Life is an amazing diaspora that continues to unfold. Stories, being lived, can I rein them in? I could write of you. The ephemeral you that says "I love you, I will love you forever," the universal you of desert tortoise kingdoms and cinnamon-tinged coffee, vegan dinners from Native Foods and new hikes on the Bump n' Grind, patching together an old quilt with side trails freshly-excavated. Walking the earth up and down, sky to body to earth, the way it's always been. Joshua tree recognitions, Indian trail discoveries, splintered quartz offerings gleaming their prayerful words, giant desert ironwood forests in a vast, dry wash.
Today: a blustery November in the low desert, sunlight so bright when I look out the window and see color behind brilliant clouds, I can't decipher if the sky is black or blue, and realize it's blue.
I could write of talking with Tarah on the phone, rain in Palm Springs, she's nestled against mountains and her new husband in a one-room apartment, living on discounted cups of noodles with two cats, Ducky and Pepper, and asks me to come over to help her do the dishes. I meant to do NaNoWriMo but I've gotten caught up in trying to save the California Desert. A foolish task, a necessary impulse, I'm meeting amazing, incredible people in my efforts: homeland security! Hey everyone, magic lives out here! Consider that. What do I do with myself, now that I'm merely a background mom? We barely had a few sprinkles just 10 miles farther out into the desert here in Palm Desert. Lots of wind, which I love. And when the rain does fall, it's for moments of prayer, of holding my hands open wide, in a moment of thanks. It's something that longtime desert people tend to do. When it rains after months of going without.
I haven't seen Tarah since my family birthday dinner last Saturday November 13, with mom and dad, freshly back from Italy, and Alex and Tarah and a handful of light presents. I bought myself a sheet cake, I've done it before, and had my name written across the bottom and top, but I insisted on no happy-birthday singing until we left the restaurant. Sammy's wood fired pizza on El Paseo at the Gardens in Palm Desert.
This being 22 stuff is so new. The four year overhaul. Living alone gets more familiar but filled with agitations, restlessness, I'm suspended between lives, and bounce along, wondering what is next, all the while living so fully, on the road from Blythe at the Colorado River to Riverside for writing workshop to Palmdale to give a Puritan reading and lecture, and back, pit stop at College of the Desert for intensive creative writing and freshman composition lectures and workshops, and back home to feed the dogs, wash a few clothes in my disheveled home, sleep, and start again.
I could write about how I picked up a copy of "Just Kids" by Patti Smith, a must-read, at Barnes and Noble at the Palm Desert mall, a place I rarely go except for my friend Patricia's monthly poetry readings or when I have a specific book to buy. How I saw the moon fragment behind pocket-clouds last night, odd browns and lights, not quite clear, and deeply present. How I woke at 4 a.m. to stiff wind, and the clear moon to the west out my bedroom. I sleep in Tarah's old room now, on the new bed I bought early last spring, flattened on the floor, with my high-end road bike parked across the sliding mirrored closet doors, an ironing board full of white cotton shirts to iron, and a drafting table holding various books and copies of various tabloids that I'll soon pass on to my mom. And Mom came over yesterday, bless her heart, to again help me go through my piles of bills. Almost there. Almost caught up. After the financial and emotional summer drought.
What else could I say? Tracing ancient intaglios and geoglyphs in the desert near Blythe. Singing my heart and footprints on the Mastodon Peak Trail in Joshua Tree, photographing along the way and grateful for the October rains that have made things bloom out there: ocotillo suprises, Indian village site down the dry wash (not on the visitor's map), a red glowing bush whose name I don't know...glowing barrel cactus and yellow-leafed cottonwood trees in November drawl against the lowering sun. Time change and I try to adapt. The months of darkness coming early, and I sleep better than before. Music has filled my house the past week, my friend Ben came over and played piano while I played several different flutes and guitar - we had a really fun jam. Hanging out in Riverside at Tio's Taco's with writing workshop friends Lorraine, Peter, Steve- my magic sax man! - and Mike. Driving home again on the familiar through-the-Badlands-route and offering my usual silent prayers for Phil, whose life ended there.
Autumn in the desert revives and renews. Magic footsteps, I could write of this, I try to bring it all into one, and I pray for desert preservation, to remember the deep grooved, storied landscape before it's gone.
And now it's time to broaden into sunshine. Outdoors for light-splash. Remember one of thousands of mother-daughter walks: Tarah in her baby backpack on Fry Mountain. Tarah climbing ahead of me in the Wonderland of rocks. Camping with my girl on a trip through Topock Gorge. The day Tarah decided to stay home instead. "I love you forever," I say to you. I can taste a few persistent raindrops on my mouth-opened tongue, and remember what water felt like not so long ago, and I know I will remain in this for however long it takes to fill.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Western Wilderness Conference, April 10. 2010
I was part of a panel presentation, with Malcolm Margolin, Tim Palmer and Kenneth Brower (grandson of the late environmentalist/Sierra Club founder David Brower) at the Western Wilderness Conference 2010 at University of California, Berkeley. Here I am, reading desert poetry, lecturing from NP4AP, and and poetically describing the cosmic vitality of the desert...a little mashup, if you will, of poet-professor-desert storyboard.
thanks to my friend, writer/audio engineer Cyrus Emerson, for filming this. The pictures are mine, most taken by me and some taken by my friend Philip Helland.
thanks to my friend, writer/audio engineer Cyrus Emerson, for filming this. The pictures are mine, most taken by me and some taken by my friend Philip Helland.
Monday, November 15, 2010
California Legacy Project: Nature Dreaming
Nature Dreaming: Rediscovering California's Landscapes borrows its title from lines of a lyric poem by Robinson Jeffers, "The Beauty of Things":
. . . man you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant—to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.
I am one of the featured scholar/writers for this new California Legacy Project radio/Internet program, Nature Dreaming, with writers/writing from around our state. Several of the interviews and readings are posted, and updates are being added (including my humble interview on the California Desert, my scholarly and literary work and poetic affiliations with my Mojave homeland) soon. Thanks to the amazing Terry Beers of Santa Clara University for putting this together.
http://californialegacy.org/radio_productions/Nature_Dreaming/
This program is inspired by the nature-based poetry and prose of the late Robinson Jeffers, whose Big Sur coastline/northern California writing rests large among our state, and country's, literary giants.
I can't wait to hear the entire show! We are at such a crucial time right now, in moving forward with California desert conservation and protection, given the onslaught of massive wind and solar projects already ok'd and being ok'd by the California Energy Commission and President Obama. 43,000 acres already signed away, and reports that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has said that he wants to make the California deserts - and southwest U.S. - the source of all wind and solar for the country. Endangered desert tortoises and fragile, vulnerable ecosystems are already being plowed under as I write this, never to be recovered again. We MUST act now to severely curtail, and reconsider, the Solar Gold Rush, which threatens so many levels of ecosystem, balance, and survival.
This is the time where I find myself so gratefully and determinedly joining a growing contingent of dedicated California desert conservationists and activists - Alfredo Figueroa, Preston Arrow-Weed, Chris Clarke, Terry Weiner, Laura Cunningham, Kevin Emmerich, Bob Ellis, Pat Flanagan, Tom Budlong, Steve Brown, Larry Hogue, Robert Lundahl, Joan Taylor, other Chemehuevi, Quechan, Mojave, and other Colorado River Indian leaders, including Charles Wood and Philip Smith, and others in the best, presssed-for-time grassroots campaigns that we can to make the public aware of what is at stake here in our precious California desert, and why we can't afford to lose this forever to the interests of corporate power mandating how "sustainable" energy implementation will go down in our deserts.
In other words, we can't afford to "murder to dissect," as the great philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson said, in our efforts to shift how we produce energy. Murdering the California desert by invading, blading, and forever destroying hundreds of thousands of acres of pristine land - home to endangered species such as the California Desert Tortoise, the Joshua tree, and so much of the magic of our landscape and heritage - that we are still barely learning about - in the name of "sustainability." To do so would be the most tragic form of irony, with no comic relief, that I can think of. I am posting updates and information as I receive it, best that I can, to Mojave Desert Watch on facebook; feel free to visit and "like" this page. Also, visiting there will allow you to connect with other sites such as Basin and Range Watch and other sources of information, including filmmaker Robert Lundahl's excellent series about the Blythe Intaglios and other archaeological sites of the area.
here I am at the Creator's Throne, an archaeological site near Blythe, CA, at the edge of the proposed 10,000 acre Millenium Solar Project. Much of the landscape behind me, which contains invaluable archaelogical features, is slated for destruction. Thank you, Alfredo Figueroa, esteemed historian, elder, activist, and who has been sounding the alarm on what stands to be lost longer and more vocally and with more passion and compassion than anyone else I have met - for sharing this treasure with me, on behalf of my heart and my love for my Mojave Homeland.
NATURE DREAMING PROJECT: in-progress and to be completed by early 2011. Featured writers-scholars include: David Mas Masumoto, San Joaquin Valley organic farmer/writer and award-winning author of Heirlooms, Letters to the Valley, Four Seasons in Five Senses, Harvest Son, Epitaph for a Peach, and Wisdom of the Last Farmer; and also writer-scholars Georgiana Sanchez; Gary Noy; Shaun-Ann Tangney; Kevin Hearle; and Juan Velasco.
I am beyond humbled and floored to be included as part of this series, representing the great California desert and its magic, mysteries, allure, power, indigenous genius, and known and unknown writers and writing.
. . . man you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant—to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.
I am one of the featured scholar/writers for this new California Legacy Project radio/Internet program, Nature Dreaming, with writers/writing from around our state. Several of the interviews and readings are posted, and updates are being added (including my humble interview on the California Desert, my scholarly and literary work and poetic affiliations with my Mojave homeland) soon. Thanks to the amazing Terry Beers of Santa Clara University for putting this together.
http://californialegacy.org/radio_productions/Nature_Dreaming/
This program is inspired by the nature-based poetry and prose of the late Robinson Jeffers, whose Big Sur coastline/northern California writing rests large among our state, and country's, literary giants.
I can't wait to hear the entire show! We are at such a crucial time right now, in moving forward with California desert conservation and protection, given the onslaught of massive wind and solar projects already ok'd and being ok'd by the California Energy Commission and President Obama. 43,000 acres already signed away, and reports that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has said that he wants to make the California deserts - and southwest U.S. - the source of all wind and solar for the country. Endangered desert tortoises and fragile, vulnerable ecosystems are already being plowed under as I write this, never to be recovered again. We MUST act now to severely curtail, and reconsider, the Solar Gold Rush, which threatens so many levels of ecosystem, balance, and survival.
This is the time where I find myself so gratefully and determinedly joining a growing contingent of dedicated California desert conservationists and activists - Alfredo Figueroa, Preston Arrow-Weed, Chris Clarke, Terry Weiner, Laura Cunningham, Kevin Emmerich, Bob Ellis, Pat Flanagan, Tom Budlong, Steve Brown, Larry Hogue, Robert Lundahl, Joan Taylor, other Chemehuevi, Quechan, Mojave, and other Colorado River Indian leaders, including Charles Wood and Philip Smith, and others in the best, presssed-for-time grassroots campaigns that we can to make the public aware of what is at stake here in our precious California desert, and why we can't afford to lose this forever to the interests of corporate power mandating how "sustainable" energy implementation will go down in our deserts.
In other words, we can't afford to "murder to dissect," as the great philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson said, in our efforts to shift how we produce energy. Murdering the California desert by invading, blading, and forever destroying hundreds of thousands of acres of pristine land - home to endangered species such as the California Desert Tortoise, the Joshua tree, and so much of the magic of our landscape and heritage - that we are still barely learning about - in the name of "sustainability." To do so would be the most tragic form of irony, with no comic relief, that I can think of. I am posting updates and information as I receive it, best that I can, to Mojave Desert Watch on facebook; feel free to visit and "like" this page. Also, visiting there will allow you to connect with other sites such as Basin and Range Watch and other sources of information, including filmmaker Robert Lundahl's excellent series about the Blythe Intaglios and other archaeological sites of the area.
here I am at the Creator's Throne, an archaeological site near Blythe, CA, at the edge of the proposed 10,000 acre Millenium Solar Project. Much of the landscape behind me, which contains invaluable archaelogical features, is slated for destruction. Thank you, Alfredo Figueroa, esteemed historian, elder, activist, and who has been sounding the alarm on what stands to be lost longer and more vocally and with more passion and compassion than anyone else I have met - for sharing this treasure with me, on behalf of my heart and my love for my Mojave Homeland.
NATURE DREAMING PROJECT: in-progress and to be completed by early 2011. Featured writers-scholars include: David Mas Masumoto, San Joaquin Valley organic farmer/writer and award-winning author of Heirlooms, Letters to the Valley, Four Seasons in Five Senses, Harvest Son, Epitaph for a Peach, and Wisdom of the Last Farmer; and also writer-scholars Georgiana Sanchez; Gary Noy; Shaun-Ann Tangney; Kevin Hearle; and Juan Velasco.
I am beyond humbled and floored to be included as part of this series, representing the great California desert and its magic, mysteries, allure, power, indigenous genius, and known and unknown writers and writing.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
HELP! Mass Destruction...in the Mojave...happening now....
People PLEASE read this and SPREAD THE WORD! Only a small group of people seem to know what is going on in the Mojave Desert as I write this. A massive LAND RAPE. All in the name of "go-green" which in this case is the rhetoric of sustainability being used in a twisted way. 5-10% of the species of the Mojave Desert flora and fauna remain un-discovered and un-named.
The Ivanpah Valley, California Spirit Run - to raise awareness for this beautiful area of the Mojave Desert located near the California-Nevada stateline....and where the world's largest solar facility is currently being installed, with drastic, horrific implications for the future of the desert and its many inhabitants. Plants, animals, geologic and archaeological-cultural features, many which are not yet fully understood.
http://vimeo.com/16014476
Watch this video:
http://thesunrunner.ning.com/video/shocking-projection-of-mass
Interview with ecologist Jim Andre, Director, Granite Mountains Desert Research Center at University of California. If he seems in shock...well, he is. This has all come down so quickly, so sneakily, and so drastically that none of us involved in desert protection quite knows what to do.
This very precious region is not only barely being understood, but as a desert that attracts millions of visitors yearly from around the world for its fragility, intensity, and wisdom, not to mention beauty and allure....it is being grabbed in what is being termed by desert conservationists as the ugliest, biggest land-grab and archaeological and biological eco-destruction our country has seen since the Gold Rush in the Sierras in the 1800's.
This is NOT good and in fact is pure evil. There is no reason these massive solar and wind plants cannot be placed on land that is already "gone" or on farms anywhere in the western U.S. that are laying fallow.
The Mojave Desert is largely YOUR land. Public land. BLM land, there for all of us to use and enjoy. The BLM has made, and continues to make, dirty deals for minor ducats with corporate robber-barns, on land it is supposed to protect for generations to come. Why can't the corporations barter deals for windmill and solar - which still uses oil and gas and water for production - with private landowners?
