Thank you to The Times They are A'Changin': Women Remember the 60s and 70s (http://www.timestheywereachanging.com/) for selecting my own very first short memoir, "My People's Park," for 2nd place winner in their writing contest - and for sponsoring the contest and publication of memoirs. Their Facebook page and website are well-conceived and worth checking out! Look for the anthology with my story, coming from She Writes Press in August, 2013.

Other very exciting news! A Time to Cast Away Stones just won Honorable Mention in the Great Northwest Book Festival. That's 4 HMs for 4 festival entries. The others were LA, San Francisco, and Southern California. There were 17 HMs out of hundreds of entries. This feels like an incredible validation of my effort to write about the ordinary people of 1968, challenged by those extraordinary times of political and social change.

For those who missed the plot! A Time to Cast Away Stones is set in Berkeley and Paris in 1968. Janet Magill is sent to Paris to get her away from the antiwar movement. There she runs headlong into the May Revolution. Love, action, and intrigue, but most of all an authentic look - and well-researched so many years later - at the era through which I lived.

Perhaps the greatest validations are the personal emails and reviews I have received. MANY from younger readers who enjoy the history and the romance. But here are two that amazed me - one from a former Vietnam War pilot, another from a former radical with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)!

From Phillip Litts, Lt Col, USAF, Ret, Vietnam era pilot, and Cal, Class of ’66: I read [this book] cover to cover, non-stop, except for nourishment, but no sleep! Thank you so much for a very thought-provoking, spiritual (Cal spirit as well!)…accurate, nostalgic, and sometimes painful trip down memory lane. In my year over [in Vietnam], I thought that “we” were saving the Vietnamese people from the yoke of Communism. If I thought then as I think now, I might well have joined the ranks of the Aaron Beckers and either taken off for Canada or declared myself a Conscientious Objector….I have come to the realization that NOTHING, save actually (not politically perceived!!) threat to the safety of our country, is worth the life of one American soldier. Reading [this book] has been very cathartic for me, and I have a feeling I’ll be reading it again.

From Barry Willdorf, 60s activist, attorney and novelist:
[Miller] is a fine writer who knows how to tell a good story and tells this one well. The story fills a void in 60′s genre literature. What makes it different from the memoirs and apologias that seem to clutter the 60′s literature landscape is that it is not a narrative about leaders, well-known 60′s personalities or the remnants of activists languishing in lock-ups. It is a novel that has the feel of a roman-á-clef with a focus on members of the rank and file, the faces behind the numbers reported in attendance at those many marches and demonstrations…and it reminds us that these multitudes were not merely mindless “followers”… [Miller] gives us people with their own politics, motives and personal agendas, people whose reasons for being among the crowds varied greatly.