Blue Ear Books

For Rwanda, July 4 is Liberation Day: the day the genocide against the Tutsi was brought to an end after one hundred days of unimaginable darkness. For my family, it is the day hope returned. Blue Ear Books is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. On June 27, 1994, my father made one of the hardest decisions of his life. He left the orphanage. It was not because he wanted to save himself.

On January 12, 2010, as I headed to a rendezvous with some MINUSTAH staff members to discuss the possibility of expanding our collaboration, I learned that the meeting had been canceled. We had conducted a successful national awareness campaign on disability, and now we were thinking of organizing a follow-up activity with teachers, to help them gain some basic skills to accompany students with special needs. Blue Ear Books is a reader-supported publication.

We are getting ready for parts of California to burn down again this year, same as last year and every year since colonization. The Spanish, the Mexican, and now the U.S. periods have in common that they did not allow the native peoples to do the controlled burns they had practiced for thousands of years. The lack of controlled burns leads to uncontrolled wildfires, followed by uncontrollable flash flooding. Later in the year, our poorly managed watersheds will flood again.

Good evening (or good morning) to everyone within the Blue Ear Books Community. I hope this finds you all doing well. We’ll be moving our scheduled conversation (April 27th) to a later date in May of 2026 in order to accommodate our speaker. We hope this doesn’t inconvenience anyone. Please be expecting a post in the next few days as we nail down a pair of speakers for the coming months! John Singleton Consulting Editor Blue Ear Books Blue Ear Books is a reader-supported publication.

Dear Blue Ear Books community, If you’re in or near Seattle, please join us next Friday, April 10, at the wonderful Couth Buzzard bookstore in the Greenwood neighborhood for a talk by Edith Mirante, author of Where the Mithuns Are: Essays on War, Art and Beasts, published last fall by Blue Ear Books. From the back cover: In these exhilarating essays, Chatwinesque adventurer Edith Mirante reveals remote Chinland, pandemic Yellowstone, Manzanar, Cahokia, Heizer’s City.

On March 2, Blue Ear Books welcomed a handful of its own in a Zoom event that was equal parts reunion and reckoning. The reunion included friends and authors both old and new, spanning fields as diverse as business, global economics, veterans’ experience, labor rights, food, music, and politics.

This coming Monday, March 2, Ethan Casey will host the first Blue Ear Books all-authors-are-welcome Zoom gathering, at 7:00 pm U.S. Eastern Time. I am fighting an honorable fight against the concept of “remaindering.” Last week I celebrated my 64th birthday, and I write with a nice fire in the woodstove, Nick Drake on the speaker, and an absolutely delish espresso on my aptly-named coffee table. Beware always when those bearing solutions were originally responsible for the problem.

John Singleton, with author Patrick Rutikanga, at work on a book about generational trauma and recovery in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, at the Blue Ear Books retreat cabin in Colorado, October 2025 Hello everyone, I’m John Singleton, recently appointed consulting editor at Blue Ear Books and longtime close colleague and friend of publisher Ethan Casey.

Dear friends of Blue Ear Books, This newsletter is a companion to our book-publishing enterprise; I think of it as - at least aspirationally - a 21st-century digital version of a literary periodical. As such, it’s meant to be a hospitable home to Blue Ear Books authors and readers. Currently, our commitment to this newsletter is to try to publish a fresh piece by one of our authors once a week, every Friday.

Little did I know what a wonderful journey I was embarking on when in 1989, after recalling a seventh-grade art project, I melted some candles and began experimenting with batik. Originally from Maryland, I was living in the mountains of Cuchara, Colorado, doing oil and acrylic paintings and operating a shop specializing in custom hand painted clothing. Excited by the batik process and the results, I quickly put my paints away. I was hooked.