Read this article, which I found on a private blog: it's by an environmental writer who really outlines the evils, comparing the solar-wind land grab on the California desert to the fights of the 1950's and 60's to protect Yosemite and nearby Sierra valleys from development of dams.
http://palimpsest.typepad.com/frogsandravens/2010/10/hetch-hetchy-and-glenn-canyon-all-over-again.html
The desert is my home. This hurts. It's unnecessary. Solar and wind CAN be done right. The sickening destruction of stands of virgin, old-growth Joshua trees, which are already endangered, by bulldozers -- to build the world's largest solar plant - is an irreversible decision that will ruin what can never be replaced.
Pass the word along. Let people know. GET INVOLVED. Maybe we can...change this world.
The California Desert...is YOUR backyard.
The Ivanpah Valley, California Spirit Run - to raise awareness for this beautiful area of the Mojave Desert located near the California-Nevada stateline....and where the world's largest solar facility is currently being installed, with drastic, horrific implications for the future of the desert and its many inhabitants. Plants, animals, geologic and archaeological-cultural features, many which are not yet fully understood.
http://vimeo.com/16014476
Watch this video:
http://thesunrunner.ning.com/video/shocking-projection-of-mass
Interview with ecologist Jim Andre, Director, Granite Mountains Desert Research Center at University of California. If he seems in shock...well, he is. This has all come down so quickly, so sneakily, and so drastically that none of us involved in desert protection quite knows what to do.
This very precious region is not only barely being understood, but as a desert that attracts millions of visitors yearly from around the world for its fragility, intensity, and wisdom, not to mention beauty and allure....it is being grabbed in what is being termed by desert conservationists as the ugliest, biggest land-grab and archaeological and biological eco-destruction our country has seen since the Gold Rush in the Sierras in the 1800's.
This is NOT good and in fact is pure evil. There is no reason these massive solar and wind plants cannot be placed on land that is already "gone" or on farms anywhere in the western U.S. that are laying fallow.
The Mojave Desert is largely YOUR land. Public land. BLM land, there for all of us to use and enjoy. The BLM has made, and continues to make, dirty deals for minor ducats with corporate robber-barns, on land it is supposed to protect for generations to come. Why can't the corporations barter deals for windmill and solar - which still uses oil and gas and water for production - with private landowners?
Read this article, which I found on a private blog: it's by an environmental writer who really outlines the evils, comparing the solar-wind land grab on the California desert to the fights of the 1950's and 60's to protect Yosemite and nearby Sierra valleys from development of dams.
http://palimpsest.typepad.com/frogsandravens/2010/10/hetch-hetchy-and-glenn-canyon-all-over-again.html
The desert is my home. This hurts. It's unnecessary. Solar and wind CAN be done right. The sickening destruction of stands of virgin, old-growth Joshua trees, which are already endangered, by bulldozers -- to build the world's largest solar plant - is an irreversible decision that will ruin what can never be replaced.
Pass the word along. Let people know. GET INVOLVED. Maybe we can...change this world.
The California Desert...is YOUR backyard.
Live Desert Poetry Reading, Guerrilla Reads Magazine + Phantom Seed @ P & W Online
This is a very cool online literary journal....Guerrilla Reads....based in L.A. and extending to the California Desert
MOJAVE DESERT POETRY: live reading by Ruth @ Guerrilla Reads Online Literary Magazine....you'll have to copy/past the URL to your browser...I'm still trying to figure out how to enliven links here on my page.
http://guerrillareads.com/
Issue 15, October 19, 2010
if you don't see it on the homepage, go to the Issue 15, Oct 19 archives.
Please also view some of the other videos on the Guerrilla Reads website, especially the one just before mine, issue 14, October 12, 2010 - featuring the stellar poet-activist-humanist Juan Felipe Herrera, my friend and a huge inspiration, in a collaborative reading his great poem, Arizona Green (Manifesto #1070), in protest the passage of SB 1070. Just scroll down from where you see my humble little video.
And: check out the Phantom Seed: a magazine of California desert poetry and prose listing at Poets & Writers Magazine....I think it looks great! Issue 4 is now out. Cover photograph taken at Rock Chapel, near Christ Church Park in Yucca Valley, CA - the cross is cut=out into the bricks of the artistically-designed, small chapel. I spent a day in there a few years back, meditating and praying, desert light filtering in through the open crosses, Joshua trees and Jesus-statues in the background.
http://www.pw.org/content/phantom_seed_magazine
submissions accepted year 'round. Email to runolan@aol.com along with writer's bio.
MOJAVE DESERT POETRY: live reading by Ruth @ Guerrilla Reads Online Literary Magazine....you'll have to copy/past the URL to your browser...I'm still trying to figure out how to enliven links here on my page.
http://guerrillareads.com/
Issue 15, October 19, 2010
if you don't see it on the homepage, go to the Issue 15, Oct 19 archives.
Please also view some of the other videos on the Guerrilla Reads website, especially the one just before mine, issue 14, October 12, 2010 - featuring the stellar poet-activist-humanist Juan Felipe Herrera, my friend and a huge inspiration, in a collaborative reading his great poem, Arizona Green (Manifesto #1070), in protest the passage of SB 1070. Just scroll down from where you see my humble little video.
And: check out the Phantom Seed: a magazine of California desert poetry and prose listing at Poets & Writers Magazine....I think it looks great! Issue 4 is now out. Cover photograph taken at Rock Chapel, near Christ Church Park in Yucca Valley, CA - the cross is cut=out into the bricks of the artistically-designed, small chapel. I spent a day in there a few years back, meditating and praying, desert light filtering in through the open crosses, Joshua trees and Jesus-statues in the background.
http://www.pw.org/content/phantom_seed_magazine
submissions accepted year 'round. Email to runolan@aol.com along with writer's bio.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Sign Petition to Stop Big Solar/Windmill in the California Desert
Help! Sign the petition to stop the "Gold Rush Mentality" desecration of the Colorado River Indian Intaglios, a sacred and important archaeological site located in the California Desert near Blythe, California -
http://www.petitiononline.com/savekoko/petition.html
Then, PLEASE pass this petition along to ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS, online and otherwise!! TIME IS PASSING QUICKLY - the Gold Rush is raging, the big utility companies are sealing-the-deals-with-the-state, and other, massive solar-windmill facilties are lined up to scrape and destroy the face in ugly, unwanted surgeries already scheduled to be knifed across vast tracts of the Mojave and other California deserts!!!
To be blunt: we need to act NOW!
Why is the big-solar-faciilty-in-the-desert-thing such a big deal?
There are so many things wrong with this picture - including the fact that these solar facilities take up mega-water.....as most of you know, water availability is a MAJOR problem throughout the desert, and the southwest. Not to mention that the CA desert, second in biodiversity of life - including the beloved icons of our region, the endangered Desert Tortoise and the Joshua Tree - stand to take another horrid ecologic hit & run that they may not recover from. Not to mention...who stands to profit in this LAND AND CULTURE RAPE? The big corporations - PG & E....Edison....not us, folks! Not the defenseless desert or its myriad, magical forms of animal and plant and geologic life.....
WE CAN AND MUST DO THIS BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!! Do you like the Grand Canyon? Who doesn't? Did you know that...back in the 60's, grassroots activists + the Sierra Club got together and managed to stop plans to install a series of dams in the Grand Canyon - yes, that's right, and one dam site even got drilled - and preserve this ancient and abiding place of magic and beauty for generations to come.
We, on facebook, can do this, too. We have the Internet at our fingertips, so please help those of us in the California Desert who are trying to pass the word along before it is too late!!!
Feel free to sign or not - but at least, before you make up your mind, take a moment to learn just a little bit about what is at stake with the massive solar-windmill-corporate-land grab, and what's going down faster than a "speeding bullet" in our Mojave Desert. Just so you are informed.
To learn more about the Intaglios, visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blythe_Intaglios
ACT NOW!! The California Energy Commission has already approved legislation that allows for construction - desecration - to begin at the Blythe Intalgio Site, as well as at Ivanpah, CA - the latter is planned to be the largest solar panel facility in the world and will destroy thousands of untouched acres of our sacred and necessary California Desert.
After you sign this petition, please visit the following site for information on the pending Ivanpah, CA (located near the stateline between California-Nevada) solar installation.
Information at Ivanpah, CA solar facility - note that "PG & E" and other utility conglomerates are jumping on the "investment" bandwagon...
http://sunpluggers.com/news/as-decisions-near-on-more-solar-power-plants-opponents-urge-alternatives-01020
http://californiasolarinstallation.com/archives/tag/brightsource
THERE IS AN EXCELLENT GROUP CALLED
SOLAR DONE RIGHT
who are working feverishly to put a stop to the Gold Rush on public desert lands. Contact them for more information.
http://solardoneright.org/
I plan to visit the Blythe Intaglio site very soon, within the next two weeks, and speak directly with a Colorado River area Native American elder who is intimately familiar with the stories behind the Intaglios, and learn more, which I will share with you on this blog as the stories unfold. I will also take more pictures and post on my blog soon. Keep the Faith!
Thank You!
Ruth Nolan
Mojave Desert Native.....and advocate
editor, No Place for a Puritan: the literature of California's deserts (Heyday Books, 2009)
http://www.petitiononline.com/savekoko/petition.html
Then, PLEASE pass this petition along to ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS, online and otherwise!! TIME IS PASSING QUICKLY - the Gold Rush is raging, the big utility companies are sealing-the-deals-with-the-state, and other, massive solar-windmill facilties are lined up to scrape and destroy the face in ugly, unwanted surgeries already scheduled to be knifed across vast tracts of the Mojave and other California deserts!!!
To be blunt: we need to act NOW!
Why is the big-solar-faciilty-in-the-desert-thing such a big deal?
There are so many things wrong with this picture - including the fact that these solar facilities take up mega-water.....as most of you know, water availability is a MAJOR problem throughout the desert, and the southwest. Not to mention that the CA desert, second in biodiversity of life - including the beloved icons of our region, the endangered Desert Tortoise and the Joshua Tree - stand to take another horrid ecologic hit & run that they may not recover from. Not to mention...who stands to profit in this LAND AND CULTURE RAPE? The big corporations - PG & E....Edison....not us, folks! Not the defenseless desert or its myriad, magical forms of animal and plant and geologic life.....
WE CAN AND MUST DO THIS BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!! Do you like the Grand Canyon? Who doesn't? Did you know that...back in the 60's, grassroots activists + the Sierra Club got together and managed to stop plans to install a series of dams in the Grand Canyon - yes, that's right, and one dam site even got drilled - and preserve this ancient and abiding place of magic and beauty for generations to come.
We, on facebook, can do this, too. We have the Internet at our fingertips, so please help those of us in the California Desert who are trying to pass the word along before it is too late!!!
Feel free to sign or not - but at least, before you make up your mind, take a moment to learn just a little bit about what is at stake with the massive solar-windmill-corporate-land grab, and what's going down faster than a "speeding bullet" in our Mojave Desert. Just so you are informed.
To learn more about the Intaglios, visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blythe_Intaglios
ACT NOW!! The California Energy Commission has already approved legislation that allows for construction - desecration - to begin at the Blythe Intalgio Site, as well as at Ivanpah, CA - the latter is planned to be the largest solar panel facility in the world and will destroy thousands of untouched acres of our sacred and necessary California Desert.
After you sign this petition, please visit the following site for information on the pending Ivanpah, CA (located near the stateline between California-Nevada) solar installation.
Information at Ivanpah, CA solar facility - note that "PG & E" and other utility conglomerates are jumping on the "investment" bandwagon...
http://sunpluggers.com/news/as-decisions-near-on-more-solar-power-plants-opponents-urge-alternatives-01020
http://californiasolarinstallation.com/archives/tag/brightsource
THERE IS AN EXCELLENT GROUP CALLED
SOLAR DONE RIGHT
who are working feverishly to put a stop to the Gold Rush on public desert lands. Contact them for more information.
http://solardoneright.org/
I plan to visit the Blythe Intaglio site very soon, within the next two weeks, and speak directly with a Colorado River area Native American elder who is intimately familiar with the stories behind the Intaglios, and learn more, which I will share with you on this blog as the stories unfold. I will also take more pictures and post on my blog soon. Keep the Faith!
Thank You!
Ruth Nolan
Mojave Desert Native.....and advocate
editor, No Place for a Puritan: the literature of California's deserts (Heyday Books, 2009)
Monday, September 27, 2010
Poetry Night in San Diego
I read on Weds, Sept 15 at Word Soup in San Diego, a terrific series hosted by my longtime poetry friend Seretta Martin (pictured at left.) Next to me is a new poetry friend, Jackleen Holton; she and I were the two featured poetesses of the evening! This inspirational poetry night also featured many amazing open microphone readers!
Friday, September 24, 2010
Friday, September 10, 2010
Blow Torch (or: desert diaspora v_02)
what it's like
to not feel safe
because the fire rages around all of us
destroying some lives entirely
and inexplicably sparing other homes
it's koran-burning talk on TV
in the basement of Riverside Medical Center,
waiting for an x-ray and huddled with held-back tears
I can't read the script, can't hear the words
then the doctor says: lungs clear.
this is the world of many homeless
this is where the old orange grove once was
next to the make believe river which is dry
until you get close enough to the hidden heart
mid-cottonwood, mini-cauliflower cosmology
water-cycle-breath
mountains to valley to sea
we stopped it up
by tearing it apart
the Bible, the Koran,
they both
came from a desert
just like this
Noah's Ark, I remember
getting those little plastic
animals at the Arco Gas Station
in Rialto on Foothill Boulevard
it's unpredictable, the planners will say
we have to make it safe
we don't want floods
we do want suburban homes
I believe you have asthma, my lass.
that's why your chest has been hurting so badly
that's why your upper back feels like it's burning sometimes.
that's why you cough and wheeze until you cry.
walgreens for an asthma inhaler.
then Bristol Farms on Country Club, Palm Desert,
samples of erotica
dams don't always work
earthquake version 9.0 about to erupt
and southern California's inland coastal valleys
are pockmarked with false lakes
cement waterways
never enough
to put out the drought
to combat fire season
some of us live closer
to the source
and feel its loss
while others yet don't
and how they yet mock
something about the desert
too much dust, not enough trees
too much emptiness of the interior
plastered with remembered and remodeled facelifts.
