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Book

Between Tahlequah and Tulsa

Published by Blooming Twig (New York/Tulsa)

Click here for information about the Audio Book

Click here to order from Amazon.com

From the publisher: The prose in “Between Tahlequah and Tulsa” combines Gustavson’s time-honored flair for evoking pastoral scenery with a newfound muscular emotionality and a brave declarative voice.

Unapologetically, she addresses Native American rights, spirituality, blunt political discourse, and the new frontier dream of 1960s. Cynthia also digs deep and courageously revisits poignant childhood memories. A stunning example of this vigorous vulnerability is halfway through the long poem that makes up this book, where she comes to grips with her father’s passing.

Here she writes: Dad said in his business voice / we’d meet misfortune head on / that we’d get stronger from this / that growing up was learning how to tough out the bad times / but three months later when he died, my thirteen year old mind didn’t feel tough and I could still smell the burned rafters of my home.

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Music

When Love is Real (with Kent Gustavson)

This record comes from the heart of lullabies and Christmas/holiday sing-alongs. Cynthia Gustavson carried her Koa-wood Harmony guitar with her through 20 moves and dozens of cities, around the world, anchoring her children in the music that magically emerged from its dull, soft strings grown green with age…

When Kent Gustavson became a professional musician, receiving a PhD in classical music, and putting out popular and folk music albums of his own, his mother and father supported him wholeheartedly, knowing that, at the core of his music, there was the integrity they had planted and watch grow within him over a quarter century.

This album, When Love is Real, is the result of a return to family roots, and a love between spouses, between children parents… There are songs here about politics. There are songs about religion… But, most importantly, there are songs about love.

Kent Gustavson and his father, Edward, were in a terrible car accident in 2001, 6 months exactly before 9/11, and went through a very lengthy and painful process of recovery. In the early stages of that, after a conversation with Kent about the differences between poetry and music lyrics, Cynthia wrote the extraordinary song ‘When Love is Real,’ a romantic ballad that truly expresses the pain of love, loss and the deep, ingrown, love that only the long-married know about. After 37 years, Cynthia and her husband are still in love. Not like children — but a deep, different love…

“It’s the touch of his hand on my cheek that I feel. / And I know when I lie awake, my every care he’ll take.”

Categories
Music

Between Tahlequah and Tulsa – Audio Book

Now available as an audiobook, read by Cynthia Blomquist Gustavson, with music by Kent Gustavson and Dejan Ilijic of the band EYOT.

The prose in “Between Tahlequah and Tulsa” combines Cynthia Blomquist Gustavson’s time-honored flair for evoking pastoral scenery with a newfound muscular emotionality and a brave declarative voice. Unapologetically, she addresses Native American rights, spirituality, blunt political discourse, and the new frontier dream of the 1960s.

Cynthia also digs deep and courageously revisits poignant childhood memories. A stunning example of this vigorous vulnerability is halfway through the long poem that makes up this book, where she comes to grips with her father’s passing.

To order copies, please contact the publisher here.

  • $15.00
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Articles & Essays Uncategorized

Alleluia: A Meditation

A year after the accident Ed and I joined the choir. Vicki moved the tenors over to the opposite side to accommodate Ed’s wheelchair, and Jerry helped Ed learn the music. He was frustrated because the respirator tube had created so much scar tissue in his throat and vocal cords that he could not sing clearly. But one Wednesday, as he was singing Alleluia he felt a great ripping pain. The scar tissue let loose, and he is now able to sing with spirit. Alleluia!

Read more by downloading the PDF below.

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Hear the Eco-Speak: An Essay

It was 1978 and I was eight and a half months pregnant as I sat, uncomfortably, listening to a professor at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities tell my class that for every non-inclusive, sexist term in our papers, we would be marked down one whole grade. Half my class was female, unheard of in 1978, and I felt totally liberated – until my paper came back, marked with red ink, and lacking any grade at all. It didn’t take long to liberate my language as well.

But when I moved to Louisiana in 1980, the inclusive language of a Minnesota seminary became Yankee feminist language, aggressive and unwanted. As a student in the Graduate School of Social Work at Louisiana State University I was told that my diligence in language was neither appreciated nor appropriate to the culture. Unfortunately for my adjustment to a new town, I never did learn to hold my tongue, or to again construct blinders for my eyes. Instead I started examining other words and images for the perceptions that they created.

