Phantom Seedlings

Five Star Reviews of No Place 4 A Puritan Desert Anthology

2011-11-06T22:23:00.000-08:00

It's nice to see that five-star reviews are still coming in on amazon.com for the collection of California Desert literature I edited and researched!

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent anthology, October 24, 2011
By Leo A. Mallette (Rancho Mirage, CA, USA) - This review is from: No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts (California Legacy) (Paperback)

Ruth Nolan has put together an assortment of stories that we mere mortals would never be able to find by ourselves. This book is packed with telling stories of the desert; stories written by long-gone as well as contemporary writers. NO PLACE FOR A PURITAN is densely packed with many stories and it took me a while to get through it, but I enjoyed most of them - this last statement is not a cut against either the book or Nolan: It refers to the story about a rattlesnake and a few poems - the rattlesnake story unnerved me and I'm simply not a fan of poetry. Buy this book now.

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Anthology of Desert Writing, August 5, 2010
By C. Schaffer (Nevada)This review is from: No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts (California Legacy) (Paperback)

This is a great anthology if you're dreaming of the desert or camping in it and want a good read in your tent during a dust storm. The anthology includes big name authors and some unexpected gold from local authors - nature writing and history, poetry and prose intermingled to reflect the extremes of the California deserts.

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent read, February 15, 2010
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA: This review is from: No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts (California Legacy) (Paperback)

The desert, barren, devoid of life, but home to some great stories. "No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts" is a collection of literature in many different formats. From excepts from novels to poetry, to short fiction and more, Ruth Nolan compiles quite the read for any who doubt the power of the desert, invoked for its mysteriousness, its hopelessness, its remoteness, and so much more. "No Place for a Puritan" is an excellent read for those who doubt the literary inspiration that is the deserts of California.

And here's one more review, by Donna McCrohan Rosenthal, just published in the News Review newspaper of Ridgecrest, CA. Ridgecrest is a small town in the northern Mojave Desert. "It's Like Being There":

The premise behind this excellent volume starts with something obvious to us yet surprising to most readers: California deserts have produced more than grizzled survivalist tales and their literature ex-tends well beyond stereotypical metaphors for triumph over adversity. To the contrary, says editor Ruth Nolan, “The true story of California's Moja-ve and western Colorado deserts is as rich and textured as their vast geography, which covers twenty-five hundred miles and parts of seven of the state's counties.”

Supporting this claim, “No Place for a Puritan” offers stories, essays, poems, journal entries and news reports by 75 contributors, among them Edward Abbey, Mary Austin, Pearl Bailey, Cesar Chavez, Joan Didion, Frank Norris, Sylvia Plath, John Steinbeck and Susan Straight.

The collection takes its name from a poem by William Justema, a twentieth-century former monk who, in addition to writing, designed wallpaper in San Francisco for 40 years. In other pieces, William Lewis Manley describes his famous rescue of a wagon train stranded in Death Valley, Asa Merton Russell better known as “Panamint Russ” details the hardships of mining for gold (“I wondered if the elements were trying to run me off, or just annoy me”) and National Public Radio commentator Craig Childs recounts a train crossing a railroad bridge in a flash flood (“Rain, when it comes to this desert, falls out of the sky like bricks”).

Aldous Huxley, contemplative futurist author of “Brave New World,” who lived his later years in the Mojave Desert, suggested in 1956 that “By taking a certain amount of trouble you might still be able to get yourself eaten by a bear in the state of New York. And without any trouble at all you can get bitten by a rattler in the Hollywood hills, or die of thirst, while wandering through an uninhabited desert, within only a hundred and fifty miles of Los Angeles … (yet) solitude is receding at the rate of four and a half kilometers per annum.”

Nolan’s selections address dangers, refuge, exile, spiritual and scientific discoveries, romance, conservation, protection, and the lure of the desert that, “far from being the disposable wasteland it was once thought to be, is in fact a fragile, overcrowded, overused, and intensely threatened landscape.” California deserts find their voice in “No Place for a Puritan.”

Fellow desert dwellers, it's calling you.

This weekly column is written by members of the Ridge Writers, the East Sierra Branch of the California Writers Club. Meetings are held the first Wednesday evening of each month at High Desert Haven. The branch’s book, “Planet Mojave,” is available at several local venues as well as on the website, planetmojave.com.

Robbie Knievel Motorcycle Jump @ Spotlight 29 Casino story by Ruth Nolan

2011-11-06T13:17:00.001-08:00

Oct 30, 2011 - It was a little bit sexy, a little bit weird, a lot wreckless, and a little bit rock n' roll. The hot, Halloween-weekend afternoon hours in the back parking lot at Spotlight 29 Casino in Coachella, California throbbed with loud rock music pumped through giant speakers that built a powerfully uneasy, yet magnetic, intoxication that drew an ever-increasing crowd for a scheduled 4 pm event that didn't start anywhere close to the scheduled time.

And what thoughts raced through the mind of famed, second-generation professional motorcycle daredevil Robbie Knievel, 49, as he raced up and down the parking lot of Spotlight 29 Casino on a Honda CR 500 bike, a string of prayerfully-placed eagle feathers flying from the back of his helmet as he prepared to make a 200 foot motorcycle jump across 10 parked vehicles from a 10 foot high wooden ramp lined with American flags in front of a crowd of 5,000?

“I was talking to God, talking to my dad, praying the whole time. I could also feel the prayers coming from the crowd, and that’s what got me ready to go.”

Finally, just before 5 pm, as the sun touched the tip of the valley’s famed mountain backdrop, Knievel appeared in front of the crowd, decked in an all-white leather suit accented with blue and red trim. After his daughter, Krysten, sang the national anthem, Knievel thanked the audience for coming, and also gave a nod of thanks to the American troops.

After doing a series of wheelies back and forth in front of crowd at 85 mph, to the pounding tunes of Lynyrd Skynrd’s famous rock anthem, “Free Bird,” Knievel “felt the time was right to go,” and successfully made the jump, albeit with an unusually rough landing, to a widely-felt collective sigh of relief that was punctuated by ear-splitting cheers.

Knievel has been doing motorcycle daredevil stunts, including successful jumps across the Grand Canyon and headlong across the top of a moving train, since he was eight years old, when he performed with famous father Evel Knievl, the legendary daredevil icon of the 1960’s and 70’s motorcycle world, at Madison Square. He decided, while performing to a crowd of 25,000 in Canada at age 11, that “this is what I do for a living.” He’s been jumping ever since, and although his father retired at age 37, Robbie isn’t ready to stop.

Among those who gathered to watch the spectacle were a unique blend of newly-arrived winter visitors, die-hard motorcycle riders, retirees, families with children, and other curiosity-seekers, many of who took time to leave slot machines in the casino behind in time to catch the show.

Brian and Samantha Magnusson, of Sky Valley, brought their three young children, who were visibly bored and fidgety in the hour before the jump, expressing their desire to go home to play video games. “The kids are going to love it,” said Brian. “They’re going to love it, because I’m going to love it!”

Gary Baston, 50, a dedicated Evel and Robbie Knievel memorabilia collector since childhood, took the time to drive from Los Angeles along with his 8-year-old son to watch the jump.

Another attendee, a winter resident of Rancho Mirage who came with his wife and a group of friends and declined to give his name, said, “It’s something to do – the football game on TV was over.”

Knievel’s jump was a dreamy and perfectly-performed nod to an era gone by, an era of open desert highways marked by off-roaders in the California 60’s and 70’s when thousands of motocross enthusiasts could gather for a 100-mile-long, open desert ride known as the Barstow-Vegas run every Thanksgiving weekend – before the BLM, concerned for the desert environment, shut it down for good and ushered in an increasingly reduced-riding space era for off-roaders, who have seen their access to desert riding shrink exponentially since then.

Applying for permits, paying registration fees, and competing for space in the relatively small areas now available to motocross and other desert vehicular riders is a whole new world, one that is far from the innocent, dreamy era when heading out into the open desert on a rusty, illegally-fitted dirtbike straight from the backyard was as exciting to teens as - and doubtless much more dangerous than - the search for enemies to kill now is for the excitement my 13-year-old nephew feels when he enters the high-tech, graphically-inebriating world of his favorite virtual-reality video game. But then again, maybe there's more danger now for kids who rarely even venture outside, some kind of loss of being able to actually feel the flames coming out of the bike's exhaust manifold, instead of just seeing a slew of dead bodies littered like broken crayons across a cartoon-world....

Knievel accomplished something at Spotlight 29 Casino that highlights a faded memory of the American psyche, that is, the stirring ‘vroom-vroom-vroom’ of the subconscious of the collective American dream: dream wild, dream big, and ‘keep on truckin’, as famed 70’s cartoon icon Mr. Natural once said. Most of us remember a time when we felt nothing was impossible, that the earth and sky had no limit.

In the blink of a jump, we remembered that it was once possible for Hunter S. Thompson to light out on Interstate 15 for Vegas, where “we were 30 miles from Barstow when the drugs began to take hold” to cover the Mint 400 off-road motocross race, another icon of desert off-roading that has long since been sacrificed for the higher environmental good.

What’s next for Knievel, who lives fulltime in a luxury RV that he uses to travel across the country? He plans to reprise his father’s jump across 13 London buses at Wembly stadium, using the same model of bike, a XR750 Harley, but attempting to jump across 16 busses. He will also repeat his father’s unsuccessful Snake River Canyon jump, in honor of his late father, in the hopes of succeeding this time.

“But first,” he notes with a wide smile as he relaxes in his RV shortly after the jump. “I plan to relax and play golf here in the desert. I think I’ve earned it.”

As far as I'm concerned, Robbie can take his time. He's earned it.

by Ruth Nolan copyright (c) 2011 by Ruth Nolan
published 11.3.11 in the Desert Star Weekly Alternative Weekly newspaper based in Desert Hot Springs, CA

http://desertstarweekly.com/

I'm back!

2011-11-06T12:27:00.001-08:00

I'm back.....

FREEZER BURN: Palm Springs, 117 Degrees

2011-08-19T14:46:00.000-07:00

Published in the summer, 2011 issue (#3) of the Inlandia Literary Journal, hot off the press. a wonderful, new online journal.

http://inlandiajournal.org/2011/08/12/ruth-nolan-3/

september isn’t
for ice cream

august cripples
the dogs

july sticks
to itself

june, a time
to lower blinds

we lived on
cool tile floors

four months
in a row last year

grocery shopping
at midnight,

sleeping
through the day

our love
boiled over

when the air
conditioner broke

down and the
frozen pizza thawed

you took my
car keys and

in slow-mo you
knocked over

three  orange  cones
then melted  into the road

The ILJ issue #3 has some excellent pieces this issue, including one by one of my favorite, Inland Empire-based prose writers, Kathleen Alcala, whose work also graced the pages of "Inlandia: A Literary Journey through southern California's Inland Empire," published in 2006. The issue also features a "spotlight focus, Inland Writers Workshop, downtown Riverside," which I've led since summer, 2008, for Dr. Harki Dhillon, who writes poetry & prose, and is a longtime member of the workshop. I'm happy to see cover art by my artist friend, Cindy Rinne & fiction from another of my workshop members, Juanita Mantz Rodriguez, who I believe also attends the Inlandia-Palm Springs workshop, as well. Enjoy!

Desert Home Diaspora

2011-08-15T18:13:00.000-07:00

photograph "Bees One: Turtle Mountains Wilderness Near the Rock Altar and Aztec Well, Mojave Desert" by Ruth Nolan copyright (c) 2011 by Ruth Nolan

If you could call me one more time,
I’d say I’m looking at a raven sky,

that the California desert isn’t Israel,
though our constellations are the same,

I’d say that I’m overjoyed by pink
wildflower clouds in the garden, it’s

April, and the tiny green oranges
you fingered grow bigger on the trees

I’d say that the dog I love is still
healing from his back injury,

that I made a bit of extra cash from
selling the didgeridoo and shotgun,

that the needled Palo Verde trees
are sprayed with yellow designer flowers,

that the red-throated Costa’s hummingbirds
suckle white sugar syrup from my feeder,

that the sunflower seeds you scattered
with one toss of the hand are now sprouting,

that the crows are occupying the tallest wasp-
filled palm, though you once beat them all away,

I swim to the bottom of the deep end of the
pool these torched summer nights, crying stars,

pretending that I haven’t been forsaken
in the promised land, that I don’t need you.

by Ruth Nolan, copyright (c) 2011 by Ruth Nolan
forthcoming published in “Raven and Crow Anthology”,2011, editor Cynthia Anderson.

for the one who died
halfway between desert and Inland Empire
in the heart of the Badlands
right before Easter Day 2010

Desert Rose: (re)membering memory, here, for your lost flower

2011-08-12T17:12:00.001-07:00

DESERT ROSE: (re)membering memory, for your lost flower

I am ancient geoglyph
Trace my blossom in the sand
Where Kokopelli lures me
To follow you everywhere

I’m your white desert rose,
Touch me, I’m from
A million years ago,
Pick me up, I’ll dissolve

I am water everywhere
Intersecting the desert,
Bringing life to the fat shores
Of humanity’s loaded seams

I am wind, then smoke,
Blowing through empty rooms
Flowing through your dreams
Then, standing still

I am drum
Loaning my face
To your beating heart
Your rake’s caress

I am rain and fog
Drifting down from clouds
Unable to fill the thirst
in your searching soul

I am thunder,
You are storm
You are standing still
I am second wind

I am the open mine
You penetrated deeply into me
leaving birthmarks
across my weathered skin

I am barbed wire fence
Circling what you left behind
Crumbling into an empty void
carved out w/your shovel's caress

I am pyramid
rocks on a lonely hill
talisman to goddesses & gods
you would call me Sphinx

I am silent, I am loud
I am meteor, I am sin
I am love, I am apple
I inhabit white sunstroke

Always waiting
Always alone
Always a memory
About to be lost
About to be re-born

I am an old pipe dream
Your last feathered song

I am water in the desert,
I am a fluted memory of land

photograph & poem
by Ruth Nolan

photograph: copy of flower two, by Ruth Nolan
copyright (c) 2011 by Ruth Nolan

poem: Desert Rose (re)rembering memory
copyright (c) 2011 by Ruth Nolan

They Are Coming Like A Storm....

2011-06-29T13:24:00.000-07:00

“They Are Coming Like A Storm”
Dedication Ceremony & Protest Held Side by Side on June 17 at Blythe Solar Millenium Site

By RUTH NOLAN
Copyright June 29, 2011 by Ruth Nolan

On Friday, June 17, a private groundbreaking ceremony was held at the Blythe Solar Millenium site in eastern Riverside County and attended by elected local, state, and federal government officials, including California Governor Jerry Brown, Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar, Bureau of Land Management Director Bob Abbey, as well as German board members of the German-based Solar Millenium company. “We (the state of California) are going to be the world leader for solar energy,” said Brown at the ceremony.

However, the ceremony also attracted protestors from Native Americans and other citizens, who strongly oppose the project based on concerns over the destruction of Native American sacred sites. Members of La Cuna de Aztlan Sacred Sites Protection Circle, the Chemehuevi and Quechan Indian tribes, and other concern citizens who attended the June 17 protest object to the destruction of the area’s estimated 300 geoglyphs, trails, and other Native American sacred and archaeological sites. A
100-foot wide road has already been bladed through the area by construction workers.

“They’ve already destroyed geoglyphs of the sun,” said Patricia Figueroa of La Cuna de Aztlan. “We’re desperate. All geoglyphs are tied to the creation story.”

According to members of La Cuna de Aztlan, former BLM archaeologist Boma Johnson, and members of the area’s Native American tribes, including Chemehuevi, Navajo, and Quechan, there are at least 300 geoglyphs ,as well as parts of the Xam Kwatchan and Cocopah-Maricopa Trails, within and adjacent to the boundaries of the Blythe Solar Millenium site. These geoglyphs hold spiritual/religious meaning that are crucial to the spiritual/religious beliefs and practices to members of all of the Colorado River Indian tribes, including one geoglyph of the anthropomorphic figure Kokopilli; a 16-level altar to the underworld; circles and shapes and swirls that form a spiritual/religious connection between humans, the earth, and the cosmos; a thunderbird; a dragonfly; three whales; an octopus, and more.

The Solar Trust of America Renewable Energy Station is the most expansive solar project to be approved on federal land, spanning 7,000 acres eight miles west of Blythe, according to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and is expected to be the largest solar facility in the world.

Although it is currently under investigation by the German government for embezzlement and financial misconduct of its former CEO - who received $12.5 after working for only 74 days -, the Solar Millenium company is still on track to receive over 2.1 billion dollars in U.S. loans and an 18 million dollar grant from the Federal government, funded largely by U.S. taxpayer money to complete the Blythe project. The company has also secured taxpayer-backed loans from the Department of Energy, though the total amount was not disclosed.

La Cuna de Aztlan Sacred Sites Protection Circle filed complaints on December 28, 2010, in United States District Court, Southern District of California, challenging the Bureau of Land Management permitting processes related to six large solar facilities planned for the Mohave, Sonoran and Colorado deserts of Southern California. The group was joined by CARE, Californians for Renewable Energy, and 6 individual Native American plaintiffs. Litigation is ongoing.

Citizens and members of the areas Native American tribes have asked the government to focus renewable energy efforts on rooftop solar, instead of destructive projects such as Blythe and in other areas of pristine California desert, which is one of the last remaining, largely ecologically and archaeologically-intact areas of the United States.

According to Philip Smith, who is a member of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, “Our church, the church of the Chemehuevi and Mojave and other Colorado River Indian tribes, is on the rocks and on the land and it is on the trails such as the Xam Kwatchan Trail that passes in the area near the geoglyphs. These sacred sites are where we pray and hold religious ceremonies. You cannot replace a sacred site once you destroy it. What will I tell my children and grand-children? That they have no history, that they have no religion, that they can’t practice their religion?

Another protestor, Reginald Wally Antone, a Quechan Indian who lives in Yuma, also voiced his concerns.“My religion, my spiritual life and practices, have to take place at the sacred sites. it can’t happen somewhere else. The Blythe geoglyph site is one of these places, and the Kokopilli geoglyph, especially the eye of the Kokopelli geoglyph, is sacred to the Quechan Indians, according to our Quechan elders. If they destroy that, I can’t go there to pray.”

Salazar maintains that the Obama Administration considered Indian concerns a top priority. We have to make decisions to move forward in a way (that is) respectful of native concerns,” he said.

However, La Cuna de Aztlan, which has a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the BLM and several leaders of the region’s Indian tribes, asserts that their concerns have been consistently ignored by the government in all stages of the Blythe solar project planning, including the Department of Energy/BLM sponsored PEIS meetings, held this past February in Indian Wells, which attracted 100 community members, most of who strongly objected to large solar development projects in the California desert.

Ron Van Fleet, Mojave Indian Tribal Elder and grandson of the last traditional Mojave Chief, who also attended the PEIS meeting in Indian Wells last February, has voiced his concerns over the lack of government respect for Native American in the renewable energy development process. The Mojave Indians, along with the Chemehuevi Indians, consider themselves caretakers of the entire California desert region, with ancestral history, usage, and religious practices dating back for centuries.

“In the last five years, they have approached our tribe, with all these big solar and wind projects, and they haven’t told us specifically what they are going to do. Our tribal leaders have written letters and gone to the public meetings to voice our concerns about these projects, and they ignore us and go ahead and do what they want anyway,” he says. “They’re coming like a storm. We aren’t opposed to solar energy. But we strongly object to these huge renewable energy projects that are going to destroy our sacred desert lands.”

Memory: A Poem to commemorate Japan

2011-04-02T22:56:00.000-07:00

This poem was written for a collection of poetry penned by southern California poets immediately after the recent 9.0 earthquake/tsunami in Japan. The collection is being overseen by several Cal State-San Bernardino graduate MFA students, and they will be hosting readings that will raise funds to send to Japan. My poem was inspired by the story of the 83 year old woman who rode her bicycle away from the tsunami.

Memory
when you had gone, the wind came, as I suppose it would high, but lonely - Emily Dickinson

she comes again,
old bones breaking free, she’s 83 years old

she comes again,
all she’s sutured together, coming undone again

she comes again,
an elderly woman making her ocean of rounds

she comes again,
riding her bicycle past the waterlogged lost and found

she comes again,
riding through the rice fields scorched by 1945

She comes again
swimming through the memories as they rise and fall

she comes again,
remembering what it was to love inside the flames

she comes again,
not forgetting, having traveled nowhere at all

-Ruth Nolan
March 13, 2011

Friendly Fire: a poem about 2 runaway girls, a shotgun and a jackrabbit cabin

2011-03-01T16:24:00.001-08:00

Forthcoming next month in Heyday's new literary series, "New California Writing 2011" http://www.heydaybooks.com/upcoming/new-california-writing-2011.html

FRIENDLY FIRE
by Ruth Nolan

The attic door opened easily
that pearl smooth August night
after a day hitchhiking in dusty wind,
no real labor, no hard breathing.

One push, we climbed on the roof,
two sunburned, runaway teenage girls,
a backpack full of cheese and fruit
stolen from the market that day

We'd broken into a desert cabin.
I shot a window with my father's gun.
No one had been there for so long
the refrigerator was propped open.

We crawled through splintered glass.
You worried that there might be
a dead baby or rattlesnake inside.
I found an unopened bottle of wine.

I held the buck knife, and you held
the fruit. I sliced the salami and
licked my sticky fingers, then you
twisted the corkscrew and laughed.

We sifted through the box of jewels
stolen from our moms. You clasped
a silver necklace on my burnt neck
and I slipped an old ring onto you.

We shared an old wool army blanket
and a man's extra-large flannel shirt,
talked about all the guys we shared,
cock and breast size, abortion cramps.

You wanted to know what it was like
to fight fires; I told you I had no sisters.
I popped the cork, you passed the bottle,
I thought I could taste your tongue,

delivered like the silent rise of moon,
punctuating spaces between stars,
I watched Venus, Orion’s Belt fade
while you spread oysters onto rye.

New California Writing 2011 is edited by Gayle Wattawa, who edited "Inlandia: A Literary Journey through southern California's Inland Empire" and also my terrifice, wise supervising editor for "No Place for a Puritan."

A Desert of Cathedrals; A World of Churches

2011-02-11T13:13:00.000-08:00

Save the California Desert from Ruin - NO to proposed solar & wind Industrial Zones!
by Ruth Nolan – presented on February 8, 2011, Indian Wells public hearing to the federal government's fast-track solar/wind installations in the California southwest.
copyright (c) 2011 Ruth Nolan.

A Desert of Cathedrals; A World of Churches

I was 10 years old in 1973 when my father first drove me in his old Volkswagen Bug from my hometown of San Bernardino, imbedded in the smog of southern California sixty miles east of Los Angeles, up the long, steep grade of Interstate 15 and over the four thousand-foot lip of Cajon Pass. I held my breath as we reached the top and saw, for the first time in my life, a land that was as wide and vast as the sea. There, at the edge of the Mojave Desert, a long necklace of headlights stretched east for forty miles; toward the west, the sky was lit with rose and orange hues. We descended towards the small town of Victorville, racing past Joshua Trees whose thick-needled fists etched gracefully and fiercely against the sunset. I knew then and there that I’d found my place, my calling, my landscape. I stuck my head out the window and looked up: there was the evening star, a slice of moon alongside it. I was instantly and forever smitten.

This was an empty and imposing land, rife with danger and thrill. I sensed that an entirely new adventure lay in wait for our family there, where we intended to re-locate to be near my father’s new job. My intuitions were confirmed when my mother opened a kitchen drawer to find a baby Mojave Green rattlesnake; when I went to bed serenaded by a symphony of coyotes every night; when my brother went to the hospital with dehydration after climbing a harsh rock peak near our house on an August afternoon. The desert was as silent as a church during a funeral and as wide open and empty as a schoolyard on a Sunday, but it was never, ever boring.

It’s essential that President Obama, in his swiftness – and rightly so - to shift the country’s energy needs to renewable energy, considers how easily a tragic irony may prevail in the current rush to establish massive industrial zones that will harbor renewable energy facilities in the California deserts. We now see the damage and that our dependency on fossil fuels has done to our planet. To repeat the large-scale energy production facilities for any type of energy, including “renewable,” which requires the types of massive technological zones that have already been approved or are pending approval under Obama’s “fast track” renewable energy plan in the California deserts is to foolishly and tragically follow the same swath of destruction caused by fossil fuel technology. In other words: in our rush to embark on a new era of sustainability, let us not destroy in order to procreate. Renewable energy production can, and must, be implemented in a responsible manner that doesn’t leave tremendous carbon footprints, and does not take more than it gives.

On that day when I was 10 years old, the road that we drove on layered over a network of extensive and sophisticated Indian trails, used for thousands of years by different desert Indian tribes to traverse the Mojave Desert, following the entire 150 mile length of the sporadically-flowing, northern-seeking Mojave River, sometimes weaving between forests of cottonwood trees, and more often not, to its final resting place at Soda Dry Lake. The road we drove on was interwoven atop a trail network – just one of many that traversed every nook and cranny of the California desert - that had myriad village sites, culturally important, and well-established geographic notations throughout their vein-like expanses. In other word, there was and is no part of the California that is not known or has not been known and lived in and used as a culturally crucial and a sustainable way – to the various Indian tribes who have lived here since time unknown.

Little did I know, on that first drive to the high desert, that this region, largely seen to that date as a waterless wasteland ready for the taking and wonton raping, through widespread and reckless mining and military usage, for example, was, in even in the 1970’s, just beginning to be approached, investigated, researched, and understood for the environmental, cultural, archaeological and internationally significant region that it was and is. Millions of visitors come to the area every year from throughout the area, to visit our national parks, and also from the hugely populated urban areas not far from our desert’s westernmost edges; that our area is so attractive to others, as a one-of-a-kind geographic icon, and also so much in demand as a recreational outlet for southern California’s masses, not to mention that the deserts are home to many endangered species, wildlife corridors, Native American resources and spiritual-cultural sights, such as those named in the Salt Song Trail Ceremonial songs of the Chemehuevi Indians, should only give more importance to the extremely careful consideration of disturbing and forever destroying what little of this precious area that still remains under the fragile care of our collective hands.

As a child, I perceived that the desert was a place of wildness and possibility, quickly learning the nuances of rock hunting and tortoise sightings, of flash floods and dry waterfalls, and to succinctly endure long months and seasons when rain doesn’t fall. As I grew older, I came to see that this was also a peopled place, and as I read about my adopted homeland as widely as I could, I learned that this was a land rife with stories of courage, despair, a land where hopes are endlessly fulfilled and countless dreams are dissolved. I learned that the desert is not some desperate, completely waterless void: in my hikes and explorations, I learned that thousands of springs and waterholes grace it. They are often hidden, detectable only to the longtime desert resident—by a lone cottonwood or sprig of weed in the Mojave, and by a cluster of native Washingtonian Fan Palm trees tucked into deep canyons of the Western Colorado. Likewise, instead of being easily diminished to the tiresome caricatures dominated by a literary canon that favors cities, farms, and forests, the human character of the California desert defies the stereotypes created by those writers who have tried to tuck it into a neatly categorized place.

Most people are certainly familiar with stories of the rugged desert survivalist, the consummate “desert rat” or gold miner, grizzled and worn by sun, who wears a rattlesnake-skin headband and roams the desert with a bag of tools. However, the stories of the earliest people, our desert Indians, whose very languages, creation stories and songs depict an active relationship between the landscape and an early and enduring people, such as the many locations named and form a crucial contributions to historical and contemporary American literature. In stock desert literature, stories of rugged western settlers, gunslingers, and stagecoach riders, who brave the desert’s harsh expanses and pray to make it to water, have been greatly emphasized. In contrast, the true stories of our state’s deserts are as rich and textured as its geography, which covers 25 million acres, comprises one-fourth of the state’s expanse, and includes all or parts of seven of the state’s largest counties.

I’ve been told by biologic resources that the California desert is second only to the Amazonian Rain Forests in terms of its plant diversity. Scientists are still trying to learn what treasures reside here. Further disturbing of desert topsoil that is necessary for mass installations of renewable energy facilities will not only rob the entire southwest of the CO2 formation that naturally occurs in the living, biotic “desert crust,” but will pose a tremendous threat to the respiratory health of millions of southwestern residents and create an uncontrollable “dust bowl” and sharply influence the inevitable increase of such viral diseases as the dreaded “valley fever,” already on the rise in the area; the disaster of Owens Dry Lake comes to mind.

The California desert is a very windy place, and it doesn’t take long for disturbed desert to stir up and create hazardous dust-zones. In addition to posing serious health threats, there is the issue of freeway visibility. Already, on various places along Interstate 10, a major east-west artery involving traffic and heavy truck travel from Los Angeles to points east, dust storms are ea problem. This area includes the corridor in eastern Riverside County where proposed renewable energy sites have already been approved, have large yellow warning signs that say “warning: dust storm ahead when lights blinking.” I’ve been on the freeway in the area when the blowing dust has been so bad that I’ve had to pull over.

In the desert, “church is on the face of the land itself,” and to scar its essence needlessly is, in essence, to tear down a world of churches and tear down a vital part of our human and national and global heart. In the desert, an old-growth Joshua Tree is the equivalent to an ancient redwood tree in our state’s northwestern forests. In the desert, the sacred desert tortoise, a federally-protected species, is what the great white whale is to our Pacific and Atlantic oceans. In the desert, the golden eagle and red-tailed hawk will be among the thousands of birds who live and migrate here on important migratory corridors who stand to lose their lives when they are sucked into windmill farms. We all know what happened in the Gulf of Mexico and the widespread environmental and cultural havoc created along out southern coastlines this past year with the BP Oil Spill. To install massive, technologically experimental and highly polluting, noisy, destructive renewable energy facilities in the California desert is to spell disaster that will have no relief.

Rather than exploit the California deserts, I’d say let’s do more to protect them, now and for future generations; to protect precious aspects of our country’s heritage so important to all of us, as a country and global community, that once gone, can never be replaced Let’s not destroy virgin desert lands, what little of them remain, and forever desecrate this very special area that is still so largely unknown, a place that motivates spiritual and personal renewal and inspiration, a region of uniqueness that can never be duplicated. Let us not forever destroy the cultural and archaeological artifacts of our desert’s Native American people, many which to date remain scantly known and little understood. The California deserts are filled with heritage and wisdom that we can’t afford to erase. At a time in human history when so much has been irreparably plundered world-wide, it would be in our best interests to sustain that which might very well serve us in our efforts towards survival on our heavily overtaxed planet.

The desert hums with the pulse of overlapping human lives to form a river of sound, a complex and richly-woven conglomerate of human voices that sometimes overflows its shores with terrible roars, gathering momentum to overrun the dry wash, and at other places, dissipates entirely, only to relieve the eyes with the gracious vision of water, that may or may not be a mirage, later on. I invite you to step in, lightly, if you please, with great reverence and curiosity and respect, to share its mysteries, its rough edges, its infinite tranquilities.

