Lenore Plassman

Lenore’s poetry and short stories derive mostly from her love of nature and the things living in it, as well as the colorful characters she has known as child and adult.

Lenore became serious about writing at about age 8, with the encouragement of a special teacher. This led her eventually to study English at the University of Washington.

Her experience caring for animals in a veterinary clinic, living in farming country, and working in elder care adds richness and interest to her narratives.

Lenore’s creative imagination takes form in her three acre which she calls her Private World. Here, numerous pocket gardens, a cow stanchion (last remnant of her family’s farm), a hillside fountain, and other colorful surprises sharing space with chickens, dogs, cats, and a burro. A painting of Gandalf guards one shed-side, Smaug the other.

A respite is found here, for friends and visitors, from city humdrumness. Several times a year Lenore journeys to Western Washington to hike in the Cascades, study and participate in writing workshops. All of the photography shown in these pages are places she has walked and from which she continues to learn.

In Lenore’s words:

“I generally allow my work to stand up and speak for itself. Currently I am stationed in the arid side of Washington state. I am a co-CEO of a small holding. I care for various birds, a burro, gardens. My husband and I take prybars to rocks in the garden and hope for rain. And sometimes poetry worms its way out of those rocks and sagebrush. Imagery never leaves my side. Bast, the cat Goddess, reigns, clawing poetic snippets out when I’d rather She left me alone.”

Glynda Shaw

Glynda Shaw is a Seattle native who has at one time or other lived in most parts of Washington State as well as Northern Idaho and the Midwest.

When her Second Grade class were called one day up to the nurse’s station to cluster around John Hay Elementary’s only TV set and watch the splashdown of John Glenn’s Friendship Seven, Glynda stopped building pirate ships and started building rockets.

In Fourth Grade she read Madelaine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time” on the recommendation of two other girls and loved it, if possible even more than they had.

“Wrinkle,” Glynda says, “gave me the idea that there should be a smaller, faster, more elegant way of accomplishing space travel than rockets. We’ve not really found it yet but I guess the process taught me to think in all areas of life about alternatives.”

Progressing to Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, Ray Bradbury and Zenna Henderson,
Glynda found science fiction a congenial and inspirational milieu in which to live out her adolescent dreams. Initially drawing on short stories and novels as sources of ideas, she was soon expressing her own scientific and technological speculations in the words of her fictional characters.

Glynda studied Aerospace Engineering, Communications and Journalism at the University of Washington. At one point during her life, she had a homestead in Northern Idaho and has built solar collectors, raised animals, distilled alcohol and is currently working on a windmill.

Glynda deals with the consternation of trying to come to grips with our guiding influences in her fantasy novel Secret Summers; first volume of an anticipated trilogy to include Secret Seasons and Secret Selves. Some, (though not all) of her characters struggle with the need to relearn the meaning of existence with each new birthing.

She calls onto the stage fairies “in whom my Irish mother never told me not to believe” as well as white witches and a previously unknown aunt who extracts from the sea using Oregon wind power.

“Witches, Windmills, a house on a clifftop, dark doings in a lighthouse,” she says. “What’s not to like!?”

Meanwhile, the physical, matter-connected Glynda Shaw continues to investigate the logistics of closed ecologies and the sustainability of transportable, integrated technologies.

Rohvannyn Shaw

The webmistress for this site, she uploads all content and does all editing.  Educated at the University of Washington with a Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Visual arts degree, she comes from a family of writers.  She has edited several books, both fiction and non fiction, collaborated on two poetry chapbooks, and illustrates stories and poetry as a sideline.  She maintains this site, the blog energy minimum road to outer space, her own blog Mindflight, and her art site Rohvannynshaw.com.