I’m Barbara Falconer Newhall, and I’m keeping this blog because I love to write – for real readers. I’m putting together a book – working title Finding Holy: True Stories of Religion and Spirituality in America – which is totally fun, but lately I’m realizing that sitting here at my computer all the day long is just too danged solitary. I’m hoping that this blog will bring some living, breathing, chatting people – that means you – into my messy but cozy writing room here in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I’ve been a journalist, columnist and religion reporter for quite a few years now. My first journalism job was in the steno pool at the old Look magazine on Madison Avenue in midtown Manhattan (and, yes, I had to learn to take dictation). In those days it was tough for a woman to be hired on as a writer at places like Look, Time or Newsweek. The women’s magazines were more welcoming, so when I was offered a spot as assistant editor at Good Housekeeping magazine, I grabbed it.
I spent four years in New York, then moved to San Francisco, where I joined the women’s movement and spent a few precarious years as a freelance writer. When I’d had enough of living hand to mouth, I went to work for a counterculture radio station news service called Zodiac. I later married my boss, Jon, who is another story.
After Zodiac, I worked on newspapers: The San Francisco Chronicle first, then the Oakland Tribune, where I wrote a weekly column about the hectic life of a woman with a job, a husband, two young children, a house, a conscience and a much-needed sense of humor. You’ll read some of those old columns – and some new ones in the same vein – under the category “A Case of the Human Condition.”
Joshua tree, Joshua Tree National Park, New Year's Day, 2009
My last job in journalism was as the religion reporter at the Contra Costa Times in Walnut Creek, California, where I met some of the people you’ll hear from in my “God’s Big Blog” category. With any luck at all, some of these true, first-person stories will wind up being published as Finding Holy, which I think of as a kind of group portrait of American religion and spirituality at the outset of a new century.
I’ve reviewed books from time to time over the years, so I can’t resist putting in my two cents on the ones coming across my desk these days. Thus the posts you’ll see in the category “Barbara’s Book Openers.” I’m also the veteran of several writing groups and conferences. You can read what I’ve learned from my writing friends in “Barbara’s Writing Room.”
From time to time, you’ll see a photo posted — for no other reason than I’ve come across something beautiful or interesting and I can’t help sharing it.
Some other things you might like to know about me: I grew up in Michigan, graduated with a teacher’s certificate and a BA in English from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), and spent a year at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. I’ve been a mentor in a program called Education for Ministry sponsored by the University of the South. I’m an Episcopalian with Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist and Catholic antecedents and Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist sympathies. My children are now in their twenties, and I live with my husband in a sixty-year-old house on a woodsy hillside in Oakland, California.
I hope you enjoy my thoughts and stories, and that you will share yours.
