This is the first time in my life that we haven’t had a dog as part of our family.  And if you do have pets, you know, that they do become a family member.  Plus having been in the medical field, I have seen the amazing effect dogs have with patients.  So when Nicole from Tribute Books contacted me, it was an instant yes for me to host the author of this book.  So please help me welcome Barbara Lampert and Charlie to our group.

BARBARA LAMPERT and CHARLIE

Barbara Lampert is a Marriage and Family Therapist specializing in relationships. She’s been in private practice in Brentwood, California for over twenty years. She considers her work a calling and loves what she does. She has a doctorate in medical sociology and two master’s degrees – one in psychology and one in sociology.

Barbara has adored dogs her whole life. They’re her passion! She considers them the magic on the planet. Barbara has had dogs most of her life and hopes to have at least one by her side always. She notes that for a lot of people, their dogs are their best friends. She loves helping people know that’s ok – that a soul-satisfying relationship may be found with any being and needs to be treasured.

Besides her love of dogs, Barbara is an avid gardener and finds herself gardening in much of her spare time. She sees her garden as a work of art. She loves being in nature – the miracle of growth, the ever-changing landscape, its beauty.

Today Barbara lives happily in Malibu, California with her husband David (married twenty-eight years!) and their six-year-old Golden Retriever, Harry.
The blog tour site is:
Barbara hopes that Charlie: A Love Story will be a tribute not only to a magnificent dog but to all dogs everywhere.
The blog tour site is:   http://charlie-a-love-story.blogspot.com/

GUEST POST

CMash:  I have seen where dogs are brought to nursing homes. So a post either about and/or the premise of “How, why, and what animals can provide and what the effects are when used in that type of setting.”

Thank you so much for having me on your site and giving me an opportunity to discuss bringing dogs into nursing homes and the benefit of dogs in that setting. Nursing homes were the first to make use of therapy dogs. To the best of my knowledge, that practice began about thirty years ago.

Have you ever visited a nursing home? For the most part, they are not happy places, so anything that can be done to bring joy and love into them and to the people who inhabit them is wonderful. To bring dogs into this setting is extraordinarily intelligent. But it has to be the right kind of dog – not every dog will be able to handle this type of setting.

Commonly known as therapy dogs, dogs who visit nursing homes must first have passed the Canine Good Citizen test, which means that they have to be well-mannered and comfortable in a variety of situations and with a variety of people.

The most essential attribute of a therapy dog is a good temperament – being friendly, patient, confident, gentle, and at ease in all situations. When a dog lacking a good temperament is put under stress, poor behavior will surface. Most people believe that a therapy dog is born and not made, though it is not impossible to teach some better behaviors. But I tend to agree with the “born and not made” theory. I am a psychotherapist, licensed twenty-two years, and have been curious about people all my life. As near as I can tell, temperament doesn’t change. Behaviors can, but temperament no.

Having had dogs most of my life, I can think of only two of them who would have made good therapy dogs. Their temperaments were perfect for the role. Both were Golden Retrievers, were calm in the face of chaos, loved all kinds of people, were fine in and actually looked forward to new situations, had a calming effect on people, and made people feel better just by their presence. The effect that both of these dogs had on people was a sight to behold. People they encountered would within a few seconds of meeting them have big smiles on their faces. These two would have been perfect therapy dogs in nursing homes.

Another characteristic of good therapy dogs, I’ve heard, is that they should not be too attached to their owners but instead should be more interested in exploring the world and the people in it. Again thinking of those two dogs of mine, that makes sense to me.

While in one respect Charlie, my Golden Retriever who is the subject of my book Charlie: A Love Story, would have made a good therapy dog, because he was so emotionally wise and intuitive and loved to make people laugh, he was much too attached to me. Far more interested in being with me than being out in the world meeting people and exploring new situations. Lucky me! How blessed I was to have had this magnificent being bonded with me! My very own therapy dog!

A good therapy dog offers comfort and companionship, soothes the agitated and fearful, engages with the isolated, and may even bring laughter to the sad and lonely. A good therapy dog does not discriminate against someone in a wheelchair, or the really old or disheveled but rather gives abundant, unconditional love and acceptance to such people, which in turn can not only calm but heal. It can be very soul-satisfying for a disabled or elderly person to pet the fur of one of these dogs and experience at least a connection, to express affection to some living being who in turn gives this person unconditional love. For a brief moment, this individual may be transported to a happier place, the day-to-day sadness and loneliness temporarily interrupted. Healing? I’d say so.