I could write of this:

2010-11-21T12:02:00.001-08:00

Life is an amazing diaspora that continues to unfold. Stories, being lived, can I rein them in? I could write of you. The ephemeral you that says "I love you, I will love you forever," the universal you of desert tortoise kingdoms and cinnamon-tinged coffee, vegan dinners from Native Foods and new hikes on the Bump n' Grind, patching together an old quilt with side trails freshly-excavated. Walking the earth up and down, sky to body to earth, the way it's always been. Joshua tree recognitions, Indian trail discoveries, splintered quartz offerings gleaming their prayerful words, giant desert ironwood forests in a vast, dry wash.

Today: a blustery November in the low desert, sunlight so bright when I look out the window and see color behind brilliant clouds, I can't decipher if the sky is black or blue, and realize it's blue.

I could write of talking with Tarah on the phone, rain in Palm Springs, she's nestled against mountains and her new husband in a one-room apartment, living on discounted cups of noodles with two cats, Ducky and Pepper, and asks me to come over to help her do the dishes. I meant to do NaNoWriMo but I've gotten caught up in trying to save the California Desert. A foolish task, a necessary impulse, I'm meeting amazing, incredible people in my efforts: homeland security! Hey everyone, magic lives out here! Consider that. What do I do with myself, now that I'm merely a background mom? We barely had a few sprinkles just 10 miles farther out into the desert here in Palm Desert. Lots of wind, which I love. And when the rain does fall, it's for moments of prayer, of holding my hands open wide, in a moment of thanks. It's something that longtime desert people tend to do. When it rains after months of going without.

I haven't seen Tarah since my family birthday dinner last Saturday November 13, with mom and dad, freshly back from Italy, and Alex and Tarah and a handful of light presents. I bought myself a sheet cake, I've done it before, and had my name written across the bottom and top, but I insisted on no happy-birthday singing until we left the restaurant. Sammy's wood fired pizza on El Paseo at the Gardens in Palm Desert.
This being 22 stuff is so new. The four year overhaul. Living alone gets more familiar but filled with agitations, restlessness, I'm suspended between lives, and bounce along, wondering what is next, all the while living so fully, on the road from Blythe at the Colorado River to Riverside for writing workshop to Palmdale to give a Puritan reading and lecture, and back, pit stop at College of the Desert for intensive creative writing and freshman composition lectures and workshops, and back home to feed the dogs, wash a few clothes in my disheveled home, sleep, and start again.

I could write about how I picked up a copy of "Just Kids" by Patti Smith, a must-read, at Barnes and Noble at the Palm Desert mall, a place I rarely go except for my friend Patricia's monthly poetry readings or when I have a specific book to buy. How I saw the moon fragment behind pocket-clouds last night, odd browns and lights, not quite clear, and deeply present. How I woke at 4 a.m. to stiff wind, and the clear moon to the west out my bedroom. I sleep in Tarah's old room now, on the new bed I bought early last spring, flattened on the floor, with my high-end road bike parked across the sliding mirrored closet doors, an ironing board full of white cotton shirts to iron, and a drafting table holding various books and copies of various tabloids that I'll soon pass on to my mom. And Mom came over yesterday, bless her heart, to again help me go through my piles of bills. Almost there. Almost caught up. After the financial and emotional summer drought.

What else could I say? Tracing ancient intaglios and geoglyphs in the desert near Blythe. Singing my heart and footprints on the Mastodon Peak Trail in Joshua Tree, photographing along the way and grateful for the October rains that have made things bloom out there: ocotillo suprises, Indian village site down the dry wash (not on the visitor's map), a red glowing bush whose name I don't know...glowing barrel cactus and yellow-leafed cottonwood trees in November drawl against the lowering sun. Time change and I try to adapt. The months of darkness coming early, and I sleep better than before. Music has filled my house the past week, my friend Ben came over and played piano while I played several different flutes and guitar - we had a really fun jam. Hanging out in Riverside at Tio's Taco's with writing workshop friends Lorraine, Peter, Steve- my magic sax man! - and Mike. Driving home again on the familiar through-the-Badlands-route and offering my usual silent prayers for Phil, whose life ended there.

Autumn in the desert revives and renews. Magic footsteps, I could write of this, I try to bring it all into one, and I pray for desert preservation, to remember the deep grooved, storied landscape before it's gone.

And now it's time to broaden into sunshine. Outdoors for light-splash. Remember one of thousands of mother-daughter walks: Tarah in her baby backpack on Fry Mountain. Tarah climbing ahead of me in the Wonderland of rocks. Camping with my girl on a trip through Topock Gorge. The day Tarah decided to stay home instead. "I love you forever," I say to you. I can taste a few persistent raindrops on my mouth-opened tongue, and remember what water felt like not so long ago, and I know I will remain in this for however long it takes to fill.

Western Wilderness Conference, April 10. 2010

2010-11-20T19:50:00.001-08:00

I was part of a panel presentation, with Malcolm Margolin, Tim Palmer and Kenneth Brower (grandson of the late environmentalist/Sierra Club founder David Brower) at the Western Wilderness Conference 2010 at University of California, Berkeley. Here I am, reading desert poetry, lecturing from NP4AP, and and poetically describing the cosmic vitality of the desert...a little mashup, if you will, of poet-professor-desert storyboard.

thanks to my friend, writer/audio engineer Cyrus Emerson, for filming this. The pictures are mine, most taken by me and some taken by my friend Philip Helland.

California Legacy Project: Nature Dreaming

2010-11-15T16:17:00.001-08:00

Nature Dreaming: Rediscovering California's Landscapes borrows its title from lines of a lyric poem by Robinson Jeffers, "The Beauty of Things":

. . . man you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant—to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.

I am one of the featured scholar/writers for this new California Legacy Project radio/Internet program, Nature Dreaming, with writers/writing from around our state. Several of the interviews and readings are posted, and updates are being added (including my humble interview on the California Desert, my scholarly and literary work and poetic affiliations with my Mojave homeland) soon. Thanks to the amazing Terry Beers of Santa Clara University for putting this together.

http://californialegacy.org/radio_productions/Nature_Dreaming/

This program is inspired by the nature-based poetry and prose of the late Robinson Jeffers, whose Big Sur coastline/northern California writing rests large among our state, and country's, literary giants.

I can't wait to hear the entire show! We are at such a crucial time right now, in moving forward with California desert conservation and protection, given the onslaught of massive wind and solar projects already ok'd and being ok'd by the California Energy Commission and President Obama. 43,000 acres already signed away, and reports that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has said that he wants to make the California deserts - and southwest U.S. - the source of all wind and solar for the country. Endangered desert tortoises and fragile, vulnerable ecosystems are already being plowed under as I write this, never to be recovered again. We MUST act now to severely curtail, and reconsider, the Solar Gold Rush, which threatens so many levels of ecosystem, balance, and survival.

This is the time where I find myself so gratefully and determinedly joining a growing contingent of dedicated California desert conservationists and activists - Alfredo Figueroa, Preston Arrow-Weed, Chris Clarke, Terry Weiner, Laura Cunningham, Kevin Emmerich, Bob Ellis, Pat Flanagan, Tom Budlong, Steve Brown, Larry Hogue, Robert Lundahl, Joan Taylor, other Chemehuevi, Quechan, Mojave, and other Colorado River Indian leaders, including Charles Wood and Philip Smith, and others in the best, presssed-for-time grassroots campaigns that we can to make the public aware of what is at stake here in our precious California desert, and why we can't afford to lose this forever to the interests of corporate power mandating how "sustainable" energy implementation will go down in our deserts.

In other words, we can't afford to "murder to dissect," as the great philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson said, in our efforts to shift how we produce energy. Murdering the California desert by invading, blading, and forever destroying hundreds of thousands of acres of pristine land - home to endangered species such as the California Desert Tortoise, the Joshua tree, and so much of the magic of our landscape and heritage - that we are still barely learning about - in the name of "sustainability." To do so would be the most tragic form of irony, with no comic relief, that I can think of. I am posting updates and information as I receive it, best that I can, to Mojave Desert Watch on facebook; feel free to visit and "like" this page. Also, visiting there will allow you to connect with other sites such as Basin and Range Watch and other sources of information, including filmmaker Robert Lundahl's excellent series about the Blythe Intaglios and other archaeological sites of the area.

here I am at the Creator's Throne, an archaeological site near Blythe, CA, at the edge of the proposed 10,000 acre Millenium Solar Project. Much of the landscape behind me, which contains invaluable archaelogical features, is slated for destruction. Thank you, Alfredo Figueroa, esteemed historian, elder, activist, and who has been sounding the alarm on what stands to be lost longer and more vocally and with more passion and compassion than anyone else I have met - for sharing this treasure with me, on behalf of my heart and my love for my Mojave Homeland.

NATURE DREAMING PROJECT: in-progress and to be completed by early 2011. Featured writers-scholars include: David Mas Masumoto, San Joaquin Valley organic farmer/writer and award-winning author of Heirlooms, Letters to the Valley, Four Seasons in Five Senses, Harvest Son, Epitaph for a Peach, and Wisdom of the Last Farmer; and also writer-scholars Georgiana Sanchez; Gary Noy; Shaun-Ann Tangney; Kevin Hearle; and Juan Velasco.

I am beyond humbled and floored to be included as part of this series, representing the great California desert and its magic, mysteries, allure, power, indigenous genius, and known and unknown writers and writing.

HELP! Mass Destruction...in the Mojave...happening now....

2010-10-19T22:50:00.000-07:00

People PLEASE read this and SPREAD THE WORD! Only a small group of people seem to know what is going on in the Mojave Desert as I write this. A massive LAND RAPE. All in the name of "go-green" which in this case is the rhetoric of sustainability being used in a twisted way. 5-10% of the species of the Mojave Desert flora and fauna remain un-discovered and un-named.

The Ivanpah Valley, California Spirit Run - to raise awareness for this beautiful area of the Mojave Desert located near the California-Nevada stateline....and where the world's largest solar facility is currently being installed, with drastic, horrific implications for the future of the desert and its many inhabitants. Plants, animals, geologic and archaeological-cultural features, many which are not yet fully understood.

http://vimeo.com/16014476

Watch this video:
http://thesunrunner.ning.com/video/shocking-projection-of-mass
Interview with ecologist Jim Andre, Director, Granite Mountains Desert Research Center at University of California. If he seems in shock...well, he is. This has all come down so quickly, so sneakily, and so drastically that none of us involved in desert protection quite knows what to do.

This very precious region is not only barely being understood, but as a desert that attracts millions of visitors yearly from around the world for its fragility, intensity, and wisdom, not to mention beauty and allure....it is being grabbed in what is being termed by desert conservationists as the ugliest, biggest land-grab and archaeological and biological eco-destruction our country has seen since the Gold Rush in the Sierras in the 1800's.

This is NOT good and in fact is pure evil. There is no reason these massive solar and wind plants cannot be placed on land that is already "gone" or on farms anywhere in the western U.S. that are laying fallow.

The Mojave Desert is largely YOUR land. Public land. BLM land, there for all of us to use and enjoy. The BLM has made, and continues to make, dirty deals for minor ducats with corporate robber-barns, on land it is supposed to protect for generations to come. Why can't the corporations barter deals for windmill and solar - which still uses oil and gas and water for production - with private landowners?

Read this article, which I found on a private blog: it's by an environmental writer who really outlines the evils, comparing the solar-wind land grab on the California desert to the fights of the 1950's and 60's to protect Yosemite and nearby Sierra valleys from development of dams.

http://palimpsest.typepad.com/frogsandravens/2010/10/hetch-hetchy-and-glenn-canyon-all-over-again.html

The desert is my home. This hurts. It's unnecessary. Solar and wind CAN be done right. The sickening destruction of stands of virgin, old-growth Joshua trees, which are already endangered, by bulldozers -- to build the world's largest solar plant - is an irreversible decision that will ruin what can never be replaced.

Pass the word along. Let people know. GET INVOLVED. Maybe we can...change this world.
The California Desert...is YOUR backyard.

Live Desert Poetry Reading, Guerrilla Reads Magazine + Phantom Seed @ P & W Online

2010-10-19T13:57:00.000-07:00

This is a very cool online literary journal....Guerrilla Reads....based in L.A. and extending to the California Desert

MOJAVE DESERT POETRY: live reading by Ruth @ Guerrilla Reads Online Literary Magazine....you'll have to copy/past the URL to your browser...I'm still trying to figure out how to enliven links here on my page.

http://guerrillareads.com/
Issue 15, October 19, 2010
if you don't see it on the homepage, go to the Issue 15, Oct 19 archives.

Please also view some of the other videos on the Guerrilla Reads website, especially the one just before mine, issue 14, October 12, 2010 - featuring the stellar poet-activist-humanist Juan Felipe Herrera, my friend and a huge inspiration, in a collaborative reading his great poem, Arizona Green (Manifesto #1070), in protest the passage of SB 1070. Just scroll down from where you see my humble little video.

And: check out the Phantom Seed: a magazine of California desert poetry and prose listing at Poets & Writers Magazine....I think it looks great! Issue 4 is now out. Cover photograph taken at Rock Chapel, near Christ Church Park in Yucca Valley, CA - the cross is cut=out into the bricks of the artistically-designed, small chapel. I spent a day in there a few years back, meditating and praying, desert light filtering in through the open crosses, Joshua trees and Jesus-statues in the background.

http://www.pw.org/content/phantom_seed_magazine

submissions accepted year 'round. Email to runolan@aol.com along with writer's bio.

Sign Petition to Stop Big Solar/Windmill in the California Desert

2010-10-13T16:02:00.000-07:00

Help! Sign the petition to stop the "Gold Rush Mentality" desecration of the Colorado River Indian Intaglios, a sacred and important archaeological site located in the California Desert near Blythe, California -

http://www.petitiononline.com/savekoko/petition.html

Then, PLEASE pass this petition along to ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS, online and otherwise!! TIME IS PASSING QUICKLY - the Gold Rush is raging, the big utility companies are sealing-the-deals-with-the-state, and other, massive solar-windmill facilties are lined up to scrape and destroy the face in ugly, unwanted surgeries already scheduled to be knifed across vast tracts of the Mojave and other California deserts!!!

To be blunt: we need to act NOW!

Why is the big-solar-faciilty-in-the-desert-thing such a big deal?

There are so many things wrong with this picture - including the fact that these solar facilities take up mega-water.....as most of you know, water availability is a MAJOR problem throughout the desert, and the southwest. Not to mention that the CA desert, second in biodiversity of life - including the beloved icons of our region, the endangered Desert Tortoise and the Joshua Tree - stand to take another horrid ecologic hit & run that they may not recover from. Not to mention...who stands to profit in this LAND AND CULTURE RAPE? The big corporations - PG & E....Edison....not us, folks! Not the defenseless desert or its myriad, magical forms of animal and plant and geologic life.....

WE CAN AND MUST DO THIS BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!! Do you like the Grand Canyon? Who doesn't? Did you know that...back in the 60's, grassroots activists + the Sierra Club got together and managed to stop plans to install a series of dams in the Grand Canyon - yes, that's right, and one dam site even got drilled - and preserve this ancient and abiding place of magic and beauty for generations to come.

We, on facebook, can do this, too. We have the Internet at our fingertips, so please help those of us in the California Desert who are trying to pass the word along before it is too late!!!

Feel free to sign or not - but at least, before you make up your mind, take a moment to learn just a little bit about what is at stake with the massive solar-windmill-corporate-land grab, and what's going down faster than a "speeding bullet" in our Mojave Desert. Just so you are informed.

To learn more about the Intaglios, visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blythe_Intaglios

ACT NOW!! The California Energy Commission has already approved legislation that allows for construction - desecration - to begin at the Blythe Intalgio Site, as well as at Ivanpah, CA - the latter is planned to be the largest solar panel facility in the world and will destroy thousands of untouched acres of our sacred and necessary California Desert.

After you sign this petition, please visit the following site for information on the pending Ivanpah, CA (located near the stateline between California-Nevada) solar installation.

Information at Ivanpah, CA solar facility - note that "PG & E" and other utility conglomerates are jumping on the "investment" bandwagon...

http://sunpluggers.com/news/as-decisions-near-on-more-solar-power-plants-opponents-urge-alternatives-01020

http://californiasolarinstallation.com/archives/tag/brightsource

THERE IS AN EXCELLENT GROUP CALLED
SOLAR DONE RIGHT
who are working feverishly to put a stop to the Gold Rush on public desert lands. Contact them for more information.

http://solardoneright.org/

I plan to visit the Blythe Intaglio site very soon, within the next two weeks, and speak directly with a Colorado River area Native American elder who is intimately familiar with the stories behind the Intaglios, and learn more, which I will share with you on this blog as the stories unfold. I will also take more pictures and post on my blog soon. Keep the Faith!

Thank You!
Ruth Nolan
Mojave Desert Native.....and advocate
editor, No Place for a Puritan: the literature of California's deserts (Heyday Books, 2009)

Poetry Night in San Diego

2010-09-27T22:37:00.000-07:00

I read on Weds, Sept 15 at Word Soup in San Diego, a terrific series hosted by my longtime poetry friend Seretta Martin (pictured at left.) Next to me is a new poetry friend, Jackleen Holton; she and I were the two featured poetesses of the evening! This inspirational poetry night also featured many amazing open microphone readers!

Phantom Seed 4 Reading @ Palm Springs Museum

2010-09-24T21:09:00.000-07:00

Blow Torch (or: desert diaspora v_02)

2010-09-10T12:55:00.000-07:00

what it's like
to not feel safe
because the fire rages around all of us
destroying some lives entirely
and inexplicably sparing other homes

it's koran-burning talk on TV
in the basement of Riverside Medical Center,
waiting for an x-ray and huddled with held-back tears
I can't read the script, can't hear the words
then the doctor says: lungs clear.

this is the world of many homeless
this is where the old orange grove once was
next to the make believe river which is dry
until you get close enough to the hidden heart
mid-cottonwood, mini-cauliflower cosmology
water-cycle-breath
mountains to valley to sea

we stopped it up
by tearing it apart

the Bible, the Koran,
they both
came from a desert
just like this
Noah's Ark, I remember
getting those little plastic
animals at the Arco Gas Station
in Rialto on Foothill Boulevard

it's unpredictable, the planners will say
we have to make it safe
we don't want floods
we do want suburban homes

I believe you have asthma, my lass.
that's why your chest has been hurting so badly
that's why your upper back feels like it's burning sometimes.
that's why you cough and wheeze until you cry.

walgreens for an asthma inhaler.
then Bristol Farms on Country Club, Palm Desert,
samples of erotica

dams don't always work
earthquake version 9.0 about to erupt
and southern California's inland coastal valleys
are pockmarked with false lakes
cement waterways
never enough
to put out the drought
to combat fire season
some of us live closer
to the source
and feel its loss
while others yet don't
and how they yet mock

something about the desert
too much dust, not enough trees
too much emptiness of the interior
plastered with remembered and remodeled facelifts.
Grass - lear jet backwash across
Whitewater Wash
an empty face of sand
imprisoned between
miles of gold courses
narrowing its neck (remove double chins)

it always happens to someone else
because they asked for it
because of how they built their life
what did they expect?
love-making on the worst night of fire season
the last time the life-shred Santa Anas swallowed
chunks of Malibu, the San Fernando Valley
you brought this on
it is all your fault

it was gray too soon in the I.E.
but burning blue and white out here, as always,
and so I diamond shop for dinner, a cartier of the mouth,
lacking soul food:

lemongrass linguine + mushroom medley + cauliflower-red pepper
+ stir fry + grilled salmon salad + expensive gouda cheese
+ eggplant hummus +
one recyclable plastic fork (a new thing)

swallowing
is what we all do,
let's just speak the truth

it's downtown Riverside, la tablita on university by the front window
hugging friends who randomly stop by, chili_relleno and no bread
darkness vaporizes
I drive home on the 91-215-60-10-cook street loop
for the 492n'd time (somewhere around there)

and you'd always drive my car, it was all good
something about 2 am and broken bridges
being retrofitted for e-q standards
gets a little old,
as if I would be the one
to be on that bridge
the instant the big one hits (again)

it's the pool guy banging on the slider, just wanted to say thanks
for moving the trash cans that were in my way in the side yard where I come in
and the weather is suddenly so cool...........weightless..........

it's the fleece cougar blanket, two fleece jackets, one orange pashmina and
a pricey cotton sweater for creative writing at noon: the classroom is COLD
I offer what warmth I can to my students, and they take me up on it

don't worry
we can save ourselves
200 cans of organic soup
29 boxes of shotgun ammo
a new gate more securely locked
restraining order against the stalker
two big dogs and camping supplies
I know how to backpack for months
I've done it before
life on the streets
in the woods
freeze-dry food, instant oats
we don't need much to survive

it's not Tarah texting/her 2nd week in Minnesota
with new in-laws I don't know
others. numbers I don't know who's behind them.
"what ru doing 2day"
"I love you"
"yr my hero"
"can you call me I need to talk"
"full tilt boogie"
"come over!"
"where u at?"
"do you have flyers for your next event?"
"I want my fam to know ur my still my friend"

it's the small hairbrush
it's Brindle and Shasta shedding fur
it's my new do-it-yourself-haircut that everyone seems to love
it's paying off the American Express bill
and slicing the cheese extra thin
it's curling up in the back bedroom on the new bed I bought 6 months ago
in a blanket and crying myself back to sleep at dawn
it's paperwork I can't get through
it's dishes I can't understand
it's waking up to peace + bird-songs by the window:

...................it's another day and I am now taking asthma medication
maybe I'll be able to breathe this afternoon
and write the gratitude list:
I am grateful for sunrise
I am grateful for the dark water
I am grateful for the dogs
I am grateful, um, to have a job
I am grateful for the bullet holes, I can believe, I think,
that they offer light after all

there's no children to worry about
..........pictures of lost parents
on the milk cartons...............

you are free! Free at last!
..........to do what, to reach for
what missing fingers you once had......

sort of like my lungs
wanting to feel at one
with the rest of my entirety
stomach, breasts, and heart
but lacking a windpipe

I'll make up for that
the other organs are there,
the negatives demonstrate that
I just need to remember
to reach for the suck-plunge inhaler
invite oxygen, even though
it causes rust

I make up for gambling
by going to extra church

I make up for not reading
by burning books

I make up for God
by making the sign of the cross
when I drive by highway accident sites
offering the crude wooden cross

it's 9.11 tomorrow and I imagine emergencies,
books burning and the hole left deep in mid-city ground,
invisible catch-all
with no words
printable
for this

one step away from empty brain,
empty book,
9.11 of the soul
something to sedate us all for
body memory
one part
many wholes

bellow: does it mean: below
or
to blow
or reach for the hose
fire of breath
dead center
has new meaning for me now
Buddha
taking arrows between the eyes,
He approves

Ruth Archives

2010-09-06T16:09:00.000-07:00

A little archiving for my files and hopefully for your viewing and listening pleasure...and so I don't forget.

April, 2010: My Western Wilderness Conference, 2010, UC Berkeley presentation. Featuring the California Desert and some of my desert poetry as stars: Panel moderated by Malcolm Margolin and featuring Kenneth Brower, Tim Palmer, and Kimi Kodani Hill. Film excerpt by my friend Cyrus Emerson who works at Blackstone Audio.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/video/video.php?v=471563005080&subj=559231276

September, 2008: Interview with poets Ruth Nolan + Juan Felipe Herrera, KCET Arts Block, SoCal. Interviewed by poet Ching-In Chen.

http://www.kcet.org/socal/podcasts/artsblock-live/ruth-nolan-and-juan-felipe-herrera.html

Another goody-item for my blog grab bag

Here is a link to the 2008 Joshua Tree Photo Shoot sponsored by UCR-CMP and Sweeney Gallery....and a writeup of my role in the film I wrote and read poetry for (I just found this writeup....I'll post the entire project description in a separate blog posting)

Escape to Reality: 24 hrs @ 24 fps

Once a rough cut of images was assembled, we approached the author of Phantom Seed, poet Ruth Nolan to add her vision of Joshua Tree. Ruth, a resident of Palm Desert, became excited about the video project and set about writing and narrating Joshua Tree Imprimatur (excerpted below). She also recorded footsteps walking and running through Joshua Tree, a place she had spent many days and nights growing up. While Mabel Luhan's memoirs, featured in sub-title form are the voice of Escape to Reality, it is Ruth Nolan's words that are its soul. She paints a picture of the desert that is complex, ironic, mysterious, and beautiful.

The film clip is at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gowJF2HLNYY

Joshua Tree Imprimatur (excerpt)

In Joshua Tree
In the land that crowns its needled glories with sand
In the desert made of pavement fallen from the Milky Way
In the desert made of deep holes, carved by grinding stones
In the desert made of gashed canyons, cut straight through stone
In the desert made of walking rain that the eye can far-off see
In the desert made of fan tree palms
In the desert made of cold
In the desert made of Blinding mirage
In the desert made of light so old it whispers like grooved bones
Where the woolly mammoth and rattlesnake cross time and home,
Oceans of time rising and receding, land quaking in their paths
Where the granite batholiths arch their backs
where the red-tailed hawks vault their hunting songs
by Ruth Nolan

AND HERE IS....

The upcoming California Legacy Project, Nature Dreaming. Sponsored by Santa Clara University & the National Endowment for the Arts - in progress, and I'm one of the invited humanities scholars from the state who will be part of the project:

http://californialegacy.org/radio_productions/Nature_Dreaming/

California Legacy Project + Poets of Bodie

2010-09-03T18:16:00.000-07:00

What a day! I've been invited to participate in an exciting California Legacy Project, by Santa Clara University, which will be comprised of interviews of prominent state scholars (me?) on California authors whose works they admire-value for their investment and connection to "place." Not surprisingly, I'm going to focus on the literary legacies by several literary heavyweights interwoven deeply the California desert and the Inland Empire region. Whee! Too cool for words. This project is funded by Santa Clara U and the National Endowment for the Arts.

So....how did I get from point A to point universe? Not long ago I was a shy and uber-private mom and teacher who hiked all the time in the desert...with Tarah and maybe a friend or two and quite often singularly alone....no public life beyond....teaching at the college, and prior to that, high school...and emphatically too scared to read my poems publicly, except rarely, and in a hushed tone.

Now - ???? A desert book? Invitations like this? I'm floored, astonished, happy, and also the thread of bittersweet walk of beauty and sad lacing through the fabric of my life...breathing and humming as one...tasting so much, tasting so little, tasting it all. From Philip: a found email from months ago: "be a hologram." Too cool for intellect, to the next worlds I go. For the record, the project is inspired in part by the legacy and works of the great California poet-writer Robinson Jeffers. For more:

Also, I'm now formally connected to an amazing poetry writing collaborative-project, "Poets of Bodie," organized and overseen by the incredible Nicelle Davis who is another desert poet/writer! A group of poets and writers from throughout the west are assuming personae based on real lives of those who lived through one of California's largest mining towns from the late Gold Rush-early 20th century era; it is now one of the world's most famous ghost towns, located east of the Sierras near Mono Lake and Bridgeport, CA. I've been there and it's unreal. Well, yes, it's a ghost town, after all. It's one of Tarah's favorite places; I took her there as a little kid on one of our many extended summer travels through the state as she was growing up. Bodie Ghost Town: http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=509

I'm writing from an imagined persona of Mary Winnemucca Tate, a Mono Lake Paiute-Anglo woman bent on transformational revenge and "putting into right balance" the evils perpetrated on the abundant Native American people of the region. The westward expansion of the "California Gold Rush" were a death sentence for the indigenous peoples, many tribes being eradicated quickly and entirely during this time.

Read more, if you'd like, about my persona and her poetic intentions at:
http://bodiepoetryproject.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/poets-of-bodie-ruth-nolan/

You may also read about all of the poets/writers and their goals with this project at: http://bodiepoetryproject.wordpress.com/

The results of this collaborative will be published and performed as a book in the near future. I'll keep you posted! This is so cool!

Art VULUPS project!

2010-09-03T18:08:00.001-07:00

Sept 2, 2010: Art VULUPS meeting at downtown Riverside Library (my adopted "2nd home" for so many events, since 2004.) I'm working as part of an arts-planner collaborative for Riverside County - teamed with Mike Harrod to focus on "sound" and many amazing others - for this ongoing project that will run for 2 years and cuminate in permanent installations throughout the region: VULUPS stands for "Art as a Vehicle to Understand Land Use Planning & Sustainability Project." 16 teams altogether. I'm so honored to be part-of! I am the only writer. Wow. Their website is:http://www.artvulups.org/

I'll post updates periodically.

Slouching Towards Mt. Rubidoux Manor, Issue 3, Sept 16 @ Back to the Grind

2010-09-01T00:08:00.001-07:00

Inlandia Writers Workshop-Riverside, Summer 2010
Reading and Anthology Release Scheduled

members of the writers workshop - photo taken August 26, 2010

Creative writers and their works from the summer, 2010 Inlandia Writers Workshop in Riverside will be showcased at an Inlandia-sponsored reading on Thursday, September 16 at Back to the Grind coffee house, from 7-9 pm. The workshop has been taught continuously during summer, fall, winter and spring sessions by Ruth Nolan since its inception in June, 2008, who is also the workshop founder.

An eclectic and diverse range of poetry and prose – including memoir, essays, and short stories – will be shared and read aloud by workshop participants at the event, which is free and open to the public. This will be one of many readings held by the group throughout the year, and is the second reading held at Back to the Grind. In addition, the reading will also feature the launch of the workshop’s yearly anthology of collected works, Slouching Towards Mt. Rubidoux Manor, issue No. 3. All of the works are original pieces and were written during the summer workshop session.

“I’m very proud of this summer’s writers – their enthusiasm, their hard work, and the community spirit built and generated by those in the workshop have all been major factors in the success of this summer’s workshop, as well as the high quality and inspirational quality of the writing to be featured in our anthology, as well as at our Sept. 16 reading,” says Nolan. “This is a strong and true community of writers, one that adds a vital and vigorous litany of voices to the emerging body literature of the Inland Empire.”

Participants in this summer’s session/contributors to the anthology include local residents/writers Karen Bradford; Vickie Buchanan; Brian Dale Bywater; Deenaz P. Coachbuilder; Nikia Chaney Mike Cluff; Harki Dhillon; Heather Dubois; Cyrus Emerson; Ellen Estilai; Amy Floyd; Michelle Gonzalez; Joan Koerper; Danielle La Paglia; Lorraine Lefaivre; Peter Naggi; Kamelyta Noor; Michael Sleboda; Zachary Smith; April Strout; Vicky Tuey; Jean Waggoner; Celeste Walter; and Sharon Zorn-Katz.

