Dr. Linda's Blog - Cup and Quill

Baxter’s Golden Ticket

December 26, 2022

Baxter Brown was a boxer dog. I didn’t know his name when he arrived on my porch one cold March evening about five years ago, but I had seen him before. He wore an ugly orange collar with the owner’s name and number roughly engraved on a gold plate. I called the owner. “Aw, just beat him with a stick. He’ll come home,” the owner said. “Someone needs to be beaten with a stick,” I said. “But it is not the dog.” I hung up and invited the dog inside, where he belonged. He was shivering and terribly thin, so

First Things First: write first, worry later

September 10, 2022

Most worry about how to tell their story impactfully without inciting the wrath of anyone whose behavior the writer exposes and condemns. I understand the concern. It’s legitimate. However, the time to worry about such matters is not when composing a draft.

Beautifully Brave: how my horse taught me the meaning of being present

August 23, 2022

On August 22, 2022, one of my horses died. High Country Dancer, aka Jerry, was a registered American Paint Horse. He was thirty years old. I met Jerry in 2003 when I moved to Arkansas. When I saw him, he was standing in a stall, skeletal, with a horrific injury to his right hock. He’d been turned out with other horses in a back pasture on the property where I was boarding my horses. He’d gotten tangled in a barbed wire fence and wasn’t found for several days. By then, he’d dropped a bunch of weight, and the injury to

Shimmer and Dance

June 22, 2022

One of my earliest memories occurred when I was about two years old. My family lived near the town of Port Elgin, a small tourist destination on the shore of Lake Huron, in a two-story apartment. The apartment comprised the front half of an old farmhouse, typical of those one finds throughout southern Ontario, Canada. The farmhouse apartment had a stairway from the kitchen to the second floor. There were two steps to a small landing and about eight more steps leading to three small bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor. A window at the top of the

Divine Intervention: The Story of SAU’s Stolen Horses and a Hero

March 15, 2022

https://horseauthority.co/remembering-credit-card When five of Southern Arkansas University’s rodeo team horses were stolen on November 2, 2011, Coach Rusty Hayes demonstrated that he is not one to stand back and let someone else figure out how to fix a problem. Instead, after the terrible discovery of the thefts that morning, Rusty immediately went into action. Over the next month, he repeatedly went to the mat for his rodeo team and the stolen horses. By now, most people know the story and have probably heard some of the gruesome details surrounding Credit Card’s death. The entire SAU family is devastated by

Rebecca’s Story: How I Became an Editor

September 30, 2020

Born to Be an English Major When I decided to go to college as a forty-something, there was no question in my mind that I would be an English major. I was born to be an English major. Still, I had no idea that the journey I was embarking on would change me forever. I anticipated a degree that would broaden my job opportunities. I did not expect that every belief I’d ever held would be challenged, or that I’d be forced to ponder the merits of my beliefs. An Empty Nester After a series of unfortunate events and a

Why We Should Talk to Strangers

September 13, 2020

A Walk in the Park A research trip took me to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, Alabama. The park across the road was the site of some of the worst acts of civil rights violence. It is now an important site of memory. Its history is retold through sculptures and other art installations throughout. It was a July morning so I decided to stroll through the park before it got too hot. I had paused to study a sculpture depicting vicious, snarling dogs when I heard a voice behind me. “Nothing has changed you know.” I turned around to see

The Best Legacies: A Love of Reading and Invitations to Imagine

September 11, 2020

Learning to Read and Imagine My mother and my older sister, Sue, instilled in me a love for reading and an appreciation of the power and pleasure found in imagination. Mom read to me a lot from picture books such as The Pokey Little Puppy—a favorite because I loved dogs so much—and others such as Little Black, a Pony, and Big Red and Little Black. My sister, Sue, four years my senior, read to me regularly. My favorite books included The Little Green Frog, Little Women, and the Little House on the Prairie series. Like most children who have someone

Covid-19 and the Contagion of Caremongering

March 19, 2020

I figure infectious disease researchers and organizations like the WHO and the CDC are more in the know than the armchair quarterbacks staking a claim in one camp or another on social media. We are living in scary times. But something pretty neat is happening too. Perhaps you’ve noticed.

Why a “Bad” Choice Can Be the Best Decision

March 18, 2020

Life’s Templates My life has never fit standard templates. So, I have always trusted my gut when making decisions. Many of my worst choices, according to most standards, became my best decisions. That’s because they rarely adhered to rules or templates about what, when, and how one should do things. When we “should” all over one another, we build traps and cages for one another. We need to stop that because the best lives are spent exploring myriad roads. That’s how we discover our passions, our gifts, and our purposes. I dropped out of high school in the 11th grade.