Grass - lear jet backwash across
Whitewater Wash
an empty face of sand
imprisoned between
miles of gold courses
narrowing its neck (remove double chins)
it always happens to someone else
because they asked for it
because of how they built their life
what did they expect?
love-making on the worst night of fire season
the last time the life-shred Santa Anas swallowed
chunks of Malibu, the San Fernando Valley
you brought this on
it is all your fault
it was gray too soon in the I.E.
but burning blue and white out here, as always,
and so I diamond shop for dinner, a cartier of the mouth,
lacking soul food:
lemongrass linguine + mushroom medley + cauliflower-red pepper
+ stir fry + grilled salmon salad + expensive gouda cheese
+ eggplant hummus +
one recyclable plastic fork (a new thing)
swallowing
is what we all do,
let's just speak the truth
it's downtown Riverside, la tablita on university by the front window
hugging friends who randomly stop by, chili_relleno and no bread
darkness vaporizes
I drive home on the 91-215-60-10-cook street loop
for the 492n'd time (somewhere around there)
and you'd always drive my car, it was all good
something about 2 am and broken bridges
being retrofitted for e-q standards
gets a little old,
as if I would be the one
to be on that bridge
the instant the big one hits (again)
it's the pool guy banging on the slider, just wanted to say thanks
for moving the trash cans that were in my way in the side yard where I come in
and the weather is suddenly so cool...........weightless..........
it's the fleece cougar blanket, two fleece jackets, one orange pashmina and
a pricey cotton sweater for creative writing at noon: the classroom is COLD
I offer what warmth I can to my students, and they take me up on it
don't worry
we can save ourselves
200 cans of organic soup
29 boxes of shotgun ammo
a new gate more securely locked
restraining order against the stalker
two big dogs and camping supplies
I know how to backpack for months
I've done it before
life on the streets
in the woods
freeze-dry food, instant oats
we don't need much to survive
it's not Tarah texting/her 2nd week in Minnesota
with new in-laws I don't know
others. numbers I don't know who's behind them.
"what ru doing 2day"
"I love you"
"yr my hero"
"can you call me I need to talk"
"full tilt boogie"
"come over!"
"where u at?"
"do you have flyers for your next event?"
"I want my fam to know ur my still my friend"
it's the small hairbrush
it's Brindle and Shasta shedding fur
it's my new do-it-yourself-haircut that everyone seems to love
it's paying off the American Express bill
and slicing the cheese extra thin
it's curling up in the back bedroom on the new bed I bought 6 months ago
in a blanket and crying myself back to sleep at dawn
it's paperwork I can't get through
it's dishes I can't understand
it's waking up to peace + bird-songs by the window:
...................it's another day and I am now taking asthma medication
maybe I'll be able to breathe this afternoon
and write the gratitude list:
I am grateful for sunrise
I am grateful for the dark water
I am grateful for the dogs
I am grateful, um, to have a job
I am grateful for the bullet holes, I can believe, I think,
that they offer light after all
there's no children to worry about
..........pictures of lost parents
on the milk cartons...............
you are free! Free at last!
..........to do what, to reach for
what missing fingers you once had......
sort of like my lungs
wanting to feel at one
with the rest of my entirety
stomach, breasts, and heart
but lacking a windpipe
I'll make up for that
the other organs are there,
the negatives demonstrate that
I just need to remember
to reach for the suck-plunge inhaler
invite oxygen, even though
it causes rust
I make up for gambling
by going to extra church
I make up for not reading
by burning books
I make up for God
by making the sign of the cross
when I drive by highway accident sites
offering the crude wooden cross
it's 9.11 tomorrow and I imagine emergencies,
books burning and the hole left deep in mid-city ground,
invisible catch-all
with no words
printable
for this
one step away from empty brain,
empty book,
9.11 of the soul
something to sedate us all for
body memory
one part
many wholes
bellow: does it mean: below
or
to blow
or reach for the hose
fire of breath
dead center
has new meaning for me now
Buddha
taking arrows between the eyes,
He approves
to not feel safe
because the fire rages around all of us
destroying some lives entirely
and inexplicably sparing other homes
it's koran-burning talk on TV
in the basement of Riverside Medical Center,
waiting for an x-ray and huddled with held-back tears
I can't read the script, can't hear the words
then the doctor says: lungs clear.
this is the world of many homeless
this is where the old orange grove once was
next to the make believe river which is dry
until you get close enough to the hidden heart
mid-cottonwood, mini-cauliflower cosmology
water-cycle-breath
mountains to valley to sea
we stopped it up
by tearing it apart
the Bible, the Koran,
they both
came from a desert
just like this
Noah's Ark, I remember
getting those little plastic
animals at the Arco Gas Station
in Rialto on Foothill Boulevard
it's unpredictable, the planners will say
we have to make it safe
we don't want floods
we do want suburban homes
I believe you have asthma, my lass.
that's why your chest has been hurting so badly
that's why your upper back feels like it's burning sometimes.
that's why you cough and wheeze until you cry.
walgreens for an asthma inhaler.
then Bristol Farms on Country Club, Palm Desert,
samples of erotica
dams don't always work
earthquake version 9.0 about to erupt
and southern California's inland coastal valleys
are pockmarked with false lakes
cement waterways
never enough
to put out the drought
to combat fire season
some of us live closer
to the source
and feel its loss
while others yet don't
and how they yet mock
something about the desert
too much dust, not enough trees
too much emptiness of the interior
plastered with remembered and remodeled facelifts.
Grass - lear jet backwash across
Whitewater Wash
an empty face of sand
imprisoned between
miles of gold courses
narrowing its neck (remove double chins)
it always happens to someone else
because they asked for it
because of how they built their life
what did they expect?
love-making on the worst night of fire season
the last time the life-shred Santa Anas swallowed
chunks of Malibu, the San Fernando Valley
you brought this on
it is all your fault
it was gray too soon in the I.E.
but burning blue and white out here, as always,
and so I diamond shop for dinner, a cartier of the mouth,
lacking soul food:
lemongrass linguine + mushroom medley + cauliflower-red pepper
+ stir fry + grilled salmon salad + expensive gouda cheese
+ eggplant hummus +
one recyclable plastic fork (a new thing)
swallowing
is what we all do,
let's just speak the truth
it's downtown Riverside, la tablita on university by the front window
hugging friends who randomly stop by, chili_relleno and no bread
darkness vaporizes
I drive home on the 91-215-60-10-cook street loop
for the 492n'd time (somewhere around there)
and you'd always drive my car, it was all good
something about 2 am and broken bridges
being retrofitted for e-q standards
gets a little old,
as if I would be the one
to be on that bridge
the instant the big one hits (again)
it's the pool guy banging on the slider, just wanted to say thanks
for moving the trash cans that were in my way in the side yard where I come in
and the weather is suddenly so cool...........weightless..........
it's the fleece cougar blanket, two fleece jackets, one orange pashmina and
a pricey cotton sweater for creative writing at noon: the classroom is COLD
I offer what warmth I can to my students, and they take me up on it
don't worry
we can save ourselves
200 cans of organic soup
29 boxes of shotgun ammo
a new gate more securely locked
restraining order against the stalker
two big dogs and camping supplies
I know how to backpack for months
I've done it before
life on the streets
in the woods
freeze-dry food, instant oats
we don't need much to survive
it's not Tarah texting/her 2nd week in Minnesota
with new in-laws I don't know
others. numbers I don't know who's behind them.
"what ru doing 2day"
"I love you"
"yr my hero"
"can you call me I need to talk"
"full tilt boogie"
"come over!"
"where u at?"
"do you have flyers for your next event?"
"I want my fam to know ur my still my friend"
it's the small hairbrush
it's Brindle and Shasta shedding fur
it's my new do-it-yourself-haircut that everyone seems to love
it's paying off the American Express bill
and slicing the cheese extra thin
it's curling up in the back bedroom on the new bed I bought 6 months ago
in a blanket and crying myself back to sleep at dawn
it's paperwork I can't get through
it's dishes I can't understand
it's waking up to peace + bird-songs by the window:
...................it's another day and I am now taking asthma medication
maybe I'll be able to breathe this afternoon
and write the gratitude list:
I am grateful for sunrise
I am grateful for the dark water
I am grateful for the dogs
I am grateful, um, to have a job
I am grateful for the bullet holes, I can believe, I think,
that they offer light after all
there's no children to worry about
..........pictures of lost parents
on the milk cartons...............
you are free! Free at last!
..........to do what, to reach for
what missing fingers you once had......
sort of like my lungs
wanting to feel at one
with the rest of my entirety
stomach, breasts, and heart
but lacking a windpipe
I'll make up for that
the other organs are there,
the negatives demonstrate that
I just need to remember
to reach for the suck-plunge inhaler
invite oxygen, even though
it causes rust
I make up for gambling
by going to extra church
I make up for not reading
by burning books
I make up for God
by making the sign of the cross
when I drive by highway accident sites
offering the crude wooden cross
it's 9.11 tomorrow and I imagine emergencies,
books burning and the hole left deep in mid-city ground,
invisible catch-all
with no words
printable
for this
one step away from empty brain,
empty book,
9.11 of the soul
something to sedate us all for
body memory
one part
many wholes
bellow: does it mean: below
or
to blow
or reach for the hose
fire of breath
dead center
has new meaning for me now
Buddha
taking arrows between the eyes,
He approves
Monday, September 6, 2010
Ruth Archives
A little archiving for my files and hopefully for your viewing and listening pleasure...and so I don't forget.
April, 2010: My Western Wilderness Conference, 2010, UC Berkeley presentation. Featuring the California Desert and some of my desert poetry as stars: Panel moderated by Malcolm Margolin and featuring Kenneth Brower, Tim Palmer, and Kimi Kodani Hill. Film excerpt by my friend Cyrus Emerson who works at Blackstone Audio.
http://www.facebook.com/#!/video/video.php?v=471563005080&subj=559231276
September, 2008: Interview with poets Ruth Nolan + Juan Felipe Herrera, KCET Arts Block, SoCal. Interviewed by poet Ching-In Chen.
http://www.kcet.org/socal/podcasts/artsblock-live/ruth-nolan-and-juan-felipe-herrera.html
Another goody-item for my blog grab bag
Here is a link to the 2008 Joshua Tree Photo Shoot sponsored by UCR-CMP and Sweeney Gallery....and a writeup of my role in the film I wrote and read poetry for (I just found this writeup....I'll post the entire project description in a separate blog posting)
Escape to Reality: 24 hrs @ 24 fps
Once a rough cut of images was assembled, we approached the author of Phantom Seed, poet Ruth Nolan to add her vision of Joshua Tree. Ruth, a resident of Palm Desert, became excited about the video project and set about writing and narrating Joshua Tree Imprimatur (excerpted below). She also recorded footsteps walking and running through Joshua Tree, a place she had spent many days and nights growing up. While Mabel Luhan's memoirs, featured in sub-title form are the voice of Escape to Reality, it is Ruth Nolan's words that are its soul. She paints a picture of the desert that is complex, ironic, mysterious, and beautiful.
The film clip is at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gowJF2HLNYY
Joshua Tree Imprimatur (excerpt)
In Joshua Tree
In the land that crowns its needled glories with sand
In the desert made of pavement fallen from the Milky Way
In the desert made of deep holes, carved by grinding stones
In the desert made of gashed canyons, cut straight through stone
In the desert made of walking rain that the eye can far-off see
In the desert made of fan tree palms
In the desert made of cold
In the desert made of Blinding mirage
In the desert made of light so old it whispers like grooved bones
Where the woolly mammoth and rattlesnake cross time and home,
Oceans of time rising and receding, land quaking in their paths
Where the granite batholiths arch their backs
where the red-tailed hawks vault their hunting songs
by Ruth Nolan
AND HERE IS....
The upcoming California Legacy Project, Nature Dreaming. Sponsored by Santa Clara University & the National Endowment for the Arts - in progress, and I'm one of the invited humanities scholars from the state who will be part of the project:
http://californialegacy.org/radio_productions/Nature_Dreaming/
April, 2010: My Western Wilderness Conference, 2010, UC Berkeley presentation. Featuring the California Desert and some of my desert poetry as stars: Panel moderated by Malcolm Margolin and featuring Kenneth Brower, Tim Palmer, and Kimi Kodani Hill. Film excerpt by my friend Cyrus Emerson who works at Blackstone Audio.
http://www.facebook.com/#!/video/video.php?v=471563005080&subj=559231276
September, 2008: Interview with poets Ruth Nolan + Juan Felipe Herrera, KCET Arts Block, SoCal. Interviewed by poet Ching-In Chen.
http://www.kcet.org/socal/podcasts/artsblock-live/ruth-nolan-and-juan-felipe-herrera.html
Another goody-item for my blog grab bag
Here is a link to the 2008 Joshua Tree Photo Shoot sponsored by UCR-CMP and Sweeney Gallery....and a writeup of my role in the film I wrote and read poetry for (I just found this writeup....I'll post the entire project description in a separate blog posting)
Escape to Reality: 24 hrs @ 24 fps
Once a rough cut of images was assembled, we approached the author of Phantom Seed, poet Ruth Nolan to add her vision of Joshua Tree. Ruth, a resident of Palm Desert, became excited about the video project and set about writing and narrating Joshua Tree Imprimatur (excerpted below). She also recorded footsteps walking and running through Joshua Tree, a place she had spent many days and nights growing up. While Mabel Luhan's memoirs, featured in sub-title form are the voice of Escape to Reality, it is Ruth Nolan's words that are its soul. She paints a picture of the desert that is complex, ironic, mysterious, and beautiful.
The film clip is at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gowJF2HLNYY
Joshua Tree Imprimatur (excerpt)
In Joshua Tree
In the land that crowns its needled glories with sand
In the desert made of pavement fallen from the Milky Way
In the desert made of deep holes, carved by grinding stones
In the desert made of gashed canyons, cut straight through stone
In the desert made of walking rain that the eye can far-off see
In the desert made of fan tree palms
In the desert made of cold
In the desert made of Blinding mirage
In the desert made of light so old it whispers like grooved bones
Where the woolly mammoth and rattlesnake cross time and home,
Oceans of time rising and receding, land quaking in their paths
Where the granite batholiths arch their backs
where the red-tailed hawks vault their hunting songs
by Ruth Nolan
AND HERE IS....
The upcoming California Legacy Project, Nature Dreaming. Sponsored by Santa Clara University & the National Endowment for the Arts - in progress, and I'm one of the invited humanities scholars from the state who will be part of the project:
http://californialegacy.org/radio_productions/Nature_Dreaming/
Friday, September 3, 2010
California Legacy Project + Poets of Bodie
What a day! I've been invited to participate in an exciting California Legacy Project, by Santa Clara University, which will be comprised of interviews of prominent state scholars (me?) on California authors whose works they admire-value for their investment and connection to "place." Not surprisingly, I'm going to focus on the literary legacies by several literary heavyweights interwoven deeply the California desert and the Inland Empire region. Whee! Too cool for words. This project is funded by Santa Clara U and the National Endowment for the Arts.
So....how did I get from point A to point universe? Not long ago I was a shy and uber-private mom and teacher who hiked all the time in the desert...with Tarah and maybe a friend or two and quite often singularly alone....no public life beyond....teaching at the college, and prior to that, high school...and emphatically too scared to read my poems publicly, except rarely, and in a hushed tone.