The Inlandia Writers Workshop-Riverside is one of several writing workshops in the Inland Empire region, including Idyllwild and Palm Springs. The fall, 2010 session of the Riverside workshop, to be led by Ruth Nolan, will begin on Thursday, September 30 at 6:30 pm at the downtown library. For more information on this or the other workshops, contact Marion Mitchell-Wilson at the Inlandia Institute.

Special thanks for the production of this year’s anthology go to Marion Mitchell-Wilson, Inlandia Institute Director; April Durham, Inlandia Advisory Committee Member and graphic designer of Slouching Towards Mt. Rubidoux Manor, issue #3, and members the Inlandia Institute Publications Committee, chaired by Cati Porter. Ruth Nolan is the founder/editor of Slouching Towards Mt. Rubidoux Manor, and also a member of the Inlandia Advisory Committee and the publications committee.

Prospecting, Indio Hills

2010-08-22T00:51:00.000-07:00

for Phil

through this slot canyon
we have decided to explore
past the ancient palm trees
living on a waterless shore
and pillared by a fault zone
we traverse a mud walled wash
that gets thinner and thinner
while late November clouds
pillar into silent gray burdens
above our heads, you say rain
I assure you that water isn't
attracted to this dry spot,
I see walls rising higher,
you say the flood will easily
cascade past us today, the
rocks fall away beneath my
feet and I find a small stack
of black crystals, the first I've
ever found in 20 odd years
of driving the sandy back
roads now I almost get stuck
again in my battered Toyota
RAV4 once again, it's not
a new 4WD, it’s from the
wandering into narrow places
unknown except to a few
desert rats and the sand dunes
are mostly leveled on the
valley, low, now the fat rain
pushes down for birthing,
I advise a hasty retreat
to a thermos of hot tea
and you want tacos again,
good thing I didn't lose
the keys this time, you win,
the rain terrorizes windshield
and hood, now I drive away,
turn to ask whether you want
chicken or beans, you’re gone,
conversation shattered, my
fingers, around these rocks.

by Ruth Nolan, copyright (c) 2010 by Ruth Nolan

NP4@P Review + Desolation Tango

2010-08-17T16:20:00.001-07:00

Here is a nice review of NP4@P (my new acronym for the desert book) and my friend Deanne Stillman's Joshua Tree book, Desolation Tango. The generous review was penned by my friend/author Cynthia Anderson, who lives in Joshua Tree. Cynthia's poetry has been featured in Phantom Seed Magazine (an offshoot publication I publish once or twice a year of contemporary poetry and prose)and will be featured again in Phantom Seed #4, coming out next month. Check my blog soon for upcoming readings, which will begin in mid-September.

Here is the writeup:

Being laid up for a couple of weeks with an injured back has had its advantages, mainly the chance to read for hours on end. Happily, I had just ordered a pile of books from Amazon and they've been steadily trickling in. Here are a few of my favorites.

"No Place for a Puritan" is an anthology of desert writing, both poetry and prose. There are heavy hitters like John Steinbeck and Sylvia Plath (!), the usual suspects like Mary Austin and Edward Abbey, and a host of others you've never heard of but will be glad you did. Editor Ruth Nolan has done a superb job of bringing together diverse voices. I devoured this book!

Last night I actually made it to an author reading at the Red Arrow Gallery that featured Ruth Nolan along with Deanne Stillman, author of "Joshua Tree: Desolation Tango" as well as a definitive book on wild mustangs and an expose about a 1991 murder in 29 Palms. Another desert writer worth checking out.

You can read the review on Cynthia's blog at:
http://cynthiashidesertblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/summer-reading.html

Thanks, Cynthia!

Desert Writers Issue, Summer 2010, Sun Runner Magazine

2010-08-16T22:03:00.000-07:00

Salton Sea, south shore, near Obsidian Butte, photo by me but not in the summer.

Desert Writers Issue, Sun Runner Magazine, Summer 2010 is out...

http://issuu.com/thesunrunnermagazine/docs/sraugustdig10

the issue looks RAD and there's a generous review of No Place 4 A Puritan.

Enjoy! This issue is a GREAT READ! Perfect for mid-August. It's drenching hot here in Palm Desert - our tropical weather with a twist of Death Valley heat thrown in. Too hot to go bike riding, even at 10 pm. Yuck-weather, too supernovabaked to breathe. Swim-mind, body-dope. That's what this is, and I'm heading to Northern California to visit my brothers Patrick (San Jose) and John (Oakland) before.....school starts.

PS how is this for an 11 pm temperature (from the weather channel)

11:00 PM, PALM DESERT, AUGUST 16 2010
95°F
Feels Like: 101°
45% humidity

YUCK!

Crazy Creek Camp Chair

2010-08-15T16:41:00.000-07:00

Here's a poem of mine that appeared in the summer, 2008 Sun Runner Magazine Desert Writers Issue....one I've never read publicly but that I think is...wobbly yet precise in its depiction of a relationship between a teenage girl and her mother...(for the record, the 2010 Desert Writers Issue is about to hit the shelves...I'll post the link when it's ready.)

Crazy Creek Camp Chair

Backpacking trip, mother and daughter, furtive coyote prowling

for short grouse. We plan to arrive at dusk, trade places, she hikes

front, I behind. We are close to the same height and weight but

I am wobbly on this jagged mountain range, a ledge, 9,100 feet,

seeking a campsite. It's May, and she is tall, eclipsing me, it can't be

helped. I am in her long shadow now, frustrated by her easy pace.

I slip behind to find a walking stick, imagine how the swirling hot

chocolate I’ll prepare will ease the aches of sleeping on the ground,

but she, she loves to sleep outdoors. How deceived she is, by our

sixteen-year routine, mother and daughter bundled side by side

in matching sleeping bags, expecting me to erect the tent, prime

the stove, the usual exchange. The meadow is yet beaten down and

a fresh-cheeked sunset chokes the joys of flowery smiles peeking

through the snow. I know the creek will sleep tonight. I’m not so far

behind, and the old birds sing in the new grass with winter’s last breath.

Ruth Nolan, Palm Desert, copyright(c) 2008 & 2010 by Ruth Nolan

the issue, which features poetry and prose by other desert-based writers, can be visited at:
http://www.thesunrunner.com/Stories/Desert_Writers_Issue_2007/Nolan_DWI_07/nolan_dwi_07.html

San Andreas Canyon Haiku Walk + Anthology

2010-08-14T13:16:00.000-07:00

I'm honored to have a haiku series, inspired by a close poet friend and my hikes/our hikes/my late-May hike with friends and members from the Southern California Haiku Study Group - organized by my good friend Deborah P. Kolodji of Los Angeles - at the Indian Canyons in Palm Springs, forthcoming in the glamorous anthology:

an island of egrets…the 2010 Southern California Haiku Study Group Anthology

My five-haiku series is a desert word walk in itself, and follows the narrator through the start of the hike, arriving at the oasis, and then hiking 1/2 mile in the cool of palm trees alongside a creek to the left, massive rocks to the right, and then stopping at the small bridge, going into the water, and seeing a tiny frog clinging to a rock.

here is one, a sneak preview, written by me:

two dragonflies
the blue one
loses a wing

Two readings by anthology contributors are planned. I will definitely be at the first one.

Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena CA Saturday Sept 26 @ 2 pm

The Ink Spot, San Diego CA, Saturday Oct 9 @ 2 pm

Here is a description of the anthology, by this year's editor Billie Dee, featuring some of the best haiku - and other traditional forms of Japanese poetry - writers living and writing today, from this year's editor Billie Dee:

about an island of egrets…the 2010 Southern California Haiku Study Group Anthology From our first beautiful hand-made 2001 edition with eight founding haijin, we have grown to a volume of 65 poets. Our new book will be perfect-bound with a full-color heavy-stock cover, featuring 267 poems, including a fine selection of regional Spanish Language haiku with English translations. This collection emphasizes our unique climate and geography, our rich cultural diversity, and embraces the broad range of experience of our contributing haijin. I think you will be very pleased with the superb quality of work in this, our 10th Anniversary Edition!

Art VULUPS

2010-08-10T12:13:00.000-07:00

Art VULUPS, Riverside County: an arts and city planning collaborative I'm part of - my artist-colleague and friend, Leora Lutz has posted an insightful blog entry on the project, with a generous nod to my role in the project as a contributing artist-writer. Thanks, Leora! Pictures are of Doug McCulloh, author-photographer-renaissance man and yours truly - I am teamed with Mike Harrod of Riverside County planning, and our topic is "noise-sound"

http://movement365.blogspot.com/2010/08/art-vulups-public-art-in-conjunction.html

letter to Phil

2010-08-09T17:59:00.000-07:00

For anyone reading this blog: I am posting a commemoration of my dear friend, longtime companion and love, Philip Helland who died on April 9th of this year.

Today is the four month mark. What can I say? "nothing...compares...2 U..." you are missed every day. I am alone at the house. I burn a candle for you every night in the orange glass holder in the northwest bedroom every night, placed at the due-west corner. I had a dear, longtime friend I haven't seen in years, who now lives in Hawaii, call and text me with loving words and grace. Thank you, Lili.

Words and generosity and hugs that are so missing from you now, and saddest of all, from all the others who knew you and loved you, who seem to be moving on with their lives and forgetting about me, shutting me out. "When will you be over it?" "f-off" I don't say....as if I could ever forget about you. I know others hurt in missing you too but there is a universe between us, me, them and you. Missing from those I thought were closest to me but in truth are no more, shutting me out, cutting me out, slicing me out, for reasons unknown, adding to my own despair in this tragedy.... including most of my own "family," many of them, incredibly, offering harsh and callous criticisms of me - as if I asked for that. Adding tragedy upon tragedy. How in any way does causing additional pain help heal the pain? Perhaps this is the ultimate tragedy of the human condition, the reasons we remain sickeningly in war after war after f-ing war. Because people, countries, whole societies want to pass along the pain hot potato of life's most cutting events, rather than rise above to offer love, light, transformation.

You were my family, Philip, more than the others, more than words, more than life itself. That's how true it always was. And remains. If you were here now, I wouldn't have to write these things, because so much would be private and shared between us and safe in our sacred zone of what we shared. I write these things now because I want the world to know how special you remain..even for those who never knew you.

Sightings: Today: A bird lands on a fence. It feels a little like you, touching down to say hello, you haven't really gone. Saturday: a yellow butterfly, rare for this time of year in the desert, touched down on the pine tree I planted after Christmas one year. It's huge now...the butterfly landed right in front of me and I slowly reached out....and touched it. It moved its little legs and head up and down....then gently flew away to a higher branch, and stayed there for a long time, regarding me.

You added so much to the world while you were here. Wisdom, kindness, leadership, brilliance, spirituality, healing, musical talent, humor, insight, poetry, friendship to so many, and love, pure love. And a deep connection with nature. All of our hikes....starting with Deep Creek....Forest Falls...and so much more.

Subtle gestures...a yellow butterfly, landing on a brutal summer day in the desert, here at the edge of the world where beauty and terror and pain and despair and love and hope remain, somehow lifting their wings and landing gently in front of me. For a brief stay. So very Alice in Wonderland, that genius novel by Lewis Carroll...and we just saw the Tim Burton version of the movie together, and were similarly blown away. We kept talking about the symbol of the caterpillar-butterfly as transformation all night afterwards, as well as discussing the other messages of insight and universality and humanity and transcendence, too. And then we were on to our regular discussions of Carl Jung...

I love you. What more can I say? May I drift and walk in beauty, too, the way you always knew and led the way the best you could, which was infinitely more than most others can and will do. In the end, love is all that remains, and this is the last gift, that love is what remains. "prema" = "love" and I try every day and hope to always do so, to add a little bit of beauty, light and love to this human condition, no matter how bad things get, everywhere I go because that is what you believed in me to do and now I do it for you. In your name, in the spirit of you. And thank you for finding me in this life, and helping make me into someone better and new.

Philip in the Anza Borrego Desert, spring 2008, photo by Ruth

And here is a song by Moby (descendant of Herman Melville)...one of our favorites and the music video captures a bit of the spirit of you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1Fcaro25Ek

more hugs and love...

Concerto No. 1 in E Minor, Hwy 111, Palm Springs

2010-08-08T14:17:00.000-07:00

On July 24, my friend Dr. Maja Trochimczyk attended and wrote about the gala concert of the 13th Festival of International Laureates at Disney Hall in Los Angeles,
Chopin in Transcription at Disney Hall, performed by the IPalpiti Orchestra, conducted by Eduard Schmieder.

Maja's stunning review, part of many performances commemorating the bicentennial of the birth of the great and enduring Fryderyk Chopin - one of my life's inspirations as a poet and musician - occurring during the year 2010. In addition, Maja, a Chopin scholar and well-established music historian, compiled an amazing anthology of poetry, Chopin with Cherries: A Tribute in Verse (Moonrise Press, 2010.) I am extremely honored to have one of my poems included in this collection, which came out this past winter.

In her review, which can be read in full at http://chopinwithcherries.blogspot.com/2010/08/chopin-in-transcription-at-disney-hall.html Maja generously includes discussion and the body of a poem I wrote last summer, Concerto No. 1, in E minor on Highway 111, Palm Springs.

Excerpt, below, from Maja's review::

In any case, hearing Chopin's concerto in an elegant and nuanced strings-only version and Schumann's concerto luxuriating with the aural delights of romanticism at its best, reminded me of Ruth Nolan's masterly poem Concerto No. 1, in E minor on Highway 111, Palm Springs. Nolan heard the Chopin concerto on the car stereo while driving through the desert and an abundance of youthful memories ensued:

"Caressed, by the windy desert mid-night,
tickling your hair as you lean
your head against the open window
tantalizes your imagination, you are 12 again
and your hands, together, devour the major
and minor keys until you are one
with the dark void, foot pressing down,
long chords that will linger into dawn"

The final image of Nolan's poem (published in the anthology Chopin with Cherries) remains with the readers, resonating in their memories:

"Styled by elegance of motion, staccato, fortissimo
cresting on the car stereo as you leapfrog
between the lines on the highway
between the spaces of darkness and sound,
blown across the sand dunes into magnificence"

Chopin's music - heard, played, experienced - echoes in the memory with an untold magnificence, withstanding the test of time.
(end of review)

a sample of movement four from the Concerto - so much energy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Nwcn_o866Q&feature=related

I first heard this as a very young college student in my UC-Santa Barbara friend's dorm room....on a record. He was from the hills of Corona del Mar (the O.C.) and a rock star guitarist studying classical guitar and he laughed every time he put this record on. I was from the desert. Thanks, PR!

The next reading from Chopin with Cherries: A Tribute in Verse will be held at Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA on Sunday, September 12, at 2 pm. The event is open to the public and will feature readings from anthology contributors. A $7 fee is charged, and contributes to helping keep the historic and prolific literary arts center open in these difficult economic times. For more information on this event, and/or to order copies of the anthology, contact Maja Trochimczyk at maja.trochimczyk@gmail.com, or visit Beyond Baroque at http://www.beyondbaroque.org/

Barnes & Noble Poetry, Palm Desert

2010-08-07T15:01:00.001-07:00

It was a lovely evening...hosted by the indefatigable Patricia d'Alessandro, poetess supreme at 86 years young....she is hosting poet Wanda Coleman at the March, 2011 reading! Not to miss!

Among the readers, photographed above, are my colleague Tim Johnson from COD (next to me,) and local poets Frances Stanley (center,) and to the right, Dessa Reed and Lee Balan. Patricia is the lovely lady wearing the scarf. Two of the people in the photo read for the very first time! I love it.

Trigger is coming home!

2010-08-06T15:50:00.001-07:00

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=20683&id=118470144843233

to my hometown of Apple Valley, the town that Roy Rogers & Dale Evans built. Thanks to my Mojave Desert O.G. homeboy Dave Pike for taking and posting these.

Ladyfest I.E., Sunday August 8th

2010-08-05T13:43:00.000-07:00

An all-day, interactive, music, e-zine making, arts, yoga and more! Back to the Grind coffee shop in Riverside...FREE and open to the public!! This is part of a national program and one of many Ladyfest events occurring throughout the U.S.
For directions.....http://www.back2thegrind.com/

From 6:50-7:15 PM I'll be reading feminist-desert poetry think: Sylvia Plath meets the ghost of Mary Austin and the bones of Shoshone woman buried at Soda Springs, with a little desert firefighting and music-keg-raves situated somewhere between sunset and sunrise on a dry lakebed just big enough for a small airplane to take off!

I am honored to be part of this....I also read last year and was and am inspired and motivated by the energy of the young people in downtown Riverside who are making it happen, keeping their voices alive, and loud, and real.

"Puritan Reviews" on LA Books Examiner and SF Books Examiner

2010-07-30T22:58:00.001-07:00

I just found this....the good thing about sitting in the desert day and night, glued to the computer, cleaning up files, reflecting on recent months of living....these reviews give a lot of overview and insight of the many diverse and fascinating authors whose works appear in "Puritan," and also offer literary criticism that serves as a guide for me.....and....

I hope others, to understand the complex framework of how the works are carefully arranged, to reflect a cornucopia of stories spilling out of an apparently lifeless form...spilling onto the table for a literary feast in astonishing abundance from our state's most arid lands....in a recursive, not-entirely-linear literary passage....circling in and in upon itself as a comprehensive and self-containing, time-and-people-and-events embracing gesture of the ouroboros...a nifty paradigm that hopefully provides a convenient metaphor for the collection's intent...to the earliest people in the earliest times - the desert's vastly diverse, Native Americans - who have lived here since before time as those of us in the early 21st century *think* we know it began.

In short: these reviews help me understand the book better than I ever could have while steeped in the deepness of...bringing it to fruition, working closely every step of the way with my wise editor and guide, Gayle Wattawa, Acquistions Editor at Heyday (who also edited Inlandia: a literary journey through Southern California's Inland Empire, 2006), and many friends and colleagues, without whose widespread support this book never would have been.

No Place for a Puritan - here is a very nice review by the LA Books Examiner:
published on May 10, by reviewer Laura Frazin Steele

No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts edited by Ruth Nolan is an interesting and unique anthology that focuses on the history and culture of California's richly diverse desert region. No Place for a Puritan is published by Heyday Books, a Berkeley, California based publisher that aspires to deepen the awareness of California's rich cultural, natural, literary, and historic resources.

Ruth Nolan's No Place for a Puritan will expand the reader's understanding and appreciation of the California desert. Rather than viewing the desert as a wasteland, the reader will come to realize that the desert is an exotic environment that has become overdeveloped, overcrowded, and threatened.

No Place for a Puritan examines the California desert within the context of its inherent dangers, the lure of the desert and desert life, changes to the desert landscape over time, and conservation and protection of its resources.

This distinctive anthology includes the works of 80 respected and award winning authors and poets. Their contributions are as rich and diverse as the desert itself. For example, No Place for a Puritan includes the poem "Sleep in the Mojave Desert" by the late acclaimed poet and author Sylvia Plath. Her highly descriptive poem was inspired by a night of camping in the desert.

Furthermore, No Place for a Puritan includes an excerpt from Farewell to Manzanar, the moving bestseller that documents living conditions for Japanese Americans in a relocation center during World War II by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and her late husband James D. Houston.

Also included in No Place for a Puritan is an excerpt from The Raw Pearl, the autobiography of the late Pearl Bailey, a legendary American singer and entertainer who lived in a dude ranch in Apple Valley, California that catered to African Americans during the 1950s.

Joseph E. Stevens' well-researched book Hoover Dam: An American Adventure offers a history of Hoover Dam, which allowed for the settlement of Southwest deserts and inland regions. An excerpt from Hoover Dam is included in No Place for a Puritan to describe major historical changes to the desert landscape over time.

The late writer and environmentalist Marc Reisner contributed to No Place for a Puritan with his excerpt from Cadillac Desert, which documents the complex policies and history of water management in the nation's West. The excerpt from Cadillac Desert describes the epic construction of the Los Angeles aqueduct, which imports water into Southern California from the California Owens Valley.

The award winning environmental and political writer Rebecca Solnit movingly describes her political activism in a 1994 antinuclear demonstration at the Yucca Mountain test site in her book Savage Dreams, which is excerpted in No Place for a Puritan. In Savage Dreams Rebecca Solnit closely examines nuclear testing conducted by the U.S. government in California's Mojave Desert.

On Thursday May 13, 2010, editor Ruth Nolan and No Place for a Puritan contributors Juan Felipe Herrera and Susan Straight will discuss their work at the Riverside Art Museum at 6:00 p.m. Additional information about these authors and the event will be available in this column. If you would like an e-mail notification of this event and more information about the authors, click the subscribe button at the top of the page.

No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts edited by Ruth Nolan is available through Heyday Books.
this review can also be viewed online at http://www.examiner.com/x-31737-LA-Books-Examiner~y2010m5d10-No-Place-for-a-Puritan-explores-changes-to-Californias-deserts

AND HERE IS ANOTHER REVIEW....from San Francisco Books Examiner No Place for a Puritan: the Literature of California’s Deserts. Reviewed by SF Books Examiner LJ Moore April 3

Ruth Nolan’s 2009 anthology, No Place for a Puritan, is a collection of stories, poems, essays, and meditations on the deserts of California, divided into seven sections: Dangers, Crossings, Refuge and Exile, Lure, Desert as Home, Changing Desert, and Conservation/Protection. The variety and range of contributors makes this collection go to work differently on the consciousness than does a single-author book, creating an impression by accumulation, and offering a vicarious experience through observations, epiphanies, and lore about the desert landscape no single person could accrue in one lifetime.

Reading No Place for a Puritan is like sitting around a campfire listening to John Steinbeck, Cesar Chavez, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Aldous Huxley, Rebecca Solnit, General George S. Patton and Panamint Annie compare notes... only without the fistfight.

Nolan’s guiding genius in putting together this anthology is the recognition that an essential character of the human psyche is to attach emotional values to our physical spaces, and then to treat them accordingly. For many of us, the desert is labeled internally as an empty, no-go zone: a place you wouldn’t want to run out of gas, or the interminable emptiness one is forced to drive through on the way to Las Vegas or Yuma or Palm Springs. It has been variously called unforgiving, deadly, barren, hellish, and is even in film and fiction depicted as inhabited with a kind of supernatural or diabolical cruelty. That imagined desert is a flat, cartoonish place, empty, sere and scattered with the bones of the wayward: a stereotype that holds, not because it is true, but because in a place of both subtlety and extremes, the extremes are easier to see.

To see the desert as it really is, one must enter it and spend some time there, as the authors included in this anthology have done. One must get quiet and one must get small, as Ann Haymond Zwinger does, following the telltale signs of sidewinders and fringe-toed lizards: species uniquely adapted to flow nimbly across sand dunes. Alternatively, there is the way of Mary Elizabeth White, a miner and prospector who moved to Death Valley in 1931 and made her home there until 1979, living in a Model A truck, an old army ambulance, or as part of an itinerant “prospector family.” Then there's Pearl Bailey, who took over a dude ranch and called the desert home. There is also the tribal history of the deserts, home to Native American peoples, among them the Chemehuevi, Paiute, Mojave, Kawaiisu, Cahuilla, Serrano, Koso, and Kitanemuk, for thousands of years. And there is the darker history: the nuclear bomb tests, the Japanese internment camps, the Salton Sea: our attempts to tame and reshape the landscape to serve our purposes by unsustainable development.

In bringing together this deep and varied array of writings, Nolan offers a glimpse into the richness and subtlety of the California deserts: both physically and culturally. It is strangely impossible not to fall in love with a place at once enduring and vulnerable. On one hand, the desert refuses to be harnessed in the ways we have tried: paved into resorts, or irrigated to a suburban splendor. On the other hand, it is a precarious ecosystem, a place where the balance between living and dying is always skin-thin. It is a place so quiet you can hear a raven flying half a mile away because of the wind against its feathers. A place where, after a spring rain, you could lie on your belly and count a thousand flowers within three feet of your face, all less than two inches high.

Why is it no place for a Puritan? Because there's no point in harnessing the mules just to drive them into the dust. The history of our human relationship with California’s deserts drives home a critical lesson: peace and longevity with nature can't be achieved by considering ourselves an instrument of its domination. At worst we lust after the wrong dreams, but at best we acknowledge nature on it's own terms, becoming part of it: participants whose best achievements come from learning to appreciate and adapt to its larger rhythm.

Happy Birthday Tarah

2010-07-28T16:39:00.000-07:00

Tarah (Nolan) Templin, married on January 16, 2010, is 22 years old today! Born 7.28.88 at 9:04 pm by C-Section at St. Mary's Hospital in Apple Valley, CA. Daughter of Ruth & Vincent. Tarah is 1/4 Lakota Sioux Indian, with an important North Dakota-based family that traces back to Major James McLaughlin and Sitting Bull. On my side and dad's side, she is Irish. Tarah is taller than me by a few inches, and much smarter. Her command of the English language in poetry and prose is formidable, and her incisive instinct for irony is unmatched; her sense of humor is brilliant. Tarah has attended Pitzer College in Claremont and is currently living at the Salton Sea. She is just as at home painting or singing opera (she excels at both) as she is cooking gourmet meals, camping out on a remote river trip, or wrapping herself stylishly in trendy fashions. What I value most in Tarah, however, is her kind heart and generosity. Tomorrow, we are going to Laguna Beach to celebrate her birthday, with no ice cream cake but definitely a long walk and stories of past birthdays spent at Sea World and a salad for dinner. Tarah just adopted a new puppy, and is a devoted animal lover, formerly serving as a junior volunteer at the Living Desert Zoo and also volunteering for the local animal shelter. She is an amazing person and I'm floored and honored to be her mother. I love you, Tarah! xxoo....from Mom

Recycled Poem

2010-07-28T16:20:00.000-07:00

created during the collaboration of writers and artists during May, 2010, UCR-California Museum of Photography Mapping the California Desert project. Phantom Seed Magazine issue #4 (editors: Ruth Nolan, Ching-In Chen, Eric Shonkwiler, publication September, 2010) will feature works from participants in the project, and will also be featured on the Sweeney Gallery Museum website. "Recycled Poem" copyright (c) 2010 by Ruth Nolan.

Ochoa's Farm, Thermal, Temperature 122

2010-07-26T22:43:00.000-07:00

Ochoa's Farm, Thermal, California
Temperature: 122

I put up the season's hot chilis, freshly drum-roasted
slimy green seaweed for a dehydrated white woman
marooned near the Salton Sea on this ancient shore.
I strip sweaty skin from smooth muscles, the stinging
passion of jellyfish singed into my hands, caress their
peppery brown stems, rinse the white seeds from their

wombs, tuck their hearts safely away, pack a dozen
ziplock bags with my contraband, another stash of
secret dreams. I look to the sky. Towering date palm
trees rise in one sigh, fruit yet bulging in brown bags.
Tonight, the chilis will freeze, and plump gray clouds
bigger than sperm whales will swim across the line

by Ruth Nolan
copyright (c) 2010 by Ruth Nolan

Full Moon Near

2010-07-25T22:34:00.000-07:00

Almost Here. The full mid-summer moon touches me in the high desert. Drove up to Joshua Tree yesterday, late afternoon. For my reading. Barely coherent, sun-smoked. Humid and hot, hot, hot. 115 here and 105 up there. Ghostly on Highway 62. Red Arrow Gallery. I arrived early. I was there with Phil on March 29 for another reading and the last picture of us together was taken then. I wore soft pink lipstick, my cool blue suede leather jacket. I look, in the pictures, elated. I was. Phil was near. We got to talk to a famous alchemist and journalist. A very nice man who has unlocked the code for anti-aging and is living proof of its success. Phil had incredibly intelligent questions to ask him. I could only stand by and smile.

Reaching down to guide me through reading. Nervous. Feeling Scorpio inward. Summer days, isolation days, worrying about Tarah days. Headache days. Too much coffee days. Not enough green tea days. A dash for the beach last week and heart in throat. We were there, we were at the Starbucks in Huntington Beach. Shit. Thought I could put it back. There it is. A homeless woman with long gray wig hair yells at traffic. She may be waiting for the bus. But the bus drives by. People go into Taco Bell, ignoring it.

Nervous. Reading with a famous author, and in a migraine days, realize I'm stuttering a little bit. Shy and scared. Not totally like me. But there is a different me these days. Last minute poem shuffle, deciding what to read, and digging the fact that the desert would backdrop me through the floor to ceiling window as I read, to the setting sun. Creosote, the earth's oldest living plants. Safety and security in that. Even if joshua trees signify the gates of heaven and hell. The light show and rave at the music fest here last May was a wonder in itself and I wish, wish, wish I could've been there with Phil. He lived for that stuff and I could see why. The coolest light show I've ever seen with the coolest, mixed up ambient beats, under soft desert night air. Magic. The spirit of parties in the desert when I was growing up. Nothing can match that. Or does. I live it again and again. Full moon splash when the sun is finally down and I read, sweetly and shyly but wryly of course, and tragi-strong. Beauty lives at the edge of terror, is what Malcolm said at the Into California reading last May. And I come from the middle of nowhere, I told him. That's where this all comes from, where it all comes in.

Sideways. I see friends in the audience of 25 or 30 who've come to see me and Deanne, hear she and I read. How honored I am, to have arrived from nothing today, and here they are. Caryn. Rainbow. Barbara. Rob & his wife Kate. Cheryl, such a generous hostess, and Katie, owner of the Red Arrow. Putting out the wine. I drink a little bit. To get over my stage fright. A few people approach me, in awe of the desert book, some having already read. I am surprised. Oh yeah, the book. Right. Sure I'll sign it. More copies are sold. Rob buys a copy of my poetry chapbook, Dry Waterfall. Now, I'm REALLY shy. He's such an awesome prose writer that I'm embarrassed. So it's time to read.

I preface with the quote I love from Chemehuevi Indian elder Larry Eddy: "I'm going to tell you a story,he said. But before I tell you that story, I am going to break your heart." Preface to the telling of one of the stories of the Salt Song Trail.

And so I read: Rattlesnake in the Cooler (haiku series, Andreas Canyon). from the preface to "No Place for a Puritan." Then, Mirage. Orouboros (Amargosa River). Jumping Cholla/Teddy Bear Cactus. Friendly Fire. Slow Freeze. Home Girl. Ghost Flower. Poolside. Wonder Valley. Chemehuevi Cemetery. Rattlesnake in the Cooler, V_02.

I didn't read Two Bunch Palms or St. Michael, V_02. I also decided against Phenomenal Phil; Stillbirth: Lake Mojave, Late June; Ochoa's Farm; Washboard Road. So little time. So many poems.

Moonside. The Joshua Tree Saloon. Too loud but we pile over there. Starving. I haven't had dinner or lunch. Past big bouncers, and an older gentleman, obviously quite well into his drinking night, smiles at me and says "here comes a live one!" If he only knew. I laugh, a little cynically, shake my head, ignore him, move on.