Again, thank you! It’s been a pleasure discussing this very good topic about man’s (and woman’s) truly best friend.

CMash:  First, Thank you for visiting.  Very interesting post, which I enjoyed and hope my readers do as well.  Being a former RN and my last job was working in geriatrics, I did see, on many occasions, the Big Smile that you mentioned.  The Nursing Home where I worked did utilize Pet Therapy on a routine basis.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Charlie: A Love Story tells of the beautiful love between Charlie, a Golden Retriever, and the author, Barbara Lampert. It takes place in Malibu, California. When Charlie turned eleven years old and started having some health problems, a journal Barbara was keeping about her garden quickly became mostly about Charlie. Charlie: A Love Story is an intimate look at an incredible connection between a canine and a human. And as a psychotherapist who specializes in relationships, Barbara brings that sensibility and understanding to Charlie’s story as well. Charlie was Barbara’s loyal confidante and best friend. He was indomitable, had a zest for life and an uncanny emotional intelligence. Charlie: A Love Story is about devotion, joy, loss, and renewal, about never giving up or giving in. But mostly it’s about an extraordinary dog and an extraordinary relationship.

THANKS TO AUTHOR, BARBARA LAMPERT, AND
TRIBUTE BOOKS, I HAVE ONE (1) COPY OF THIS
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If you are a frequent visitor here at the CMash blog, then you know that Jodi from WOW, always stops by and introduces us to amazing and talented female authors.  And today is no exception.  So I ask, to help me welcome, Ms. Caryn Miriam-Goldberg!

CARYN MIRIAM-GOLDBERG

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg is the Poet Laureate of Kansas, and the author of 14 books, including a forthcoming non-fiction book, Needle in the Bone: How a Holocaust Survivor and Polish Resistance Fighter Beat the Odds and Found Each Other (Potomac Books); The Sky Begins At Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community & Coming Home to the Body (Ice Cube Books); the anthologies An Endless Skyway: Poetry from the State Poets Laureate (co-editor, Ice Cube Books) and Begin Again: 150 Kansas Poems (editor, Woodley Press); and four collections of poetry. Founder of Transformative Language Arts – a master’s program in social and personal transformation through the written, spoken and sung word – at Goddard College where she teaches, Mirriam-Goldberg also leads writing workshops widely. With singer Kelley Hunt, she co-writes songs, offers collaborative performances, and leads writing and singing Brave Voice retreats.
Connect with the author at her website.

GUEST POST

The Long Way Home: Writing As a Way of Healing

            Growing up as someone who had to make something to feel right in the world, I used to draw incessantly, but when I was 14, I switched on a dime to writing. The reason? My parents’ outlandish, long-winded and terrifying divorce pointed me toward words to make sense out of a reality that included my father kidnapping my mother’s Hummel figurines and neither of them moving out of the house during a year of court battles.

            There’s an old Yiddish saying that everything is bearable is it’s part of a story, and I know that was true for me. By narrating what I was living as a teenager caught in the middle of a domestic war, I could see some kind of crazy coherence to what was happening, a narrative thread that helped me track the symbolic moments that I knew I would need to bring to therapy sessions for years ahead as well as gain enough distance to see sign posts of hope and courage along the way. From the year of the divorce through the next year of living as my father’s wife-daughter through the final year of our family merging with a very different kind of family, I wrote. I knew that once day I would write a novel about all of this.

So it was no surprise that within weeks of turning in my PhD dissertation, I started writing The Divorce Girl. Having been through a lot of good therapy and, even more so, the passage of time, and now being a mother myself, I had arrived at the place where I had the perspective I needed to start this novel.

That starting place was 17 years ago, which I know is an outrageously long time to write a book, but the process itself has been right on time. I wrote the first draft during a long, hot summer, sitting at my husband’s grandfather’s giant desk in my basement. Having composted in me for decades, the novel came out in a rush, and I often wrote 10 to 20 pages each day. Then, suddenly feeling overwhelmingly depressed and too exhausted to even walk upstairs to the couch or my bed, I curled up on the carpet under the desk and took a nap. Strangely enough, I woke 15 minutes later, refreshed, and within an hour or so I was positively elated.

This went on until autumn when I had a solid draft. Then I let it air itself out for a year until I was ready and had time to start revising it with giant rewrites and re-configurations of characters or new threading or a core theme through the novel.

The writing time was herded into small spaces by the happenings in my life: I had full-time work teaching and leading writing workshops, three kids (my youngest was a newborn when I started the book), a house in the country with too much weeding to ever finish, cars that needed work, dishes that were never done, and lot of other writing projects. During this time, I’ve had 12 books published (poetry, a memoir, anthologies, a writing guide), which also took center stage, one at a time, for long periods. But I also took so long on the book because it took many years of working with agents and editors to find the right press for it.

