Monday, November 30, 2009
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
Friday, November 27, 2009
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
Saturday, Dec 5 2-4 pm, FREE
Riverside Public Library downtown 3581 Mission Inn Avenue, Riverside CA
Friday, November 20, 2009
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
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
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
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.
"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.
Monday, November 16, 2009
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
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
Sunday, November 15, 2009
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.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
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
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
Tuesday, November 10, 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!
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!
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!
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
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
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
Monday, November 2, 2009
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!!
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!!
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