Me and a group of cool women friends, named above. I drink a fat tire beer (memories there and in red stripe beer) and we listen to horribly loud horrible rock music. Caryn, ever take-charge and speak-up, asks the waitress to turn it down, but...it is (terrible) rock and roll night. Caryn is from NYC and speaks French fluently and in fact is going to France soon for a rendez-vous with her beloved. Deanne, super-cool, talks more about her terrific book of historical research into the legacy of the wild horse in the U.S.. I'm touched by her passion for ending the government slaughter, which continues to this day, of wild mustangs in the west. Barbara, one of the editors of the well-known Sun Runner desert magazine, and I share a plate of french fries and onion rings (the bar has stopped serving all but the most abysmal junk food.) Rainbow, who is a medical doctor also from NYC, talks about her yoga and tai-chi classes and says we need to go for a hike. It's hard to follow conversation, music way too loud, my mind is distracted, I give into my recent habit of zoning out, zoning out, and watch a table of rather innocent-looking marines drink a lot. One of them sidles out smoothly with a woman he has shared one dance with and gives his buddies a thumbs up as he chugs his beer and tosses the empty into the trash.

And the moon holds me on the drive home. Middle of night. I call a friend to talk, on speakerphone. Mesmerized, and losing the signal in the Morongo Pass, then calling back and picking it up again. The moon showers the open land. No one is in the desert, mid-summer, too hot to handle. Moonlight feels good. The sun is a brute. My writing is at once, now, more beautiful and richer and more violent than it was a year ago. What of it I've done. Debbie coerced me to write a haiku series, and helped me shape them into top haiku form, hopefully to be published in this year's Southern CA haiku journal, where I've published before. I'm nervous about several writing assignments I've been given. I drive home on empty roads, taking the shortcut, Indian Avenue, through Desert Hot Springs down to the I-10. Gratefully, I easily fall asleep. Be brave. Again. How could I ever have thought this is the best way to live. But it is. Still, it is. The desert is where my imagination lives and grows wings, grows sunflowers in my garden from a previous nothing-ness, where roads uncurl to infinity. Wisdom and eternal sunshine of the moon-mad mind. Maybe I don't have to be here to know this now, but for now, it's where I still live.

And sleep with blinds not concealing everything, no matter how hard I try to beef u their work with blankets pinned up with tacks. What more then, except to wake up to blasting sun at noon, and hide indoors all day until night comes back again, with that soothing moon. Pink Floyd is perfect. For here and now. The sunflowers hold their heads alert, the hummingbirds visit their blooms, but only at the start and close of day, in the twilight of birth and death. The dogs are bored. Brindle plays ball by himself, and Shasta stands nearby. Tarah has moved to the Salton Sea. I'm alone here again. Maybe she'll call, maybe she won't. Floating. Waiting. Drinking iced tea.

Almost there. The moon, I mean. Ready to quiver across the lips of my 90 degree pool. Kiss me deep where the water's over my head. Again. I can almost see you.

"I'm going to tell you a story,he said. But before I tell you that story, I am going to break your heart."

Into California: When the Desert Blooms, May 13, 2010

2010-07-25T22:04:00.000-07:00

"The most we can do is to dream the myth onwards and give it a modern dress. And whatever explanation or interpretation does to it, we do to our own souls as well, with corresponding results for our own well-being." C. G. Jung/c. W 9i, par. 271

Into California....When the Desert Blooms: Literary Bounty in our Driest Lands
May 13, 2010 Riverside Art Museum.

Susan Straight, Ruth Nolan, Juan Felipe Herrera, Malcolm Margolin

A reading and panel discussion focused on California's Inland Empire and Mojave Desert. Sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Co-sponsors: Heyday Books and the Inlandia Institute.

Heyday Books founder and No Place for a Puritan contributors at Riverside Art Museum on May 13. Article published on May 11, 2010 by LA Books Examiner. By Laura Frazin

No Place for a Puritan explores the literature of California's rich and diverse deserts

This Thursday May 13, 2010, Malcolm Margolin, the founder and publisher of Heyday Books, will be at the Riverside Art Museum at 6:00 p.m. Appearing with Malcolm Margolin will be Ruth Nolan, the editor of No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts, Susan Straight and Juan Felipe Herrera, contributors to No Place for a Puritan.

Heyday Books, based in Berkeley, California, aspires to deepen the awareness of California's rich cultural, natural, literary, and historic resources. Heyday Books recently participated in the April 2010 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

One of Heyday's many unique and fascinating books is No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts edited by Ruth Nolan. No Place for a Puritan is an anthology that includes the works of over 80 respected and award winning authors and poets, including John Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, Susan Straight, and Juan Felipe Hererra.

Editor Ruth Nolan begins No Place for a Puritan with her descriptive tale of her early memories of California's wide and vast Mojave Desert. Her love of the desert was immediate and her intimate knowledge and appreciation of the desert's rich complexity is expressed through her books and poetry. Ruth Nolan teaches poetry, creative writing, desert literature, and Native American literature at College of the Desert in Palm Desert, California, where she is an associate professor of English. She is the founder and editor of Phantom Seed, a California desert literary magazine, and is a former wildland desert firefighter. Her poem "Mirage," which evokes strong desert imagery, is included in No Place for a Puritan.

Susan Straight, who will also be at the Riverside Museum of Art this Thursday, contributed the short story "Cellophane and Feathers" to No Place for a Puritan. "Cellophane and Feathers," originally published in Susan Straight's award winning collection of short stories, Aquaboogie, is the story of a desolate prisoner who is tasked with picking up trash alongside of the desert Interstate 10 freeway. Susan Straight is a novelist and writer of short stories and essays for adults and children, and is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.

Juan Felipe Herrera, the award winning author and activist for at-risk youth and migrant communities, will also be at the Riverside Museum of Art this Thursday. The son of migrant workers, Juan Felipe Herrera teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside where he is the Tomas Rivera Endowed Chair. He is a prolific writer of poetry, prose, short stories, novels for adults and young adults, and children's picture books. His poem "Loss, Revival, and Retributions," originally published in his collection of poetry Night Train to Tuxtla, is one of the many richly unique contributions in the anthology No Place for a Puritan.

For more information about the event on Thursday May 13, 2010 at the Riverside Art Museum featuring Heyday Books' Malcolm Margolin, Ruth Nolin, Susan Straight, and Juan Felipe Herrera click here. http://www.examiner.com/x-31737-LA-Books-Examiner~y2010m5d11-Heyday-Books-founder-and-No-Place-for-a-Puritan-contributors-at-Riverside-Art-Museum-on-May-13?cid=edition-rss-Los_Angeles

Poetry Reading Claremont 7.23, 7 pm

2010-07-18T17:59:00.000-07:00

Scribblerus monthly series presents...

POETRY READING
Featured poets + open microphone
FRIDAY, JULY 23 – 7 PM

RUTH NOLAN
reading from Dry Waterfall
and
MICHAEL CLUFF
reading from Casino Evil

THOREAU’S BOOKSHOP
586 W 1st St, Claremont, CA 91711
http://www.yelp.com/biz/thoreaus-bookshop-claremont
in the Claremont Packinghouse

Guitar music by John Hendricks
refreshments by Virginia Bower

More information:
HELEN GRAZIANO
event Coordinator(909) 621-2876
sandigee@verizon.net

One Star, Tonight

2010-07-17T11:47:00.000-07:00

I look to the dark sky,
without my glasses
the night is fuzz,
I am in the warm pool
desert midnight - there you are,
star dandelion
here you are
splintered glass
rainbow light
ready
to blow away-
where you are
here and there
you hold steady, and everywhere
before you emerge
and merge
with me
and I touch you
with a finger, the same finger
I fingered on the oak tree
where you slipped
from your body
the way a snake
parts with its outgrown skin
and swims away
through the tall grass
through the sea sky
where, here,
you and I part
and meet
again
in the dark places
while all around us
it will be this way -
eternally, always was
the way stars
break apart
the way galaxies
are born
and die
and remain
unseen

--Ruth Nolan
copyright(c) 2010 by Ruth Nolan

Andreas Canyon Haiku Series, 7.14.10, Palm Springs

2010-07-14T02:28:00.000-07:00

San Andreas Haiku Series

fan palm oasis
everything stings, sticks or stabs
beauty killed you too

yellow butterflies
cottonwood fluff, deep water
burial at noon

we walked the canyon
two dragonflies, orange, blue
one loses a wing

heatwave: I seek shade
you’re hiding behind the sun
I can’t find you

lavender half dry
moisture clings to mesquite beans
you died in mid-spring

your dandelion eyes
blink on sun-lidded breezes
one last wink, all mine

it’s time to change rocks
the frog is ready to leap
fondle the trigger

by Ruth Nolan

Andreas Canyon Haiku Series
copyright (c) 2010 by Ruth Nolan

In memory of P.H., 1985-2010, he hiked there, too, more than once and he climbed the razor-wire fence to see what was beyond where we weren't supposed to go

...and thanks to my friend and haiku goddess, Deborah P. Kolodji, for guiding the Andreas Canyon Haiku Walk and Write with me this past May....and for inspiring me to write these tonight.

Red Arrow Gallery, Joshua Tree: Desert Poetry & Prose, Saturday July 24, 7:00 pm

2010-07-12T16:54:00.000-07:00

In case you can't read the tiny print: it's at the Red Arrow Gallery, in downtown Joshua Tree, 61597 Twentynine Palms Hwy (Hwy 62). For more information, visit Red Arrow Gallery at www.theredarrowgallery.com, email info@theredarrowgallery.com or call 760-366-3700. The reading is free to the public, and will feature free wine, cheese and crackers, for attendees. You can also email me at runolan@aol.com

The reading starts at 7:00 pm, and I am honored to be reading with critically-acclaimed writer Deanne Stillman author of Mustang: the Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West - A Los Angeles Times Best Book, 2008 and winner of the California Book Award Silver Medal for nonfiction. Deanne is also author of the outstanding, award-winning book Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave, , which Hunter Thompson called "A strange and brilliant story by an important American writer."

I will be reading my prose and poetry from the anthology I've edited, No Place for a Puritan: the literature of California's deserts (Heyday Books, 2009) and also new desert writing I have been generating. Copies of the anthology, along with Phantom Seed: a literary magazine of California desert poetry & prose, a magazine I co-edit, and copies of my two poetry chapbooks, Dry Waterfall and Wild Wash Road, (both on Petroglyph Books) will also be available for sale.

A BIG thank you to gallery owner & writer Cheryl Montelle for organizing and hosting this in her super-cool high desert gallery!! Thanks, Cheryl, for all you do, for so many desert-related artists and writers, and the desert communities!

Fourth of July, London Planetree

2010-07-04T13:58:00.000-07:00

Finally. Mind-spin has slowed. The pool water warms to above many tepid degrees. Swimming is now for night, for the silent shriek of stars. They say we are approaching the Milky Way, and it's at night that this I can most feel. I feel tepid. I've been on auto-pilot in many no-fly zones for months.

It's a time to crawl back to my blog, crawl back to my inner stance and inner self, to that quiet and private, ironically human-connecting place called "home," which means the house on California Drive, behind stucco walls, shouldering a wild sunflower garden that I planted and nurture myself, resting on the large-tiled, cool floors on a woolen blanket I got at Warner's Hot Spring Ranch last winter....going within, going within, air conditioning clicking on and off, complete stillness. Reflecting, reflecting, processing, staggering inwardly, meditating, slowing....it...down...

Days here, now, are heat and sun blinded.

Fourth of July. How I wish you were here. Fireworks. That sums it up, about the two of us, me, and my absent shadow-twin. Thank you for downloading all of the music of Pink Floyd on my PC....how I listen to it now. My first album, bought in a giddy, I-just-got-paid-from-my-first-job-at-Victorville-McDonald's shopping spree:

Dark Side of the Moon.

Dad's headphones, the diamond-needled stereo, the 70's vintage swivel orange chair. Head back. Stoned by that music, beyond immaculate. Still. Something you and I shared. So I could be 16 again, and 47, and 25, and everything beyond, before and in between. Me and You. And the Doors. Of course. Blake, my favorite poet. How I loved turning you on, to the Gates of Heaven and Hell. The Songs of Innocence and Experience. You had a brilliant mind for knowledge and words. Break on Through. You Did.

And here I am. I broke on through. Through what, and to where? Oh, dark desert bed-room. I own a three bedroom house, and my office is the darkest room of all. Where I write, where I work, where I try to keep piles of work and poetry and writing manuscripts neat. Happy pictures of me. With Tarah. When we were so naive.

Back to our Holiday Weather. It's much cooler than it would normally be. We're at 103, instead of 113, without humidity. Still. This is our shut-in season. Where others elsewhere are coming alive, agitating about, the desert is in reverse time. Tourists are mostly gone (except for a few here to enjoy cheap, summer hotel rates at fine resorts)...the wicker blinds in my office are mostly down, and the deep blue sari I've stretched behind them keeps the sun from heating my time.

So, this summertime. In the low desert. I now have two MP3's, filled with tunes.

You can only really see and breathe and inhabit fully when the long afternoon finally smalls itself down into shadows. The mind begins to gel. So it's rather brave I'm writing this at 2:21 pm. I see that the moment I look down. And get this. That is the date of Philip's birth. He'd smile to see the synchronicity of that. We were both intensively into Jungian mythopoetics and philosophy...Ah. Now, the computer screen says 2:22. And that is the number of Phil's cemetery plot, his final resting place, at Olivewood Cemetery in Riverside. Number 222. Somehow, this is all cosmic, and this is all soothing, and this is all good. I have to brush away a few tears. Grief does not know anything familiar. Grief has its own agenda. It's my constant accomplice now, and sometimes it is benevolent and at other times it's a sword that pins me down. Today, I am glad I'm writing. Finally, after months of difficulty articulating. Who, what or where I am.

This is no coincidence, our ancestors might say.

And this is to know: that I am not in the same degree I was before. My life, my psyche, my self, are light years deeper and richer and exponentially lifted beyond anything I thought I was at the beginning of 2010. I am a Tiger. A water Tiger. and this is my year. I am also a Scorpio, and everything is amazing, deep, butterfly-dancing, migrations of old and singing of new songs. Could I call this a crossroads? Life has been a wild game of ping-pong, soccer, basketball. I soothe into rhythms that are familiar to my athletic sensibility, my poetic flow....but this is the wildest mesh of games I've ever been in. Is this a field, or is it a court? Am I on a table that's suddenly getting smashed up? Tennis is familiar, really my game, but I don't play now because, well, I bought racquets for two, and one person is gone.

This is a time to read the words of elders. To listen to wisdom. To sit deep in Palm Canyon, at water's edge. To let waterfalls curl out of tangled words. To rest in a park, in a grove of London Planetrees, studying mushrooms that have sprouted from an absent spot where a tree has died, or been taken out, and not replaced, from a perfect, linear arrangement of rare and fragile, imported sycamores. The whole story is here.

Perhaps, more accurately, I'm experiencing a great and deep and widening and narrowing circling in, circling in, rounding about, and returning to some familiar home. Same bones, different angles and curves; trails I've walked but never before knew...like this. Great triumphs and life-thrust events: Tarah's wedding, Mom & Dad's 50th anniversary, not-common family visits from those I've been close to and in many ways lost touch in life's rush: my cousin Shari and her four beautiful children who I deeply love; my cousin Beth who was/is like a sister to me (together, in San Bernardino and the desert, we grew up, until she got married at 18 and moved away...to Texas!), and her two teenage boys; and the terrible shock and sorrow of my psychic soulmate and lover and best friend Phil's suicide death in early April, in a remote area called the Badlands, which is rather invisibly lodged between Moreno Valley/Calimesa and the beautiful citrus towns of Redlands and Loma Linda. A place of ancient, old California Oak trees in tall grasses, tucked into rolling hills. A place most people have never known, or will quickly forget. But. Not Me. It's not far from a modern-day freeway rest-stop where a band of Native Americans died in the southern California smallpox epidemic of 1863 which, like all fevered epidemics, breaks forth out of sky, and soil, and breath, and rages through the softest smiles, breaking out in death, only to suddenly depart, the wounded left in shock. It may have been the infected blankets. No one has said. Few even know this happened. Somehow, I do. How it happened. Yeah. That's for the authorities. Why? Approach that one on foot, whatever you do.

"I wish my life could go back to where it was before April 9th."

That is the first thing I wrote in the now-gathering stacks of big yellow notepads where I've been journaling intensively, the moment I found out about Phil's death. In a horrible way. By calling a number on a notecard left on my door, when I arrived home from Berkeley at mid-day on April 11th - feeling sad, disappointed Phil's car was gone, and disturbed by the horrible nightmares I'd had on Friday night, and the fact that I was unable to reach him by phone - the number of the Cabazon police. Who were pretty fucking abrupt in how they told me. Why are THEY even in San Timoteo Canyon? How do they know? It had to have been an accident. It was, the dull voice on the other end told me, most certainly not. Fuck you. I may have said. Every story ends the way it is supposed to be. Except for this one.

To hear that, some stranger's voice telling me my loved one was long-dead, over the goddamned phone, and proceed to grill me like the inquisition..... instinctively, I reached for a clean yellow journal and a pen. All I could do was start writing. And then, begin to sob. And grab the phone to start making what were undoubtedly madwoman, hysterical calls. That journal, and two subsequent ones, have been through so much in the past three months I've had to duct-tape the tablets together. Phone numbers, emails for friends of Phil's who I met in the most unlikely get together of a young man's funeral, he was a widely popular guy, and his family, and the private investigator, and more. How can I keep this all straight? I'm in hypertext. Non-Linear Land. And Water. And Sky. End on End within. This is the end, my friend.

It's July 4th, and I've been floating on auto pilot for the past three months. One reading and lecture and friend outreach and event and crushing afternoon or evening and class to teach and family event to class to reading to event....for three months. And now, time has come to land. I'm landing, and I'm not sure about this at all. I want my life back. But I'm 12 weeks down the road, in this odd little, metaphorical unplanned "pregnancy" that has me in chokehold, no turning back. Certainly, some great thing will be born of this. For now, I'm carrying the baby and the bathwater, which is increasingly heavy, and warm, and isolating, and not sure how to bear this new body of mine, how to balance in heaven or on earth, where to place my feet, and what to do with my heart.

The missing plane-tree. Where I instinctively sat. And cried. It will take time for those of us remaining in the beauty of grass and trees to grow around where you are so suddenly not. For now, a few mushrooms, and butterflies, and puffs of cigarette smoke. A season of long, drawn breathing. Summer. Is Here. Like it or not. The colors, the raging light. Mixed in with the pulling in. To avoid Heatstroke. The soothing, quiet beauty of desert summer nights, the deep end of the pool.

I am still here....

2010-06-25T21:50:00.000-07:00

A near two-month hiatus from blog writing....

I just wanted to let everyone know I'm winding my way down from a very intensive past several months...a blur and whirl of teaching, lecturing, unbelievable, surrealistic and life-warping tragedy, deeper sorrow than I've ever known, the richest rewards, internal synergies, incredible gifts of reading and speaking with top notch writers, opportunities and joys of the reading moment that are among the most tangible word leaps and spirit connecting and "success" than I ever could have expected or believe I'd ever witness, sweeter memory than I've ever touched, sharper loneliness than I've ever felt, work-shopping, greater gifts than I've ever unboxed, morphing and mingling with groups and individuals of amazing people....from Mapping the Desert to my friend the Marine, from cousin upon cousin visiting from Oklahoma and Texas to student poets and artists at C.O.D.....

connecting the dots from one amazing, uplifting, transformational poetry reading to the next, going to a music rave in Joshua Tree, collaborating on several writing projects, publishing an e-zine, returning to supermom status (Tarah and Alex have moved in with me, sign of the cross,) spending time with more family in the past month than in the past several years, and healing, healing, healing, transforming....tragedy into beauty, life into poemas, heart-shock to memory, and my storied landscape into innovative reality...I am beyond honored that people follow and lead me, time weave through and beyond hugs and words....o, life tapestry...

More than anything, I've been carrying giant yellow notepads for the past several months, writing and writing and writing everything I can: every feeling, every dream, every grief, small joy, private 107 degree afternoon gut sobbing sessions, snuggling up against the random facebook IM session here and there (several who do so much to comfort and support me,) friend outreaches, gentle lentil soup making even without appetite, my big dog approaching me when I crumple on tile floor to show me the love, for every person who saddens me by not making that call, I embrace midnight nude full moon pool swims and sweet mountain waterfall, sage collecting, and wildflower embracing....I'm grateful to be surrounded and immersed in so much love. Year of the Tiger, 2010, and I'm a water tiger.

Keeping my head just above surface line. Immersing, full body and head, and emerging occasionally to remember, I am real. Sometimes. Summer, end-June, and finally finally time to reflect, go within. 2morrow I board a flight for Ashland, Oregon. Peace and pine trees, my first time there. Kiss touch, my loved one. You are and were for real. As I brace for flight and then, the calm of air soaring....above clouds...touchscreen, get a new i-pad, and magick memory and love into i-touch. i-hug. you. Remember. My name is Love.

Badlands

2010-06-25T21:48:00.000-07:00

Badlands

Here,
The pretty hills
The pretty hills

I see people circling on freeways,
the circling
of red tailed hawks above
ancestral Cahuilla land
in Redlands, Box Springs Mountains,
at the Santa Ana River
close to downtown Riverside
with its Mission Inn,
realize there were no Mission Indians,
only slaves,
now the old asistencia on Barton Road
sits by Loma Linda hospital behavioral center
and the monument of de Anza
adjacent to the river,
stippled with graffitti, urine, blood

so I begin to live in circles,
repeating the same affirmations
listening to NASA voyager recordings
of outer space over and over again
making the rounds from Palm Desert
past Chino Canyon, where all of
creation was begun
through the shouldered gap
of San Gorgonio Pass
through Badlands, Riverside, Redlands
the I-10 to the 60 to the 91 south,
and looping back,
passing Mary Jane Cemetery

and back home,
after easing downhill
through the windmill farms
I see open space
where once there was a tree, views
of the little San Bernardino mountains
a bit more breeze
and I want to photograph the absence,
frame it with memory, now I can see
familiar patterns of stars,
a better view of passing satellites
tracing their faithful circumference
around the earth faster than planets do

The pretty hills
The pretty hills

it will give me hope, I hope
I hope I hope I hope
that things really are connected,
better this than the whip of thorned
cactus stinging me in the face
every time I stepped into the front yard,
the sad fact of a bird's nest tossed
onto the ground by a blast of wind,
the hooks of religions that rope us in,
the dams that block us all,
the demon intaglios can't be pulled
to the sea on the Colorado River
anymore from the tops of canyon walls
the water is re-assigned
before it reaches the sea,

tell me there is no obsessive
compulsive disorder here,
just a smooth meditation
of people walking the same
pilgrimages, embellishing here,
pruning here, entirely colonizing
over there, new volunteers,
a deeper groove in the old flood
channels each time the heavy
rains push water over the top,
magical strata revealed in rock,
unimagined layers of sand
richer in color and theme
the same stories played out over
and over again, circularly

Red tailed hawk
The pretty hills
The pretty hills

Morning, 11 a.m.

by Ruth Nolan
copyright (c) 2010 Ruth Nolan
Ruth Nolan, June 25, 2010

called out of darkness

2010-04-28T13:41:00.000-07:00

Yes, the angel thing. I am definitely transpired by angels just about now. They are finding me, lifting me gently and surprisingly and without expectation or payment through the upside down skyfall that has become my life. "Called out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession" by Anne Rice. Staring at me from my office desk. Lots of white. Tonight I've been invited to read poetry at Space 120 bar/art center in Palm Springs. Tomorrow I've been invited to help put together "The Common Good" e-zine with College of the Desert students, then on to my Inlandia Writers workshop. Saturday I'm teaching a poetry of place workshop at Mt. San Antonio College. Sunday I'll be part of a collaborative desert writing/arts activity. I'm sending the last of the pages for the COD Solstice lit-mag, 2009-10, to the printer in San Diego. My friend Reggie, artistic director at UCR-CMP museum of photography, calls me just to say hi. Little things keep me moving along and busy.

Less than a month ago, I attended an event - with Philip - at UCR-Palm Desert, featuring the vampire-turned-angel author Anne Rice. I seem to have been having an interesting synchronicity with Anne Rice in recent months. I've never read her books. I am not a vampire fan. Not even close. I know she's a major author, and from picking up a copy of her newest book in which she examines the roots and basis and memories and continuation of her early Catholic faith. Like me, she was imbedded in Catholic ceremony and rhetoric, a hushed and gothic thing across the years and locations. Me, in humble and eerie, palm-tree-santa-ana-wind laced, mysterious downtown San Bernardino where as a little girl I was pushed into a dark confessional booth in an empty church, lit only by the votive candles flickering beneath a statue of the Virgin Mary with the baby Christ. I could hear the tall palms scratching the church's brick spyres, a rather old building for a very new, Inland Empire settlement. Overlaced atop an old cienega, a murky, lowland swamp. Near the present day Central City Mall. I know now that a Serrano Indian massacre took place there, and Mormons from Utah tried to claim it, but returned home when recalled by their prophet after a few short years. Willie Boy was held in the jail there one time, and the area is now one of the highest per-capita crime city districts in the country.

Anne Rice lives in Rancho Mirage now, not far from me, having re-located after the Hurricane Katrina armaggedon in New Orleans and the death of her poet-husband Stan Rice. I've met her cool and talented son Christopher at the Palm Springs Book Fest in recent years, chatted him up and looking forward to reading his newest book. The desert book came out in November. I learned that after our first reading/event in downtown Riverside in early December, Anne Rice had just been signing her new book at the Mission Inn next door. And when I went to sign copies of Puritan @ the Palm Desert Barnes and Noble shortly after that, the sales clerk told me Anne Rice had just been there signing books the day before; he'd displayed my book next to hers - prime real-estate, he smiled - and he gave me the last copy the store had of her handsomely-bound Vampire Chronicles Trilogy, signed. As a gift. I hadn't even asked for it.

I read in the Inland Empire Weekly that Anne Rice had done most of the writing for her memoir at the Mission in, during 2007-2008...even more interesting because that was the precise time that the Inlandia anthology came out, and that I began to do some serious hanging out and hanging in with the poetry scene in downtown Riverside at Jeff's apartment and Back to the Grind and Wednesday night poetry with my friend Joel Lamore's group. Sitting in the apartment, studying the moroccan-era spires of the Riverside Art Museum, Congregational Church, and other stunning, late 19th-early 20th century landmark buildings of the former Citrus Capital of the west, and jewel of southern California, in this downtown district of Riverside, California, next to the glorious Mission Inn, which stands to this day in priceless, antique-and-history-filled homage to an era gone by, and a new era unfolding. Yes, that's right. Anne Rice had picked up the energy, or perhaps imported it, and wrote most of her novel during extensive stays at the Mission Inn, and there I was, floating around next door, doing my things, connecting, breaking out in my own little Inland Empire gothic swirl of a poetry and writing scene. Meeting so many cool people and connecting to community which has continued to proliferate in my divided-between-the-desert-and-I.E.-life to this day.

For more than three years, it's been a back and forth life, that hour drive from one of the most intensive, stunning deserts in the world, into a supremely windy pass and a wall of blowing sand, through a windmill farm, past a canyon raging with Whitewater, past a huge, multi-storied casino on the Morongo Indian Reservation, through a gentle pass where snow often falls in winter, and rain much more often, then a thrilling mountain ride on a narrow road through the sharp and dangerous Badlands, and soothing out into the former Mexican rancheria of Moreno Valley, past Box Springs and Cahuilla Mountain, and into the valley of Riverside, nurtured by the oft-overlooked Santa Ana River. De Anza's little road. Wow. And Mike calls me late at night while I talk on and on in nonsense rhyhmes. Wendy calls to check on me. Day by day, friend after friend reaches out to me. What did I do to deserve this? Breaking the silence of desert homesteading. And Lindsey, Cahuilla Indian who's in my writing class, gives me a beautiful, huge braid of sweetgrass to burn, and a burden basket to hang above my front door, that she just picked up at the Albuquerque Powwow of the Nations last week. I'm incredibly blessed, to be touched by such beauties and gestures in such a time as this, and I'm floored. No words.

And so, the Anne Rice symphony plays in my mind, a thread, a direction, an inspiration beyong my own imaginings. Her book, about finding and reconfirming faith, and moving from vampires to angels. Transforming her fascination with otherworldly dimensions and energies that guide us with unseen hands, from darkness into the light. And I write about this not to be a name dropper, because as I said I haven't read her vampire books. But I am inspired by her meditation on the power of angels and the power of angels in my life in recent months and recent weeks. A music unheard but felt. A confession I no longer need to make, because I've not shame, not sinned, and not as alone carrying such burdens as I once thought I was. And I can put the heavy rocks down and I can sit on a 1950's era postmodern-architecture lawn chair I found at an abandoned house long ago, at 1 a.m., and fall into the lullaby of the hypnotic, full moon. Blazing its way through yet another stunning night-cloud. My feet resting and safe on the level and clean cement around the pool. Moon in the water. The way I like.

Driving to Palm Springs yesterday. I live in a free float fog now. Alone in the house and with my cell phone by my head as I sleep. It's not easy to sleep even when I'm beyond exhausted, as I was last night. I bury my face in Phil's clothes sometimes. I talk to him out loud, most pointedly to ask questions. I almost....see him sitting in the rocking chair in my room, one of his favorite hangs. I touch the last of the avocados that he bought on his last trip to Clark's organic store. It's very ripe now and must be eaten soon or become inedible. Will do. Days don't have much structure. I exist from point to point. I have a full schedule that pleases me. The culmination of my years as a teacher, professor, and more recently, book editor and writer and lecturer and photographer and artistic collaborator and so forth. It's a different story every day, which is both fun and also at times exasperating and imbalancing. So I write something new and make up a new act each day for the scenes that continue to unfold.

Like wings. Sky transformation. Yesterday the weather shift. I had to get up early and was surprised by a phone call from Eduardo, artist-poet-organizer extraordinaire, a COD student. Inviting me to come the the campus FAME club meeting. Yes, I will and did. A wonderful Eng 1A class at 12:30, discussing symbolism in Silko's novel "Ceremony," and enjoying so much that the students were really understanding the importance of the novel on a personal, individual level. Then off to give a lecture on the desert book at Palm Springs Library. Wind had become loud. Freeway driving, the usual blowing around. Down Sunrise, into calm, and meeting my friend Julie Warren, the activities director at the library. A wonderful talk, sold books, met nice people, and was so heartened to see friends Lee Balan, one-of-a-kind artiste and poet/writer, and Phil Polazzo, cool hippy-generation author of the fantastic novel Hunga Dunga. Four of my creative writing students also came, and we met on the grass outside afterwards, watching an incredible, powerful comet/tornado/spinning top cloud in the sky....talking of how this was a spirit thing, that it seemed like a person looking down. I had thought the same thing earlier when spotting magnificent wing-shapes in the late afternoon cloud formations while driving to Palm Springs. Philip, shielding and carrying me along from one point to the next, which is about how I am living my days and nights right now.

