story teller ever! I dont know when I enjoyed a story that much, I finished the book in a day and a half. I went through all of the ups and downs with Calla, her friends and family. I patiently await your next book. Thank you
Hi http://www.rebeccawellsbooks.com!
About 900 species of plants and animals have gone extinct in the last five centuries, and more than 10,000 others are now on the verge of joining them as endangered species, threatened species or vulnerable species. Here’s a look at some of the countries…
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/infographic-top-20-countries-with-most-endangered-species
That do you think about it?
Kristin Hannah introduced me to you last October when you wrote such a lovely message on her blog. I don’t know if Kristin passed along our messages to you. However, I was so intrigued with the ease of your message that I purchased and read “The Crowning Glory of Cally Lilly Ponder.” I really loved the subtle spiritual overtone in your novel. Your book was simply charming, soulful, heartbreaking and inspiring. Each time I picked up your book it carried me to another place and I found it hard to put down. Cally and Sweet’s wedding night love scene was one of the most beautiful, spiritual connection I’ve ever read from an author. What a talent you are! Thank you for gracing my life with your stories. I have seen many time and loved the movie of “The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood,” but sad to say I didn’t read your novel. So, I look forward to catching up with your work and look forward to your upcoming novels. And, continue to post comments on Kristin’s blog.
HI, WAS BORN AND RAISED IN JACKSON PARISH,NOW LIVE IN THE GREAT NORTHWEST. I LOVE YOUR BOOKS ONE AND ALL AND I ESP LOVE YOUR REFEREAL TO FOLLOWING THE MOSQUITO FOGGING TRUCK/WAGON. I DIDNT DO THAT BUT MY HUSBAND DID IN JONESBORO AND ALTHOUGH NOT HEALTHY IS VERY FUNNY.GOOD HEALTH TO YOU AND I CANT WAIT FOR A NEW BOOK LINDA PEEL
Like the design, template, post is decent, writing is good. I’ll probably check your blog again….