Bøker av Sue Fagalde Lick

Blue Chip Stamp Guitar is a love story-about Sue and her guitar It starts with a cheap guitar the poet's mother bought with Blue Chip stamps and continues through her life, outlasting jobs, marriages, and deaths. A guitar is just a wooden box with six strings strung from one end to another, but in the musician's hands, it becomes music and magic, companion and comfort. These backstage poems describe the teenager dreaming of fame, the young adult dealing with sex and stage fright, and the seasoned performer lugging gear and singing through bad weather, hecklers, sore throats and sore fingers. At the beginning and the end, she plays alone, feeling the calluses on her fingertips as she sends music into the air. These poems will appeal to all music lovers, especially the musicians who share that special bond with their instruments."There is no pretention or affectation in this work, just solid storytelling, and poetic craft at its best. Here is a rich life, bittersweet, at times vulnerable yet underneath is a quality of humility with fierce independence in the life and the poetry."--Dave Mehler, editor of Triggerfish Critical Review, author of Roadworthy"This collection takes the reader into the 'raw, unpolished edges, dust, and glue, /the underbelly of a cathedral, ' of a life lived in pursuit of music and love finally found in Fred, the husband/roadie to whom the book is dedicated. By the end of this intimate collection, you'll be singing, 'Let's play another memory.'"--Lacie Semenovich, author of Community, Not Market, and Legacies

A widow and her white-muzzled dog, a coastal landscape filled with bully winds, characters who relieve the loneliness of being alone: Sue Fagalde Lick weaves these images throughout Dining al Fresco with My Dog in narratives both vulnerable and brave. Whether floating in her hot tub with memories of her husband or fixing a roof, she proclaims: "I am old, but... / warm dog at my fingertips, / I feel light as the alder tree, / rooted here for eternity". This is a touching celebration of life in poetry at its best.--Carolyn Martin, Ph.D., author of The Catalog of Small Continents Sue Fagalde Lick, in her collection, Dining Al Fresco with My Dog, walks us comfortably into her later life where she is "turning butch in [her] old age...now...wife and husband too." She imagines with humor how a cryptic observer would see her, guiding the reader through her daily routine of dog, pellet stove, writing, and reading, and concludes with, "Eats three times a day, keeps warm, still alive." She shares the richness of her solitude in nature (and the solitary nature of the writing life) but with many forays into the music, humor, and warmth she finds in her community. As a reader, I feel included and deeply satisfied.-Rachel Barton, editor of Willawaw Journal and author of This is the Lightness Grief. Brave attitude. Small triumphs. "Dear dead departed husband, / your being dead and departed / is a major pain in the ass." The widow senses her husband everywhere. Wears his shirts. Stacks the logs. Learns to change a spark plug. Sue Fagalde Lick may make you weep, make you smile. And then, of course, there's the dog. This is a strong book.-Penelope Scambly Schott, author of On Dufur Hill

When Sue Lick's husband's charming forgetfulness worsens into dementia, she trades her life of writing, music, and travel with the love of her life for years of caregiving, guilt, and impossible decisions. And yet the love remains.

Although the title, Gravel Road Ahead, hints at what's in store, readers may not be prepared for the heart-wrenching journey ahead. When poet Sue Fagalde Lick and her husband Fred left their careers in Silicon Valley for a new home on the Oregon Coast, they thought all their dreams were coming true. Then Fred, a former city administrator and part-time tax preparer, started forgetting things. In moving poems that range from darkly humorous to heart-breaking, Sue is unflinchingly honest in her chronicling of both the bitter and the sweet moments as she accompanies her husband of 25 years down the circuitous path of Alzheimer's disease. For those traveling this road with a loved one, Lick's a guide to be trusted, offering a lifeline of patience and forbearance gleaned from their journey. But there's plenty of insight here for any couple growing older together-and a reminder of just what we sign on for when we repeat "I do."

First you marry a man who does not want children. He cheats and you divorce him. Then you marry the love of your life and find out he does not want to have children with you either. The three he has are more than enough. Although you always wanted to be a mother, you decide he is worth the sacrifice, expecting to have a long happy life together. But that''s not what happens. This is the story of how a woman becomes childless by marriage and how it affects every aspect of her life. This is the book of my heart, the one I had to write. Ever since I realized I was not going to have children, I have felt recurring grief and an emptiness in my heart. I am different from most women, but I have found that I am not alone. There are many of us childless women, and I think it''s important to share our stories about what it''s like when you don''t have children in a world where most girls grow up to become mothers. I hope this book offers comfort to those who are childless and understanding to those who are not. If it makes you smile here and there, even better.

It''s like this giant secret that is right in front of everyone. One in five women and even more men don''t have children-at least not their own. For more than half of them, it was not by choice. Their partners a) never wanted children, b) already had kids from a previous relationship, c) never quite felt ready for parenthood, d) had had a vasectomy, or e) had fertility problems. They are forced to make a choice between this man or woman they love and the children they might have had. Love or Children features the best of more than 700 posts and comments from the Childless by Marriage blog. Sue Fagalde Lick and her readers unveil situations and feelings they wouldn''t dare tell their families, friends, partners, or even their therapists. 

Nearly one million Portuguese Americans live in California, immigrants or the descendants of immigrants who left poverty behind to seek a better life. Stories Grandma Never Told collects the accounts of the women who settled a foreign land, facing a new language, new customs, and new expectations about their roles as wives, mothers, and workers. Here, too, are the stories of their daughters and granddaughters, and their own struggles to reconcile old-country ways and morality with American lives and identity.