I live for the wing brushes touching down on my from all directions now, unexpectedly. Angels are looking out for me and I don't know from where they come or why I deserve, but here they are. Tarah comes over Monday night, gives me extra hugs, hangs out with me, just because she wants to. We revive our always super-close mother/daughter bonds. My friend Susanne in Las Vegas sends a beautiful card of a sand dune to express her condolences and give me hugs. Cyrus calls on and off from Ashland and we delve into literary sub-topics and discuss my latest lectures and talks, his work as an audio-book producer at Blackstone Audio. My brothers Pat and Jerry, just returned from a weekend in Death Valley, post one incredible black/white sand dune picture after another on facebook. Another parallel synchronicity. I was just there a few weeks ago with Phil, in another big windstorm and spring storm, and we also took photos at Zabriskie Point and the San Dunes. The flowers were just starting to come out. I drove south, studying the ancient river channel that flows south, or should I say north: the mysterious, snake-shaped Amargosa River, flowing southward through a valley east of Death Valley...then looping back in a long arc to join Death Valley in its southernmost wedge, 100 miles south.

And I should add, that for the Timbisha Shoshone, whose homeland this has long been: this it Tuppuuh. A place of life. Of rebirth. Of the center of all creation and sustainability. The circle traces without breaking, through canyons and sand to join itself again. Like an angel, picking up the broken-winged. Shape-shifting through the sky on its own whim. Surrender to this, on your knees. Hummingbirds in the garden, a few dog bones for the dogs, the wind picks up suddenly here this afternoon, I sweep thorns from the drive. Pick plastic bottles from the pool. Sweep the dirt Shasta dug out of the garden last night back into place. Red ocotillo flowers peer at me. Sunflowers are so wise. And the orange poppies have landed in my yard too. They won't last long.

(photo by Lee Balan - taken in the sky above Palm Springs, 4.27.10)

Poetry Reading Palm Springs Weds 4.28

2010-04-27T16:08:00.000-07:00

I'll be there along with the local Global Alchemy poetry/art members....reading poetry. Show starts @ 9 PM must be 21+. Space 120 in Palm Springs.

It's My Dad's Birthday

2010-04-26T19:25:00.001-07:00

My therapist told me during our phone session last Friday that I should find the biggest rock I can find, and carry that around with me when I feel the burden of Phil's disappearance/abandonment/death/the whole thing, whatever you want to call it...and then set it down. An ancient ritual for those in mourning - to personify and articulate and validate the weight of such a thing....and the relief, inevitable, of setting the heavy rock down. So far, I only have a few big chunks of crystal that Phil had found on some of our recent desert hikes. They're not even close to heavy enough. They're too pretty, too white. I need a jag of concrete, I think, something uneven and ugly and brutalized. That or an elegant seashell.

Lots of coffee. lots of it, this morning and continuing until now. My mind must, must, must sharpen so I can sluice through my impressive workload today, tomorrow, for the next days on end through, pretty much, the end of May. Book presentations and signings, Palm Springs Library tomorrow night - poetry reading with Global Alchemy friends that I'll be at Weds night, also in Palm Springs, at a bar, Space 120(beer, glorious beer), Inlandia Writers Workshop in Riverside Thursday night, Mt. San Antonio College writer's conference on Saturday morning - I'm teaching a poetry of place workshop - and back to Riverside on Sunday for what will be a very cool desert writing workshop - I'm partaking - with multimedia artists and UCR MFA students, sponsored by the UCR CA Museum of Photography and the Sweeney Art Museum.
Diet coke and poring through bills, too. I was numb at the LA Times Bookfest last Saturday...signing books and chatting people up, an old friend from BLM firefighting days looked me up, that was great...was I even there.

How can this house weigh so much. Over 100 degrees today. I rode my bike in the mid-day noon for half an hour. My body feels like it's hauled firehose over a series of 12,000 foot passes in the high Sierras. Sucking on low oxygen altitudes. Chilled by snow, melted by high thin sun. Except there's no fun backpacking adventure in this one. I'm a beast of burden. The walls and windows close in with this kind of heat. Phil ditched out of the rocket ride right before summer cinched its tight belt around me. It was spring and flowers were alive. Now it's summer and it's only going to get hotter day by day, month by month until deep into 2010 fall. Anticipating fall. How much more of this can I go? I was burned out a year ago. Thought I had returned. It will be a rough fire season, I can tell. The tall weeds, mega-rain, are already brown and will burn too well. Again.

Mom comes by mid-afternoon. I'm staring at piles of bills. I'm struggling to get files for Solstice lit-mag to the printer so that the COD lit-mag can be printed up in time for a big event on campus for contributors on May 11th. I got it done. I need to email my creative writing students. I need to post new forum threads for English 1A classes online. They're writing a lit analysis of symbolism in Leslie Marmon Silko's novel, Ceremony. I was unable to teach the book last week - catching myself too imbedded and stung and impotent in the sickening irony of....a novel of a post-modern-era young man struggling with identity, mental illness, and inability to get his life together, suicidal. I told my students. This hits too close to home. The novel has a beautiful, healing motion to it. My life goes the other, wrong direction on this one, strange dry wash discourse, datcourse, not a course but is. Stay away for now.

Mom leaves. It's Dad's birthday. He cancelled our planned dinner at the Esmerelda Resort in Indian Wells tonight because they're getting ready to go to San Francisco for a brief getaway very early tomorrow morning. So I email him. Happy Birthday Dad. Have fun. I tell Dad in an email that I love him. I love you, Phil said. I really, really love you. He told me. A few days earlier. Hugged me extra long. We ARE going to be together, always. I see now. He was actually saying goodbye. How can a day, before the day, make so much sense, but only in retrospect. He knew that my #1 hangup in life was fear of abandonment. And he left. Imagine that. Is it possible to feel so left behind by someone 25 years old? Who I met and knew for the past three years...go ahead and tell me I lost my head. Yeah, and I'll say we just saw Alice In Wonderland after a hike to Tahquitz Waterfall, dinner at Native Foods. And it was good. Beheadings befell. And there was us two, digging the show. Caterpillar. Butterfly. I want only to sit him down and ask questions and get answers that aren't zen koans, impossible riddles that may or may not lead me to enlightenment. Cupid, you weren't in the movie. What sucker punch did you blow.

Simplify. I have zero capacity to cook anything beyond toast - which I did last night, eating the last of a loaf of La Brea Bakery sourdough, with avocado - I order a Z-Pizza, to be delivered. Last time I had Z-Pizza, just a few weeks ago, Phil did the ordering. Our usual, organic vegetarian, well-done. Like he did for most things domestic. Going to Trader Joe's last week for food - only when I was at less than zero for groceries - destroyed me. I even asked the cashier if I could get a blue balloon to take home. I ignored her questioning eyebrows. Clearly I had no small child with me. Only the one inside me: lost, sad, and unable to cry aloud in public, not quite able to be soothed by carrying around a blue balloon - biodegradable I'm happy to say - and it's still got air, smaller now, and perched on my kitchen counter. I ended up buying Phil treats: a box of cookies, and his own dark chocolate bar. One for each of us. We did things like that for each other. His cookies and mine. His candy and mine. And sharing.

What is it about the food thing, going to the store? I almost lost it in Albertson's yesterday.....when I saw his favorite chocolate chip cookies by the cash register. When I saw the cases of Fat Tire and Red Stripe beer in the cold case. Even buying beer right now feels stale and old. I can barely eat, let alone drink anything. Except for water. And I take two iron pills today, finally, doctor's orders, I'm anemic as hell. She told me, and that was weeks ago. I kind of forgot. Could be adding to my extreme, mono-like fatigue. I stare out the window. Watermarks. Desolation. Am I even here?

Now Tarah is here. She calls and comes over. After work. I'm now in my home office, staring at the computer monitor, wondering how to even begin to scroll through the formidable backlog of emails from recent weeks (nevermind the many, many phone calls I am obliged to return, both professional and personal). I'm starting at the monitor,staring out the window at hot, empty, late day desert space. Nothing has moved since noon. Frozen would be an apt adjective, yet ice can only melt here. Faster than you can keep it cold. The way a life can expire in a fractioned second, a bullet shell too fast for the hole. That was and is and grows larger with the pondering.

Tarah. Full of life and love. She brings a huge dish of pasta with four cheeses from Olive Garden, leftover from a drug-company rep who delivered the food to Dr. Younis's office today; it went mostly uneaten. I tell Tarah not to quit her job just yet. She gets incredible perks, working in a posh private practice here. You wouldn't get that anywhere else. The pasta goes well with the pizza. Perfect timing. Ice coffee now. A short break from an endless day, as I try to get as much done as possible tonight in this groundswell. Candle lit in the bedroom on a small pile of rocks. Wearing the hand acupressure t-shirt he gave me just a few weeks ago. It's soft and warm and it's better than anything else I can think of to wear right now. Last night I lay in bed, my mind just reeling: Phil isn't here. Phil is dead. How can that be? It just doesn't want to click. Let alone make sense.

Time to water the orange trees. The garden, with its lettuce heads and carrot tops and reach for the sky yellow flowers already taller than the wall separating me from neighbors next door and the swamp cooler sticking out of the wall that actually has weeds growing on it. I don't think I should tell them about it. The plants I tendered only a few weeks ago, tiny things burst into sturdiness, outlasting my care. All they need is water. The heat begs their thirst, and the tiny budded green fruits on the citrus trees are ready to grow. What bees made thee? A William Blake sort of thing. Ahhh, Sunflower.

They won't be ripe for many months, till next January. Good to see that the flower made it through to baby fruit. I will nurture them well, never mind what outcome it may bring. Water is good. I will be generous with my love, as always, and again, even if with my beautiful, concerned daughter who comes by to stir mom from her cement brick load walking for a short spell, to bring food, and wine, and hugs, and conversation and even a few jokes along with her. Like the shriveling blue balloon, I know I can still let go of this wrist-rope, and float for awhile. But not entirely away. I'm thinking Hamlet now, my favorite Shakespeare play to teach, (love the Ethan Hawke/Julia Stiles film version) and wondering about those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Nobler of mind, tonight.

Ten Days Ago

2010-04-19T21:06:00.001-07:00

it's been ten days since you killed yourself
in the hills behind San Timoteo Canyon
the private investigator calls me to ask questions
the sky is a pale easter egg blue, April, I say: it's
summer overnight. Warm wind stings my eyes, the air
filled with short lived flower smells, I can't tell
what color, the color of you, I guess. These things
should grow on their own, their story shouldn't
burst through me to be told, I am compelled.
I shop alone at Trader Joe's for the first time
in months, almost incapacitated as I choose avocados,
buy hemp granola - our favorite stuff - and
wander through the aisles, suprised by bustling life.
I even ask the cashier if she'll cut a blue,
biodegradable balloon for me, as she just has
for a little girl leaping out of her mother's arms.
I water the garden, contemplate pulling lettuce.
Ten days later, I hang a redwood calendar in the
empty room where you sometimes slept. This isn't
very profound but it takes a lot of courage to
share grief when all around me the prettiest spring
we've seen in years knocks me to the ground, others
I feel sure, would not want to know the deep truths
that water me, too much to ask, no one knows why.
Ten days ago, I touched you last, and I look for
strands of reddish-blonde hair in the bed, your pillow
touches mine. And I managed to throw out the rest of
the food that you bought eleven days ago, what's left
is no longer good, and I couldn't cry today. Something
about passing the single digits, this things is two
handed now, going on to feet and the trail dead ends
the balloon string is still tied around my wrist to
keep me near the ground, is this what you wanted to know?

Cosmic Ruth and Phil

2010-04-17T09:24:00.001-07:00

What can I say. Philip Andrew Helland, February 21, 1985 - April 9, 2010. AK to me and his friends as Phil Phonics, Lightbeam, Homie. And me. Red Arrow Gallery in Joshua Tree, March 26, 2010, drinking red wine, having fun at a poetry reading/art event, mingling with friends, Phil was stoked to meet a famous alchemist and founder of the LA Free Press, who now lives in the small town of Joshua Tree and just walked into the reading. And here it is. You can't always live up to your truth. Sometimes the best thing to do is to write your truth. Write all the way through it, falling star wish sky streak. Do it brilliantly with colors and do it well. And here it is.

The poppies, exploding orange on the Mojave Desert far below the airplane, just last Friday morning, a few hours before Philip took his life. On my way to give a presentation for No Place for a Puritan at the Western Wilderness Conference at UC Berkeley. I had been reluctant to leave. Phil hadn't been feeling well, said he had a virus or something, had been resting a lot on Thursday. I gave him a last kiss and hug and told him to take care that morning, told him to sleep in, I'd call him that night to check in. He said okay, and told me to do a great job at this prestigious and important conference, where I'd be meeting all kinds of famous environmental writers and movers and shakers, northern California style, the chance to bring the desert, the desert consciousness, to those who live in the green. Stuff Phil loved too. We'd talked endlessly about our summer plans, once the semester was/is finished at College of the Desert (where I teach), going to northern California and Oregon to check out organic farms and communities, visiting friends, networking, living green away from the weight of the summer heat soon to be upon us here.

I was astounded and moved beyond words and tones by the sudden rush of orange, near Palmdale, suddenly soothing my view of the wounds of the glaring, white hot dry lakebed I'd been absently staring at, Rosamond Dry Lake. And the poppy fields. What I knew. My immediate thought was to call Phil that afternoon and tell him we'd be going there to roll in the orange shouldered hills first thing on Monday. He'd love that, so would I. That, and the hike high above Whitewater Canyon, I couldn't wait to take him there, too, and he knew it. My phone calls that night went unanswered, and I felt uneasy. I had the worst dreams of my night that life, somehow I knew he had left me, but it didn't make sense at all. It was entirely out of synch, a rhythm gone wrong, a plane dropped out of the sky for no reason, poppies exploding more vividly in my head to take up the slack. Before I know.

Phil. My cosmic soulmate. Bringer of life, inspiration, companionship, frustrations, deeper, shared joys than I've experienced in my life. He was of so many worlds. We'd wake up in the mornings and say "homie hug," and eat organic cereal and hang out, reading vast and varied volumes of literature, go on long bike rides, take weekend adventure-trips all the time: Warner's Hot Springs, Indian Village sites in the Anza Borrego Desert, Tahquitz Canyon, Tecopa Hot Springs, hikes in the desert, hikes in the mountains, a shared spirit beyond words. A world of poppy surprises and psychedelic colors and Be Here Now and Bliss Now and deep, deep friendship. Phil was phenomenal and he had a brilliant mind, light years ahead of his years in earthly age. We had amazing intellectual discussions and also tons of fun.

He plowed through my extensive book collection, and was reading, at the time of his death, and simultanously, like I do, books by Jung, Schopenhauer, Huxley, Native American mythologies, books on medicine and alternative healing and cosmic consciousness, sociology books on globalization, poetry, and much, much more. We saw Avatar, we saw Alice in Wonderland, we saw Borat, we saw foreign films and documentaries on 2012 and sophisticated intellectual movies, too. We did it all. As much as any two friends could. All of the movies were his ideas, he hand picked them out. My netflix order list has about 200 movies ready to go, that he already pre-selected. He coordinated our weekend trips and hikes, too. He did the shopping. He ran the errands. He gave hug after hug after hug. He was my rock. He was a talented singer, musician, speaker, thinker, human being.

The yellow brittlebush soothing me as I drove through the hills Phil grew up with near Moreno Valley, knew intimately, and loved, as I did with my own desert mountains in Apple Valley. The Box Springs Mountains, filled with huge rocks and hidden springs. Yesterday, driving to his funeral and final resting place overlooking Lion Head Hill. I can imagine him directing his mother and brothers to select that spot, where into eternity he can look at the rocks, and the hawks circling over, and imagine himself at the top, getting the cosmic view of all that was around. Phil lived at the pulsing center of so many people, so many things, so many interests and talents, and so much like me, kept it together for everyone else, on a friendship level and artistically and poetically. Connecting the dots and harmonizing the blend: that was and is me, that was and is him. He inspired me, he healed me, he knew me inside and out. As I did him.

I could feel Phil comforting me with a nature hug, yesterday, and it made me cry. The narrow road through the hills. So close to the major freeways, the merge of 60 and 91 and 215, pulsing with traffic, thousands of people pouring through rushing here and there. And just to one side, behind one small hill, another world. A world of me and Phil. Yellow flowers, purple flowers, it's a beautiful spring, we had so much rain, and the light was hawk light, it was lion light, it was a walk in beauty. Phil and I walked in beauty. It was our habit, it was our life, it was our thing. Today a volcano explodes out of its frozen respite in Iceland. Planes are grounded. Ash is falling from the sky, flooding the face of land. Forever altering the familiarity of earthly things. Opening new corridors of the human soul. Like a lightbeam. Like Phil. The force of this volcano grounds planes continents away, and decides when they will fly. Like Phil. And maybe leave jet flame trails across the darkest skies, as Phil did, Phil does, Phil will continue to do.

Joshua Tree Writing Workshop, Reading, Film Event!

2010-04-08T21:56:00.000-07:00

Saturday, April 17, 2010
Focus on Joshua Tree:
Desert Writing Workshop, Author Reading,
& Joshua Tree Film/Photography
Twentynine Palms Inn, 29 Palms, CA www.29palmsinn.com
FREE! OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!

4:00-6:00 p.m. DESERT WRITING WORKSHOP
Led by Ruth Nolan, M.A., Professor, College of the Desert
Join us for a desert-focused writing workshop focusing on composing poetry and prose by interacting with our desert surroundings and engaging the senses and creative spirit to capture the power of place in this unique setting.

6:30-8:30 p.m. DESERT AUTHORS READING:
DEANNE STILLMAN and RUTH NOLAN
• Deanne Stillman, “Rolling Stone Magazine” journalist and award-winning author of Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West, the bestseller Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave,” and Joshua Tree: Desolation Tango.

• Ruth Nolan, editor of No Place for a Puritan: the literature of California’s deserts and author of Wild Wash Road and Dry Waterfall.

• Escape to Reality: 24 hrs @ 24 fps: Joshua Tree Film and
Photography screening: desert photographs taken during the 2008 and 2009 UCR-California Museum of Photography Joshua Tree National Park UCR-California Museum of Photography.

For more information on the April 17 workshop/reading/film screening at 29 Palms Inn: runolan@aol.com (760) 964-9767

All events are presented in conjunction with the UCR- Museum of Photography Joshua Tree Photo Shoot 2010: Flash Flood: a three-day interactive photo/writing event in/around Joshua Tree National Park April 17-19, 2010. Sponsored by Sweeney Art Gallery, UCRiverside, UCR CA Museum of Photography, the Inlandia Institute, College of the Desert Solstice Poets/Writer. Thanks to the 29 Palms Inn!

Palm Springs Life Magazine - Feb 2010

2010-03-02T11:37:00.000-08:00

PSST! - Word Association - February 2010

"No Place For A Puritan" - Desert poems, stories, and essays.

No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California’s Deserts (Heyday Institute) demonstrates the danger, refuse, and lure of the desert in a collection of poems, stories, and essays by more than 80 writers. The anthology was edited by Ruth Nolan, a former Bureau of Land Management firefighter, an associate professor of English at College of the Desert, and a Palm Desert citizen.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This article appears in the February 2010 issue of Palm Springs Life

Did you like what you read here? Subscribe to Palm Springs Life!
Where glamour and glitter, famous and pedestrian, meet! Chaucer would've loved it. Bring all to the table with yr stories high and low, regal and vulgar, in the name of the future Shakespeare, or was that Marlowe?

Midwest Book Review...two thumbs up!

2010-03-01T00:02:00.000-08:00

amazon.com book review....exciting!

An excellent read, February 15, 2010
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)http://www.midwestbookreview.com/

The desert, barren, devoid of life, but home to some great stories. "No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts" is a collection of literature in many different formats. From excepts from novels to poetry, to short fiction and more, Ruth Nolan compiles quite the read for any who doubt the power of the desert, invoked for its mysteriousness, its hopelessness, its remoteness, and so much more. "No Place for a Puritan" is an excellent read for those who doubt the literary inspiration that is the deserts of California.

--thanks--!!

Reflections on a Wintry Storm

2010-02-27T21:47:00.000-08:00

It doesn't feel like the desert. I was out this evening, getting take-out from Panda Express - mixed vegetables, noodles, and some kind of firey chicken dish, and somehow I ended up with three eggrolls - two veggie and one chicken - and I admit that I took a total of eight pairs of chopsticks in different colored packs. I have been dieting lately, living on pots of lentils and rice, on blueberries and nuts, and, well, chopsticks just work better with that and in this part of town (the entire region, I daresay) I can't think of a single place to buy chopsticks legitimately. Ah, it's just light pieces of bamboo, and very "go green" and low carbon-footprint, as well. Cheaper than running the dishwasher with a full rack of knives and forks. So there. And my headlights flashed, as I pulled into a parking spot, on the white contact lenses of a dark figure in a black hoody, waiting for the bus. Nouveau vampire, I suppose, in the town of the bourgeoise and very few in betweens. My friend, who's gone along for the ride with me, says, "don't look at that guy. Don't act scared." I laugh. I'm not. Either.

Dark night. Too cold, too damp. Wet streets. It doesn't feel like what should already be well into our desert winter "spring." Our sense of spring usually begins in late January, and by late February, flowers are starting to singe, days are creeping towards 90 degrees, and nights are fragrant with orange blossoms and a warm, dry balm. The big, 10-day-long Indian Wells tennis tournament, just a mile or two from my house and an early leg of the international tennis tour that leads to Forest Lawn and Wimbledon, is ready to go. That, along with things like the Bob Hope Golf Classic at PGA West, minus Mr. Woods this year, are our sort of local versions of the Olympics. I catch a real chill while pumping gas, a damp, cold, mountain wind heavy with moisture and the smell of nearby snow. A maroon Rolls Royce pulls in beside me while my friend runs into the mini mart to get dark chocolate Raisinettes. My 2005 Toyota Rav-4, flush with 105,000 miles and lots of off-roading experience, desperately needs to be cleaned. I emptied the trash earlier today, but there is a gob of melted chocolate on one of the rugs, and chunks of dirt from one of my many recent hikes on the floor. Time. I'm still looking for my 1099-R tax form for the 403(b) lump sum distribution I took out a few months ago (long story you don't want to hear) so I can get my 2009 tax return back, and it's a minor miracle that my fridge is clean but I still haven't written a new poem in days, or is it months?

And so in this odd dislocate, when I'm actually thinking of using the fireplace again, a night when the dogs will pretend to be invisible so I don't put them outside, I glue myself to the computer. To watch CNN news and youtube and weather channel videos and stories on the freaky spate of earthquakes and tsunamis and snowmaggedons that continue to plague. Mudslide on a Portugese Island, snow in San Antonio. First 8.8 earthquake in my lifetime, first all-California-coast tsunami warnings, 2 feet of snow smothering New York City. I've done a lot of starting at the computer screen in the last few days, on a sort of anticlimactic fatigue low. I took a day off work this past week and slept. Today, I was due at a poetry festival in North Hollywood, but woke up to rain and instantly fell back asleep until noon.

And I found myself almost malfunctioning while teaching Thursday's English 1A. Vaguely wandering into an adjacent classroom to find an erasable marker to write on the board with while my students wrote sample thesis statements and topic sentences for essay #1: argue for or against the good of the Internet. The other teacher....we exchange names..."oh, YOU're Ruth Nolan, with that new book, right? I've heard about you...." I promise to bring him one, he's a new adjunct recently graduated from the UCR MFA program. Of course this feels good! I realize I've been talking to him for five minutes, and roam back into my class and my students are laughing good naturedly at my obvious....spaciness. We're on good terms, me and them, fortunately, they know I am funny, as in entertaining in my teaching in a good way, I'm always getting them to laugh, so this is part of the program...right? The blissful way to higher education. Always.

So I, using youtube to find commercials to help my students identify the various persuasive appeals to teach them how this argument stuff works. How manipulated most of them have been, by our one-two visual-sales pitch punch since the day they were born. Or maybe the day after. ME, the no-TV-in-my-home defender since the day I left my parents' home at 17, am formally....addicted? Consumed by? Dependent on? All of the above? On my Internet connection. I may be a tragedy junkie, tears coming to me as I view scenes from Chile - and think back on those from Haiti posted just weeks ago - and shudder to hear the tsunami sirens in Hawaii, where I visited a month and a half ago. Or I may just be human, concerned about the tragedies occurring in the world, just like I am so deeply affected by my college students' plights, with our school a budget-hungry mess and none of us knowing where the cuts are going to bite in more deep than they already have, who is going to steer this storm-pitched boat across the moody and imposing sea to the next uknown shore. Navigating without the technologies we've always know, or the cash.

It's been a whirlwind past few months. For me personally, for those around me, for the world, as we all know. My book launch, several launches, that is: at the Riverside library on December 5th - UCR-Palm Desert on January 29th - again at the Riverside library on a warm February 13 for UCR Writers Week - and the talk I gave for our College of the Desert campus recently, to which only three people came, one of them my loyal and good friend Jean Waggoner, who I've taught with for the past ten years. Mind pinioned with the weight of trying to live up to the book's scope and delivery: upcoming lectures at the La Quinta, Corona, and Palm Springs libraries, as well as a slot on a panel of writers and my friend and mentor Malcolm, who's moderating, at the upcoming Western Wilderness Conference 2010 in Berkeley. Papers I need to fill out for that. Exciting news from Heyday that the California Voices reading with me and two famous authors is a "go" for this May - and that little voice in my head, how did I get to this? Can I step into these new shoes? Or should I run for the open desert with my North Face two person backpacking tent, a few gallons of water, and my boots, and disappear until I can breathe again?

Back to the stuff that seems more within my "normal" realm. Scraping together a few readers and workshop leaders for the 2010 brand new Joshua Tree Writers workshop, which I'm coordinating for the UCR CA Museum of Photography photo shoot, Dry Waterfall, (I think that's the correct name) this April. Need to return a phone call to my friend Susan Sorrells in Shoshone, CA to coordinate books sales at the Shoshone Museum, where she's the curator. And so on. A mixed miasma of weather, new patterns, and the ups and downs, I'm learning, of my pursuit of the fulltime writers life. One day I'm featured in the press, and the next I'm cuddled on the couch at home with the dogs, wondering if I should buy new straps and take my canoe down to the Salton Sea, go snowshoeing on top of the tram. Call my friend Cyrus in Ashland, Oregon (which I do tonight) or do the easy thing: jump on the mountain bike and take a long cruise around town. Like I did yesterday near sunset. I got on Tarah's mountain bike - my choice, one of three sets of wheels I have - and rode 6 miles to my favorite city park art bench, a tribute to Spain and all good things Spanish, laid in mosaic tile on a corner near a field that leads to UCR-Palm Desert campus on one side, and a high-end RV park on the other - and sit near the mosaic head of Salvador Dali, my favorite piece. Lean the bike against one low wall, run my fingers over the large smooth tile that constitutes the better half of Christopher Columbus' beard, wishing he'd never been, and having a much-anticipated, hour long therapy session with my doctor, who lives in Riverside.

Watching the sun go down, sketching the near-full-moon with my imagination, sensing the train that rumbles nearby, between the rows tamarisk trees planted on each side of the Southern Pacific Railroad, adjacent to Interstate 10. Trees that aren't native here, and are a nuisance, sending deep roots far into the water table that can't be entirely cut out. Trees that always grow back. Like my own uneasy feel for the increasingly unstable world we are all in. Is it too much mirror-effect with instant visual coverage via this Internet? Has it always been this way, or is the world closing in on itself insansely?

Trim it all back and see a clear day, a world that makes sense. Look around. The sky is different than it used to be. Or maybe I just didn't experience winter back then. Or it's just another fluke wet cold winter, like, say, in 1933. Before I was born. And then, log online, and read an article that says tsunami warning canceled in Japan, and then realize that was posted LAST night, and that was for a 7.0 quake that struck off the coast Friday, click again, and here it is, yes, the udpate, a 9 foot wave expected to hit the Japanese coast tonight, from the Chilean earthquake, and now I'm getting Haiti and Chile confused in the footage and I'm not sure where to send the 10 bags of clothes I have marked for giveaway in my garage or sure which bike I'll ride next time I slide out, to get away from the house, the piles of student papers waiting to be read, the piles of desert book promotional materials and places that want me to read at waiting to be addressed.

I know my top priority is returning my newly-married daughter's three phone calls from just a little while ago, urgently waiting to be fed, and she was here the other night, a little drunk and crying for her favorite teddy bear, Curly, that she's had since she was a little girl, and hugging tightly to her chest the tiny pink Dior bear her aunt Mary gave to me at Tarah's baby shower before T was born, back in the designer 80's when everyone was rich. The one with a little rattle inside its soft exterior. Me, finding a calm within this ongoing mother-daughter storm, and helping Tarah to her car, hugging her, wiping her tears, and gently telling her to go home, to her apartment two miles away, where Alex would be sure to be waiting for her and tuck her into bed, something I can't do anymore.

How I didn't cry, eludes me. But those pictures of Chile today, and the shivery fear of what an 8.8 quake must have felt like, still traumatized by childhood memory of the 6.4 in Sylmar when I was a little kid, my God, that one was like a train running through my room - Chile must have been a three minute nuclear bomb. And this rain, filling in for what chokes deep inside of me. The desert, not what it usually is, and in my garden I can't tell the weeds from the nasturtiums and lettuce and watermelon and carrots I've planted, just have to let them all go and wait for a drier day. A day without pelting rain and wind, a day that relinquishes uncertainty to calm.

Time...for hot cranberry tea and reading the tabloids, maybe watching black and white LA noir film clips from the 40's on youtube on my beloved laptop, rubbing Brindle on his big, warm ears and scratching beneath his mug, where he can't scratch with his hind legs anymore, because of the spinal cord injury and temporary paralysis that broke my heart last August. On top of all these breaks, these breaks, with what I once thought I was so sure of. One day you're on the Pacific Plate, the next, on the Continental Shelf, and where I am now, somewhere in between drifting on an old, ancient sea floor. In, this new type of desert. Goodnight to all. Sleep well.

Warners Hot Springs, Anza Borrego, Kumeyaay Indian Village Site

2010-02-23T02:07:00.000-08:00

Just returned today from a weekend visit to Warner Springs (homeland of the Cupa Indians) which is on one of the old California roads, between San Diego and Palm Springs, in mountains that aren't too high or too low.....and along the old Butterfield Stage Coach Route, earlier the de Anza Spanish Trail, and for centuries, an ancestral Indian trail for many known and unknown crossings: grooved into the land like butter nestled in the slivers of bread between the air and crust.

the spring where water begins.....

