Writing & Publishing
My personal journal sketchbooks and paintings of the garden inspired this book. It was a joy to write and I am continually rewarded by hearing from readers.
"In A Painter's Garden, the parallels between lessons in the garden, the studio, and life ring true. Christine Walker's writing is intelligent, evocative, elegant, and articulate. She addresses universal truths about the creative process in an accessible and fresh way. And she renders very complex emotions in beautifully simple terms...weaving her experiences of motherhood into an examination of her working methods in the studio... ‘feeling a cadence as measured as the breathing of a sleeping child.'"
Eleanor Coppola, filmmaker of Hearts of Darkness
A Painter's Garden: Cultivating the Creative Life. Originally published by Warner Books. Over 60 full color paintings, 144 pages ISBN 0-9700217-0-4. Now distributed by Compozarts. Order through Compozarts or Amazon or contact Compozarts at 707.824.0652
My husband, Dennis Hysom, and I wrote the first Wooleycat songs for our nieces and nephews and children of our friends. Now, more than twenty years later, Wooleycat has spawned several albums, a video, another generation of fans, and this book, which I illustrated. Dennis sings the songs on the CD enclosed.
The songs are based on well-loved nursery rhymes. In our versions, Humpty pulls himself together again, Ladybug the firefighter saves the children and the Three Blind Mice safari in Africa, where they learn that things aren't always what they seem. Published by Tortuga Press.
Below are opening paragraphs from three of my novels. Ruby's Evidence chronicles five women in San Francisco who, in raising their children from toddlers to teenagers, are tested as friends, wives, and mothers. Tap Dancing at the Bluebird Buffet was sparked by my grandmother's diaries, which she kept during the depression years of the 1930s in the Kansas City. Still Life in Water, set in Northern California, is an environmental story about nature, love, and loss.
Ruby's Evidence
In the cramped apartment, the bronze arcs of the bedstead Neal had made curved before Ruby like two swans’ necks. While he watched, she decorated herself with a black lace thong and feathery camisole, pulling the black silk stocking over her foot, shimmying it up her calf and around her thigh. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “Beautiful.” She reached down for the second stocking, which lay like an S on the rug. Rising up, she caught herself in the mirror—pale freckled skin, strawberry hair frizzed and damp from the shower—and caught Neal reflected—pants around his ankles, cup in one hand, erection in the other, the pained ecstasy on his face, and the stream into the cup. “Yes!” This is what their sex life had become: thermometers, sterile cups, stimuli, ejaculations, and dashes to the clinic. She’d laughed darkly to think of all the years they’d used birth control, then the years of bitter teas, headstands, drugs, and amulets: the pictures of babies she’d painted, wanting to create something so real it breathed. She’d never envisioned life this way.
Tap Dancing at the Bluebird Buffet
Going out and coming home, my father carried dreams in his hands. “Mattie,” he said, “if you believe in yourself, you’re halfway there.” He wanted to build a church with the highest spire in Missouri, write a book of poetry, paint like Manet, and become rich. He did all those things, except for making money. Only one other man brought the world to me as my father had, and that was Joe Wood. If times had been different, if times had been better, Joe would not have appeared, hat in hand, at the Bluebird Buffet that Saturday morning in 1932, and I would be a different woman now—old still—but less filled with longing.
Still Life in Water
He floated on his back in the light-splintered water of the cold deep pool. Then he gave a hard kick and dove with a splash, inciting a family of otters to stir on their granite ledge and spill one by one, like liquid mercury, into the water. The animals played around him, their fur brushing his chest, his thighs, then swam away, disappearing shadows in the silky green. He came up laughing and coughed, rose with arms flung wide, balding head thrown back, and called to the sky, "God, I love this place!"
Lectures, Seminars & Consulting
I give lectures, lead seminars and workshops, and consult with writers and artists on creative process and craft. Please contact me for more information about content and presentation formats.
“Christine is a natural teacher with such a clear and gentle manner.”
Gillian Parker, PhD – Philosophy Professor, Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park CA
Adult Continuing Education
"Christine is extremely talented and is a true educator.”
Denise Rosendahl – Director, Life Learning Center, Santa Rosa, CA
Writing Classes for Women in Jail
“Christine really knows how to bring out the creative soul in each student. She has the magic touch to get the women motivated in a completely different way than any other class they would take.”
Karen Whissen – Director, Sonoma County Library Literacy Program, CA
Workshops
“Your curriculum and presentation were great and I feel inspired.”
“One gem I pulled from your class on Saturday is to believe in your work. That you care and are passionate about what you do and wish to share is evident.”
“I loved your workshop. I walked away from it, for the first time feeling like a writer.”
Workshop participants, Sebastopol Center for the Arts, Sebastopol, CA