Now - ???? A desert book? Invitations like this? I'm floored, astonished, happy, and also the thread of bittersweet walk of beauty and sad lacing through the fabric of my life...breathing and humming as one...tasting so much, tasting so little, tasting it all. From Philip: a found email from months ago: "be a hologram." Too cool for intellect, to the next worlds I go. For the record, the project is inspired in part by the legacy and works of the great California poet-writer Robinson Jeffers. For more:
Also, I'm now formally connected to an amazing poetry writing collaborative-project, "Poets of Bodie," organized and overseen by the incredible Nicelle Davis who is another desert poet/writer! A group of poets and writers from throughout the west are assuming personae based on real lives of those who lived through one of California's largest mining towns from the late Gold Rush-early 20th century era; it is now one of the world's most famous ghost towns, located east of the Sierras near Mono Lake and Bridgeport, CA. I've been there and it's unreal. Well, yes, it's a ghost town, after all. It's one of Tarah's favorite places; I took her there as a little kid on one of our many extended summer travels through the state as she was growing up. Bodie Ghost Town: http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=509
I'm writing from an imagined persona of Mary Winnemucca Tate, a Mono Lake Paiute-Anglo woman bent on transformational revenge and "putting into right balance" the evils perpetrated on the abundant Native American people of the region. The westward expansion of the "California Gold Rush" were a death sentence for the indigenous peoples, many tribes being eradicated quickly and entirely during this time.
Read more, if you'd like, about my persona and her poetic intentions at:
http://bodiepoetryproject.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/poets-of-bodie-ruth-nolan/
You may also read about all of the poets/writers and their goals with this project at: http://bodiepoetryproject.wordpress.com/
The results of this collaborative will be published and performed as a book in the near future. I'll keep you posted! This is so cool!
So....how did I get from point A to point universe? Not long ago I was a shy and uber-private mom and teacher who hiked all the time in the desert...with Tarah and maybe a friend or two and quite often singularly alone....no public life beyond....teaching at the college, and prior to that, high school...and emphatically too scared to read my poems publicly, except rarely, and in a hushed tone.
Now - ???? A desert book? Invitations like this? I'm floored, astonished, happy, and also the thread of bittersweet walk of beauty and sad lacing through the fabric of my life...breathing and humming as one...tasting so much, tasting so little, tasting it all. From Philip: a found email from months ago: "be a hologram." Too cool for intellect, to the next worlds I go. For the record, the project is inspired in part by the legacy and works of the great California poet-writer Robinson Jeffers. For more:
Also, I'm now formally connected to an amazing poetry writing collaborative-project, "Poets of Bodie," organized and overseen by the incredible Nicelle Davis who is another desert poet/writer! A group of poets and writers from throughout the west are assuming personae based on real lives of those who lived through one of California's largest mining towns from the late Gold Rush-early 20th century era; it is now one of the world's most famous ghost towns, located east of the Sierras near Mono Lake and Bridgeport, CA. I've been there and it's unreal. Well, yes, it's a ghost town, after all. It's one of Tarah's favorite places; I took her there as a little kid on one of our many extended summer travels through the state as she was growing up. Bodie Ghost Town: http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=509
I'm writing from an imagined persona of Mary Winnemucca Tate, a Mono Lake Paiute-Anglo woman bent on transformational revenge and "putting into right balance" the evils perpetrated on the abundant Native American people of the region. The westward expansion of the "California Gold Rush" were a death sentence for the indigenous peoples, many tribes being eradicated quickly and entirely during this time.
Read more, if you'd like, about my persona and her poetic intentions at:
http://bodiepoetryproject.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/poets-of-bodie-ruth-nolan/
You may also read about all of the poets/writers and their goals with this project at: http://bodiepoetryproject.wordpress.com/
The results of this collaborative will be published and performed as a book in the near future. I'll keep you posted! This is so cool!
Art VULUPS project!
Sept 2, 2010: Art VULUPS meeting at downtown Riverside Library (my adopted "2nd home" for so many events, since 2004.) I'm working as part of an arts-planner collaborative for Riverside County - teamed with Mike Harrod to focus on "sound" and many amazing others - for this ongoing project that will run for 2 years and cuminate in permanent installations throughout the region: VULUPS stands for "Art as a Vehicle to Understand Land Use Planning & Sustainability Project." 16 teams altogether. I'm so honored to be part-of! I am the only writer. Wow. Their website is:http://www.artvulups.org/
I'll post updates periodically.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Slouching Towards Mt. Rubidoux Manor, Issue 3, Sept 16 @ Back to the Grind
Inlandia Writers Workshop-Riverside, Summer 2010
Reading and Anthology Release Scheduled
members of the writers workshop - photo taken August 26, 2010
Creative writers and their works from the summer, 2010 Inlandia Writers Workshop in Riverside will be showcased at an Inlandia-sponsored reading on Thursday, September 16 at Back to the Grind coffee house, from 7-9 pm. The workshop has been taught continuously during summer, fall, winter and spring sessions by Ruth Nolan since its inception in June, 2008, who is also the workshop founder.
An eclectic and diverse range of poetry and prose – including memoir, essays, and short stories – will be shared and read aloud by workshop participants at the event, which is free and open to the public. This will be one of many readings held by the group throughout the year, and is the second reading held at Back to the Grind. In addition, the reading will also feature the launch of the workshop’s yearly anthology of collected works, Slouching Towards Mt. Rubidoux Manor, issue No. 3. All of the works are original pieces and were written during the summer workshop session.
“I’m very proud of this summer’s writers – their enthusiasm, their hard work, and the community spirit built and generated by those in the workshop have all been major factors in the success of this summer’s workshop, as well as the high quality and inspirational quality of the writing to be featured in our anthology, as well as at our Sept. 16 reading,” says Nolan. “This is a strong and true community of writers, one that adds a vital and vigorous litany of voices to the emerging body literature of the Inland Empire.”
Participants in this summer’s session/contributors to the anthology include local residents/writers Karen Bradford; Vickie Buchanan; Brian Dale Bywater; Deenaz P. Coachbuilder; Nikia Chaney Mike Cluff; Harki Dhillon; Heather Dubois; Cyrus Emerson; Ellen Estilai; Amy Floyd; Michelle Gonzalez; Joan Koerper; Danielle La Paglia; Lorraine Lefaivre; Peter Naggi; Kamelyta Noor; Michael Sleboda; Zachary Smith; April Strout; Vicky Tuey; Jean Waggoner; Celeste Walter; and Sharon Zorn-Katz.
The Inlandia Writers Workshop-Riverside is one of several writing workshops in the Inland Empire region, including Idyllwild and Palm Springs. The fall, 2010 session of the Riverside workshop, to be led by Ruth Nolan, will begin on Thursday, September 30 at 6:30 pm at the downtown library. For more information on this or the other workshops, contact Marion Mitchell-Wilson at the Inlandia Institute.
Special thanks for the production of this year’s anthology go to Marion Mitchell-Wilson, Inlandia Institute Director; April Durham, Inlandia Advisory Committee Member and graphic designer of Slouching Towards Mt. Rubidoux Manor, issue #3, and members the Inlandia Institute Publications Committee, chaired by Cati Porter. Ruth Nolan is the founder/editor of Slouching Towards Mt. Rubidoux Manor, and also a member of the Inlandia Advisory Committee and the publications committee.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Prospecting, Indio Hills
for Phil
through this slot canyon
we have decided to explore
past the ancient palm trees
living on a waterless shore
and pillared by a fault zone
we traverse a mud walled wash
that gets thinner and thinner
while late November clouds
pillar into silent gray burdens
above our heads, you say rain
I assure you that water isn't
attracted to this dry spot,
I see walls rising higher,
you say the flood will easily
cascade past us today, the
rocks fall away beneath my
feet and I find a small stack
of black crystals, the first I've
ever found in 20 odd years
of driving the sandy back
roads now I almost get stuck
again in my battered Toyota
RAV4 once again, it's not
a new 4WD, it’s from the
wandering into narrow places
unknown except to a few
desert rats and the sand dunes
are mostly leveled on the
valley, low, now the fat rain
pushes down for birthing,
I advise a hasty retreat
to a thermos of hot tea
and you want tacos again,
good thing I didn't lose
the keys this time, you win,
the rain terrorizes windshield
and hood, now I drive away,
turn to ask whether you want
chicken or beans, you’re gone,
conversation shattered, my
fingers, around these rocks.
by Ruth Nolan, copyright (c) 2010 by Ruth Nolan
through this slot canyon
we have decided to explore
past the ancient palm trees
living on a waterless shore
and pillared by a fault zone
we traverse a mud walled wash
that gets thinner and thinner
while late November clouds
pillar into silent gray burdens
above our heads, you say rain
I assure you that water isn't
attracted to this dry spot,
I see walls rising higher,
you say the flood will easily
cascade past us today, the
rocks fall away beneath my
feet and I find a small stack
of black crystals, the first I've
ever found in 20 odd years
of driving the sandy back
roads now I almost get stuck
again in my battered Toyota
RAV4 once again, it's not
a new 4WD, it’s from the
wandering into narrow places
unknown except to a few
desert rats and the sand dunes
are mostly leveled on the
valley, low, now the fat rain
pushes down for birthing,
I advise a hasty retreat
to a thermos of hot tea
and you want tacos again,
good thing I didn't lose
the keys this time, you win,
the rain terrorizes windshield
and hood, now I drive away,
turn to ask whether you want
chicken or beans, you’re gone,
conversation shattered, my
fingers, around these rocks.
by Ruth Nolan, copyright (c) 2010 by Ruth Nolan
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
NP4@P Review + Desolation Tango
Here is a nice review of NP4@P (my new acronym for the desert book) and my friend Deanne Stillman's Joshua Tree book, Desolation Tango. The generous review was penned by my friend/author Cynthia Anderson, who lives in Joshua Tree. Cynthia's poetry has been featured in Phantom Seed Magazine (an offshoot publication I publish once or twice a year of contemporary poetry and prose)and will be featured again in Phantom Seed #4, coming out next month. Check my blog soon for upcoming readings, which will begin in mid-September.
Here is the writeup:
Being laid up for a couple of weeks with an injured back has had its advantages, mainly the chance to read for hours on end. Happily, I had just ordered a pile of books from Amazon and they've been steadily trickling in. Here are a few of my favorites.
"No Place for a Puritan" is an anthology of desert writing, both poetry and prose. There are heavy hitters like John Steinbeck and Sylvia Plath (!), the usual suspects like Mary Austin and Edward Abbey, and a host of others you've never heard of but will be glad you did. Editor Ruth Nolan has done a superb job of bringing together diverse voices. I devoured this book!
Last night I actually made it to an author reading at the Red Arrow Gallery that featured Ruth Nolan along with Deanne Stillman, author of "Joshua Tree: Desolation Tango" as well as a definitive book on wild mustangs and an expose about a 1991 murder in 29 Palms. Another desert writer worth checking out.
You can read the review on Cynthia's blog at:
http://cynthiashidesertblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/summer-reading.html
Thanks, Cynthia!
Here is the writeup:
Being laid up for a couple of weeks with an injured back has had its advantages, mainly the chance to read for hours on end. Happily, I had just ordered a pile of books from Amazon and they've been steadily trickling in. Here are a few of my favorites.
"No Place for a Puritan" is an anthology of desert writing, both poetry and prose. There are heavy hitters like John Steinbeck and Sylvia Plath (!), the usual suspects like Mary Austin and Edward Abbey, and a host of others you've never heard of but will be glad you did. Editor Ruth Nolan has done a superb job of bringing together diverse voices. I devoured this book!
Last night I actually made it to an author reading at the Red Arrow Gallery that featured Ruth Nolan along with Deanne Stillman, author of "Joshua Tree: Desolation Tango" as well as a definitive book on wild mustangs and an expose about a 1991 murder in 29 Palms. Another desert writer worth checking out.
You can read the review on Cynthia's blog at:
http://cynthiashidesertblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/summer-reading.html
Thanks, Cynthia!
Monday, August 16, 2010
Desert Writers Issue, Summer 2010, Sun Runner Magazine
Salton Sea, south shore, near Obsidian Butte, photo by me but not in the summer.
Desert Writers Issue, Sun Runner Magazine, Summer 2010 is out...
http://issuu.com/thesunrunnermagazine/docs/sraugustdig10
the issue looks RAD and there's a generous review of No Place 4 A Puritan.
Enjoy! This issue is a GREAT READ! Perfect for mid-August. It's drenching hot here in Palm Desert - our tropical weather with a twist of Death Valley heat thrown in. Too hot to go bike riding, even at 10 pm. Yuck-weather, too supernovabaked to breathe. Swim-mind, body-dope. That's what this is, and I'm heading to Northern California to visit my brothers Patrick (San Jose) and John (Oakland) before.....school starts.
PS how is this for an 11 pm temperature (from the weather channel)
11:00 PM, PALM DESERT, AUGUST 16 2010
95°F
Feels Like: 101°
45% humidity
YUCK!
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Crazy Creek Camp Chair
Here's a poem of mine that appeared in the summer, 2008 Sun Runner Magazine Desert Writers Issue....one I've never read publicly but that I think is...wobbly yet precise in its depiction of a relationship between a teenage girl and her mother...(for the record, the 2010 Desert Writers Issue is about to hit the shelves...I'll post the link when it's ready.)
Crazy Creek Camp Chair
Backpacking trip, mother and daughter, furtive coyote prowling
for short grouse. We plan to arrive at dusk, trade places, she hikes
front, I behind. We are close to the same height and weight but
I am wobbly on this jagged mountain range, a ledge, 9,100 feet,
seeking a campsite. It's May, and she is tall, eclipsing me, it can't be
helped. I am in her long shadow now, frustrated by her easy pace.
I slip behind to find a walking stick, imagine how the swirling hot
chocolate I’ll prepare will ease the aches of sleeping on the ground,
but she, she loves to sleep outdoors. How deceived she is, by our
sixteen-year routine, mother and daughter bundled side by side
in matching sleeping bags, expecting me to erect the tent, prime
the stove, the usual exchange. The meadow is yet beaten down and
a fresh-cheeked sunset chokes the joys of flowery smiles peeking
through the snow. I know the creek will sleep tonight. I’m not so far
behind, and the old birds sing in the new grass with winter’s last breath.
Ruth Nolan, Palm Desert, copyright(c) 2008 & 2010 by Ruth Nolan
the issue, which features poetry and prose by other desert-based writers, can be visited at:
http://www.thesunrunner.com/Stories/Desert_Writers_Issue_2007/Nolan_DWI_07/nolan_dwi_07.html
Crazy Creek Camp Chair
Backpacking trip, mother and daughter, furtive coyote prowling
for short grouse. We plan to arrive at dusk, trade places, she hikes
front, I behind. We are close to the same height and weight but
I am wobbly on this jagged mountain range, a ledge, 9,100 feet,
seeking a campsite. It's May, and she is tall, eclipsing me, it can't be
helped. I am in her long shadow now, frustrated by her easy pace.
I slip behind to find a walking stick, imagine how the swirling hot
chocolate I’ll prepare will ease the aches of sleeping on the ground,
but she, she loves to sleep outdoors. How deceived she is, by our
sixteen-year routine, mother and daughter bundled side by side
in matching sleeping bags, expecting me to erect the tent, prime
the stove, the usual exchange. The meadow is yet beaten down and
a fresh-cheeked sunset chokes the joys of flowery smiles peeking
through the snow. I know the creek will sleep tonight. I’m not so far
behind, and the old birds sing in the new grass with winter’s last breath.