An amazing place. Left Palm Desert late Saturday afternoon, traversing Seven Level Hill, Highway 74, a vertical 4,000 feet in less than 15 minutes, and taking extra care; four lives have been lost in two horrific car accidents up there in the past two weeks. Very sad. I never answer the cell phone and don't even listen to the stereo on this road, not even my NASA deep space healing tone CD, which always soothes. Whisk past Carrizo Road. Movie Star Homes Up Here, hidden from the road.

south towards the Salton Sea....from the hilly roads....with ancient sea level imprinted on the low rocks, in front of the little dam....I have two friends who live on large family date and citrus ranches near there...

Entered a dark cloud zone, and suddenly, the mountain town of Anza, stopped for water and a diet coke - and a sudden whim to buy five various types of candy bars and a pack of starbursts and the movie Borat on DVD - as well as a lighter. Cold, winter weather and people dressed like Montana. Instant winter.

And left on the turn in the town of Aguanga heading south - instead of going to Temecula - past an olive vineyard offering free samples of virgin oil, and into a charming town called Sunshine Summit, where I always stop at Ocean's Burrito Restaurant. And through the thicket called Oak Grove, and past the 1830, adobe hilltop Catholic Church. Warner Springs, with its Olympic size 104 degree hot spring pool, and quaint cabins. Nothing quite like gathering six spaghetti floaties and drifting on my back, watching the occasional plate of stars appearing through moving clouds....nothing like drizzle on the face while neck deep in 10 feet of hot water....and more...

a day trip south through a tiny town called San Felipe....on the old de Anza Historical Trail. Rain has just smashed the mud a little further down, more water on top, it's just downpoured here. Through Earthquake Valley. Stop at a little market for a huge bag of potato chips and a solitary twin-blade razor.

I hike the mile to the pictographs - remnants of puberty rites of young Kumeyaay Indian girls. Similar colors and shapes are also found on rocks near Idyllwild and in Joshua Tree National Park and throughout the Santa Rosa/San Jacinto Monument. A cold wind, scarf from an Indian fashion show in Palm Springs around my head. I'm alone, same spot where in 2008 the cover shot for my poetry chapbook "Dry Waterfall" was taken, when a group of 40 or so hiking men approaches...one photos me. Thanks!

And the ride home....the next day....patchy rain and skies of clear...I've driven to the top of Santa Rosa Mountain before, on a very long dirt road that takes more than an hour to climb. One hot summer day Tarah and I rescued a non English speaking hiker, who'd been abandoned by his friends after an all night party with Tequila on top - with gatorade and directions to the highway to Temecula - a long walk - about 10 more miles, we said.

And back to the low desert again - family of barrel cactus - warm - didn't even rain here while we were gone and the house looks untouched. The dogs wag me in the door.

Ruth and Brindle, Today

2010-02-18T00:43:00.000-08:00

one of my favorite things to do with Brindle, my big lunka-dog who is always, always making me laugh and inspiring me....tonight, he found a little "shelf" on the overhang between my memory foam mattress and the bed mattress beneath it, where he rested his chin....on the floor, you see, I took my wooden bed apart and hijacked Tarah's old mattress. Brindie sleeps on the floor in my room at night and Shasta on a warm blanket, with water, in the garage, because she has a habit of waking up and waking me up at 3 a.m. precisely each night if she's in my bedroom so she can go outside, and just when I'm falling alseep again, she'll scratch at the sliding door.

Anyway, my mom and aunt Jeanne came by this afternoon on their way home from a trip to Laughlin. They marveled at my new iron front gate - with a deadbolt and key, that that! - and the tippiness of a starting-to-bloom, high-as-the-roof cactus whose genus and name I do not know, pink kisses with brisks of yellow, pollenating frills.

And so, my aunt took a picture of me reminding Brindle to be very, very nice in taking his dog treat....I trained him as a puppy in his big metal-barred cage, to always be super gentle when taking treats or food from a person's hand, good thing because now his mouth is big enough to wrap around the calf of my ankle. Good thing he is nice. That is my mom, Beverly, in the background, taking a lesson from me.

Brindie! Making us all laugh. Good Boy!!

Feb 15 Spring Has Arrived, Low Desert

2010-02-15T23:24:00.000-08:00

We've had weeks of colder than normal weather, well months....as I recall it's been a big chill since November...December....big chill for us. Lots and lots of rain. Yesterday was the first day for these few months that have felt warm and dry, and hyperbolic amounts of sunlight that alternately have made me feel energized and exhausted. A little frantic in the garden, planting the first batches of nasturtiums and carrots and lettuce and watermelon and desert wildflowers. And more than little irritated that my hot tub motor/pump went out. According to Dave, my longtime loyal and cool friend/pool guy, the motor I need isn't even manufactured anymore. And I finally got my yard cleaned, first time in two years. A shock to see the ground, and no citrus rat nests this year under the machete'd off bougainvellia. The citrus trees aren't so wild-eyed. I've helped them birth, down to the last fruit, which lingered long in this season's european monastery; the greenery is lush and about to pop into flowers and hatchling more fruit, which will take almost a year to ripe.

Oh yeah, and I got a new gate put on today! An iron thing, iron bars painted black, the dogs puzzling over their new view of the outside world. The last version of my gate was nailed on by Jeff a year or two ago, a rather lopsided conconction that finally, weeks ago, popped out. The guys who built today's iron fence came by a week ago and nailed the old one shut, because the dogs almost nailed the mean neighbor across the street one day while I was at work. Note from the dog catcher to secure my dogs in the yard. Too much rain, swollen wood, dogs jumping on it. The original gate, a pretty, sculptured thing made of too-thin balsa or something, gave way when my stalker busted it down, just before he entered my yard and threw his pomeranian dog through the doggie gate in an effort to make me laugh and gain entry. I think Jeff was there that night, too. The gate in all its incarnation has many stories. And the wood that Jeff bought for his version and so neatly measured and trimmed with his skillsaw is now leaning against my stucco wall and I don't know what to do with it.

UCR Writer's Week desert book reading + panel discussion was a charm. It was wonderful. Malcolm met me for lunch at Relish deli in Riverside, and we strolled through Back to the Grind, and to the library, and were met from the door by friends of mine. Friends I didn't know were friends, but who now are, which makes me happy and also surprised. Michael Jayme of UCR and a terrific writer did a great job moderation; Deanne and Tod were awesome; Mario of Inlandia + Mike + my awesome friend Allison from Laguna Beach who came all the way to Riverside! - held it together and sold a lot of books, and I gave away my last copy of Phantom Seed issue 3. I read my desert poetry and got to espouse the finer points and sophisticated essence of the greater chapters of Puritan. We had fun at the Grind afterwards, along with another friend Mike, laughing and joking and eating grilled cheese and cheesecake....nice to say hi to Darren, who invited me back to do a poetry reading 'anytime I like." Laughing tonight as I read a funny pantoum written by one of my creative writing students where he pokes fun at being a Puritan in the desert.

I need to sew a large button back onto my new black trenchcoat....iron 13 shirts....look for socks....I took the handlebars of my mountain bike off with an allen wrench to try to adjust it for a higher ride and now my front tire is on crooked and I can't get it right...my cell phone has lost its capacity to text message and I'm now out of touch with a handful of new "text friends" I developed recently...I bought a beautiful cut of salmon at Ralphs and burned it when I left it cooking and got lost in English 1A online stuff....but the good stuff was salvageable and it has gone down nicely 2nite with organic skim milk + organic vegan chocolate chip cookies.

I've had a blazing migraine all day, and yesterday I took a very long bike ride to sand dunes and lay on my back and looked south to Point Happy, rocks still outstanding the Del Taco restaurant at this old Cahuilla Indian Village site - and also the shoreline of ancient Lake Cahuilla. I experienced my 2nd earthquake in one year in the Riverside library 2nd floor auditorium on Saturday - and my dad gave me a teddy bear for Valentine's Day. Chatting with my friend Cyrus this evening - he was just driving over the CA-Oregon border, en route home to Ashland from a weekend in Santa Cruz. A friend is visiting and he's watching a Quentin Tarantino movie in my living room while I type this.

Tarah's entire bedroom has been cleaned out, even the carpets, and by some miracle, the carpet guy got some unmentionable stains out of it (like where Tarah's cat died, and where Brindle had an accident, and where Tarah herself spilled glasses of red wine and a bowl of spaghetti and so forth, you know, those touchy adolescent years) and everything from the bedroom is sitting on my front porch until I figure out what to do with it. Except for her bed. I've dismantled the frame and am sleeping on her old mattress on my bedroom floor, on top of a slice of expensive and soothing memory foam I bought at Costco with my new membership (a long story on that one, since I've rebelled against getting a Costco card all my adult life, until now, and yeah, it involved a guy and the shock of finding myself at the checkout with a $900 bill for stuff I didn't realize I'd put in the cart...including 6 months of 2012/possible crash of the dollar any day now survival food, like 10 lbs of quinoa, 100 power bars, 42 cans of progresso chicken and wild rice soup, a 5 lb bag of dried mangos, 200 lbs of dog food, large bites for big dogs.....12 cases of perrier water in grapefruit, lemon, lime and orange flavorings.....a carton of organic omega three nut and fruit mix in nifty three hundred calorie, protein and good carb packets, say, for a designer lunch....2.5 lbs of organic lavender tinged flaxseed oil, and much more....thanks to the guy....he's looking out for me....but he'd kill me if I told you his name.)

I'm inundated by super white skinned (but with a flush of too much red atop, too much sun too quick and very, very bad for the skin cancer cause) always larger than size 12, pointedly not-botoxed by sometimes face lifted.... Canadians.... Seattleits.... Chicagoans....Oregonflights...etc...have all landed at Palm Springs airport together and I think they were all walking out at McCallum Grove this past weekend, swooning over creosote bushes and having heart palpitations at the wonder of a scraggly smoke tree in a not so dry wash....like they all arrived at once on February 1st or something. Avoid the stores until evening, avoid restaurants, avoid popular hikes, and try not to drive.

Bed. Never before 1 or 2 am. So, that gives me 8 minutes here. I'm so glad I have a job where I don't have to be there until 12 noon and only on Tuesday and Thursday. Tarah calls me when she's getting off work at 5 pm each day, and my day is only getting started....

Feb 8th

2010-02-08T23:07:00.000-08:00

The star is back in my sky and my mattress is on the floor of my room. More space, deeper heart, NASA inner space recordings playing on the PC speakers hour upon layered midnight. Guide.

Amazing, rugged hike in the Santa Rosa/San Jacinto Mountains yesterday afternoon, on the other entry into wilderness on the Boo Hoff Trail - last weekend, entered from the mouth of the La Quinta cove - what magic! what power and awe, even to my well hiked eyes....instead of watching the super blow. At the end of one of the canyons that lead in from the desert. Soft and articulate shadows blending the lowering sun. The day after rain, and the desert plants are green, and starting to flower. Early desert spring. It could be 100 degrees next month. But for now, oranges are sweet, flowers hold their promises, and the wild desert lavendar bushes smell of delight. I picked a few sprigs...I could feel and hear them hum. An old Indian trail, I'm told. The plants are full of personality, so alive. In the deep wilderness zone.

And tonight, Brindle ate two giant crowns of broccoli and a few licks of cilantro, plus some mashed sweet potato. He has a full bowl of dog food. He's gone vegan on me.
I love my memory foam mattress.

Wilderness pictures, soon to come.

And I must add that the Puritan/desert book reading last Friday, January 29th at UCR-Palm Desert campus was an awesome event! The lineup proper included me, Jo Scott Coe, Juan Felipe Herrera, Tod Goldberg, Judy Kronenfeld, Rebecca K O'Connor, Julie Paegle, Susan Straight and Deanne Stillman. Hurrah! Thanks, Inlandia Institute personnel for helping make this stellar on a deep winter desert night!!!

Now I'm rolling up my sleeves for our next event, UCR Writers Week, Saturday Feb 13, downtown Riverside Library, 2-4 pm. Panel reading + discussion and Malcolm Margolin, my publisher from Heyday Books, will be joining us!!

Yours Truly. What I wished for, came true. Dreams, Memories, Reflections.

I'm Here!

2010-02-06T20:36:00.000-08:00

It's Saturday, February 6, a rainy and soggy day in the desert of southern California, Coachella (conchilla) valley to be more zoned in and I've made my way back to my desert blog, at long last!

So. So much in the past few months since I've last posted here. Life and the business of living, of family, of connecting and directing and just resurrecting sometimes descends and wraps around us all like these El Nino visitors, huge circuses of clouds and damp desert, wildflower beginnings are damped down by more rain and yet more rain in this already-record year. Early February, because I remember this weekend a year ago exact, is full of drizzle and over-hanging orange and lemon trees in Thermal and Coachella, and packed with Canadians and ex-California, now-Oregon and Washington seasonal residents, shopping at posh Ralph's on Country Club across from the 7 Star Marriott in Palm Desert is a bit of a hash.

For the first time in three years, I've basically been home! Wow, a real concept. I've only been to the Inland Empire side of the mountains once or twice since the New Year began. So, I helped coordinate and partake in my daughter Tarah's elegant wedding to high school sweetheart Alex on Saturday, January 16, the last sunny and warm day in the desert before all the rain began. Timing. Everything was beautiful about it, and Tarah pulled off real glamour. St. Francis Church in La Quinta,a priest who has the same name as her famous Sioux Indian agent three-greats-grandpa Major James Mc Laughlin, and it knitted the Nolans together in a way we haven't glamored in years. All of us, the parents and brothers looking sharp and full of wit in the front row of the church. Trilogy golf club resort also in La Quinta, overlooking a faux lake and stunning desert crag mountains as the son went down. Not into the water, but down to his knees to show his love for Tarah. We had real glamour pictures, a la brother Jerry's friend Pablo who is a celebrity and fashion photog in L.A. and I'll post my due share of them here!

January was also a month of family! My 2nd cousin Una, one of a huge clan of Irish relatives who live in western Ireland, county Donegal, was here for a few weeks and I had the great pleasure of doing lots of hanging out and touring her through Joshua Tree Park on a super rainy day, unto a full rainbow over the town of Joshua Tree at sunset! Pictures also forthcoming. And January was a month of Hawaii. I went to Honolulu for five days and didn't get stung by a jellyfish and did eat at awesome Japanese restaurants and did shop at Macy's and did hang out at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and did a lot of bike riding over near Diamond Head. I missed my flight on a Thursday night out of LAX so I stayed at the Palos Verdes Inn in Redondo Beach, a very affordable and little-known, cool place that my family's stayed quite a bit over the years and done family reunions, just 20min from the airport, and managed to get on a standby in the morning - getting on that plane and flying away felt like the most cush thing I've done in a few years. Back then, a few years ago, I took really nice trips and vacations, with Tarah, all the time, two weeks of camping, weeklong river rafting trips, visits to family on the East coast, on the glam sand dune shores of the Carolinas....so...circling and cycling back around again to the time when I got away and relaxed! It didn't hurt matters that I got a super cheap price on my package deal to Hawaii, and had a bit of money saved for that trip as I've not gone anywhere in so long! Hurrah!

Aside from that. The Desert Book is out, and I've done a few events! Riverside Library on December 5th, and it was well attended and we sold a lot of books + January 29th here at UCRiverside Palm Desert campus, where we sold a lot of wine and I was extremely priveleged to sit in the front row next to the great Susan Straight! And share a stage with her. Invites to lecture and read: Saturday the 13th for UC Riverside Writers Week, which is another huge honor, a Western Wilderness Conference in Berkeley in April, Palm Springs Library, and more....can I keep up? I have an assitant now, an amazing creative writing student of mine, and it seems we've barely scratched at it. Another assistant helping me with some college-related duties, my brother John planning our parents' 50th wedding anniversary for June, singlehandedly, well, with his girlfriend who is great at that kinda stuff and has more time than me, and another friend helping me clean and clear out the house, ie Tarah's old bedroom. We pulled all the furniture and waist-high bags and boxes and had the carpet cleaned (organically, of course) and the empty room made me cry. More than that, stunned me. The rest of the house is next. Even having the yard thoroughly cleaned and stuff hauled away and all the trees cut and trimmed this past week blew my mind - stuff piles up and we resent it, for sure - but when we just swath it aside - is it easy to let go? Memories. Do they sustain us or drain us? Tough questions of the 40-something years.

More coming soon and particularly pictures and more desert vibes but for now. A catch up to the hologram of my inside out halfway there and halfway finished life and centerpoint, and the rainbows run through it all. True. I saw another one on my office wall today, and the one last week was on my topographical, wall-hung California map....and it fell on the desert.

Your friend and literary muse on this soothing and somewhat stuffy, unfamiliary clinging damp, with a few potshots at stars, Saturday night. -- Ruth

Anthology explores the myths and realities of Inland deserts | Inland News | PE.com | Southern California News | News for Inland Southern California

2010-01-30T20:35:00.000-08:00

Anthology explores the myths and realities of Inland deserts | Inland News | PE.com | Southern California News | News for Inland Southern California

Crossing the Water from 2009.....

2009-12-31T11:51:00.000-08:00

hiker's suspension bridge over Deep Creek, San Bernardino Mountains/Mojave Desert divide, California, photo by Ruth Nolan copyright (c) 2009

Suspension Bridge

I've hiked 2.5 miles
from the spillway
at Mojave Forks,
a 2,000 foot ridge
on my shoulder,
the creek at my feet

I'm halfway to the hot springs
mine, the only footprints
going in
for the soak
patterning my passage
upon 6 inches of snow

There's an ocean to one side
of the divide, a parched desert
on the other
and I walk between
sycamores, boulders,
drum sounds, small and large
watefalls forced through gaps

I've reached the suspension bridge
time to walk across
the frigid green expanse,
cross from one side to the other,

I'm halfway
to the sandy beaches,
to where the water is warm
all year round, winter is deep
but optimistic here,
a few more miles
of my soul, here
we part ways, the shadow
self and the body
that seeks the sun, but
the river, the river
stays the same here
and in many
eternities
flowing as one

by Ruth Nolan
c. 2009 by Ruth Nolan 12.31.09

Deep Creek is a place I've hiked since I was 19 years old. It was literally in my backyard, growing up in the Mojave Desert town of Apple Valley. Much to my intense joy, it is currently listed as a potential Wild and Scenic River, under the proposal outlined by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, CA, to expand the California Desert Protection Act of 1994. It is a wild, unique river, flowing from the San Bernardino Mountains through a deep gorge cut in rocks and between mountains, flowing from pine wildernss to open desert at the headwaters of the Mojave River. The Pacific Crest Trail follows its journey nearly from exit to birth, more than 16 miles. It's one of the most amazing places I've ever hiked, and the hot springs along its banks, deep along its course, are the best, hands down, I've spent time at. Here is to bridge crossing, as we exit the sometimes turbulent, sometimes passive, and always surprising turns of the current in the year 2009. Here, in my picture and mind's eye, is calm. Sere, silent, winter wonderland calm, in the heart of this wilderness.

Infinite

2009-12-29T13:43:00.000-08:00

Infinite

lying on my back
crying stars,
pretending
I don't miss you
or is it me, or
another you, these
fluid reflections
accentuated by
the dark surface
of the pool

a universe gathers
her lost children
together each night
and the sun spits
solar flares that
tear us apart again

it's desert
in December
we enjoy
reverse summer here,
the watermarks, the
watermarks on the
low rise rocks
imposing in their
shouldered light
hollowed out at the shore

narrow hips
in my eyes, the watermark
the watermark, hollowed
by eternity
again and again
and slowly filling
at the ocean's whim
in the
now
year

by Ruth Nolan
copyright (c) 2009 by Ruth Nolan

Poetry & Prose @ COD Weds, Dec 2

2009-11-30T16:20:00.000-08:00

What The Equation Is:
A Poetry & Prose Reading

Wednesday, Dec 2
12:30-1:50 p.m.
Pollock Theater
free and open to the public!

A reading of College of the Desert
original poetry, prose and memoir
written by fall, 2009 Eng 5A-B students

Sponsored by the College of the Desert Faculty Forum Series,
the COD Communication Division, and Solstice Poets & Writers Club

Desert Book! Dec 5 at Riverside Library!

2009-11-27T23:03:00.000-08:00

Our first event! Hurrah! Thanks to everyone who's involved - featured readers and other readers of excerpts from the anthology, and everyone who is working hard to make this event happen....everyone welcome!

Saturday, Dec 5 2-4 pm, FREE
Riverside Public Library downtown 3581 Mission Inn Avenue, Riverside CA

Invisible Children Poetry 2nite Nov 20

2009-11-20T10:53:00.000-08:00

I'm doing a poetry set tonight for the Invisible Children event in Riverside....hats off to my friend Alaska Whelan for coordinating this, and for all she does, so magnificently.

first, a little poem by me! (aw, shucks)

slow freeze

september isn't
for ice cream

august cripples
the dogs

july sticks
to itself

june, a time
to lower blinds

we lived on
cool tile floors

four months
in a row last year

grocery shopping
at midnight,

sleeping
through the day

our love
boiled over

when the air
conditioner broke

down and the
frozen pizza thawed

fast you took my
car keys and

in slow-mo you
knocked over

three
orange
cones

then melted
into the road

copyright (c) 2009
Ruth Nolan

INVISIBLE CHILDREN
Date: Friday, November 20, 2009
Time: 5:30pm - 9:30pm
Location: Back to the Grind
Street: University Ave. downtown
City/Town: Riverside, CA

Invisible Children is a non profit organization that relies on the donations and activism from everywhere to put an end to the longest running war in Africa. Invisible Children was created to show the world the lives of the families torn apart by the abduction and imprisonment of children. With the help of the donations, Invisible children provides educational scholarships, mentorship, and the rebuilding of secondary academic institutions in northern Uganda.

This event will feature musicians and poets supporting this cause. Donations will be accepted. There will be literature available to learn more about the cause and all sales of goods will go to benefitng the invisible children movement. To read more, visit the Invisible children website: http://www.invisiblechildren.com/about/

Performing artists-
Winston and the Telescreen
Mary Roach
ivy walls

Poetry reading with Ruth Nolan

DJ set with Molly Hughes and Lonny Huff

Desert Lecture Thurs, Nov 19 La Quinta Museum

2009-11-18T15:19:00.000-08:00

George Wharton James - the early 20th century writer - a real O.G. of California desert and Native American cultural understanding....my lecture is part of a photography/Cahuilla basketry and cultural/and literary exhibit at the La Quinta Museum, ongoing through December 5, 2009. Free to the public! Thanks to the museum and director Christi Salamone for inviting me to give this lecture.

"Literary Bounty in an Arid Land: the weave of Coachella Valley geography, Cahuilla culture, and desert art in the writings of George Wharton James." Lecture and discussion by Ruth M. Nolan, M.A. Associate Professor of English, College of the Desert.
Date: November 19, 2009
Time: 5-6pm

here were/are some of the other events associated with this exhibit:

Opening Reception
Southern California Bird Singers perform traditional songs of the Desert Cahuilla people. Meet artist David Salk and Coachella Valley resident Dennis Wharton James, descendant of George Wharton James.

Date: November 6, 2009
Time: 5-7pm
Events
Lecture and Native American Basketry Demonstration by Alice Kotzen, noted artist and author. Limited to 30, reservations required.
Date: November 7, 2009
Time: 10am - Noon

"Muskat's People: The Story of the Cahuilla" by Ginger Ridgway, Curator and Director of Programs for the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum.
Date: November 12, 2009
Time: 5-6pm

"A Taste of the Desert" by Tracy Albrecht, Interpretive Specialist, Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument.
Date: December 3, 2009
Time: 10:30am - Noon

This exhibit presented by the La Quinta Arts Foundation and the La Quinta Historical Society.

new poetry + poetry reading tonight Redlands

2009-11-16T11:31:00.000-08:00

Tonight's reading
Augie's Coffee Shop in old downtown Redlands
113 N. 5th Street

art by Cindy Rinne + music and poetry
poetry featuring CSUSB MFA student readers, Julie Paegle, Ruth Nolan

Tag Cloud
The pool is warm, the sun is kind,
it's mid November and Tahquitz god
20 miles away, 10,000 feet high
resides on the red-tinged peak
from where summer thunder rolls down
Chino Canyon, sometimes it wants
to rain but can't, we are the last
stop against the tall mountains
that separate us from the coast
where the ocean resides, a shadow
pain of some kind, you can save
yourself from drowning in sand dunes
by throwing a coat on your head
you left a paint stained white shirt,
the clouds have long dissipated
and left us behind, the long
stares have evaporated, it's
winter, time to open the blinds

Ruth Nolan
copyright (c) 2009 Ruth Nolan

Holiday Season

a lone strand of colored lights
the fat kind
in an old person's gnarled fingers,
disorganized ocotillo cactus tree
that blooms
trumpeted reds at all odd times
of year
you
never know what
happens when you add dark
season colors
to their flimsy limbs
that survive
next to aluminum-tinned trailer
windows and mason-jarred prickly
pear cactus jelly
wrapped with
second hand
ribbon these
odd winter blooming things,
sharp at the touch
leaning at the tongue
thin at the knee
ten, fifteen, twenty
maybe forty
feet high
shallow rooted
under ground
remote in neighbor
surviving on
very little
rain

Ruth Nolan
copyright (c) 2009 Ruth Nolan

here we are! Friday the 13th!

2009-11-15T11:52:00.000-08:00

at the leonard cohen concert - the master poet of high wit and torture and transformation....incredible show that lasted almost four hours with tremendous musicians and musicianship and lots of beer (shots of jack daniels for the guys). from left to right, my dear longtime friend Avideh, from the old apple valley days, then Kathleen (brother's girlfriend) and brother John of Oakland, and then moi.

hiked in the los gatos hills yesterday and ended up at a winery founded and run by jesuit priests....dinner afterwards at a fantabulous mediterranean restaurant in santa clara and coffee from peet's (don't have them in palm desierto) this a.m. I'll find my way to the airport and a plane and I have enough time to not have to drive 90-100 mph on the way home from, like I did tunneling through the San Gorgonio Pass rain en route to ontario international on my way here a few days ago.

dry waterfall, again

2009-11-12T16:25:00.001-08:00

dry watefall, again

I'd slip on slick rock granite
hundreds of feet, to a dried
pool, the nimble bighorn sheep
sipped water here before memory

that day, hiking east Stoddard
Ridge, cross country, along a
ridge that resembled, in profile
your turned-away back that night

in bed after you rolled away,
you led me there, past the last
dirt road gouged by four by fours,
the open stand of 14,000 year old

creosote, the smell of rain in the
desert is a rolled down window
thing, that summer night long
ago, in the desert that day you

carefully stepped down cliffs,
a bighorn's fire-charred horns
in one hand, you could appraise
me, another in a long chain of

lovers, deserts yield to fire
one season and in the next, to
flash flood, then to the down
hill slide of silent gray stone

Ruth Nolan
c. 2009

books at heyday's office

2009-11-10T11:56:00.000-08:00

No Place for a Puritan/No Placer for Old Cilantro
Email from Anna at Heyday, Hurrah! Salad time.
And champagne. Gayle has sent me a copy via UPS
and it looks like it will, quite fortuitously,
arrive on my birthday tomorrow, Friday Nov 13!

Desert Anthology Reflections, Meditations

2009-11-10T09:54:00.000-08:00

Before I do anything else today - the dishwasher is loaded, I finally got the floor mopped and the living room rearranged, i.e,. cleaned...ah, how handy, Tarah's room, now the storage room for boxes of papers and stuff that I'll go through...some day! I need to talk about the desert book, and what it means to me. The rip current of insecurity and worries and fears, tugging at my confident and excited swimming. I can ride waves. I know how to swim parallel to shore. Still, the anxiety.

Before I say anything else, it's a beautiful morning and it's time for me to reflect. A whirlwind, busy, full, past few months. It feels like September started, school started, and bam, bam, bam. Desert outings and hikes. Tecopa Hot Springs, Amargosa Canyon, East Mojave Preserve. Morongo Canyon, Joshua Tree, full moon sunsets and the excitement and inspiration of October and November in the desert. Creative writing classes, crazy teaching load, cool students I'm enjoying getting to know, the back and forth to Riverside. Exploring widely, and being home.I could be sailing on Lake Mojave, as I was once wont to do, that's how smooth this time of year to a desert person truly is.

As I realized awhile back, my geographical spin the past few years has actually evolved into a trace-over of the centuries-continous, Cahuilla Indian landscape. From the Anza Borrego Desert, up to the Salton Sea, actually ancient Lake Cahuilla as it was once known, to the rim of the start of the Mojave Desert, inclusive of the Santa Rosa & San Jacinto Mountains and western plateau to Temecula, and inclusive of the San Gorgonio Pass, Moreno Valley, Redlands, and what is now downtown Riverside next to the Santa Ana River. This has become my turf, my driving range, my friend-circle and my poetry and writing center.

And so it's been, a circular tracing by car, by hike, by poetry readings, by desert conservation meetings. Where the Indians know the roll and cut of the land, where every oasis and shelter and food resource is, every scope of climate and altitude, from warm winter sand dune to cool mountain peaks, so I've come to know the same, in a metaphorical and internal way. Not to completely bifurcate from the innate hiking and outdoors soul connection I have with the land. Years of hikes, backpacks, exploring, sitting, silencing, connecting with the desert and chapparal and high mountain turf. My homeland, and extension of my inclusive homeland of the entirity of the California deserts and southernmost mountains and ocean coasts, to the Colorado River.

The desert book! No Place for a Puritan, indeed! My friend and greatly admired professor and poet, Juan Felipe Herrera, responds to an email naming it, so creatively and aptly, No Placer for Old Cilantro. I love it!!! I've gone through a lot of emotions in the past few months. I wonder if all authors go through these things! Doubts, insecurites, fears, weird sensations of alone-ness, pressure to do my end for book readings and releases - the first one scheduled for downtown Riverside Library on Saturday, December 5th! Agh! Then UCR-Palm Desert, January 29th, and UCR Writers Week back in Riverside again on February 13. Oh, did I mention College of the Desert on February 10th? I'm scared! The scope and involvement of so many writers, desert topics, places, and people. Have I done these writers justice, as their editor? Did I do well enough on the introductions to each piece? What kinds of criticism will I receive? Hopefully the uplifting types of literary criticism, little tidbit reminders of my grad school years.

I'm worried about my preface. I realized just this weekend that I think an earlier version of it appears in the advance copy I got back in August. I'm fretting over who wrote reviews. I'm fretting over getting review copies to reviewers I know, if we will get the advance press we need in time. At Heyday, I'm working with three different people - Lillian for events, Susan for publicity, and Sean for book sales.I have piles of business cards, contact information, people, connections, lists, names, emails, for readings, lectures, sales....stretching from L.A. to San Diego to Death Valley to Imperial County, and let's not forget Palm Desert and Riverside! I feel I'm coming full circle with the book that made me feel so connected three years ago, Inlandia: a literary journey through southern California's Inland Empire. The big readings in Riverside and UCR-Palm Desert in December, 2006 - the latter, I coordinated with my friend and poet, Lori Davis- and all the community excitement and involvement and path this has led me on as a writer, poet, editor, and part of the Inlandia Institute and beyond.

