Crossing the Water from 2009.....

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

Tag Cloud + poetry reading Thurs 11.5 in Pasadena

On Hwy 127
the road into Death Valley

cycling this time,
noticed a splintered sign, ghost
town called Zabriskie

Tag Cloud
this is fun - I found it on a web search site

Apple Search Native American literature Anthology Nolan Ryan Edgar Ruth Associate Professor English Sally College of the Desert Riverside Public Library Mosaic Published poetry Heyday Books Palm Desert Nolan Reviews Baseball Mojave Desert Poet

Desert River
the Amargosa

exits Death Valley at sunset
mouth west, an intermittent
snake moving in and out of
sand, marking midnight trails
across dry skin, drifting
to the white noon and lifting
your desire to flow lower than
below sea level then rising
at dawn into fat sand dunes
having devoured itself again.



I'll be reading poetry at my friend Kath Abela Wilson's poetry salon Thursday night. Her husband, renowned Cal Tech Math Professor and accomplished flutist, will accompany with Native American flute. Kath is a poetess and poetry salon hostesss extraordinaire, and publishes many poetry booklets to accompany her many, many ongoing poetry events. Hats off to Kath Abela for her beauty, style and grace!!

Joshua Tree @ Halloween

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Morongo Canyon Blazeout

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

everything is dandelion

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

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

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.