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.
It’s hard not to be overwhelmed with despair at all the crises looming large near and far, from racially motivated killings and random violence in the U.S. to the ongoing atrocities in Ukraine and triple digit temperatures in India. Not to mention the millions of lives lost to COVID and hundreds of thousands of others […]
Mindlessly scrolling through Yahoo News (a time suck, I know), I came across a headline titled “Caroline Kennedy’s first grandchild’s name revealed.” It stopped me cold and aged me a lifetime all at once. I still picture Caroline as that sweet little girl at her father’s grave site in 1963, two days before her seventh […]
I confess. I have a soft spot for thrift stores, particularly those that support local non-profits. So it only follows that not one, but two thrift stores appear in my novel Taking Root. You know the saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”? I was thinking about that the other day when I pulled […]
I suppose another title for this post could be “Reverberations.” Some are gentle, quiet, reminiscent of the fading ring of a bell. Others are loud, persistent—drumbeats, almost—like the hourly news headlines of the brutal slaughters in Ukraine, occasionally punctuated by stories of defiance, strength and resilience. It’s Monday morning, the day before I’ll upload this […]
Have you ever had one of those moments when what you needed most (or didn’t know you needed) seemed to suddenly appear, out of nowhere? My husband and I were taking a walk this past Sunday afternoon in a neighborhood a couple of blocks from downtown when I noticed what appeared to be a wooden […]
“Morgues are full.” Ukraine struggles to bury the dead. So the headline reads on my news feed this morning. Wasn’t it just yesterday that some of our own morgues in areas hardest hit by the pandemic were bringing in refrigeration trailers to cope with the overflow of bodies? So many of those deaths, like these, […]
Toward the end of his life, my father, who used to enjoy painting, would often say he couldn’t “get in the mood” or “just lost interest.” His easel stood waiting, a pencil-sketched canvas in place and a table of brushes and paints nearby. Sometimes, writing can feel that way, as though you’re engaged in a […]
Walking to a favorite local café after dropping my car off for service, I passed one of those little free libraries. I chose a copy of This Side of Brightness by Colum McCann, an author whose work I hadn’t previously read. Settling in with my breakfast burrito and cup of coffee, I was unprepared to […]
When the last person living in the family home dies, there is the practical matter of what to do with all of the furnishings and other belongings. If their surviving children and grandchildren already have complete households and Goodwill isn’t accepting furniture donations due to the pandemic, where does it all go? Sure, Craigslist might […]
I don’t know about you but I’m still waiting for this to feel like a fresh start instead of more of the same. My family has a memorial event to plan and a wedding coming up this summer. Will we be able to travel and safely gather together? I’m thinking of other families who lost […]
Brenda Bellinger