Yet sometimes when we can’t find the right door to open for something we care about, it can be blessing to wait. Taking so much time helped me come to cleaner terms with the most impossible time and people in my life, writing my way through old hurts and aging anger. That spaciousness also allowed me to get very clear about what this book was and wasn’t truly about beyond my longing to see it published. That process entailed editing out what didn’t serve the book (“killing my darlings” as the saying goes) and searching out what this book is truly about after peeling away my own feelings about its healing role in my life.

What I realized was that I wanted to share with readers a story of someone who found her way through making things — in my main character’s case, photographs — that helped her discover herself and her calling. I wanted to lift of a story of how we can find our way through soul-battering life experiences and learn, even in the hardest moments, to trust our innate voices and take creative risks to land us where we need to be.

Writing The Divorce Girl has been healing for me, and now I hope it’s healing for readers too.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Meet Deborah Shapiro, a New Jersey teenage photographer whose parents’ outrageous divorce lands her in the biggest flea market in the free world, a Greek diner with immigration issues, a New York City taxi company, a radical suburban synagogue, a hippie-owned boutique, and bowling alleys, beaches and bagel shops. As her home explodes apart, a first love, a series of almost-mothers, and a comical collection of eccentric mentors show Deborah how to make art out of life, and life from the wreckage of a broken home. This debut novel of Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg travels through wild loss, untended grief and bad behavior with humor and imagination. Reminiscent of the works of Wally Lamb, Stephanie Kallos, and Kaye Gibbons, this coming of age story illuminates how a daring heart can turn a broken girl into a woman strong enough to craft a life of art, soul and beauty.
Genre: Women’s Fiction/Young Adult
Just Thought You Should Know (from WOW):
We feel The Divorce Girl will appeal to a YA audience but, because there is some violence and sexual scenes, we’d like to appeal to YA bloggers followed by older teens (15 and up) not the tween market.

THANKS TO AUTHOR, CARYN MIRIAM-GOLDBERG, I HAVE
ONE (1) BOOK TO GIVE AWAY.  U.S and CANADA RESIDENTS.

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Today is the start of High Summer Read-A-Thon, hosted by Michelle of The True Book Addict, and will run through July 22nd.  It is not too late to sign up!!  Starting tomorrow I will have a “sticky note” progress report as to how I am doing.  If you would like to join in, click the link below.  Not too sure how much reading I will be getting in because this week I am very busy with Partners In Crime Tours and will also be preparing for an upcoming pool party on Saturday since the engaged couple, my son, Mark and Jess, will be coming home!!!!!

Hosted by Michelle  from Seasons Of Reading

Hosted by Miz B at Should Be Reading

Today’s question:
What are you currently reading? Is it any good? Would you recommend it?

My answer:
I just recently finished reading Sweat by Mark Gilleo, a phenomenal read.  And had planned to start reading Twelve Months by Steven Manchester, from The Story Plant as part of their “Spread The Word Initiative”.  He is being compared to Michael Baron, which I am a huge fan of.  So hopefully today, for the Read-A-Thon and when I get caught up with Partners In Crime Tours, I will be able to start it.

July is being hosted by Mrs. Q Book Addict
Mailbox Monday was created by Marcia of A girl and her books and is now on tour.

According to Marcia, “Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week. Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists.”
                                   Author            From Gina @ Hott Books

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Hello Sunday Saloners!  And how was your week?   The Mash family had a very exciting week!!

Real Life:  Friday the 13th turned out to be a very lucky day for my family.  If you follow my blog, you know that I have talked about my 2 fantastic and wonderful sons, who both live out of state because of their jobs.  Well, my husband and I can now officially say we have a daughter!!  My youngest son, Mark, proposed to his gf and she said YES!!!!!!  We have loved Jess from the minute we met her.  And over the past couple of years we have fallen in love with her more and more because she makes my son so happy.  They truly are the perfect couple.  Jess, I am publicly welcoming you into our family.  Thank you for loving Mark as you do.  And, I know, Mark has your heart.  I can see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice, see it in his smile.  Mark, thank you for giving us the daughter I always wanted!!

Congratulations Mark and Jess!!!!!

Don’t think the rest of my week can even come close.  My husband and I are elated!!

……of A Death In C Minor by Rebecca Yount

20 J. Connatser Easy entry for fans of this blog post

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