a new novel:
Brooding with Storm Clouds
Return to Oaxaca
After twenty-six years, award-winning photographer Lena Mendel returns to Oaxaca, Mexico, where at the age of sixteen she spent a school year that transformed her life. Now she’s back with two classmates from that magic time, Camen and Marta. With them, too, is Lena’s son, Gabriel, grown distant in his adolescence. While their mission is to inter the ashes of Marta’s late husband Tony, an unplanned encounter in Oaxaca’s festive chaos draws them into Mexico’s political netherworld, sweeping the past into the present,
and awakening possibilities for the future.
Moving between present-day reckoning and the ache of what endures Brooding with Storm Clouds confronts the lasting imprint of youth, the quiet fractures within families, and the ways love and loss echo across decades. Ultimately, Lena discovers that some ties are never broken and the memories you bury might finally set you free.
Coming Summer 2026
About Me
Brooding with Storm Clouds was inspired by an extraordinary program that lured me from New York’s suburbs to Oaxaca, Mexico for three high school summers and led to my studies of anthropology, first at Bennington College, then at the University of California, Los Angeles, and finally the New School for Social Research for a master’s degree. But living in New York, I longed for a more rural, simpler, hands-on life, galvanized, in part, by the village visits of my Oaxacan experience. I soon found my place—a century-old, wood-heated summer inn on a hill overlooking Maine’s Penobscot River as it opens to the bay. With the novelist and poet Bill Carpenter, we’ve kept this old house warm, turned food waste into compost, sailed among dozens of Maine islands, and sent a lovely child out into the world. Throughout, I worked as a journalist for national and international periodicals, including cover stories in Smithsonian and Natural History magazines, served as a correspondent for the Boston Globe and other regional newspapers, published two Maine travel books and the oral history compilation, We Never Knew Any Different: Stockton Springs Stories of the Past Century, and founded COA, the magazine of the environmental College of the Atlantic. Eventually, Maine’s quiet and distance, and the daily interplay of sun and cloud on water, offered me the perspective to visualize the fullness of the friendships and openings gathered during my time in Oaxaca and mold it into the fictional story that is Brooding with Storm Clouds.
Donna Gold
Personal History Project
Our stories are our heritage. They offer insights into who we are, remind us where we’ve been. Beyond the history of one family, our stories are the history of a community, a people, a world.
And so we must preserve them.
Today, the stories may seem ever-present.
Personal History ensures that they remain so.
Whether I’m helping others create a 200-page published memoir, a handbound collection of stories, or a two-page legacy letter, whether I’m working with a class of memoirists, or an individual, editing a manuscript, I find this work beautifully fulfilling. I love that I can combine my skills as an editor, journalist and oral historian with my master’s degree in anthropology, to connect to families, communities, senior residences, businesses, and many others as I encourage and ensure the preservation of stories.