Ruth Nolan, Palm Desert, copyright(c) 2008 & 2010 by Ruth Nolan
the issue, which features poetry and prose by other desert-based writers, can be visited at:
http://www.thesunrunner.com/Stories/Desert_Writers_Issue_2007/Nolan_DWI_07/nolan_dwi_07.html
Saturday, August 14, 2010
San Andreas Canyon Haiku Walk + Anthology
I'm honored to have a haiku series, inspired by a close poet friend and my hikes/our hikes/my late-May hike with friends and members from the Southern California Haiku Study Group - organized by my good friend Deborah P. Kolodji of Los Angeles - at the Indian Canyons in Palm Springs, forthcoming in the glamorous anthology:
an island of egrets…the 2010 Southern California Haiku Study Group Anthology
My five-haiku series is a desert word walk in itself, and follows the narrator through the start of the hike, arriving at the oasis, and then hiking 1/2 mile in the cool of palm trees alongside a creek to the left, massive rocks to the right, and then stopping at the small bridge, going into the water, and seeing a tiny frog clinging to a rock.
here is one, a sneak preview, written by me:
two dragonflies
the blue one
loses a wing
Two readings by anthology contributors are planned. I will definitely be at the first one.
Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena CA Saturday Sept 26 @ 2 pm
The Ink Spot, San Diego CA, Saturday Oct 9 @ 2 pm
Here is a description of the anthology, by this year's editor Billie Dee, featuring some of the best haiku - and other traditional forms of Japanese poetry - writers living and writing today, from this year's editor Billie Dee:
about an island of egrets…the 2010 Southern California Haiku Study Group Anthology From our first beautiful hand-made 2001 edition with eight founding haijin, we have grown to a volume of 65 poets. Our new book will be perfect-bound with a full-color heavy-stock cover, featuring 267 poems, including a fine selection of regional Spanish Language haiku with English translations. This collection emphasizes our unique climate and geography, our rich cultural diversity, and embraces the broad range of experience of our contributing haijin. I think you will be very pleased with the superb quality of work in this, our 10th Anniversary Edition!
an island of egrets…the 2010 Southern California Haiku Study Group Anthology
My five-haiku series is a desert word walk in itself, and follows the narrator through the start of the hike, arriving at the oasis, and then hiking 1/2 mile in the cool of palm trees alongside a creek to the left, massive rocks to the right, and then stopping at the small bridge, going into the water, and seeing a tiny frog clinging to a rock.
here is one, a sneak preview, written by me:
two dragonflies
the blue one
loses a wing
Two readings by anthology contributors are planned. I will definitely be at the first one.
Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena CA Saturday Sept 26 @ 2 pm
The Ink Spot, San Diego CA, Saturday Oct 9 @ 2 pm
Here is a description of the anthology, by this year's editor Billie Dee, featuring some of the best haiku - and other traditional forms of Japanese poetry - writers living and writing today, from this year's editor Billie Dee:
about an island of egrets…the 2010 Southern California Haiku Study Group Anthology From our first beautiful hand-made 2001 edition with eight founding haijin, we have grown to a volume of 65 poets. Our new book will be perfect-bound with a full-color heavy-stock cover, featuring 267 poems, including a fine selection of regional Spanish Language haiku with English translations. This collection emphasizes our unique climate and geography, our rich cultural diversity, and embraces the broad range of experience of our contributing haijin. I think you will be very pleased with the superb quality of work in this, our 10th Anniversary Edition!
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Art VULUPS
Art VULUPS, Riverside County: an arts and city planning collaborative I'm part of - my artist-colleague and friend, Leora Lutz has posted an insightful blog entry on the project, with a generous nod to my role in the project as a contributing artist-writer. Thanks, Leora! Pictures are of Doug McCulloh, author-photographer-renaissance man and yours truly - I am teamed with Mike Harrod of Riverside County planning, and our topic is "noise-sound"
http://movement365.blogspot.com/2010/08/art-vulups-public-art-in-conjunction.html
http://movement365.blogspot.com/2010/08/art-vulups-public-art-in-conjunction.html
Monday, August 9, 2010
letter to Phil
For anyone reading this blog: I am posting a commemoration of my dear friend, longtime companion and love, Philip Helland who died on April 9th of this year.
Today is the four month mark. What can I say? "nothing...compares...2 U..." you are missed every day. I am alone at the house. I burn a candle for you every night in the orange glass holder in the northwest bedroom every night, placed at the due-west corner. I had a dear, longtime friend I haven't seen in years, who now lives in Hawaii, call and text me with loving words and grace. Thank you, Lili.
Words and generosity and hugs that are so missing from you now, and saddest of all, from all the others who knew you and loved you, who seem to be moving on with their lives and forgetting about me, shutting me out. "When will you be over it?" "f-off" I don't say....as if I could ever forget about you. I know others hurt in missing you too but there is a universe between us, me, them and you. Missing from those I thought were closest to me but in truth are no more, shutting me out, cutting me out, slicing me out, for reasons unknown, adding to my own despair in this tragedy.... including most of my own "family," many of them, incredibly, offering harsh and callous criticisms of me - as if I asked for that. Adding tragedy upon tragedy. How in any way does causing additional pain help heal the pain? Perhaps this is the ultimate tragedy of the human condition, the reasons we remain sickeningly in war after war after f-ing war. Because people, countries, whole societies want to pass along the pain hot potato of life's most cutting events, rather than rise above to offer love, light, transformation.
You were my family, Philip, more than the others, more than words, more than life itself. That's how true it always was. And remains. If you were here now, I wouldn't have to write these things, because so much would be private and shared between us and safe in our sacred zone of what we shared. I write these things now because I want the world to know how special you remain..even for those who never knew you.
Sightings: Today: A bird lands on a fence. It feels a little like you, touching down to say hello, you haven't really gone. Saturday: a yellow butterfly, rare for this time of year in the desert, touched down on the pine tree I planted after Christmas one year. It's huge now...the butterfly landed right in front of me and I slowly reached out....and touched it. It moved its little legs and head up and down....then gently flew away to a higher branch, and stayed there for a long time, regarding me.
You added so much to the world while you were here. Wisdom, kindness, leadership, brilliance, spirituality, healing, musical talent, humor, insight, poetry, friendship to so many, and love, pure love. And a deep connection with nature. All of our hikes....starting with Deep Creek....Forest Falls...and so much more.
Subtle gestures...a yellow butterfly, landing on a brutal summer day in the desert, here at the edge of the world where beauty and terror and pain and despair and love and hope remain, somehow lifting their wings and landing gently in front of me. For a brief stay. So very Alice in Wonderland, that genius novel by Lewis Carroll...and we just saw the Tim Burton version of the movie together, and were similarly blown away. We kept talking about the symbol of the caterpillar-butterfly as transformation all night afterwards, as well as discussing the other messages of insight and universality and humanity and transcendence, too. And then we were on to our regular discussions of Carl Jung...
I love you. What more can I say? May I drift and walk in beauty, too, the way you always knew and led the way the best you could, which was infinitely more than most others can and will do. In the end, love is all that remains, and this is the last gift, that love is what remains. "prema" = "love" and I try every day and hope to always do so, to add a little bit of beauty, light and love to this human condition, no matter how bad things get, everywhere I go because that is what you believed in me to do and now I do it for you. In your name, in the spirit of you. And thank you for finding me in this life, and helping make me into someone better and new.
Philip in the Anza Borrego Desert, spring 2008, photo by Ruth
And here is a song by Moby (descendant of Herman Melville)...one of our favorites and the music video captures a bit of the spirit of you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1Fcaro25Ek
more hugs and love...
Today is the four month mark. What can I say? "nothing...compares...2 U..." you are missed every day. I am alone at the house. I burn a candle for you every night in the orange glass holder in the northwest bedroom every night, placed at the due-west corner. I had a dear, longtime friend I haven't seen in years, who now lives in Hawaii, call and text me with loving words and grace. Thank you, Lili.
Words and generosity and hugs that are so missing from you now, and saddest of all, from all the others who knew you and loved you, who seem to be moving on with their lives and forgetting about me, shutting me out. "When will you be over it?" "f-off" I don't say....as if I could ever forget about you. I know others hurt in missing you too but there is a universe between us, me, them and you. Missing from those I thought were closest to me but in truth are no more, shutting me out, cutting me out, slicing me out, for reasons unknown, adding to my own despair in this tragedy.... including most of my own "family," many of them, incredibly, offering harsh and callous criticisms of me - as if I asked for that. Adding tragedy upon tragedy. How in any way does causing additional pain help heal the pain? Perhaps this is the ultimate tragedy of the human condition, the reasons we remain sickeningly in war after war after f-ing war. Because people, countries, whole societies want to pass along the pain hot potato of life's most cutting events, rather than rise above to offer love, light, transformation.
You were my family, Philip, more than the others, more than words, more than life itself. That's how true it always was. And remains. If you were here now, I wouldn't have to write these things, because so much would be private and shared between us and safe in our sacred zone of what we shared. I write these things now because I want the world to know how special you remain..even for those who never knew you.
Sightings: Today: A bird lands on a fence. It feels a little like you, touching down to say hello, you haven't really gone. Saturday: a yellow butterfly, rare for this time of year in the desert, touched down on the pine tree I planted after Christmas one year. It's huge now...the butterfly landed right in front of me and I slowly reached out....and touched it. It moved its little legs and head up and down....then gently flew away to a higher branch, and stayed there for a long time, regarding me.
You added so much to the world while you were here. Wisdom, kindness, leadership, brilliance, spirituality, healing, musical talent, humor, insight, poetry, friendship to so many, and love, pure love. And a deep connection with nature. All of our hikes....starting with Deep Creek....Forest Falls...and so much more.
Subtle gestures...a yellow butterfly, landing on a brutal summer day in the desert, here at the edge of the world where beauty and terror and pain and despair and love and hope remain, somehow lifting their wings and landing gently in front of me. For a brief stay. So very Alice in Wonderland, that genius novel by Lewis Carroll...and we just saw the Tim Burton version of the movie together, and were similarly blown away. We kept talking about the symbol of the caterpillar-butterfly as transformation all night afterwards, as well as discussing the other messages of insight and universality and humanity and transcendence, too. And then we were on to our regular discussions of Carl Jung...
I love you. What more can I say? May I drift and walk in beauty, too, the way you always knew and led the way the best you could, which was infinitely more than most others can and will do. In the end, love is all that remains, and this is the last gift, that love is what remains. "prema" = "love" and I try every day and hope to always do so, to add a little bit of beauty, light and love to this human condition, no matter how bad things get, everywhere I go because that is what you believed in me to do and now I do it for you. In your name, in the spirit of you. And thank you for finding me in this life, and helping make me into someone better and new.
Philip in the Anza Borrego Desert, spring 2008, photo by Ruth
And here is a song by Moby (descendant of Herman Melville)...one of our favorites and the music video captures a bit of the spirit of you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1Fcaro25Ek
more hugs and love...
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Concerto No. 1 in E Minor, Hwy 111, Palm Springs
On July 24, my friend Dr. Maja Trochimczyk attended and wrote about the gala concert of the 13th Festival of International Laureates at Disney Hall in Los Angeles,
Chopin in Transcription at Disney Hall, performed by the IPalpiti Orchestra, conducted by Eduard Schmieder.
Maja's stunning review, part of many performances commemorating the bicentennial of the birth of the great and enduring Fryderyk Chopin - one of my life's inspirations as a poet and musician - occurring during the year 2010. In addition, Maja, a Chopin scholar and well-established music historian, compiled an amazing anthology of poetry, Chopin with Cherries: A Tribute in Verse (Moonrise Press, 2010.) I am extremely honored to have one of my poems included in this collection, which came out this past winter.
In her review, which can be read in full at http://chopinwithcherries.blogspot.com/2010/08/chopin-in-transcription-at-disney-hall.html Maja generously includes discussion and the body of a poem I wrote last summer, Concerto No. 1, in E minor on Highway 111, Palm Springs.
Excerpt, below, from Maja's review::
In any case, hearing Chopin's concerto in an elegant and nuanced strings-only version and Schumann's concerto luxuriating with the aural delights of romanticism at its best, reminded me of Ruth Nolan's masterly poem Concerto No. 1, in E minor on Highway 111, Palm Springs. Nolan heard the Chopin concerto on the car stereo while driving through the desert and an abundance of youthful memories ensued:
"Caressed, by the windy desert mid-night,
tickling your hair as you lean
your head against the open window
tantalizes your imagination, you are 12 again
and your hands, together, devour the major
and minor keys until you are one
with the dark void, foot pressing down,
long chords that will linger into dawn"
The final image of Nolan's poem (published in the anthology Chopin with Cherries) remains with the readers, resonating in their memories:
"Styled by elegance of motion, staccato, fortissimo
cresting on the car stereo as you leapfrog
between the lines on the highway
between the spaces of darkness and sound,
blown across the sand dunes into magnificence"
Chopin's music - heard, played, experienced - echoes in the memory with an untold magnificence, withstanding the test of time.
(end of review)
a sample of movement four from the Concerto - so much energy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Nwcn_o866Q&feature=related
I first heard this as a very young college student in my UC-Santa Barbara friend's dorm room....on a record. He was from the hills of Corona del Mar (the O.C.) and a rock star guitarist studying classical guitar and he laughed every time he put this record on. I was from the desert. Thanks, PR!
The next reading from Chopin with Cherries: A Tribute in Verse will be held at Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA on Sunday, September 12, at 2 pm. The event is open to the public and will feature readings from anthology contributors. A $7 fee is charged, and contributes to helping keep the historic and prolific literary arts center open in these difficult economic times. For more information on this event, and/or to order copies of the anthology, contact Maja Trochimczyk at maja.trochimczyk@gmail.com, or visit Beyond Baroque at http://www.beyondbaroque.org/
Chopin in Transcription at Disney Hall, performed by the IPalpiti Orchestra, conducted by Eduard Schmieder.
Maja's stunning review, part of many performances commemorating the bicentennial of the birth of the great and enduring Fryderyk Chopin - one of my life's inspirations as a poet and musician - occurring during the year 2010. In addition, Maja, a Chopin scholar and well-established music historian, compiled an amazing anthology of poetry, Chopin with Cherries: A Tribute in Verse (Moonrise Press, 2010.) I am extremely honored to have one of my poems included in this collection, which came out this past winter.
In her review, which can be read in full at http://chopinwithcherries.blogspot.com/2010/08/chopin-in-transcription-at-disney-hall.html Maja generously includes discussion and the body of a poem I wrote last summer, Concerto No. 1, in E minor on Highway 111, Palm Springs.
