Lianne Downey

I’ve never before shared this piece of my personal history on social media, but current headlines about Israel’s war of vengeance on Gaza has pressed me to break my silence.

In 1980, I married an American citizen who was born in Beirut. We lived in San Francisco, enjoying a terrifically fun, loving, and educational life. Educational for me, because I grew up in the Midwest, where Arab exchange students were a thing to be feared while I walked the campus at Michigan State. Or so I’d been told.

“If you look them in the eye and you’re an American girl, they think that means ‘yes,’” advised an older female friend. “So never do that!”

When I met my future Lebanese-American husband years later, he agreed. ...

While researching my upcoming novel (title TBD but it will be Book 1 in the Psychics & Aliens series), I read extensively about the U.S. government’s remote viewing experiments back in the late 20^th century.

When I saw this morning that a Marine Corps F-35 fighter jet was lost over the weekend—I mean literally, they don’t know where to find the multimillion dollar aircraft, partly because it’s composed of stealth materials—I immediately thought of a passage I include in my novel, based on real life stories told by Dale Graff, a remote viewing pioneer for the U.S. government's Stargate program and now author of several books on the subject.

For months now we’ve been learning from a pair of Northern Harrier hawks nesting near our three townhouse balconies, which overlook the San Diego River Gorge. Hawk totem. Teaching us how to be fierce in our creative commitments.

Whoosh! I was standing on the small balcony outside our bedroom when from behind the wall on my left swooped a v-shaped pair of gray wings that soared up into a tall eucalyptus, about four trees to my right. A few minutes later, I saw him soar back with a stick held perpendicularly in his beak, like a trapeze artist’s balancing bar, longer than his body length. It was early March, nesting season. How can he fly with that thing? I wondered ...