Brenda Bellinger is an award-winning writer and author of Taking Root, an urban coming-of-age novel. As a former courtroom clerk and high school secretary, she didn't have to look far to find fertile soil for her imagination.
Brenda has been honored with first place awards for non-fiction and flash fiction at the Mendocino Coast and Central Coast Writers Conferences, respectively. Her work has appeared in Small Farmer's Journal, Mom Egg Review, Persimmon Tree, THEMA, the California Writers Club Literary Review, and in various anthologies.
Fueled by good coffee, Brenda writes from an empty nest on an old chicken farm in Northern California.
My feelings about accepting the COVID-19 vaccine were twofold. Even after experiencing what has been called “Covid Arm” after the first dose (a raised, red, intensely itchy rash at the injection site that appeared nine days afterward), I still felt that this was one of those decisions in which the benefit clearly outweighed the risks. […]
Between this post and the last, my husband and I stopped by one of our favorite local cafés for coffee. It was a chilly afternoon, too cold to sit at an outside table so we thought we’d take our coffees and a treat to go. This café is much loved in our community for its […]
Sometimes ideas for a blog post surface organically, like the other day. We were beginning to clear a huge tangle of old-growth blackberry vines that had taken over a corner and two sides of an outbuilding. They’d grown so tall last summer we couldn’t even reach the berries, much to the birds’ delight. Working my […]
There has been so much confusion and misinformation about COVID-19 vaccination eligibility and availability in our area. Of the five W’s, only the “what” and “why” have been answered. It’s the “who,” “where” and “when” that remain elusive. My 90-year-old father is in generally good health, both mentally and physically, except for his diabetes. He […]
Remember being a young child in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day? You may have decorated a brown paper lunch bag with bold red hearts that you’d carefully cut out of construction paper with your safety scissors. The bag would be taped to the front edge of your desk—a hopeful receptacle for the 30 […]
To borrow a couple of lines from Amanda Gorman’s striking inaugural poem The Hill We Climb: It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit, it’s the past we step into and how we repair it I’d only recently become aware of the conversation around capitalizing the “b” in the word “black” in […]
Politics weren’t central to my upbringing and though I’ve never been an activist myself, what I’ve seen in recent months has shocked me to the core. As the recent events surrounding the insurrection at our Capitol unfolded, my thoughts went to some people I have loved and lost, grateful that they hadn’t lived long enough […]
Remember when we used to rely on weather forecasts that were broadcast with our nightly news? We’d get a good-enough sense of when to expect rain from the fuzzy satellite image. Many years ago, I used to ride the bus to work. At one of the stops along the way, a cheerful woman named Marilyn […]
After over four decades as a Berkeley institution, Au Coquelet Café on University Avenue closed its doors a couple of months ago, another casualty of the pandemic. For the past several years, my husband and I would visit Berkeley every other month or so for an evening of Irish music, sometimes at the Freight & […]
For the most part, members of our family celebrated Thanksgiving in small “household units” of two, three or four as I’m sure many other families did around the country. This was the first year our infamous “green stuff” didn’t make its appearance on the table. It’s a molded Jell-O recipe my mother used to fix […]