Excerpt, below, from Maja's review::
In any case, hearing Chopin's concerto in an elegant and nuanced strings-only version and Schumann's concerto luxuriating with the aural delights of romanticism at its best, reminded me of Ruth Nolan's masterly poem Concerto No. 1, in E minor on Highway 111, Palm Springs. Nolan heard the Chopin concerto on the car stereo while driving through the desert and an abundance of youthful memories ensued:
"Caressed, by the windy desert mid-night,
tickling your hair as you lean
your head against the open window
tantalizes your imagination, you are 12 again
and your hands, together, devour the major
and minor keys until you are one
with the dark void, foot pressing down,
long chords that will linger into dawn"
The final image of Nolan's poem (published in the anthology Chopin with Cherries) remains with the readers, resonating in their memories:
"Styled by elegance of motion, staccato, fortissimo
cresting on the car stereo as you leapfrog
between the lines on the highway
between the spaces of darkness and sound,
blown across the sand dunes into magnificence"
Chopin's music - heard, played, experienced - echoes in the memory with an untold magnificence, withstanding the test of time.
(end of review)
a sample of movement four from the Concerto - so much energy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Nwcn_o866Q&feature=related
I first heard this as a very young college student in my UC-Santa Barbara friend's dorm room....on a record. He was from the hills of Corona del Mar (the O.C.) and a rock star guitarist studying classical guitar and he laughed every time he put this record on. I was from the desert. Thanks, PR!
The next reading from Chopin with Cherries: A Tribute in Verse will be held at Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA on Sunday, September 12, at 2 pm. The event is open to the public and will feature readings from anthology contributors. A $7 fee is charged, and contributes to helping keep the historic and prolific literary arts center open in these difficult economic times. For more information on this event, and/or to order copies of the anthology, contact Maja Trochimczyk at maja.trochimczyk@gmail.com, or visit Beyond Baroque at http://www.beyondbaroque.org/
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Barnes & Noble Poetry, Palm Desert
It was a lovely evening...hosted by the indefatigable Patricia d'Alessandro, poetess supreme at 86 years young....she is hosting poet Wanda Coleman at the March, 2011 reading! Not to miss!
Among the readers, photographed above, are my colleague Tim Johnson from COD (next to me,) and local poets Frances Stanley (center,) and to the right, Dessa Reed and Lee Balan. Patricia is the lovely lady wearing the scarf. Two of the people in the photo read for the very first time! I love it.
Among the readers, photographed above, are my colleague Tim Johnson from COD (next to me,) and local poets Frances Stanley (center,) and to the right, Dessa Reed and Lee Balan. Patricia is the lovely lady wearing the scarf. Two of the people in the photo read for the very first time! I love it.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Trigger is coming home!
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=20683&id=118470144843233
to my hometown of Apple Valley, the town that Roy Rogers & Dale Evans built. Thanks to my Mojave Desert O.G. homeboy Dave Pike for taking and posting these.
to my hometown of Apple Valley, the town that Roy Rogers & Dale Evans built. Thanks to my Mojave Desert O.G. homeboy Dave Pike for taking and posting these.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Ladyfest I.E., Sunday August 8th
An all-day, interactive, music, e-zine making, arts, yoga and more! Back to the Grind coffee shop in Riverside...FREE and open to the public!! This is part of a national program and one of many Ladyfest events occurring throughout the U.S.
For directions.....http://www.back2thegrind.com/
From 6:50-7:15 PM I'll be reading feminist-desert poetry think: Sylvia Plath meets the ghost of Mary Austin and the bones of Shoshone woman buried at Soda Springs, with a little desert firefighting and music-keg-raves situated somewhere between sunset and sunrise on a dry lakebed just big enough for a small airplane to take off!
I am honored to be part of this....I also read last year and was and am inspired and motivated by the energy of the young people in downtown Riverside who are making it happen, keeping their voices alive, and loud, and real.
For directions.....http://www.back2thegrind.com/
From 6:50-7:15 PM I'll be reading feminist-desert poetry think: Sylvia Plath meets the ghost of Mary Austin and the bones of Shoshone woman buried at Soda Springs, with a little desert firefighting and music-keg-raves situated somewhere between sunset and sunrise on a dry lakebed just big enough for a small airplane to take off!
I am honored to be part of this....I also read last year and was and am inspired and motivated by the energy of the young people in downtown Riverside who are making it happen, keeping their voices alive, and loud, and real.
Friday, July 30, 2010
"Puritan Reviews" on LA Books Examiner and SF Books Examiner
I just found this....the good thing about sitting in the desert day and night, glued to the computer, cleaning up files, reflecting on recent months of living....these reviews give a lot of overview and insight of the many diverse and fascinating authors whose works appear in "Puritan," and also offer literary criticism that serves as a guide for me.....and....
I hope others, to understand the complex framework of how the works are carefully arranged, to reflect a cornucopia of stories spilling out of an apparently lifeless form...spilling onto the table for a literary feast in astonishing abundance from our state's most arid lands....in a recursive, not-entirely-linear literary passage....circling in and in upon itself as a comprehensive and self-containing, time-and-people-and-events embracing gesture of the ouroboros...a nifty paradigm that hopefully provides a convenient metaphor for the collection's intent...to the earliest people in the earliest times - the desert's vastly diverse, Native Americans - who have lived here since before time as those of us in the early 21st century *think* we know it began.
In short: these reviews help me understand the book better than I ever could have while steeped in the deepness of...bringing it to fruition, working closely every step of the way with my wise editor and guide, Gayle Wattawa, Acquistions Editor at Heyday (who also edited Inlandia: a literary journey through Southern California's Inland Empire, 2006), and many friends and colleagues, without whose widespread support this book never would have been.
No Place for a Puritan - here is a very nice review by the LA Books Examiner:
published on May 10, by reviewer Laura Frazin Steele
No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts edited by Ruth Nolan is an interesting and unique anthology that focuses on the history and culture of California's richly diverse desert region. No Place for a Puritan is published by Heyday Books, a Berkeley, California based publisher that aspires to deepen the awareness of California's rich cultural, natural, literary, and historic resources.
Ruth Nolan's No Place for a Puritan will expand the reader's understanding and appreciation of the California desert. Rather than viewing the desert as a wasteland, the reader will come to realize that the desert is an exotic environment that has become overdeveloped, overcrowded, and threatened.
No Place for a Puritan examines the California desert within the context of its inherent dangers, the lure of the desert and desert life, changes to the desert landscape over time, and conservation and protection of its resources.
This distinctive anthology includes the works of 80 respected and award winning authors and poets. Their contributions are as rich and diverse as the desert itself. For example, No Place for a Puritan includes the poem "Sleep in the Mojave Desert" by the late acclaimed poet and author Sylvia Plath. Her highly descriptive poem was inspired by a night of camping in the desert.
Furthermore, No Place for a Puritan includes an excerpt from Farewell to Manzanar, the moving bestseller that documents living conditions for Japanese Americans in a relocation center during World War II by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and her late husband James D. Houston.
Also included in No Place for a Puritan is an excerpt from The Raw Pearl, the autobiography of the late Pearl Bailey, a legendary American singer and entertainer who lived in a dude ranch in Apple Valley, California that catered to African Americans during the 1950s.
Joseph E. Stevens' well-researched book Hoover Dam: An American Adventure offers a history of Hoover Dam, which allowed for the settlement of Southwest deserts and inland regions. An excerpt from Hoover Dam is included in No Place for a Puritan to describe major historical changes to the desert landscape over time.
The late writer and environmentalist Marc Reisner contributed to No Place for a Puritan with his excerpt from Cadillac Desert, which documents the complex policies and history of water management in the nation's West. The excerpt from Cadillac Desert describes the epic construction of the Los Angeles aqueduct, which imports water into Southern California from the California Owens Valley.
The award winning environmental and political writer Rebecca Solnit movingly describes her political activism in a 1994 antinuclear demonstration at the Yucca Mountain test site in her book Savage Dreams, which is excerpted in No Place for a Puritan. In Savage Dreams Rebecca Solnit closely examines nuclear testing conducted by the U.S. government in California's Mojave Desert.
On Thursday May 13, 2010, editor Ruth Nolan and No Place for a Puritan contributors Juan Felipe Herrera and Susan Straight will discuss their work at the Riverside Art Museum at 6:00 p.m. Additional information about these authors and the event will be available in this column. If you would like an e-mail notification of this event and more information about the authors, click the subscribe button at the top of the page.
No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts edited by Ruth Nolan is available through Heyday Books.
this review can also be viewed online at http://www.examiner.com/x-31737-LA-Books-Examiner~y2010m5d10-No-Place-for-a-Puritan-explores-changes-to-Californias-deserts
AND HERE IS ANOTHER REVIEW....from San Francisco Books Examiner No Place for a Puritan: the Literature of California’s Deserts. Reviewed by SF Books Examiner LJ Moore April 3
Ruth Nolan’s 2009 anthology, No Place for a Puritan, is a collection of stories, poems, essays, and meditations on the deserts of California, divided into seven sections: Dangers, Crossings, Refuge and Exile, Lure, Desert as Home, Changing Desert, and Conservation/Protection. The variety and range of contributors makes this collection go to work differently on the consciousness than does a single-author book, creating an impression by accumulation, and offering a vicarious experience through observations, epiphanies, and lore about the desert landscape no single person could accrue in one lifetime.
Reading No Place for a Puritan is like sitting around a campfire listening to John Steinbeck, Cesar Chavez, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Aldous Huxley, Rebecca Solnit, General George S. Patton and Panamint Annie compare notes... only without the fistfight.
Nolan’s guiding genius in putting together this anthology is the recognition that an essential character of the human psyche is to attach emotional values to our physical spaces, and then to treat them accordingly. For many of us, the desert is labeled internally as an empty, no-go zone: a place you wouldn’t want to run out of gas, or the interminable emptiness one is forced to drive through on the way to Las Vegas or Yuma or Palm Springs. It has been variously called unforgiving, deadly, barren, hellish, and is even in film and fiction depicted as inhabited with a kind of supernatural or diabolical cruelty. That imagined desert is a flat, cartoonish place, empty, sere and scattered with the bones of the wayward: a stereotype that holds, not because it is true, but because in a place of both subtlety and extremes, the extremes are easier to see.
To see the desert as it really is, one must enter it and spend some time there, as the authors included in this anthology have done. One must get quiet and one must get small, as Ann Haymond Zwinger does, following the telltale signs of sidewinders and fringe-toed lizards: species uniquely adapted to flow nimbly across sand dunes. Alternatively, there is the way of Mary Elizabeth White, a miner and prospector who moved to Death Valley in 1931 and made her home there until 1979, living in a Model A truck, an old army ambulance, or as part of an itinerant “prospector family.” Then there's Pearl Bailey, who took over a dude ranch and called the desert home. There is also the tribal history of the deserts, home to Native American peoples, among them the Chemehuevi, Paiute, Mojave, Kawaiisu, Cahuilla, Serrano, Koso, and Kitanemuk, for thousands of years. And there is the darker history: the nuclear bomb tests, the Japanese internment camps, the Salton Sea: our attempts to tame and reshape the landscape to serve our purposes by unsustainable development.
In bringing together this deep and varied array of writings, Nolan offers a glimpse into the richness and subtlety of the California deserts: both physically and culturally. It is strangely impossible not to fall in love with a place at once enduring and vulnerable. On one hand, the desert refuses to be harnessed in the ways we have tried: paved into resorts, or irrigated to a suburban splendor. On the other hand, it is a precarious ecosystem, a place where the balance between living and dying is always skin-thin. It is a place so quiet you can hear a raven flying half a mile away because of the wind against its feathers. A place where, after a spring rain, you could lie on your belly and count a thousand flowers within three feet of your face, all less than two inches high.
Why is it no place for a Puritan? Because there's no point in harnessing the mules just to drive them into the dust. The history of our human relationship with California’s deserts drives home a critical lesson: peace and longevity with nature can't be achieved by considering ourselves an instrument of its domination. At worst we lust after the wrong dreams, but at best we acknowledge nature on it's own terms, becoming part of it: participants whose best achievements come from learning to appreciate and adapt to its larger rhythm.
I hope others, to understand the complex framework of how the works are carefully arranged, to reflect a cornucopia of stories spilling out of an apparently lifeless form...spilling onto the table for a literary feast in astonishing abundance from our state's most arid lands....in a recursive, not-entirely-linear literary passage....circling in and in upon itself as a comprehensive and self-containing, time-and-people-and-events embracing gesture of the ouroboros...a nifty paradigm that hopefully provides a convenient metaphor for the collection's intent...to the earliest people in the earliest times - the desert's vastly diverse, Native Americans - who have lived here since before time as those of us in the early 21st century *think* we know it began.
In short: these reviews help me understand the book better than I ever could have while steeped in the deepness of...bringing it to fruition, working closely every step of the way with my wise editor and guide, Gayle Wattawa, Acquistions Editor at Heyday (who also edited Inlandia: a literary journey through Southern California's Inland Empire, 2006), and many friends and colleagues, without whose widespread support this book never would have been.
No Place for a Puritan - here is a very nice review by the LA Books Examiner:
published on May 10, by reviewer Laura Frazin Steele
No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts edited by Ruth Nolan is an interesting and unique anthology that focuses on the history and culture of California's richly diverse desert region. No Place for a Puritan is published by Heyday Books, a Berkeley, California based publisher that aspires to deepen the awareness of California's rich cultural, natural, literary, and historic resources.
Ruth Nolan's No Place for a Puritan will expand the reader's understanding and appreciation of the California desert. Rather than viewing the desert as a wasteland, the reader will come to realize that the desert is an exotic environment that has become overdeveloped, overcrowded, and threatened.
No Place for a Puritan examines the California desert within the context of its inherent dangers, the lure of the desert and desert life, changes to the desert landscape over time, and conservation and protection of its resources.
This distinctive anthology includes the works of 80 respected and award winning authors and poets. Their contributions are as rich and diverse as the desert itself. For example, No Place for a Puritan includes the poem "Sleep in the Mojave Desert" by the late acclaimed poet and author Sylvia Plath. Her highly descriptive poem was inspired by a night of camping in the desert.
Furthermore, No Place for a Puritan includes an excerpt from Farewell to Manzanar, the moving bestseller that documents living conditions for Japanese Americans in a relocation center during World War II by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and her late husband James D. Houston.
Also included in No Place for a Puritan is an excerpt from The Raw Pearl, the autobiography of the late Pearl Bailey, a legendary American singer and entertainer who lived in a dude ranch in Apple Valley, California that catered to African Americans during the 1950s.
Joseph E. Stevens' well-researched book Hoover Dam: An American Adventure offers a history of Hoover Dam, which allowed for the settlement of Southwest deserts and inland regions. An excerpt from Hoover Dam is included in No Place for a Puritan to describe major historical changes to the desert landscape over time.
The late writer and environmentalist Marc Reisner contributed to No Place for a Puritan with his excerpt from Cadillac Desert, which documents the complex policies and history of water management in the nation's West. The excerpt from Cadillac Desert describes the epic construction of the Los Angeles aqueduct, which imports water into Southern California from the California Owens Valley.
The award winning environmental and political writer Rebecca Solnit movingly describes her political activism in a 1994 antinuclear demonstration at the Yucca Mountain test site in her book Savage Dreams, which is excerpted in No Place for a Puritan. In Savage Dreams Rebecca Solnit closely examines nuclear testing conducted by the U.S. government in California's Mojave Desert.
