INTERMARRY a new novel by Rhea Harmsen

A strange menagerie in an unlikely setting. Jack Wolinski, a young white architect with a crazy scheme and some maxed-out credit cards. Fiona Reed, a young woman with the brass of a CEO and the innocence of a nun. Otis Reed, a Denzel-like construction foreman with a penchant for poetry. And Towana Jackson, a desperate single mother with too many pounds and too many kids.

Their lives intersect at the juncture of Drexel Boulevard and 47th Street. It’s a wild bid to turn a corner of the ghetto into paradise. Starting with boarded up, urine-smelling, condemned properties. Aiming for yuppie south side “revitalization,” and urban gardens. A mad venture that sucks them into a vortex of hard work, laughter, and near-bankruptcy. Hoping to find dignity, love and healing. But what the heart longs for and the eyes crave, you must not touch.

It’s…

A few weeks ago I asked my readers for help in naming my new novel. This plea went out over wordpress and facebook and many of you responded with truly excellent feedback. So, you might be surprised to find that the final cover, the one which now accompanies the novel, is not one of the four I submitted for your consideration. Truthfully though, your collective input was key in my settling on not only a cover, but also on the title. (Without a title concept it is impossible to have a cover). So, I want to thank everyone who helped. I also want to thank Lua Harmsen, for her beautiful painting, which expresses what I am trying to say in three hundred pages.

It is a new morning in history, (or a  sunset to old ideas) and it is time to explode that myth, perhaps more prevalent in Latin novelas…

Here’s a little known news item from an obscure organization that someone obviously is trying to hide by releasing it in a Friday news dump…oh, wait.

NYTimes:

A panel of experts appointed by the United Nations, unveiling its latest assessment of climate research, reinforced its earlier conclusions that global warming is real, that it is caused primarily if not exclusively by human emissions, and that it is likely to get substantially worse unless efforts to limit those emissions are rapidly accelerated.

“Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes,” the report said. “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”

Going well beyond its four previous analyses…

Simply amazing student work!
Im sure they’re lovers of the mighty bean.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently released a study regarding global statistics on physical and sexual violence and the related deaths of women. The information the WHO released proved that physical or sexual violence affects a third of all women…globally. They rightfully consider this an epidemic.

Of course, one can assume that such violence against women occurs mostly in third world nations, or nations experiencing war, and that would be a mostly correct assumption. One would think that a nation such as the U.S. would have the lowest statistics, they would be right, but these statistics are by far not low enough. The percentage differences between the most violent regions and the least is less than 15 percentage points apart.

So the questions remain: why is this happening at all, and why is this such a huge problem in the 21^st century? Why is there no…

In honor of the Fourth this week, we wanted to highlight one of our favorite American-made product lines. Hydroponics is growing in popularity for growing a variety of different plants. It requires much less space than traditional growing methods and uses only water to bring plants to maturity. Here is a little run down on Growers Supply’s NFT hydroponic channels that fits in with the theme of the week—the good ole’ red, white and blue!