Read the entire essay by downloading the PDF below.

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My Sunshine: A Meditation

This March (2004) is the third anniversary of Ed’s near fatal car accident. Each morning he thanks God for the new day, and each night he goes to sleep to the words of You are my sunshine. That’s the song I sang to him over and over in the hospital when I had run out of words. You’ll never know Dear, how much I love you, and then the prayer, Please don’t take my sunshine away. I knew I was not the only one praying that prayer. Thousands of people all over the world were praying for Ed, but the one he heard every day was the one sung by my voice, the one accompanied by my hand on his forehead.

Download full article below as a PDF.

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A Skit for Youth: “The Story of Adam & Eve”

THE STORY OF ADAM AND EVE’S TEMPTATION: A SHORT SKIT FOR DRAMATIC READING (For Six Characters)

Excerpt: “Adam and Eve lived in the beauty of the Garden of Eden where it was never too hot, and never too cold. They ate fruit freely from the abundant trees. Animals surrounded them as friends. There was no hatred, war or bullying in the garden. It was a paradise of peace…”

To download the skit, please click on the PDF below.

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Swords into Plowshares: An Essay

The pops of a shotgun awakened me. It was a crisp, November morning, squirrel season, too beautiful to stay inside – but too dangerous to walk in the woods. It was our land, but Louisiana country folk don’t cotton to northerners buying up land and posting “no hunting” signs. We’d already had our gas yard-light shot out, and my just-planted winter pansies rolled over by not-so-accidental truck tires.

So my husband and I decided to go to the local wildlife preserve for a walk through the sweet gum and cow oak turning red and gold against the evergreen of loblolly pine. We took the long trail, and when we finished, our stomachs echoed the squawking of overhead migrating geese. We headed to the closest restaurant, The Stumpwater Inn. Sounded inviting. We asked for stumpwater. They didn’t have it. But they had fried catfish and the choice of three veggies. I took black-eyed peas, creamed potatoes, and flat Italian green beans. The customers next to us had pulled two tables together and were having some kind of reunion. We listened. Blanchard’s 100th birthday – town hall dedication – flea market.

Read the rest of this essay by downloading the PDF below.

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I Choose to Call Myself: Inspiration & Feminism

The poets I know hesitate to call themselves poets. They are waiters or business women or nurses, those labels that give out a steady paycheck. Poets don’t get paychecks, two copies of a journal maybe. I knew when I could call myself a teacher. I celebrated when I finally got board certified as a social worker, but it took years before I called myself “Poet.”

It happened at the publication of my first book. Others referred to me on radio or in print as a poet, but it still seemed a bit arrogant to refer to myself that way. Then I overheard my scientist husband conversing with another of his ilk about his wife, the poet, how for years he had not understood the workings of her irrational mind, been confused by the stream of unconsciousness she substituted for logic, and how he could now finally categorize her, like an illusive jigsaw puzzle piece, put there to tease, and finally when fit into its place, how it illuminates and makes whole the gestalt.

Read the rest of the article by downloading the PDF below.

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Life & Death & Doctor Shows: An Essay

I tried to write a television screenplay once. They told me my characters were too one sided. That meant that the good guys were too good and the bad guys too bad. It’s fun to watch tv movies now and guess how the good guys will screw up and the bad guys will pour out their heart. It has to happen, otherwise it won’t sell. That’s how it is in real life they say. But is it?

Let’s compare some television doctors. Remember Marcus Welby? And then there was Doug, the pediatrician on E.R. And you know the modern day television doctors who know more about the different positions of sexual activity than the correct positions of vertebrae. My husband is a doctor. I’m one of those rare wives who lived through medical school, internship, residency and drafted military service without ending in divorce, only because my husband, a pediatrician (like Dr. Doug,) was more like Dr.Welby. Still, on those few occasions when we found ourselves watching E.R., my husband often was heard shouting, “That’s it! Hold your line, Dougy! Don’t let those surgeons tell you what to do.”

Read the rest of this essay by downloading the PDF below.