A touch of sadness, that I met my now-ex at the inaugural Inlandia events. He was (is?)a part of the creation and formation of the desert book, both in spirit and assistance, and his poetic presence at the many recent events I've been part of in Riverside, and particularly our working partnership with so many written publications, is a sad loss for me. His house and mine. Lugging the boxes of manuscripts and books back and forth, back and forth. Did we get the late fees on 25 library books on his card or mine? Working overtime. Teaching fulltime, and jamming back and forth from the Palm Desert library to downtown Riverside local history basement room. The routine 120 mile round trip again, again, again, sometimes at 2 or 3 a.m. and sometimes stops at the Morongo Casino. The loss of my working friend. Guess I was more dispensible in his life than he in mine. To be from the desert is to be always kind of looking for a home, where maybe the sand isn't so stinging, the summers not so taut, the hunkering down behind closed curtains lifestyle, not so impenetrable. I came in on the last train on a night of pounding rain. Sweet rain and unimaginable relief. For a time. To birth a book. Whose pages of my life, my shared journey, in the making are now imaginary wings. Drifting in a thousand different places to grace the desert and sift into obscurity. And the book somehow remains. Having nowhere else to go. I always thought a writer/editor's life was fun.

It was about all I could do to pull a professional life out of College of the Desert, in a town where people leave work by noon and shake the martinis and grab the clubs of golf. And raise the kid. And shiver on my first visits to Riverside, cold and suprised by the people overlapping and the fog. A place where people have longtime friends from childhood and very few move away. Something I've never known. Everyone from my then-small desert town got the hell away as soon as they finished high school and never come back. Why did I stay? Not sure I know. Sadness, and also amazement at the beauty I've seen, in this long desert criss crossing and re-crossing. The last three years, and more, beyond what I can repeatedly see.

The best thing about this book, for me, is that I feel, at last, widely connected to people, even if I can't claim a true home, or identity, or having the continuity of a life where the ocean is always rubbing shoulders with the mountain-protected inner-coastal towns, as in the I.E., with its brow-cooling late-day breeze. We don't get that in the deserts, only raw, furiously scraping winds that turn entire days, weeks, year-round, into their own brand of nervous breakdown. Coming from my own strangely betrothed homeland, I have no real cultural or personal identity, except what I can borrow, not steal, and fuse from an inner oasis of sorts a grafting onto an outer self to be, through the beauty and inspiration of other lonesome desert dwellers and quick-trip-visitors have committed to words.

This desert, ah, this desert, is the last void in a voidless land where most people have long hastened away from their roots. Even the westward expansioners hurried through, and gave some Californians a place to know and grow in. For 100, 200 years for the lucky ones, or even in a recent generation. Things I do not know. The product of parents who wanted nothing more than open space and to be left alone. Far from "society." The desert has no roots. What passes for longevity is always short-lived. And for those who have shared their stories and words with me, I thank them all and one. I think I visioned these on some remote hike in a canyon near Wild Wash Road. One day.

Scanning libraries and ordering rare desert books from amazon. Reading and dreaming, organizing in my mind, looking at maps, pinpointing the geography. 25 million square acres, all of parts of 7 counties, early human history to present time, and who am I? Rewriting the introductions at least 50 times, some 100 or more. Enlisting whatever friend, family member, colleague I could find at the time to help me photocopy, read a piece and give feedback, and also finding sensitive ways to let good friends know if their piece was not going to be in. The job of editor can easily make someone into a "bad guy." I'm probably more sensitive to peoples' feelings than they'll ever know. Revisiting desert places again and again, taking photographs (many which will be fused into a short film that will join me at some of the readings) across the Mojave, wanting to just...get it right. Visually, poetically, peripatetically.

The bibliography pages: don't even ask. I almost slammed my laptop to the tile floor a few dozen times at the agony of birthing the endless endless endless trudge of getting permissions. Finishing the last of the introduction revisions on a January day with a blinding migraine on a Santa Ana windy dry day, sitting near my friend the poet Ching-In, and trying to placate a restless 11-year-old who was with me that day. Finishing the book, turning it in to Gayle at Heyday in March, and doing the slow glide through spring and summer and fall - will the book ever get here? Does it really exist? Any day, any day, they tell me - I'm ready for birth.

I don't know how many other writers can identify with me on this: the creation of the desert book, for me, was and continues to be an epic journey for me, which in this case, reflects the arduous crossing and re-crossing thousands of times, in body and spirit, in story and book, in personal life triumphs and agonies, and in fact, a reflection of my entire life since the age of 13, and the years since, and the intensity of the past 2 or 3, gathering tidbits of stories and words and people's desert forebodings and meditations and beauties and lives - from the age of 13 and now a series of three's down the dusty road line to 46....from the age of 13, when I first began to inhabit the Mojave full time and innocently wandered into its remotest shores. Not a stretch. The mirage-wink bounces back to me, and I rise from a salt bed where ancient inland lakes, connected by rivers and streams, once laid their heads.

Used to feel just like me and Ed Abbey out there, maybe a touch of Yeats's Second Coming, a bit of Pete Fairchild, my mentor, who encouraged me to articulate the loneliness of a twenty-something young woman stumbling through the desert and into his intro to poetry classes at Cal State San Bernardino, 60 miles away and a long drive with the old, broken down car I had then. And back uphill. And now?

Now, out of silence and isolation, out of apart-ness and an imagination that has developed much like the desertscape itself, surprising, frightening, delicately beautiful, embodied and exposed: my inner world, and I'm coming out of the desert a little beat up for the travels, with a bag of literary gold. And this has been my life. A book. I present it to the world, then I'm off to disappear again. Or so I think. Maybe a little bit of both. Readings and people and my new life as a book editor and writer. Creative writing teacher. Workshop leader. And more, that I can't yet foresee. Free fall life, daughter grown, more adventures await me. I have a lot of memory flashes of remote desert hikes over the years. Providence Mountains, Kelso Dunes, Panamint Hot Springs, Deep Creek.

Quiet times, and now there is so much activity and noise, the music-song of stories new and old. Humming from the landscape and my story joins a massive alluvial fan, once surging with water, now wide and silent, waiting, a quarter, half mile, the streth of bluff to bluff of the vast Mojave River, flowing from the forks at the base of the San Bernardino Mountains to Soda Dry Lake in the middle of nowhere. Waiting for the rain and power that it will one day own, again. I'm thrilled. I am in the current. I am terrified. And I am vastly stilled.

And now...for the announcements

I'm pictured in the Pahrump, Nevada newspaper as part of a Phantom Seed reading I coordinated at Tecopa Hot Springs Resort Oct 25. It was really nice, and best of all was hearing my friend Brian Brown of the Amargosa River Conservancy (one of the founders!) read his awesome story, "The Best Funeral." Check the pictures out at:
http://www.pahrumpvalleytimes.com/2009/Nov-06-Fri-2009/news/32277505.html

Veteran's Day Alternative Poetry Reading
Wednesday, November 11th
Studio 120, corner of Tahquitz Canyon + Palm Canyon Drive
downtown Palm Springs.
9:00 p.m.- 2:00 a.m.
21+ featuring Latin Beats and spoken word poetry
hosted by the inconquerable Eduardo Valdez
I am one of the featured poets! Hurrah!

Monday, November 16th
6:00-9:00 p.m.
Poetry, Music and Art
downtown Redlands (location/information coming soon)
hosted by the artist Cindy Rinne
featuring CSUSB MFA poets + Ruth Nolan

Friday, November 20th
Poetry Reading at Back to the Grind
7:00-10:00 p.m.
music + spoken word poetry
hosted by Alaska Whelan
I'll be reading there, too!

And...thanks to Kath Abela Wilson and Rick Wilson for hosting me so generously last Thursday evening, complete with a desert-food-themed evening, with Rick playing Native American flute. I gave a talk on desert poetry and then attendees from Kath's usual Thursday night group shared desert poetry they had written in advance! Thanks to my friend Maria Elena, for driving me to Pasadena and back and for her poetic and awesome comraderie!

The reading at Whitewater Preserve last Sunday was nice. I got to meet up with my friend, the desert conservation writer Chris Clarke, who edits the El Paisano journal for the Desert Protective Council. He's been a steady contributor to Phantom Seed magazine. This event was a great tribute to desert conservation heroes, many working on desert protection since the 1950's and more, including a talk by the honored speaker, Elden Hughes, a leading proponent of such bills as the Desert Protection Act and the new, emerging Desert Conservation and Usage bill that is being shaped by Senator Dianne Feinstein. I was humbled and honored to be given 15 minutes to promote No Place for a Puritan (Old Cilantro) among them!

Desert Protective Council Annual Meeting Sunday, Nov 11 @ Whitewater Preserve

2009-11-03T17:37:00.000-08:00

You are warmly invited (free of charge) to the
Desert Protective Council’s 55th Annual Membership Meeting
featuring Ruth Nolan on the spirit of the California desert as embodied in its literature, along with Elden Hughes, lifelong protector of the desert and mentor to generations of activists, on Senator -Diane Feinstein’s“Desert Conservation and Recreation Act.”

Sunday November 8, 2009 11a.m. – 4p.m.
Whitewater Canyon Preserve/off Interstate 10 between Riverside and Palm Springs
directions: http://www.wildlandsconservancy.org/twc_preserve_whitewater.html
Meet DPC Board, staff, members, and other desert lovers at the beautiful Whitewater Canyon Preserve in the Coachella Valley near Palm Springs. The Preserve is 2,851 acres surrounded by the San Gorgonio Wilderness, a crucial wildlife corridor between the San Jacinto and San Bernardino mountains.

Camping is available at the Preserve on Saturday night. You can tent camp on a grass area, or sleep in a camper in the parking area. Running water and flush toilets available. Bring your own supplies if you plan to camp Saturday evening. Other accommodations are available in Palm Springs less than 30 minutes away.

For more info contact Terry Weiner at (619) 342-5524.

On the agenda:
Cameron Barrows of UC Riverside on climate change and the desert tortoise.
Pat Flanagan on the “Making of a Naturalist” field trip curriculum for Imperial County students, and Mojave Desert Land Trust successes.
Chris Clarke on Joshua trees.
Ruth Nolan on the spirit of the California desert as embodied in its literature.
Keynote Speaker Elden Hughes, lifelong protector of the desert and mentor to generations of activists, on Senator -Diane Feinstein’s“Desert Conservation and Recreation Act.”

There will also be much, crucial information and discussion about ongoing preservation/conservation struggles in the fragile and very endangered California desert. Bring a chair and a hat and snacks and water.

The Desert Protective Council, founded in 1954, is California's oldest desert protection organization and has led the way for desert preservation from then until the present. Please visit their website at http://www.dpcinc.org/_about.shtml

Joshua Tree @ Halloween

2009-10-31T19:55:00.000-07:00

I went hiking in Joshua Tree National Park today, out of Cottonwood Cove. It was an illustrious and windy afternoon, hiked in about 2 miles on the trail to Lost Palms Oasis and then back out. Yes, this is the type of stuff I have spent many many hours, days, weeks, months of my life since I was 13 years old doing - sifting out into the open Mojave desert. It may look remote to some, but to me, in a place like this, I feel incredibly centered, calmed, unafraid, and at home. Besides, the well-marked and well-worn hiking trail wasn't far...though I only saw a total of four hikers on the trail (about 100 yards up and down wash and horizon behind me...somewhere...) on my way in, and they were all hiking out.

self portrait in the wind....I could see the north end of the Salton Sea from my high rock/ridge perch, and across to the Santa Rosa Mountains from here. I did check the deep cracks in the rocky ridge I sat on, because one time, years ago, as I sat atop a desert rock peak, I suddenly heard terrifying, loud, asthmatic breathing. I jumped aside, then cautiously traced the noise to....a giant Gila monster, puffing himself up in a rock crack, as these big desert lizards are wont to de, when they feel threatened. No enemy, animal or human, can pry them out when they are puffed up with air! No repeats today, nor mice nor rattlesnakes; just the breezing of wind.

I am very pleased with how the lighting came out on this picture, right as the last of the sun's rays met with the rise of near-full moon. Halloween Night, 2009 just before darkness, or a sort of off-whiteness tonight, set in. And yes, I got to the car before it got really dark! Good girl!

Tecopa Hot Springs Poetry + Prose+ Hike!

2009-10-27T16:51:00.000-07:00

First, there was hiking on Sunday morning....

Ruth in a dry part of Amargosa River Canyon

With amazing, unexpected scenery and views - greenery in the desert near Death Valley. I had the pleasure of going on my friend Brian Brown's guided tour of the Amargosa River, recently designated by Congress as a wild, scenic and recreational river.

young hiker in a cosmic spot

The six miles we hiked downriver, starting at the tiny Tecopa Post Office, is an amazing, canyon and water filled gorge that is reminiscent of parts of the Grand Canyon.

hikers enter the canyon area, walking on the old Tonopah Tidewater Railroad berm. That's right - there was once a railroad through here that brought mined goods from Death Valley south to the main railway route to and from Los Angeles, near Barstow (now the corridor of Interstate 40.)

Then...after a date shake at Brian's date palm ranch tucked in a side canyon up from the main river concourse (in the family for 100 years): the poetry! Our reading this past Sunday at Tecopa Hot Springs Resort was tres magnifique! What a pleasure to hear Brian read his story about a family funeral that took place at a family funeral at the site of a ghost town north of Baker, California.....Brian's family has been in the northern Mojave Desert in the region east/southeast of Death Valley and adjacent to the Old Spanish Trail and Tonopah Tidewater Railroad for more than 100 years; he is a descendant of the former California senator Charles Brown who helped establish navigable roadways in the rugged area back in the early 20th century. Phantom Seed was a star lit-magazine, too!

from left to right: poet Suzy Q of Shoshone; memoir writer Brian Brown; me; Amy, owner of Tecopa Hot Springs Resort + curator of Tecopa Arts Gallery collaborative

and one of the coolest most orange sherbet and light-inspired sunsets I've seen...

only in the desert....

I want to add that Brian and others in the area, which is sparsely populated, is working fervently to raise awareness of the Amargosa River Conservancy, a nonprofit he started to help support efforts to further protect the river and its unique surrounding canyons and flood plain, both north and south, and to bring in funding for increasing the hiker accessibility to this remote and rugged terrain. Read more: http://www.nature.org/wherewework/northamerica/states/california/preserves/art9752.html

Phantom Seed at Tecopa Hot Springs near Death Valley

2009-10-23T09:42:00.000-07:00

Phantom Seed Literary Magazine Reading
Sunday, October 25
5:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m.
Tecopa Hot Springs Resort Art Gallery
featuring:
Brian Brown, author & owner, China Date Ranch/Amargosa River
Ruth Nolan, poet and professor, College of the Desert

Phantom Seed is a magazine of magnetic poetry, interviews and prose embodying the essence of the California desert

Tecopa Hot Springs Resort
860 Tecopa Hot Springs Road,
Tecopa, CA 92389 (760) 852-4420
directions: www.tecopahotsprings.org/

this FREE reading is hosted by Amy Noel and TBAG - the Tecopa Basin Artists Group
for more information: contact Amy Noel at: (760) 352-4420

light refreshments will be served at the reading - free and open to the public!
donations warmly welcomed; all proceeds will go towards the Amargosa River Conservancy

poemeleon "gender" issue reading Oct 14 at the Sweeney Gallery

2009-10-18T23:28:00.000-07:00

I'm way on the right....wrapping a blue pakshmina around my waist....my zebra wannabe slippers....for the poemeleon gender issue....reading....last Weds, Oct 14 at the Sweeney Gallery in downtown Riverside. A fantastic reading with and for poetic friends and consorts....and made a few new friends!

from left: Frances Ruhlen McConnel, Stephanie Prodmorides, Hilda Weiss, Judy Kronenfeld, Ching-In Chen, Maureen Alsop, Robert Krut, me, Joe-Scott Coe.

Thanks Cati + Maureen + Judy, co-editors of poemeleon! I'm honored to have had my poems "Friendly Fire," "Maturity Class" and "Home Girl" included in this issue. Poemeleon can be viewed online at: http://www.poemeleon.org/

Ruth @ Poets & Writers Roundtable, Monday October 19

2009-10-18T22:20:00.000-07:00

Poets & Writers Roundtable
Riverside, CA October 19, 2009
Woodcrest Public Library
Date: Monday, October 19, 2009
Time: 4:30 pm until 6:30 pm
Location: Woodcrest Library (16625 S Krameria Avenue, Riverside, CA 92504)

A map of the area is available here (please double-check instructions as Google Maps is not always entirely accurate) and you can use the link to find directions from your starting location: http://tinyurl.com/ye2wcjw

Ruth Nolan, featured presentation:
“I Came from the Desert….”

Ruth Nolan, poet/writer/editor/professor, presents a discussion on how her life and adventures in the California desert shapes and inspires her writing, teaching, and literary life. As a longtime desert resident, desert firefighter, poet and writer, professor, lecturer, and most recently, desert anthology and literary magazine editor, Ruth’s life and creative work embodies a unique energy and passion emanating from California’s formidable and enticing desert region.

Cheryl Klein, P&W, Director of the California Office and Readings/Workshops (West), will moderate the meeting, which provides a forum for dialogue and exchange of ideas between a diverse group of presenters, presses, and writers. www.pw.org

A Lot of Love In This Picture

2009-10-12T13:58:00.000-07:00

need I say more...? my Indian princess daughter, 21.

oh yeah, and the fiance, Alex + Tarah's cousin/my nephew, Mik.
pictures taken at Tarah's Uncle Jim + Aunt Sandra Fenelon's house in Apple Valley.

Coachella Valley Archaeological Symposium October 17

2009-10-12T12:57:00.000-07:00

I'll be presenting a talk on desert literature, using No Place for a Puritan to highlight California desert Indian cultures, including Cahuilla, Kumeyaay, Serrano, Chemehuevi, Timbisha Shoshone, Paiute, Mojave, Quechan, Yuman. Also I will show a slide show of desert photography, taken during my many desert sojourns throughout the Mojave, Sonoran, and Anza Borrego deserts.

The symposium is open and free to the public; lunch is provided free of charge. My friend and colleague, anthroplogist Dr. Ellen Hardy of College of the Desert, is the event coordinator and host. This is an annual, magnificent event,usually including a performance by the local Cahuilla Bird Singers and an opening blessing by Cahuilla leader, author, spokesperson Dr. Katherine Siva Sauvel.

Open Microphone College of the Desert Weds Oct 14 at 7:00

2009-10-10T23:54:00.002-07:00

Open microphone at College of the Desert!
Weds, October 14 - 7:00 - 10:00 p.m.
music + poetry free and open to the public
This is going to be a dynamic and awesome event!

2009-10-10T23:54:00.001-07:00

Morongo Canyon Blazeout

2009-10-05T23:47:00.000-07:00

Morongo...top of the canyon...Willie Boy passed through here 100 years ago....riparian beginning of the Mojave Desert...picture taken on Saturday, October 3after a 4 mile roundtrip hike down the canyon (behind the photographer) and back up. Saw no one, on the watch for mountain lions. Morongo Canyon Preserve is located on Highway 62 right in the town of....Morongo Valley. Highway 62 connects the Coachella Valley to the high desert and on to 29 Palms Marine Base and east to the Colorado River. A drive I first enjoyed at the age of 10, dad driving, extreme scenery, en route to see the London Bridge in Lake Havasu. circa 1972 or something like that.

A great hike, this past Saturday, much about the highway unchanged, then up to Pappy and Harriet's in Pioneertown, a music festival and super crowded but had time to down some draft hefenweiser beers (correct spelling) with lime, share a table with a cool cosmic cat from LA who said he's a yoga guru and designs leather clothes for rock stars, then on to thai food in the town of Joshua Tree, then to the Desert Hot Springs spa and resort, spent the night there soaking in various hot mineral pools and listening to an extreme windstorm batter the sliding glass door of my 2nd floor room.

And I'm happy tonight because I'm eating a 100 calorie pack of pretzel sticks and drinking pomegranite/white tea and listening to Chopin and I finally (don't laugh!) got my English 1A and creative writing class calendars of assignments/due dates completed tonight and posted to blackboard! I actually feel like I know what I'm going to focus on when I go to teach tomorrow - "A Modest Proposal" by Swift in English 1A; fiction writing prompts and small group critique in creative writing....we're using the desert as a basis for generating "a storyscape" that is the heart of individual writing projects. Week 6 begins. There are 16 weeks in the semeseter.

And, I'm moving towards getting my writer's web page built. Happy because I got to spend time with a good friend + other friends during the past few days, Brindle is home and walking better than ever though still under strict "don't do too much" supervision, and because the loan modification on my mortgage seems to be going through and because Tarah came and did her laundry tonight and brought chipotle burritos for us and hung out with me and because it's a rare moment when, despite the piles of papers waiting for feedback from...me...the rigors of the semester seem under control for once. And because last Friday night's poetry reading at Barnes & Noble went incredibly well and was very uplifting - three of my students came and read very well - and I am going to get a good night's sleep, and because the desert is much cooled off!

CA Desert Protective Council Meeting: No Place for a Puritan/Desert Conservation Sunday, Nov 8th

2009-10-05T21:59:00.000-07:00

Open to the public - I'll be a keynote speaker discussing the conservation reading selections from the go-green (though sandy in spirited irony) momentum embodied in No Place for a Puritan: the literature of California's deserts"

California Desert Protective Council (a VERY important group!)
55th Annual Membership Meeting
Sunday November 8, 2009 11AM–4PM.
FREE and open to the public!
Whitewater Preserve, off the I-10 between Banning + Palm Springs
Read the Desert Protective Council blog, filled with crucial and up-to-the-minute CA desert conservation movement/legislation/information at http://www.dpcinc.org/blog/

Meet DPC Board, staff, and your fellow members at the beautiful Whitewater Canyon Preserve, 2,851 acres surrounded by the BLM’s San Gorgonio Wilderness, a crucial transition-zone wildlife corridor between the San Jacinto and San Bernardino mountains.

(photo courtesy Whitewater Preserve/Wildlands Conservancy)

On the November 8th agenda:

Ruth Nolan will introduce the new anthology of desert writing she edited for Heyday Books, and will speak on the “spirit” of the California desert, a place of inspiration and renewal, as embodied in the literature of the California desert.

Cameron Barrows of UC Riverside will offer a presentation on his research on climate change and the desert tortoise

Mojave Land Trust and DPC member Pat Flanagan will speak about the “Making of a Naturalist” field trip curriculum DPC is funding for Imperial County students, and will provide update on Mojave Desert Land Trust successes.

Chris Clarke, desert writer and editor of the DPC newsletter, will read some of his writing on Joshua trees.

plus Special Guest Elden Hughes, lifelong protector of the desert and mentor to generations of activists, with a presentation on Senator Diane Feinstein’s forthcoming “Desert Conservation and Recreation Act.”

Lunch will be provided by DPC.

Directions to Whitewater Preserve: see the Whitewater website at: http://www.wildlandsconservancy.org/twc_preserve_whitewater.html

No Place for a Puritan...back cover info + a day in my life

2009-09-25T17:19:00.000-07:00

Crowning
Pyramid visioned
Moments...Hallucinations?

First, the highlight of tonight was having Tarah and Alex surprise me by stopping by for talk and laughs and hugs. How blessed I am. And a soak in the hot tub + good phone conversation with several friends, IM'ing my mom who's in Italy, with dad, studying Italian, 11 pm Friday night here and 7 a.m. Saturday there. Talked to my brother Patrick via cell - he is a tech writer and long distance runner who lives in San Jose, CA - while I rollerbladed the neighborhood for 30 minutes; we are going to see the poet/musician Leonard Cohen there on my birthday, Nov 13, along with my brother John, and their respective girlfriends, Laura and Kathleen. Tarah tells me she talked to my brother Jerry, a D.J. and computer graphic designer who lives in Silver Lake (L.A.) a few days ago, and he'd been out having too much fun on a work night (I've been doing it for 20 years, don't worry about me.) I've been trying to get over the visit him on a weekend for about two months but he's so cool he doesn't sweat a thing.

Oh yes, and I am proud to announce that the Fall, 2009 version 4.0 of the Inlandia Writers workshop, which commenced last night and has a group of a dozen or so repeat attendees, making the evening feel cozy, warm, and commuinity - my idea of a great workshop! This session also has the excitement of enjoying the youngest-ever participant, the two month old son of Amy Floyd, who has been in the workshop in utero from conception and is now attending in his stroller! What a joy for me, to teach my workshop and get to hold the baby, who slept through the entire two hour class! He's welcome to scream anytime he wants. Now, our age-span covers the gamut from pre-birth to 80 years old, the latter would be Wally Longshore of Mt. Rubidoux Manor, who provided the Summer, 2008 version 1.0 workshop with humor, dignity, wisdom and inspiration. And afterwards a fun get together at Denny's on University (near UCR)
attended by friends/writers Mario, Wendy, Mike and Cyrus. And me. Fun fun fun.

Now, I loop back around....to the obsessive compulsive desert book stuff!

Forgive my obsession...just me and the PC and I have to shout it out somewhere! Hurrah! the new-ness of book editing for me...sorta like giving birth after a prolonged labor -- getting all the help, guidance, love and wisdom I could realistically extract from so many writing friends, editor & publisher, family, associates, and diverse others, including one devout from-start-to-finish friend who I feel safe to moniker "permissions-wanding wizard.

My love and thanks and gratitudes to ALL of you without who this project would have been unimaginable and impossible to complete-- along the way. This is your book as well as "mine," and I also must give a nod to all of the authors whose works are reflected in the mirage I've somehow managed to glue down in space + time.

And at last, impossibly, unbelievably, can it be? Completely alone and finally investigating at my solitary reflection in rare desert waters, mirroring back to my youngest childhood days, at a series of desert oases, some with scant water - a thousand crossings and overlays on every ancient Indian trail, later turned to spring-to-spring covered wagon and later vehicle roads....in the middle of summer....actually late last winter...got it done....dehydrated and have had months to replenish, cut the umbilical cord myself with my own fingers, and...this!

Could it be? A whim from nearly three years ago, when I preposterously proposed the concept to Malcolm M. at Heyday Books...little old desert isolationist me? A lifetime culmination of all my private readings and dreams...ready for public purview in the more populated population centers and readers...an act of loneliness births itself from the desert and finds a home among the civilized and degenerate reader alike, come to the party as you are!

The baby is born.
Almost. I'm handing you over to the morning glow, see there over the limned desert peaks to the east? Just past the Colorado River, adobe red hues, blanketing the long open Mojave....wink...smile....cry....almost there, full sun...your pyramid hour come round at last... Sorta having in case you guessed, a Yeats-inspired phantasmagorical moment. Off to pet the dog.

FRONT COVER
[Cover Done]

SPINE
Nolan
No Place for a Puritan

[Heyday Logo-Cal Legs]

BACK COVER

Literature/Anthology
$21.95

A man foolishly and arrogantly collecting live rattlesnakes…
A lone woman striving to make a home in a remote desert canyon…
A blooming romance by the desolate Salton Sea…

To the uninitiated, the California desert is a parched and unforgiving place, but to those who know it intimately, it is rich in plants, animals, people, and a seemingly endless variety of geography. It also abounds in stories—tales of human folly, courage, aspiration, struggle, and at times heroic delusion.

No Place for a Puritan brings together eighty writers and poets to pay homage to a land that has been feared and romanticized throughout the ages. From the traditional stories of the Cahuilla Indians to Joan Didion’s acerbic cast of characters in Play It As It Lays, from Mary Austin’s meditations in The Land of Little Rain to the writings of today’s young and emerging authors, this anthology unfolds the many stories of the California desert with freshness, drama, delicacy, and surprise.

from advance reviews:
"You could argue that the great California desert is such an idiosyncratic landscape that stories of lives spent there there are too regional to have universal meaning. But, as this thrilling and necessary collection attests, you'd be wrong. A landscape that captivates writers as diverse as Joan Didion and John Steinbeck, that provokes unexpected works of literary beauty from obscure Spanish missionaries and Chemeheuevi Indians must be a place that reflects something deep and true about us all."
- Marisa Silver, author of the New York Times Notable Book, Babe in Paradise, a collection of short stories, and the novels No Direction Home and The God of War, finalist for the Los Angeles Time Book Prize.

“With voices as varied and untamed, as resilient and beautiful, as the landscape itself, this anthology maps another misunderstood and too often overlooked region of our state.”
—Alex Espinoza, author of Still Water Saints

[Put this on the side instead of below the quotes]

Writers:

Mary Austin
Gayle Brandeis
César E. Chávez
Joan Didion
Juan Felipe Herrera
James D. Houston
Aldous Huxley
Jon Krakauer
Barry Lopez
Sylvia Plath
Rebecca Solnit
John Steinbeck
Susan Straight
Hunter S. Thompson
Wakako Yamauchi
and more…

[Heyday logo-Cal Legs

ISBN: 978-1-59714-098-0
barcode

www.heydaybooks.com]

National Hispanic Month Poetry Reading Friday, October 2nd @ 6:00 pm

2009-09-25T16:30:00.000-07:00

CELEBRATE NATIONAL HISPANIC MONTH, October
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2nd, at 6:00 p.m.
Barnes & Noble - Westfield Shopping Center
72-840 HWY 111, Palm Desert

PRESENTING Associate Professor RUTH NOLAN of the College of the Desert, who will give a brief history of Hispanic writers and poets, reading their poetry, as well as her own. Also reading, will be Hispanic students from her creative writing class who will be reading their original poetry in English/Spanish.

MARIA ELENA BOEKEMEYER,
TONY AGUILAR
DIANNA SERNA

Host: Patricia D'Alessandro
760-329-6130
or email Ruth Nolan at: runolan@aol.com

Inlandia Writers Workshop Thurs Night 9.24, 6-8 pm

2009-09-23T22:44:00.000-07:00

Manzanar Free Press
a real sign commemorating a real building and a real newspaper at the Manzanar WW2 Japanese-American Internment Historical Site, painted fresh as of summer, 2008

words flow like rocks from
mountains to river: bouldered
slopes catch the news

my little late night, post-rollerblading-at-twilight try at haiku - think I'm getting the use of the colon in hand. "By the time I came out of the birth canal I was black and blue," writes one of my freshman composition students in his "this is me" essay. Boulders also shoulder passages. Some of them, razored lava rock tubes.
Only one way through. Dark chocolate-covered almonds or peanuts. Take your pick. I have samples of both. I don't know if I'm tired or inspired. Both. Late night haiku writing (or my efforts at it) has a way of rejuventating me.

The fall edition of the Inlandia Writers Workshop, Version 4.0, begins Thursday, Sept 24, from 6-8 pm at the downtown Riverside Library. Free to all, come as you are, bring paper + pen or a laptop if you'd like. I'm the instructor, once again. This workshop is sponsored by the Inlandia Institute and a generous grant from Poets and Writers/the James Irvine Foundation. IWW Version 4.0 will meet for six consecutive sessions on Thurday eves, with the exception of Oct 1 and Nov 5. This session will focus on the California deserts - including the Mojave - as the basis for a regional writing exercise.