On Thursday May 13, 2010, editor Ruth Nolan and No Place for a Puritan contributors Juan Felipe Herrera and Susan Straight will discuss their work at the Riverside Art Museum at 6:00 p.m. Additional information about these authors and the event will be available in this column. If you would like an e-mail notification of this event and more information about the authors, click the subscribe button at the top of the page.
No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts edited by Ruth Nolan is available through Heyday Books.
this review can also be viewed online at http://www.examiner.com/x-31737-LA-Books-Examiner~y2010m5d10-No-Place-for-a-Puritan-explores-changes-to-Californias-deserts
AND HERE IS ANOTHER REVIEW....from San Francisco Books Examiner No Place for a Puritan: the Literature of California’s Deserts. Reviewed by SF Books Examiner LJ Moore April 3
Ruth Nolan’s 2009 anthology, No Place for a Puritan, is a collection of stories, poems, essays, and meditations on the deserts of California, divided into seven sections: Dangers, Crossings, Refuge and Exile, Lure, Desert as Home, Changing Desert, and Conservation/Protection. The variety and range of contributors makes this collection go to work differently on the consciousness than does a single-author book, creating an impression by accumulation, and offering a vicarious experience through observations, epiphanies, and lore about the desert landscape no single person could accrue in one lifetime.
Reading No Place for a Puritan is like sitting around a campfire listening to John Steinbeck, Cesar Chavez, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Aldous Huxley, Rebecca Solnit, General George S. Patton and Panamint Annie compare notes... only without the fistfight.
Nolan’s guiding genius in putting together this anthology is the recognition that an essential character of the human psyche is to attach emotional values to our physical spaces, and then to treat them accordingly. For many of us, the desert is labeled internally as an empty, no-go zone: a place you wouldn’t want to run out of gas, or the interminable emptiness one is forced to drive through on the way to Las Vegas or Yuma or Palm Springs. It has been variously called unforgiving, deadly, barren, hellish, and is even in film and fiction depicted as inhabited with a kind of supernatural or diabolical cruelty. That imagined desert is a flat, cartoonish place, empty, sere and scattered with the bones of the wayward: a stereotype that holds, not because it is true, but because in a place of both subtlety and extremes, the extremes are easier to see.
To see the desert as it really is, one must enter it and spend some time there, as the authors included in this anthology have done. One must get quiet and one must get small, as Ann Haymond Zwinger does, following the telltale signs of sidewinders and fringe-toed lizards: species uniquely adapted to flow nimbly across sand dunes. Alternatively, there is the way of Mary Elizabeth White, a miner and prospector who moved to Death Valley in 1931 and made her home there until 1979, living in a Model A truck, an old army ambulance, or as part of an itinerant “prospector family.” Then there's Pearl Bailey, who took over a dude ranch and called the desert home. There is also the tribal history of the deserts, home to Native American peoples, among them the Chemehuevi, Paiute, Mojave, Kawaiisu, Cahuilla, Serrano, Koso, and Kitanemuk, for thousands of years. And there is the darker history: the nuclear bomb tests, the Japanese internment camps, the Salton Sea: our attempts to tame and reshape the landscape to serve our purposes by unsustainable development.
In bringing together this deep and varied array of writings, Nolan offers a glimpse into the richness and subtlety of the California deserts: both physically and culturally. It is strangely impossible not to fall in love with a place at once enduring and vulnerable. On one hand, the desert refuses to be harnessed in the ways we have tried: paved into resorts, or irrigated to a suburban splendor. On the other hand, it is a precarious ecosystem, a place where the balance between living and dying is always skin-thin. It is a place so quiet you can hear a raven flying half a mile away because of the wind against its feathers. A place where, after a spring rain, you could lie on your belly and count a thousand flowers within three feet of your face, all less than two inches high.
Why is it no place for a Puritan? Because there's no point in harnessing the mules just to drive them into the dust. The history of our human relationship with California’s deserts drives home a critical lesson: peace and longevity with nature can't be achieved by considering ourselves an instrument of its domination. At worst we lust after the wrong dreams, but at best we acknowledge nature on it's own terms, becoming part of it: participants whose best achievements come from learning to appreciate and adapt to its larger rhythm.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Happy Birthday Tarah
Tarah (Nolan) Templin, married on January 16, 2010, is 22 years old today! Born 7.28.88 at 9:04 pm by C-Section at St. Mary's Hospital in Apple Valley, CA. Daughter of Ruth & Vincent. Tarah is 1/4 Lakota Sioux Indian, with an important North Dakota-based family that traces back to Major James McLaughlin and Sitting Bull. On my side and dad's side, she is Irish. Tarah is taller than me by a few inches, and much smarter. Her command of the English language in poetry and prose is formidable, and her incisive instinct for irony is unmatched; her sense of humor is brilliant. Tarah has attended Pitzer College in Claremont and is currently living at the Salton Sea. She is just as at home painting or singing opera (she excels at both) as she is cooking gourmet meals, camping out on a remote river trip, or wrapping herself stylishly in trendy fashions. What I value most in Tarah, however, is her kind heart and generosity. Tomorrow, we are going to Laguna Beach to celebrate her birthday, with no ice cream cake but definitely a long walk and stories of past birthdays spent at Sea World and a salad for dinner. Tarah just adopted a new puppy, and is a devoted animal lover, formerly serving as a junior volunteer at the Living Desert Zoo and also volunteering for the local animal shelter. She is an amazing person and I'm floored and honored to be her mother. I love you, Tarah! xxoo....from Mom
Recycled Poem
created during the collaboration of writers and artists during May, 2010, UCR-California Museum of Photography Mapping the California Desert project. Phantom Seed Magazine issue #4 (editors: Ruth Nolan, Ching-In Chen, Eric Shonkwiler, publication September, 2010) will feature works from participants in the project, and will also be featured on the Sweeney Gallery Museum website. "Recycled Poem" copyright (c) 2010 by Ruth Nolan.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Ochoa's Farm, Thermal, Temperature 122
Ochoa's Farm, Thermal, California
Temperature: 122
I put up the season's hot chilis, freshly drum-roasted
slimy green seaweed for a dehydrated white woman
marooned near the Salton Sea on this ancient shore.
I strip sweaty skin from smooth muscles, the stinging
passion of jellyfish singed into my hands, caress their
peppery brown stems, rinse the white seeds from their
wombs, tuck their hearts safely away, pack a dozen
ziplock bags with my contraband, another stash of
secret dreams. I look to the sky. Towering date palm
trees rise in one sigh, fruit yet bulging in brown bags.
Tonight, the chilis will freeze, and plump gray clouds
bigger than sperm whales will swim across the line
by Ruth Nolan
copyright (c) 2010 by Ruth Nolan
Temperature: 122
I put up the season's hot chilis, freshly drum-roasted
slimy green seaweed for a dehydrated white woman
marooned near the Salton Sea on this ancient shore.
I strip sweaty skin from smooth muscles, the stinging
passion of jellyfish singed into my hands, caress their
peppery brown stems, rinse the white seeds from their
wombs, tuck their hearts safely away, pack a dozen
ziplock bags with my contraband, another stash of
secret dreams. I look to the sky. Towering date palm
trees rise in one sigh, fruit yet bulging in brown bags.
Tonight, the chilis will freeze, and plump gray clouds
bigger than sperm whales will swim across the line
by Ruth Nolan
copyright (c) 2010 by Ruth Nolan
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Full Moon Near
Almost Here. The full mid-summer moon touches me in the high desert. Drove up to Joshua Tree yesterday, late afternoon. For my reading. Barely coherent, sun-smoked. Humid and hot, hot, hot. 115 here and 105 up there. Ghostly on Highway 62. Red Arrow Gallery. I arrived early. I was there with Phil on March 29 for another reading and the last picture of us together was taken then. I wore soft pink lipstick, my cool blue suede leather jacket. I look, in the pictures, elated. I was. Phil was near. We got to talk to a famous alchemist and journalist. A very nice man who has unlocked the code for anti-aging and is living proof of its success. Phil had incredibly intelligent questions to ask him. I could only stand by and smile.
Reaching down to guide me through reading. Nervous. Feeling Scorpio inward. Summer days, isolation days, worrying about Tarah days. Headache days. Too much coffee days. Not enough green tea days. A dash for the beach last week and heart in throat. We were there, we were at the Starbucks in Huntington Beach. Shit. Thought I could put it back. There it is. A homeless woman with long gray wig hair yells at traffic. She may be waiting for the bus. But the bus drives by. People go into Taco Bell, ignoring it.
Nervous. Reading with a famous author, and in a migraine days, realize I'm stuttering a little bit. Shy and scared. Not totally like me. But there is a different me these days. Last minute poem shuffle, deciding what to read, and digging the fact that the desert would backdrop me through the floor to ceiling window as I read, to the setting sun. Creosote, the earth's oldest living plants. Safety and security in that. Even if joshua trees signify the gates of heaven and hell. The light show and rave at the music fest here last May was a wonder in itself and I wish, wish, wish I could've been there with Phil. He lived for that stuff and I could see why. The coolest light show I've ever seen with the coolest, mixed up ambient beats, under soft desert night air. Magic. The spirit of parties in the desert when I was growing up. Nothing can match that. Or does. I live it again and again. Full moon splash when the sun is finally down and I read, sweetly and shyly but wryly of course, and tragi-strong. Beauty lives at the edge of terror, is what Malcolm said at the Into California reading last May. And I come from the middle of nowhere, I told him. That's where this all comes from, where it all comes in.
Sideways. I see friends in the audience of 25 or 30 who've come to see me and Deanne, hear she and I read. How honored I am, to have arrived from nothing today, and here they are. Caryn. Rainbow. Barbara. Rob & his wife Kate. Cheryl, such a generous hostess, and Katie, owner of the Red Arrow. Putting out the wine. I drink a little bit. To get over my stage fright. A few people approach me, in awe of the desert book, some having already read. I am surprised. Oh yeah, the book. Right. Sure I'll sign it. More copies are sold. Rob buys a copy of my poetry chapbook, Dry Waterfall. Now, I'm REALLY shy. He's such an awesome prose writer that I'm embarrassed. So it's time to read.
I preface with the quote I love from Chemehuevi Indian elder Larry Eddy: "I'm going to tell you a story,he said. But before I tell you that story, I am going to break your heart." Preface to the telling of one of the stories of the Salt Song Trail.
And so I read: Rattlesnake in the Cooler (haiku series, Andreas Canyon). from the preface to "No Place for a Puritan." Then, Mirage. Orouboros (Amargosa River). Jumping Cholla/Teddy Bear Cactus. Friendly Fire. Slow Freeze. Home Girl. Ghost Flower. Poolside. Wonder Valley. Chemehuevi Cemetery. Rattlesnake in the Cooler, V_02.
I didn't read Two Bunch Palms or St. Michael, V_02. I also decided against Phenomenal Phil; Stillbirth: Lake Mojave, Late June; Ochoa's Farm; Washboard Road. So little time. So many poems.
Moonside. The Joshua Tree Saloon. Too loud but we pile over there. Starving. I haven't had dinner or lunch. Past big bouncers, and an older gentleman, obviously quite well into his drinking night, smiles at me and says "here comes a live one!" If he only knew. I laugh, a little cynically, shake my head, ignore him, move on.
Me and a group of cool women friends, named above. I drink a fat tire beer (memories there and in red stripe beer) and we listen to horribly loud horrible rock music. Caryn, ever take-charge and speak-up, asks the waitress to turn it down, but...it is (terrible) rock and roll night. Caryn is from NYC and speaks French fluently and in fact is going to France soon for a rendez-vous with her beloved. Deanne, super-cool, talks more about her terrific book of historical research into the legacy of the wild horse in the U.S.. I'm touched by her passion for ending the government slaughter, which continues to this day, of wild mustangs in the west. Barbara, one of the editors of the well-known Sun Runner desert magazine, and I share a plate of french fries and onion rings (the bar has stopped serving all but the most abysmal junk food.) Rainbow, who is a medical doctor also from NYC, talks about her yoga and tai-chi classes and says we need to go for a hike. It's hard to follow conversation, music way too loud, my mind is distracted, I give into my recent habit of zoning out, zoning out, and watch a table of rather innocent-looking marines drink a lot. One of them sidles out smoothly with a woman he has shared one dance with and gives his buddies a thumbs up as he chugs his beer and tosses the empty into the trash.
And the moon holds me on the drive home. Middle of night. I call a friend to talk, on speakerphone. Mesmerized, and losing the signal in the Morongo Pass, then calling back and picking it up again. The moon showers the open land. No one is in the desert, mid-summer, too hot to handle. Moonlight feels good. The sun is a brute. My writing is at once, now, more beautiful and richer and more violent than it was a year ago. What of it I've done. Debbie coerced me to write a haiku series, and helped me shape them into top haiku form, hopefully to be published in this year's Southern CA haiku journal, where I've published before. I'm nervous about several writing assignments I've been given. I drive home on empty roads, taking the shortcut, Indian Avenue, through Desert Hot Springs down to the I-10. Gratefully, I easily fall asleep. Be brave. Again. How could I ever have thought this is the best way to live. But it is. Still, it is. The desert is where my imagination lives and grows wings, grows sunflowers in my garden from a previous nothing-ness, where roads uncurl to infinity. Wisdom and eternal sunshine of the moon-mad mind. Maybe I don't have to be here to know this now, but for now, it's where I still live.
And sleep with blinds not concealing everything, no matter how hard I try to beef u their work with blankets pinned up with tacks. What more then, except to wake up to blasting sun at noon, and hide indoors all day until night comes back again, with that soothing moon. Pink Floyd is perfect. For here and now. The sunflowers hold their heads alert, the hummingbirds visit their blooms, but only at the start and close of day, in the twilight of birth and death. The dogs are bored. Brindle plays ball by himself, and Shasta stands nearby. Tarah has moved to the Salton Sea. I'm alone here again. Maybe she'll call, maybe she won't. Floating. Waiting. Drinking iced tea.
Almost there. The moon, I mean. Ready to quiver across the lips of my 90 degree pool. Kiss me deep where the water's over my head. Again. I can almost see you.
"I'm going to tell you a story,he said. But before I tell you that story, I am going to break your heart."
Reaching down to guide me through reading. Nervous. Feeling Scorpio inward. Summer days, isolation days, worrying about Tarah days. Headache days. Too much coffee days. Not enough green tea days. A dash for the beach last week and heart in throat. We were there, we were at the Starbucks in Huntington Beach. Shit. Thought I could put it back. There it is. A homeless woman with long gray wig hair yells at traffic. She may be waiting for the bus. But the bus drives by. People go into Taco Bell, ignoring it.
