JUST PUBLISHED! This memoire-driven novel chronicles my soul-searching journey from introspective, apolitical sculptor to thespian protestor in the iconic 60s. Protagonist Lucina, born to a conservative Protestant midwestern family, armed with a Master’s of Fine Arts and a fierce desire to carve out an identity, realizes her education has just begun when her loft in New York City’s factory district becomes a hub for articulate politicos. READ MORE

Don’t worry, my black journals, we’re simply in cyberspace now

How I’ve missed you, my constant companion, my home away from home, and at times my only home. For over two decades, 1965 through 1985, I had a black journal in reaching distance as constant companion through all my internal and external changes so that I could share and understand those changes with myself and the other(s) as you never wrote down your thoughts without the possibility of them being read.

How I have been able to go so long without this faithful companion, I don’t know, except to say I have sublimated and transformed that primary need of struggling to know myself through other forms of communication: therapy, consciousness raising groups, intimate friends and lovers, and as memoir-driven content in plays, songs, poems, short stories and novels. This constant need to express my feelings through language to others has been satisfied in many ways. So why now have I returned to “My Black Journal,” with an almost desperate need and have accepted that it won’t be the same as before.

I will not be holding you, “my beloved black journal,” in my hands; I will not feel your precious weight nudging into my loins, I will not gaze down on your pale face waiting for me to tattoo my images upon your lovely skin, I will not be thrilled at the expanse of your line-less sheets, allowing me to open my soul, my imagination, my variety of forms of expression on your waiting pages.

That is to say: I still have the same needs to express myself and be heard by “You,” human awareness beyond myself, but I have been transformed sufficiently to accept that 2019 is not 1985. I will not be carrying my 2 pound black journal around with me any longer. I will sit at my desk in my studio apartment with my hands on the computer keyboard, not grasping a black pen, I will enter my thoughts and concerns on my transformed soul mate.

The 8” x 12” books of 140 pages, white and unlined, bound in black, pebbly covers, exist in my past. In my present: My Blog, under the name Jeri Hilderley will now serve as the counterpart of those beloved volumes still held dearly in my studio bookcase. Now, I will share with a much wider audience (not just me!) my new journal entries, my novel excerpts, my short stories, my favorite links and reads, and oh, my struggles to find an agent or publisher. 

As I continue the quest for my own authenticity as a person, writer and contributor to the humane race, I still relive what those hand-held books meant to me — my development and my survival.