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.
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 […]
Life continues to surprise us, doesn’t it? We’ve just experienced an election like no other in American history. Voter turnout was unprecedented and yet the nation feels more divided that I can ever recall in my lifetime. I’m thinking about current events in this country and how they will take their place in our history. […]
As remaining ballots around the country are being submitted and tallied, I’m wondering how many writers have elected to participate in National Novel Writing Month this November. Given rising numbers of Covid-19 and potential fallout from the election, I think hunkering down over a laptop at home for the rest of the month to hammer […]
The next blog will happen to fall on Election Day. Many years ago, employees in the County Clerk’s office were offered the opportunity to work during election night as ballots were tallied. Our County Clerk is also the Registrar of Voters. We’d sit at tables grabbing handfuls of paper ballots, checking for rough edges, straightening […]
We’ve turned the corner into fall and are emerging from yet another round of wildfires. Our skies were painted with the shades of fall leaves and the air has been thick with smoke. Tire tracks were visible in a layer of ash on a Santa Rosa parking lot. More homes have been lost; more lives […]
Someone asked me why I chose Vallejo as the setting for my novel, Taking Root. Early on, as I began thinking about the plot and envisioning Delaney, the protagonist, a little memory bubble floated up to the surface and popped. When my brothers and I were kids, our family lived in Novato, a city north […]
I have a confession to make. I didn’t enjoy reading until well into adulthood. My mother tried her best to entice me with The Happy Hollisters but I was only briefly interested. I resisted reading the books assigned in school, skimming them only sufficiently enough to be able to pass any quizzes or tests. Only […]
Last night, my attention was caught by the flame of a candle as it swayed and stretched at our dinner table. Wildfires came early this year, touched off by strikes of a rare summer lightning storm. I’ve been concerned for friends and people I know living in areas under threat, their “go bags” ready for […]
In my coming-of-age novel Taking Root, the protagonist, Delaney, has endured panic attacks for as long as she can remember. Alienated from her mother, and trying to carve out a life for herself, she suffers in silence and has managed to cope with these episodes, most of the time, in a unique way. The number […]
