Click here for installments number one, two, three, and four of this chronicle by WVFC publisher Patricia Yarberry-Allen, writing of her travels home for a major family Thanksgiving. (Ed.) Mommie expected us at 10am to bring her home for Thanksgiving Day.  She was dressed in her winter coat waiting since it was 10:05am when we [...]

I woke on Thanksgiving Day at 4am with a terrible sense of things all gone wrong.  I was in my mother’s home and she was in a nursing home.  We had arrived last night after 15 hours on the road and had been just too tired to make sense of much.  The boxes of ingredients [...]

 All of us will be greeted with the phrase “Happy Holidays” sometime soon, if we haven’t been already. But I realized long ago that in my profession, this is the mean season.  As a psychologist in private practice I have noticed that the period of time from the Jewish New Year in September through Easter/Passover [...]

By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger I've always thrown myself into Thanksgiving. You can see in the photo below, from my turn as a Pilgrim in the 1956 sixth grade pageant at Hunter College Elementary School in New York City. Long, long ago. Might as well have been the first Thanksgiving ever. As a playwright I can tell [...]

(Third installment in Dr. Patricia Yarberry's ongoing chronicle of her life-changing holiday trip home — a trip born of change and time, and evoking far more. ) I am travelling from New York City to my birthplace, Columbia, Kentucky to recreate in my mother’s kitchen, Thanksgiving foods from memories.  My mother is ill and can [...]

Second of a series by WVFC publisher Patricia Yarberry Allen, as she chronicles a singular Thanksgiving. It is 9 a.m.and we are in a snow storm.  Snow is covering the fields and the wind is increasing in intensity.  Anorexic pine trees line the sides of the road, barely rooted in shallow soil they hold fast [...]

Editor's note: This is the first in a series by Patricia Yarberry Allen, WVFC's publisher, as she drives south on an unexpected  journey home for Thanksgiving. Road trips across the American landscape are an important part of the 21st century romance of Thanksgiving as fragmented families sacrifice to make the family whole for at least [...]

Did you know today is International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women? We didn't  – though WVFC has long been watching  "Say No to Violence" campaign, headlined by Nicole Kidman. Now,  Kidman will present the million NO! signatures to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. First, at a press event live as we write, [...]

by Laura Sillerman There are times when to state the obvious is the natural course of grace and gratitude.  This Thanksgiving is one of those times.  I am deeply grateful for these women of Women’s Voices for Change, who are so compelling in their morality while so different in background. (As an example:  some of [...]

Most WVFC  readers likely know  Faith Childs from her essays here, ranging from deeply serious (her elegies for for Benazir Bhutto and Paul Newman, her frank discussion of everyday racism) to tech-savvy (the Amazon Kindle review) to hilarious (her coverage of a 2007 "Candidate Spouses Conference"). But to the literary world, the Faith Childs Literary [...]