A Rumor of Coyotes – web home of author Cheryl Unruh
Writing Our Stories – Day 3
Welcome to Day 3 of Writing Our Stories - or How to Become a Writer Without Really Trying. Today’s writing prompt is a Jughead comic book. Did you read comics as a kid? Do you read them now? Comic strips in the Sunday paper were the best thing. Peanuts, of course,...
Writing Our Stories Day 2
Writing Our Stories - Day 2 It’s Day 2 of Writing Our Stories, or How to Become a Writer Without Really Trying. Writing your life stories can be as easy as sitting with a friend drinking coffee or beer. Instead of talking out loud, write it all down on paper or on...
Gravedigger’s Daughter Launch
Oh hey, 2021 was quite a year! I wrote a new book, my fourth, Gravedigger's Daughter: Vignettes from a Small Kansas Town, start-to-finish, in 2021. And with the help of my editor brother, my photographer husband, and my publishing friend Tracy, the book was published...
Writing Our Lives – Prompt No. 1
Writing Our Stories #1Welcome to: Writing Our Stories. Or, an alternative title: How to become a Writer Without Really Trying. For the next 7 days, I’ll post writing prompts that I hope will encourage you to write your own life stories. Some of your life stories may...
Gin & Tonic
GIN & TONIC The holy man is an equation: reverence plus self-control equals what? purity? heaven? It equals something, surely. As he sits on the barstool to my right, I happen to be on an inhalation - His robe smells like celery. And a bit like my...
A Journey of No Distance
A JOURNEY OF NO DISTANCE A vacuum of chatter A detachment of friends A tavern of echoes A grocery store of disappointment A temperature of fate A fever of connection Streets of abandon A round globe of loneliness A pneumonia of worry A panic of...
Dawn Chorus
Dawn Chorus I was surprised to hear them: birds. It was February still. Late February. But in the darkness before sunrise, birds sang me awake. How could I have forgotten about morning birds? After a long winter with maybe a dozen smallish winter storms, and months...
Author Michael Graves
Michael D. Graves has written three books, all published by Meadowlark Books of Emporia, Kansas: Green Bike (with co-authors Kevin Rabas and Tracy Million Simmons) was published in 2014, To Leave a Shadow in 2015 (a 2016 Kansas Notable Book),...
Author Roy Beckemeyer
Roy Beckemeyer is one of those people who makes you feel comfortable in his presence. He's a poet, a retired aerospace engineer, a man who loves the arts. He wields an incredible vocabulary. He's a kind human being, a gentleman. He's been Poet of the Year...
Author Grant Overstake
Wichita. 1968. Gasoline is no longer allowed to be pumped into glass containers because of a rash of firebombs. A troubled 13-year-old boy is growing up in a racist white home. A black family moves next door. Fellow writer Tracy Million Simmons recommended...
The landscape is one hill folding into another, bodies of hills lying together. There are few trees for shade. We make our own shadows here, unless a cloud runs interference with the sun.
As a hawk glides overhead, we feel the rhythms of land and sky. And somewhere out here, we step into that space between questions and answers, a place where we are satisfied with the unknown.
After darkness comes, the wind settles down, and the Milky Way flings itself across the sky. A rumor of coyotes hangs in the night air.
When the world closes up shop, when the sky turns from blue to black for the very last time, when the last poem is written and read, this is where I want to be – out in my beloved Flint Hills.
– excerpt from “At Home in the Flint Hills,” Waiting on the Sky by Cheryl Unruh ©2013