No Place for a Puritan @ UCR Writers Week

2009-09-21T19:43:00.000-07:00

I am stoked! Just found out today that a panel presentation/discussion for No Place for a Puritan will be on the schedule for UC Riverside's writer's week, 2010, next February. Hurrah! More details to come, closer to the date.

Sept 21, autumn is loose....sort of

2009-09-21T18:17:00.000-07:00

so I turn my attention to my blog - writing here is so good for me, my staggering earlier-in-the-day migraine instantly disappears, and I'm finding my Imitrex in preparing more pictures from last Thursday night's smash hit reading event to post - so many friends came from locally and afar. The event symbiosed in such a beautiful collaboration of true community spirit that it's taken a few days to wrap my head around it, so to speak....there I was on Wednesday, sweating literally and figuratively at home in Palm Desert, too nervous to work on my online classes and other "school" work - the books had not yet arrived at 3 pm, I couldn't reach our printer in San Diego by phone, except for the high-maintenance (but nice) phone calls I left, and I had a big reading featuring two magazines and many readers scheduled for the very next day.

Oh yes, and three possible sound systems - my friend Mike, an Inlandia writers participant from this past summer, had gone to radio shack and picked up a $20 microphone bearing his name; Henry, from the local bands Mute Point and Polite, had offered to show up with a good mike; and I had been promised by a friend of Jen, of Riverside, that there would be an amplifier and mike ready for us by 4 pm. However, being 60 miles away from the Grind until the day of, an hour before, not to mention a very full teaching and work schedule right up until Thursday afternoon, made it impossible for me to nervously So, I had no idea what would happen even once I reached Back to the Grind in Riverside on Thursday, or even take time to make phone calls to follow through! Luck, grace, and many outstanding people collaborated on poetry-time to bring this event together in the way that the very best community happenings just happen to....gel and vibrate shimmering electronic light!

Thanks to Darren, owner of the Grind, for allowing us the use of his basement!
Marion from the Inlandia Institute along with the new intern/assistsant, Cyrus, who did so much legwork making posters, signs, publicity, and helping set up and make book sales!
JEN, who set up the sound system hours early on Thursday, arranged a stool and table and taped-on flowers to the mike, and left me not only a gracious note about how to use the sound system, but also a lavendar plant! My favorite. THANKS, JEN! And thanks, Wendy, for connecting Jen to our event.
Jean, coming all the way down from Idyllwild in a bright red shirt.
Laurie, super-poet of the desert, for joining me to and from Palm Desert to enjoy the read...
Mike S., for buying a mike that he will have to return to the store.
Henry, who I just met last weekend, for also bringing a mike AND for packing Jen's amplifiers and equipment in my car, up a flight of stairs (along with his Mute Point bandmates, thanks, guys!) and for attending our reading!
Julie, who shared her own amazing poetry and brought CSUSB students
Mike C., for bring students from RCC and also giving a dynamic reading performance of his poetry
Dr. Harki Dhillon, for gracing our reading with his memoirs!
Mary for her wonderful reading and presence...
Joan, for reading, sans Gilligan the loyal workshop dog-comrade....
Mae, for her awesome reading
Michelle, hurrah hurrah for the freeways of downtown!
Cindy, for reading her visual poetry
Brandon, a famous San Diego poet, for making the long trek - and ditto to Debbie, coming from Pasadena...
Celeste, for her hard work helping the summer workshop and her contributions...
Peter and Lorraine, for reading their outstanding short stories and giving our reading a delectable edge
Mario, our photographer-galore
and everybody else, all the workshop participants and readers, and friends, and others who wandered in, or sat through the entire thing....I am so fortunate to have been there, too!
April! We missed you! Everyone LOVES both books, and you did a fantastic job. Truly the unsung hero (though I did my best to laud your praises) of our evening.
And Terri - thanks for shipping the books at 4:45 pm (all is well, and to heck with UPS for botching up your previous shipping order...THANK YOU!)so I'd have them by 11 a.m. on Thursday - I was sleeping in...heard the doorbell...and there they were, three neat boxes stacked on my doorstep. Truly, the 11th hour. The best way for these kinds of things to take place.

More pictures coming soon. It takes time to resize them so I can post, and there are many English 1B discussion questions (I have three sections, 100 students there, not to mention English 1A in real-time, 35 there, and creative writing in real-time too, another 35. Wipe the brow again and again.)

And now, I must tell you, the palo verde tree that was at least 10 years old and quite small when I bought my house 7 years ago and split in two from being top heavy this June and had to be cut down....is now transforming itself into a palo verde bush. Tarah and Alex came by yesterday to go out to a late lunch, and Tarah and I were laughing our heads off, looking at the oddity this thing has become. It survives by its own new brand, it never did conform, living in half, it tells me what happens after things fall apart and then begin again. With its own humor and tenacity.

Plants in this desert, all 110 degrees (or more, it may have been, it was 106 degrees at 6 o'clock!) of today in a late summer/early fall heatwave not uncommon for this part of the world, yes, our first day of fall, and someone's dog was barking when I took this picture and it wasn't mine, Brindle had some problems this past weekend (digestive and too delicate to detail on a public blog) but he is now doing fine, and being very loved in a wonderful home by terrific people I can only hope to repay some day, somehow.

It was a weekend that also involved a major $$$$$ shopping binge at Ross Dress for Less - me and Tarah - she helps with fashion sense, thank God, but also loaded up the cart with a few clothes for her, and Alex, and makeup...for me, as well as nail polish kits....how can I turn my only and beautiful and wise daughter down? Dresses, jackets, jeans, blouses, sweaters, wallet, pricey pastel shaded faux snake skin shoulder bag, 5 or 6 new pairs of one of a kind shoes for me - as Tarah reminded me, you can never have too many pairs of shoes, and she learned that from me - I even let her "do my eyes," I trust her so much...until she started curling the eyelashes. I still can't believe she didn't actually pull them out. Beauty = pain. I thought it was beauty = truth - she knows Keats as well as I, and I can't WAIT to see the new movie "Bright Star." IM'ing my mom, who's in Rome, Italy, after being in Ireland for two weeks, with my dad.

They are both taking Italian classes and will be there another few weeks....my dad showed a copy of the desert anthology to our extended family in Killibegs, Ireland, a beautiful fishing village on Ireland's western coast, and he said they really enjoyed hearing my mom read them the preface. Reasons to return to Ireland (was there in 2002 for a family reunion) - my grandmothers' hometown is just an hour's drive from Sligo Castle, Yeat's legendary western Irish home. One of THE all time knockout poets! Last time, we were rushing for a train and only could stop by for ten minutes, imagine my agony.

And I somehow made it through the Badlands and back again this weekend to the Riverside Mayor's Ball on Saturday night, surprised to see kobe beef burgers on the menu and so many people I already know. Dancing to "Sexy Back" in my red high heeled shoes - my daughter just rolled her eyes when I told her how silly I must have seemed, but guess what. Mom's the new version of ping pong ball and the game seems to be going well, not much different than tennis and much lighter as well.

pictures from reading last night

2009-09-18T21:04:00.000-07:00

Phantom Seed issue 3 is out and already burning the fireline. Awesome reading last night at Back to the Grind in Riverside, love the basement there. Friends came from all over: San Diego, Pasadena, Palm Desert (me + a friend) and so forth. 3 hours of nonstop glory. Also Slouching Towards Mt. Rubidoux Manor #2 release, from the third installment of the Inlandia Writers Workshop, which I teach.

with my friend, poet + professor Julie Paegle of CSUSB

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my friend Cyrus with Slouching Towards Mt. Rubidoux Manor + some homies from a local band, friends of his cousins

Ruth and the cool guys from the band who loaded up the amp + equipment up the stairs and into my car + Phantom Seed Issue 3

at back to the grind

98 is the new 42

2009-09-18T14:33:00.000-07:00

so Brindle is now back from the vet hospital in Orange County. I had him from Sunday-Wednesday, and it was a flashback to the early Tarah years. Brindle is doing better, and definitely did NOT want to be confined to a blocked off space in the bedroom. He made several escapes, by pushing the wicker chairs aside - remember, he's a hearty 10pound dog - and actually crawling under my bed. NO Brindle, don't slide under there, you'll hurt yourself! Not easy pulling him out and keeping him from knocking his back on the metal shelf. Like a small child, he doesn't understand the danger he is in. And, he think he owns my bed - as in, jumping atop my rather high mattress and claiming it for himself. Yes, he does pretty much fit all the way across its queen frame when stretched out for a serious nap.

The bedrooms are the only carpeted rooms in the house, you see, and tile, with its slippery slide, is a dangerous surface for him to ambulate his still-loopy back legs. His front half wants to run - strong chest and shoulders - yet his back half is in recuperation from his spinal cord bleed, and the legs give out. He still needs to be walked outside to do his bathroom duties, and held up with a sort of harness. 6-8 times per day, and wanting to jump on my (HIS) bed in the back room - it was not going to work for me, with my chaotic schedule. I had to keep him AND Shasta in the back room the past three days, because if SHE got to come out and be with me on my living room computer, then HE wouldn't quit barking. No wonder I call them "the little kids."

So, I'm happy to report that I've had the great luck-blessing of finding a temp.home for him while he continues to recover. One of my students, Beatriz, an amazing woman, has taken him in to her home in Cathedral City, not far from my house. Lots of love, in-home care from her young adult children, and most of all, Beatriz's warm generosity for Brindle, and by association, me. She only needs to keep her puppy chihuahua away from tantalizing the big guy into hazardous pay. Thank you Beatriz + family for your extensive generosity. I miss my "baby" but he continues to get well and hopefully will be back home soon again.

Claremont 9.9.09 + Empty Mom

2009-09-11T15:23:00.000-07:00

I had a very enjoyable evening this past Wednesday at Casa de Salsa restaurant in Claremont, CA, home of the elite, private Claremont colleges and one of the most literary and hip spots on the west coast. I gave a lecture on California desert literature, embedding poetic selections from No Place for a Puritan and a few of my own poems into my talk. Nothing's better than to read, connect with people, and share the desert-as-I-feel it. Also got a chance to share and promote Phantom Seed lit mag, issue #3 is coming out next week and our newest issue is the grooviest to date.

here I am with some new friends and wonderful Claremont people, Barbara and Mark Ashworth and Barbara's son...they are also avid fans of the California desert.

It was nice to see a number of poetic friends: Lucia Galloway, a wonderful poet who lives in Claremont; Bruce Williams, another desert poet who teaches at San Antonio Community College in San Dimas; Mike Cluff, another poet-professor who's at Riverside City College, RCC, and my friend/writer Cyrus Emerson, an aspiring audio-novel innovator. I also made a few new friends, and basked in the joy and sublimity of spending an evening with people who enjoy poetry!

and here is the hostess with the mostest, the incomparable Helen Graziano, Claremont poetess laureate....Helen is a standout poet and indefatiguable coordinator of many stellar poetry readings and events in Claremont. She is also a contributor to Phantom Seed.

Thanks, Helen, for inviting me!

And so, another blissful poetic synchronicity, the making sense of what randomly holds me at the edge of abyss - for a night, and through today, the edge smoothed, a salve provided for the "shock and awe" of starting back to teaching fulltime (many more students, many fewer classes,) as well as the ongoing....numb and oft-disoriented coping with "empty nest" and this strange, silent house I find myself in, 21 years of fulltime house-sharing, with the lovely Tarah, of course, and now, the cord's cut, or should I say, yanked out so hard I'm kinda staggering around - staying sober, good girl. Hm, haven't lived alone since I was 23. Then, it was fun, because I was "leaving home" and the quiet, after growing up in a raucous Irish family of 6, still space meant everything, "my own" small house was a real achievement. My 1930's adobe cabin on Nancotta Road, owned by an Australian man named Mr. Brindle, and the namesake of my dog Brindle (who is yet in recovery from his tragic and inexplicable spinal cord injury at a vet hospital, but slowly regaining use of his back legs.) I had pistachio trees and an outdoor adobe brick fire pit on my 3 acres in then-remote Apple Valley, and my friends and I had some terrific parties under the close-neighbor stars....all for $100/month!

Now - the achievements seem so passe, and I often find myself kind of wandering around the house on California Drive, wondering "how did this come about? My mortage is many, many times more multiplied than my first, modest rent. I'm in a designer desert town filled with shopping glitz and the occasional Rolls Royce, in my closeted (stucco-walled-in) 3 BR, 2 BA (at the urging of my former boyfriend Rob, a former realtor who told me just what type of house is most saleable, of course that was before this housing disaster), 2 car garage, pool + hot tub, fully desert landscaped yard....Oh yeah, I moved here for that fulltime job 10 years ago, and much of my decision to move to Palm Desert was based on moving to a place that worked best for Tarah (i.e., grandparent proximity.) This big house? Did I BUY this thing?" A sort of child or young adult, sustained in this newness and oddity by my own adult creation...it seems impossible that I did it: raised Tarah mostly on my own, built a career, bought a house, made a home, edited a desert lit-book. A life. And I had sand dunes, four square ancient miles of them, behind me, inviting long views to Mt. San Jacinto, now obliterated by golf and mansions....all of which has brought me to...some new kind of "here" that I want to run screaming away from! I step back and "see" how closed in I've gotten, that open space has eluded me, and I've always relied on houses that give good porch and wide nature views. Of COURSE I'm stifled here! I'm an open-desert and mountain and desert river and lake (yes, there is (mostly pilfered) water here....canoeing woman!

Realizing everything was filtered through the Tarah daughter/Ruth Mom lens for 21 year, and now that identity and sense of orientation has shifted radically, and a mix of fatigue, satisfaction, and loss, not to mention more than a bit of fear and confusion over how to (re) invent myself as a "single 46 year old woman/adult" person. Walking across the large-tile floors, from one bedroom to the next, they're mostly empty (master BR = furniture stacked in it) and the hallway is way too long. I can't even muster the heart to mop the floors, or tear the dead weeds from the garden. Yeah, one of the palo verde trees fell over and we had to cut it apart and have it hauled away for an outrageous $$ sum, but it's bushing back out again and I don't know wether to let it grow shaggy and weird or keep trimming it back before those sharp limbs get too big to cut w/my modest tree clippers.

My brother John, 48, an unmarried man with no children, who also teaches in Oakland, CA, says, "just enjoy it, now you only have to work and take care of yourself." Well, I say, I don't think I ever really learned how to take care of myself - I've always taken care of Tarah." Not to mention - what IS a single adult life? In one's 40's, not early 20's (I had Tarah at 24.) Anchored by the culmination of college degrees and career creating, and now unachored at the hip, the navel station, but still with the adult baggage, and without the adult-child responsibilities that were a driving force for me for so many years - a reinvention that must involve all parts of development, age, experience, and inexperience. Even the way I interact with people is different now. I feel glimmers of being a confident and professional 46, and shimmers of being an awkward and shy 23. Half my age and then doubled, and confused by it all.

Sometimes I don't know how to drive to the grocery store, which is 2 miles down from my road, without any turns, and Albertson's, bless its familiar-aisled heart (food for one: organic skim milk, fresh orange juice, Thompsons sourdough muffins, fat free mozarella cheese, organic coffee and tea, organic oatmeal and healthy crunch cereal and flaxseed to add, a bit of sliced turkey meat, pre-cooked, thin-crust CA Pizza Kitchen pizzas, salad greens and spinach and broccoli, avocados and grapes and bananas and a stack of tabloid magazines, and oh yeah, bottles of Perrier - this is the simple diet, and I eat at all odd hours now anyway.) What is this? A skillet? What in this drawer? Why these piles of silverware. Too many cups. Dishes only once/week? Weird weird weird. Cooking, other than microwaving, making coffee, pouring milk or juice, and using my toaster oven to make pizza or english muffins, is entirely out of the question. There's a reason I buy pre-made salad mix.

Of course I'm still Tarah's MOM, but I'm a distant figure now, one reachable by phone and for guidance on life's little things (what do you do when you run out of $$ before the next paycheck? I can't get the college classes I wanted. My boyfriend is pissing me off. The cat has ringworm. Black water is coming out of the apartment faucet.) I've become #1 advice dispenser, via cell phone. Sigh, sigh, sigh.

Okay, back to the fun-relief of last Wednesday night! Good vibes....it's all good. I'm learning to be my own mom. "It will all be okay, and it will all work out. Don't worry." At least the washing machine hasn't gone entirely out, tho it doesn't spin the clothes dry enough, and the pool guy, my friend Dave, keeps coming to keep the chlorine floater afloat, and sits to talk with me when I'm available and knows that when I'm not, I'm probably asleep at 1 pm and he doesn't knock, and my water timer is working so everything is getting watered. Shasta demands a doggy bone every morning, but other than that she's completely quiet and keeps to self, sad that HER little boy, Brindle has been gone, and at a loss herself of where to put herself for condolence, other than beneath my bed or curled always at my feet wherever I happen to house-be at the time. And big clouds out the window, I've opened it for view, hint of rain, if 108 degress on 9.11 is hot enough, over the desert mountains, to wring moisture from the sky and bless thunderheads, zig-zag-zig electricity for midnight inspiration. And so I write.

Tarah birthday pictures

2009-09-07T21:55:00.000-07:00

I surprised Tarah at work - she is a front desk receptionist for Dr. Younis in Palm Desert - on her 21st birthday this past July 28.

Tarah turns 21..ice cream cake + proud mom and a little Hannah M...

Tarah and Velvet...the doctor's pet, who goes to work every day...

Slouching Towards Mt Rubdioux Manor + Phantom Seed Reading Back to the Grind September 17

2009-09-04T17:55:00.001-07:00

if you click the picture.....it gets bigger and you can everything on the flyer.

everything is dandelion

2009-09-01T18:51:00.000-07:00

so the day goes auto flying...that is, on pilot....a wonderful English 1A class and I enjoyed our discourse....ended up asking them to all sign up for twitter accounts so I can easily text them if and when class is cancelled....save a parking spot, sleep in.

off to teach creative writing, my plum and joy....waited nine years to get this class and it's a splendid evening assignment, with already 40 people signed up - either I'm really popular or classes are so packed that people are taking whatever they can get. Maybe both.

I want to add a disclaimer to my friends and fans (tongue in cheek on that one) for bearing with my kvetching of recent past. If you haven't and don't want to read it, it is the posting from Aug 30, titled Post Partum Professor. It's shouldered off now and the cord snapped off and I'm holding up better than I'd ever have thought I would, even managed to get a few poetic inspiration lines scratched and caught up on my texting during an Ed Tech meeting, reconvened with a few longtime friends/colleagues, my friends Claudia (librarian) and Bina (Information Systems Administrator) and....

I have a fresh pot of coffee cooking in the empty faculty lounge, guess I'm the only one in our division besides our Italian teacher Prof. Sottile to be teaching an evening class. And as my older brother John convinced me on the phone last night, hey...now, I only have to work for me...so it will be all fun and parties when I'm not at work from now on - no pressure to run a household and be a fulltime parent. What has haunted me now seems like opportunity. At golden, heat compressed last.

September 1st

2009-09-01T11:10:00.000-07:00

ah, that the poet shapes the landscape

first, in case you missed it, here is the Heyday Books advance PR blurb for No Place for Puritan.

http://www.heydaybooks.com/upcoming/no-place-for-a-puritan-the-lit.html

so the poet
engages it, dances it, gathers it, lies back on it and shapes storylines...narrative arcs on sand dunes, rain where dry lake beds mock the lonely lover, and a straight lined highway engulfs the poet in its square arms, what of my recursive path? Circles for me. I missed a deadline for the poets and writers California writers exchange, I assumed materials could be sent via email, like most everyplace else, but alas, when I went to meet the Aug 31 deadline at around 10 pm last night...it was a surprising snail mail deadline. I can console myself with the usual....there are probably 10,000 people applying for it and therefore your chances were slim...but...damn.

So here, in its lieu, in lieu of much missed lovers and daughter and dog and poetic stream of consciousness - it is late summer, fires scour the mountains and eat houses and a few people - what about the couple who tried to ride it out in their backyard hot tub? Reminds me of friends I hiked into Deep Creek with a few years back, who refused to hotfoot it out of there when I saw a major fire break out, downwind from us....they refused to leave and very nearly died while the fire burned over them later (I pretty much RAN up the steep hill to my car!) and they huddled low in the creek, wet towels over choking faces) - I can't wait to go to Burning Man, in fact my friend Van, one of the Deep Creek Fire survivors, is an avid attendee.

Now, to embrace the joie de vivre, here is a lovely poem by Bukowski that I found while leafing through piles of teaching materials, in preparation for my 12:30 pm Eng 1A class today (that is a little more than an hour away, and I've got to yet leave the house), and no apologies for being a poet and a bit off the worn path, as Morrison said, "out here we is stoned, immaculate" and tomorrow I have a very coveted appointment to meet with the renowned Juan Felipe Herrera (what a forever generous person and true poetry hero!) for a poetry get together and I know this will shot-arm me into my poetic and prosaic pulse, my fireline escape route from the flames, and in fact, my redemption and power. I've given up on comma splices, as you may have noticed, have seen so many students using them inadvertently over the years that it's become my latest poetry technique.

Made a Mistake
charles bukowski
I reached up into the top of the closet
and took out a pair of blue panties (ruth: worn-so-much-by-me gray dickies t-shirt that it's shredded with holes)
and showed them to her (him) and
asked, "are these yours?"
and she (he) looked and said,
"no those belong to a dog."
She (I) left after that and I haven't seen her (him)
since. I keep (not) going there, leaving notes stuck
into the door. I go back and the notes are still there.
I take the Maltese cross (Indian dreamcatcher)
cut it down from my car mirror, tie it
to the doorknob with a shoelace, leave
a book of poems.
when I go back the next night everything
is still there.
I keep searching the streets for that
blood-wine battleship (beat up car missing a rim on drivers wheel) she (he) drives
with a weak battery, and the doors
hanging from broken hinges.
I drive around the streets
an inch away from weeping,
ashamed of my sentimentality and
possible love.
a confused old man (um, still young, not yet siliconed or liposuctioned or botoxed and proud of it 40 something woman)
wondering where the good luck (the hikes and poetry glitter) went.

sorry Bukowski, but I sense that you would understand.

off to teach - the wizard - ceiling fans are my best friends today - it occurs to me I haven't been on the earth nearly enough so it's time to go sit beneath the big trees in the mountains, the ones that were spared the slaughter of last century logging due to their remoteness, and have claimed and maintained their spacious identity, the big tree in fact where I've seen huge mountain lion tracks in the snow whilst I've cross country skied, in the Mt. San Jacinto wilderness. Yes, that's where I must go, soon.

desert book advance publicity

2009-08-31T23:28:00.000-07:00

Okay, I found this today, and it makes up for the vitriol of my previous blog entry from yesterday...or perhaps affirms all of that and takes me to some new dimension that I, the nervous emerging writer/editor, still struggle to recognize, let alone understand...this is all new to me, folks! Out here.....

http://www.heydaybooks.com/upcoming/no-place-for-a-puritan-the-lit.html

Today's Brindle report: his physical therapy continues, he is the favorite dog in the hospital, and he is getting spoiled on a mix of canned and dry food (at home it's dog bone treats and dry good, although an expensive brand of chow so I don't feel too guilty.) His legs are moving, though he still can't quite stand on them.

Empty Nest update, today's Tarah report: better than yesterday, one of those "time is frozen" Sundays that we endure with increasingly August and September tension as the heat presses on and sometimes even gets worse....yes, it was Tarah, yesterday, sobbing at 4 pm. To reiterate, it was one of those "close" late summer days where you feel so shut in with dark curtains and A/C and sensory outside deprivation you may as well be in Nome, Alaska during December...sobbing....Alex was gone playing poker with friends, the kitty didn't want to hang out with her, she was sick of watching "lost" reruns on her laptop, the apartment was a mess, she was lonely.....and later, after I tried to convince her to visit me at the house, she called in a panic from the Shell station. Not only had she heard, at 9 pm, gunshots so loud that she'd hit the deck and fled (police and helicopter swarming the complex,) but she'd just locked her keys in the car. Good thing MOM paid for her Triple A card for a year.....I don't remember having one of those at 21....today is much better, I was a morning wreck, but she called at lunchtime from work, "everything is fine, and Alex apologized for not rushing home at 10 pm when I cut my foot on the kitchen table and thought I needed stitches." Oh, good. Nirvana once again. I can't wait for them to get married.

As for me. Online classes (three sections of 1B) are under control + I managed, after four hours of staring at the computer,to hack out my Eng 1A and creative writing syllabi. Do I detect a faint tremor of.....feeling okay about fall semester, after all? I have a great, if really packed, schedule of classes, and it's been my dream to teach creative writing, which I will be for the second year....so I can say it's all good, and time to toss that Mojave Green rattlesnake off the blanket on my chest. Hurl the whole thing, blanket and reptile, far across the room and jump and run!

And, I have a book coming out. I might be the lone ranger, walloping around an empty desert with a big three ring notebook of some 400 pages printed out, invisible to polite society, but there it is. I've rescued it from the dark corner of my hot garage, and I'm even going to take it to work tomorrow and build a shrine to it.

Brindle Update

2009-08-25T17:42:00.001-07:00

Update on Brindle's inability to walk:
The vet from the neurological animal center just called....Brindle had an MRI to check his spinal cord and associated spinal fluids and membranes and bones of his skeleton - it appears to be something congenital that sometimes gives way, breaks, shards, in dogs. He is alert and doing well, and as sweet and friendly as ever with the staff there, and will be kept overnight and receive hyperbaric oxygen treatment to help him heal and regain his ability to walk. I'm so grateful he is at one of the best facilities in the country.

He has feeling in his toes, and can wag his tail a bit, all excellent signs. I was able to hold and pet him for about half an hour at 5:30 this morning....he laid his head on my lap and groaned and relaxed a bit...and is a favorite with the hospital staff. Then, I headed back to Palm Desert from the cool mist-fog of sunrise, Orange County on the wide-hipped "thick" 405 south up to the 55 to the 91, the Orange Crush, and the 215 to the 60 to the 10. There is something comforting in the hypnotic and shared freeway consciousness...the tangle of feeling and emotion between me and this dog, and my abandonment-heart, I've been anxious and nervous all day more than usual and not able to much sleep, and Shasta is staying close by, curled near me and worried about her little brother. In a way she's as much Brindle's mom as I am.

A stop in Mo Val at Denny's for a slippery breakfast and the strange entertainment of a car fire in a lot across the street, a strange car with a rear engine, not a Volkswagen, much smoke, people crowding around, the inevitable fire engine, no one hurt, the car didn't migrate into cumulus flame clouds and the car was left abandoned in the end, and no people, a nondescript donut shop, I drove home into the desert overwhelm, expanse sand and inexpensive light, too much for the eyes, and not long ago, the world made sense to me, daughters and the "little kids" were all at one with me and life was manueverable without smackdowns and grief at losing those I love, or is it just now that my heart has been so ripped open that I am finally able to feel, in a Buddhist angled windowpane, and all love flows in and out with breathing...of course to feel, to love, our hearts must steeple with compassion. We never really lose...we merge as one.

Phantom Seedlings

Five Star Reviews of No Place 4 A Puritan Desert Anthology

Robbie Knievel Motorcycle Jump @ Spotlight 29 Casino story by Ruth Nolan

I'm back!

FREEZER BURN: Palm Springs, 117 Degrees

Desert Home Diaspora

Desert Rose: (re)membering memory, here, for your lost flower

They Are Coming Like A Storm....

Memory: A Poem to commemorate Japan

Friendly Fire: a poem about 2 runaway girls, a shotgun and a jackrabbit cabin

A Desert of Cathedrals; A World of Churches

I could write of this:

Western Wilderness Conference, April 10. 2010

California Legacy Project: Nature Dreaming

HELP! Mass Destruction...in the Mojave...happening now....

Live Desert Poetry Reading, Guerrilla Reads Magazine + Phantom Seed @ P & W Online

Sign Petition to Stop Big Solar/Windmill in the California Desert

Poetry Night in San Diego

Phantom Seed 4 Reading @ Palm Springs Museum

Blow Torch (or: desert diaspora v_02)

Ruth Archives

California Legacy Project + Poets of Bodie

Art VULUPS project!

Slouching Towards Mt. Rubidoux Manor, Issue 3, Sept 16 @ Back to the Grind

Prospecting, Indio Hills

NP4@P Review + Desolation Tango

Desert Writers Issue, Summer 2010, Sun Runner Magazine

Crazy Creek Camp Chair

San Andreas Canyon Haiku Walk + Anthology

Art VULUPS

letter to Phil

Concerto No. 1 in E Minor, Hwy 111, Palm Springs

Barnes & Noble Poetry, Palm Desert

Trigger is coming home!

Ladyfest I.E., Sunday August 8th

"Puritan Reviews" on LA Books Examiner and SF Books Examiner

Happy Birthday Tarah

Recycled Poem

Ochoa's Farm, Thermal, Temperature 122

Full Moon Near

Into California: When the Desert Blooms, May 13, 2010

Poetry Reading Claremont 7.23, 7 pm

One Star, Tonight

Andreas Canyon Haiku Series, 7.14.10, Palm Springs

Red Arrow Gallery, Joshua Tree: Desert Poetry & Prose, Saturday July 24, 7:00 pm

Fourth of July, London Planetree

I am still here....

Badlands

called out of darkness

Poetry Reading Palm Springs Weds 4.28

It's My Dad's Birthday

Ten Days Ago

Cosmic Ruth and Phil

Joshua Tree Writing Workshop, Reading, Film Event!

Palm Springs Life Magazine - Feb 2010

Midwest Book Review...two thumbs up!

Reflections on a Wintry Storm

Warners Hot Springs, Anza Borrego, Kumeyaay Indian Village Site

Ruth and Brindle, Today

Feb 15 Spring Has Arrived, Low Desert

Feb 8th

I'm Here!

Anthology explores the myths and realities of Inland deserts | Inland News | PE.com | Southern California News | News for Inland Southern California

Crossing the Water from 2009.....

Infinite

Poetry & Prose @ COD Weds, Dec 2

Desert Book! Dec 5 at Riverside Library!

Invisible Children Poetry 2nite Nov 20

Desert Lecture Thurs, Nov 19 La Quinta Museum

new poetry + poetry reading tonight Redlands

here we are! Friday the 13th!

dry waterfall, again

books at heyday's office

Desert Anthology Reflections, Meditations

Desert Protective Council Annual Meeting Sunday, Nov 11 @ Whitewater Preserve

Tag Cloud + poetry reading Thurs 11.5 in Pasadena

Joshua Tree @ Halloween

Tecopa Hot Springs Poetry + Prose+ Hike!

Phantom Seed at Tecopa Hot Springs near Death Valley

poemeleon "gender" issue reading Oct 14 at the Sweeney Gallery