Nervous. Reading with a famous author, and in a migraine days, realize I'm stuttering a little bit. Shy and scared. Not totally like me. But there is a different me these days. Last minute poem shuffle, deciding what to read, and digging the fact that the desert would backdrop me through the floor to ceiling window as I read, to the setting sun. Creosote, the earth's oldest living plants. Safety and security in that. Even if joshua trees signify the gates of heaven and hell. The light show and rave at the music fest here last May was a wonder in itself and I wish, wish, wish I could've been there with Phil. He lived for that stuff and I could see why. The coolest light show I've ever seen with the coolest, mixed up ambient beats, under soft desert night air. Magic. The spirit of parties in the desert when I was growing up. Nothing can match that. Or does. I live it again and again. Full moon splash when the sun is finally down and I read, sweetly and shyly but wryly of course, and tragi-strong. Beauty lives at the edge of terror, is what Malcolm said at the Into California reading last May. And I come from the middle of nowhere, I told him. That's where this all comes from, where it all comes in.
Sideways. I see friends in the audience of 25 or 30 who've come to see me and Deanne, hear she and I read. How honored I am, to have arrived from nothing today, and here they are. Caryn. Rainbow. Barbara. Rob & his wife Kate. Cheryl, such a generous hostess, and Katie, owner of the Red Arrow. Putting out the wine. I drink a little bit. To get over my stage fright. A few people approach me, in awe of the desert book, some having already read. I am surprised. Oh yeah, the book. Right. Sure I'll sign it. More copies are sold. Rob buys a copy of my poetry chapbook, Dry Waterfall. Now, I'm REALLY shy. He's such an awesome prose writer that I'm embarrassed. So it's time to read.
I preface with the quote I love from Chemehuevi Indian elder Larry Eddy: "I'm going to tell you a story,he said. But before I tell you that story, I am going to break your heart." Preface to the telling of one of the stories of the Salt Song Trail.
And so I read: Rattlesnake in the Cooler (haiku series, Andreas Canyon). from the preface to "No Place for a Puritan." Then, Mirage. Orouboros (Amargosa River). Jumping Cholla/Teddy Bear Cactus. Friendly Fire. Slow Freeze. Home Girl. Ghost Flower. Poolside. Wonder Valley. Chemehuevi Cemetery. Rattlesnake in the Cooler, V_02.
I didn't read Two Bunch Palms or St. Michael, V_02. I also decided against Phenomenal Phil; Stillbirth: Lake Mojave, Late June; Ochoa's Farm; Washboard Road. So little time. So many poems.
Moonside. The Joshua Tree Saloon. Too loud but we pile over there. Starving. I haven't had dinner or lunch. Past big bouncers, and an older gentleman, obviously quite well into his drinking night, smiles at me and says "here comes a live one!" If he only knew. I laugh, a little cynically, shake my head, ignore him, move on.
Me and a group of cool women friends, named above. I drink a fat tire beer (memories there and in red stripe beer) and we listen to horribly loud horrible rock music. Caryn, ever take-charge and speak-up, asks the waitress to turn it down, but...it is (terrible) rock and roll night. Caryn is from NYC and speaks French fluently and in fact is going to France soon for a rendez-vous with her beloved. Deanne, super-cool, talks more about her terrific book of historical research into the legacy of the wild horse in the U.S.. I'm touched by her passion for ending the government slaughter, which continues to this day, of wild mustangs in the west. Barbara, one of the editors of the well-known Sun Runner desert magazine, and I share a plate of french fries and onion rings (the bar has stopped serving all but the most abysmal junk food.) Rainbow, who is a medical doctor also from NYC, talks about her yoga and tai-chi classes and says we need to go for a hike. It's hard to follow conversation, music way too loud, my mind is distracted, I give into my recent habit of zoning out, zoning out, and watch a table of rather innocent-looking marines drink a lot. One of them sidles out smoothly with a woman he has shared one dance with and gives his buddies a thumbs up as he chugs his beer and tosses the empty into the trash.
And the moon holds me on the drive home. Middle of night. I call a friend to talk, on speakerphone. Mesmerized, and losing the signal in the Morongo Pass, then calling back and picking it up again. The moon showers the open land. No one is in the desert, mid-summer, too hot to handle. Moonlight feels good. The sun is a brute. My writing is at once, now, more beautiful and richer and more violent than it was a year ago. What of it I've done. Debbie coerced me to write a haiku series, and helped me shape them into top haiku form, hopefully to be published in this year's Southern CA haiku journal, where I've published before. I'm nervous about several writing assignments I've been given. I drive home on empty roads, taking the shortcut, Indian Avenue, through Desert Hot Springs down to the I-10. Gratefully, I easily fall asleep. Be brave. Again. How could I ever have thought this is the best way to live. But it is. Still, it is. The desert is where my imagination lives and grows wings, grows sunflowers in my garden from a previous nothing-ness, where roads uncurl to infinity. Wisdom and eternal sunshine of the moon-mad mind. Maybe I don't have to be here to know this now, but for now, it's where I still live.
And sleep with blinds not concealing everything, no matter how hard I try to beef u their work with blankets pinned up with tacks. What more then, except to wake up to blasting sun at noon, and hide indoors all day until night comes back again, with that soothing moon. Pink Floyd is perfect. For here and now. The sunflowers hold their heads alert, the hummingbirds visit their blooms, but only at the start and close of day, in the twilight of birth and death. The dogs are bored. Brindle plays ball by himself, and Shasta stands nearby. Tarah has moved to the Salton Sea. I'm alone here again. Maybe she'll call, maybe she won't. Floating. Waiting. Drinking iced tea.
Almost there. The moon, I mean. Ready to quiver across the lips of my 90 degree pool. Kiss me deep where the water's over my head. Again. I can almost see you.
"I'm going to tell you a story,he said. But before I tell you that story, I am going to break your heart."
Into California: When the Desert Blooms, May 13, 2010
"The most we can do is to dream the myth onwards and give it a modern dress. And whatever explanation or interpretation does to it, we do to our own souls as well, with corresponding results for our own well-being." C. G. Jung/c. W 9i, par. 271
Into California....When the Desert Blooms: Literary Bounty in our Driest Lands
May 13, 2010 Riverside Art Museum.
Susan Straight, Ruth Nolan, Juan Felipe Herrera, Malcolm Margolin
A reading and panel discussion focused on California's Inland Empire and Mojave Desert. Sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Co-sponsors: Heyday Books and the Inlandia Institute.
Heyday Books founder and No Place for a Puritan contributors at Riverside Art Museum on May 13. Article published on May 11, 2010 by LA Books Examiner. By Laura Frazin
No Place for a Puritan explores the literature of California's rich and diverse deserts
This Thursday May 13, 2010, Malcolm Margolin, the founder and publisher of Heyday Books, will be at the Riverside Art Museum at 6:00 p.m. Appearing with Malcolm Margolin will be Ruth Nolan, the editor of No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts, Susan Straight and Juan Felipe Herrera, contributors to No Place for a Puritan.
Heyday Books, based in Berkeley, California, aspires to deepen the awareness of California's rich cultural, natural, literary, and historic resources. Heyday Books recently participated in the April 2010 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
One of Heyday's many unique and fascinating books is No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts edited by Ruth Nolan. No Place for a Puritan is an anthology that includes the works of over 80 respected and award winning authors and poets, including John Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, Susan Straight, and Juan Felipe Hererra.
Editor Ruth Nolan begins No Place for a Puritan with her descriptive tale of her early memories of California's wide and vast Mojave Desert. Her love of the desert was immediate and her intimate knowledge and appreciation of the desert's rich complexity is expressed through her books and poetry. Ruth Nolan teaches poetry, creative writing, desert literature, and Native American literature at College of the Desert in Palm Desert, California, where she is an associate professor of English. She is the founder and editor of Phantom Seed, a California desert literary magazine, and is a former wildland desert firefighter. Her poem "Mirage," which evokes strong desert imagery, is included in No Place for a Puritan.
Susan Straight, who will also be at the Riverside Museum of Art this Thursday, contributed the short story "Cellophane and Feathers" to No Place for a Puritan. "Cellophane and Feathers," originally published in Susan Straight's award winning collection of short stories, Aquaboogie, is the story of a desolate prisoner who is tasked with picking up trash alongside of the desert Interstate 10 freeway. Susan Straight is a novelist and writer of short stories and essays for adults and children, and is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
Juan Felipe Herrera, the award winning author and activist for at-risk youth and migrant communities, will also be at the Riverside Museum of Art this Thursday. The son of migrant workers, Juan Felipe Herrera teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside where he is the Tomas Rivera Endowed Chair. He is a prolific writer of poetry, prose, short stories, novels for adults and young adults, and children's picture books. His poem "Loss, Revival, and Retributions," originally published in his collection of poetry Night Train to Tuxtla, is one of the many richly unique contributions in the anthology No Place for a Puritan.
For more information about the event on Thursday May 13, 2010 at the Riverside Art Museum featuring Heyday Books' Malcolm Margolin, Ruth Nolin, Susan Straight, and Juan Felipe Herrera click here. http://www.examiner.com/x-31737-LA-Books-Examiner~y2010m5d11-Heyday-Books-founder-and-No-Place-for-a-Puritan-contributors-at-Riverside-Art-Museum-on-May-13?cid=edition-rss-Los_Angeles
Into California....When the Desert Blooms: Literary Bounty in our Driest Lands
May 13, 2010 Riverside Art Museum.
Susan Straight, Ruth Nolan, Juan Felipe Herrera, Malcolm Margolin
A reading and panel discussion focused on California's Inland Empire and Mojave Desert. Sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Co-sponsors: Heyday Books and the Inlandia Institute.
Heyday Books founder and No Place for a Puritan contributors at Riverside Art Museum on May 13. Article published on May 11, 2010 by LA Books Examiner. By Laura Frazin
No Place for a Puritan explores the literature of California's rich and diverse deserts
This Thursday May 13, 2010, Malcolm Margolin, the founder and publisher of Heyday Books, will be at the Riverside Art Museum at 6:00 p.m. Appearing with Malcolm Margolin will be Ruth Nolan, the editor of No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts, Susan Straight and Juan Felipe Herrera, contributors to No Place for a Puritan.
Heyday Books, based in Berkeley, California, aspires to deepen the awareness of California's rich cultural, natural, literary, and historic resources. Heyday Books recently participated in the April 2010 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
One of Heyday's many unique and fascinating books is No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts edited by Ruth Nolan. No Place for a Puritan is an anthology that includes the works of over 80 respected and award winning authors and poets, including John Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, Susan Straight, and Juan Felipe Hererra.
Editor Ruth Nolan begins No Place for a Puritan with her descriptive tale of her early memories of California's wide and vast Mojave Desert. Her love of the desert was immediate and her intimate knowledge and appreciation of the desert's rich complexity is expressed through her books and poetry. Ruth Nolan teaches poetry, creative writing, desert literature, and Native American literature at College of the Desert in Palm Desert, California, where she is an associate professor of English. She is the founder and editor of Phantom Seed, a California desert literary magazine, and is a former wildland desert firefighter. Her poem "Mirage," which evokes strong desert imagery, is included in No Place for a Puritan.
Susan Straight, who will also be at the Riverside Museum of Art this Thursday, contributed the short story "Cellophane and Feathers" to No Place for a Puritan. "Cellophane and Feathers," originally published in Susan Straight's award winning collection of short stories, Aquaboogie, is the story of a desolate prisoner who is tasked with picking up trash alongside of the desert Interstate 10 freeway. Susan Straight is a novelist and writer of short stories and essays for adults and children, and is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
Juan Felipe Herrera, the award winning author and activist for at-risk youth and migrant communities, will also be at the Riverside Museum of Art this Thursday. The son of migrant workers, Juan Felipe Herrera teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside where he is the Tomas Rivera Endowed Chair. He is a prolific writer of poetry, prose, short stories, novels for adults and young adults, and children's picture books. His poem "Loss, Revival, and Retributions," originally published in his collection of poetry Night Train to Tuxtla, is one of the many richly unique contributions in the anthology No Place for a Puritan.
For more information about the event on Thursday May 13, 2010 at the Riverside Art Museum featuring Heyday Books' Malcolm Margolin, Ruth Nolin, Susan Straight, and Juan Felipe Herrera click here. http://www.examiner.com/x-31737-LA-Books-Examiner~y2010m5d11-Heyday-Books-founder-and-No-Place-for-a-Puritan-contributors-at-Riverside-Art-Museum-on-May-13?cid=edition-rss-Los_Angeles
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Poetry Reading Claremont 7.23, 7 pm
Scribblerus monthly series presents...
POETRY READING
Featured poets + open microphone
FRIDAY, JULY 23 – 7 PM
RUTH NOLAN
reading from Dry Waterfall
and
MICHAEL CLUFF
reading from Casino Evil
THOREAU’S BOOKSHOP
586 W 1st St, Claremont, CA 91711
http://www.yelp.com/biz/thoreaus-bookshop-claremont
in the Claremont Packinghouse
Guitar music by John Hendricks
refreshments by Virginia Bower
More information:
HELEN GRAZIANO
event Coordinator(909) 621-2876
sandigee@verizon.net
POETRY READING
Featured poets + open microphone
FRIDAY, JULY 23 – 7 PM
RUTH NOLAN
reading from Dry Waterfall
and
MICHAEL CLUFF
reading from Casino Evil
THOREAU’S BOOKSHOP
586 W 1st St, Claremont, CA 91711
http://www.yelp.com/biz/thoreaus-bookshop-claremont
in the Claremont Packinghouse
Guitar music by John Hendricks
refreshments by Virginia Bower
More information:
HELEN GRAZIANO
event Coordinator(909) 621-2876
sandigee@verizon.net
Saturday, July 17, 2010
One Star, Tonight
I look to the dark sky,
without my glasses
the night is fuzz,
I am in the warm pool
desert midnight - there you are,
star dandelion
here you are
splintered glass
rainbow light
ready
to blow away-
where you are
here and there
you hold steady, and everywhere
before you emerge
and merge
with me
and I touch you
with a finger, the same finger
I fingered on the oak tree
where you slipped
from your body
the way a snake
parts with its outgrown skin
and swims away
through the tall grass
through the sea sky
where, here,
you and I part
and meet
again
in the dark places
while all around us
it will be this way -
eternally, always was
the way stars
break apart
the way galaxies
are born
and die
and remain
unseen
--Ruth Nolan
copyright(c) 2010 by Ruth Nolan
without my glasses
the night is fuzz,
I am in the warm pool
desert midnight - there you are,
star dandelion
here you are
splintered glass
rainbow light
ready
to blow away-
where you are
here and there
you hold steady, and everywhere
before you emerge
and merge
with me
and I touch you
with a finger, the same finger
I fingered on the oak tree
where you slipped
from your body
the way a snake
parts with its outgrown skin
and swims away
through the tall grass
through the sea sky
where, here,
you and I part
and meet
again
in the dark places
while all around us
it will be this way -
eternally, always was
the way stars
break apart
the way galaxies
are born
and die
and remain
unseen
--Ruth Nolan
copyright(c) 2010 by Ruth Nolan
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Andreas Canyon Haiku Series, 7.14.10, Palm Springs
San Andreas Haiku Series
fan palm oasis
everything stings, sticks or stabs
beauty killed you too
yellow butterflies
cottonwood fluff, deep water
burial at noon
we walked the canyon
two dragonflies, orange, blue
one loses a wing
heatwave: I seek shade
you’re hiding behind the sun
I can’t find you
lavender half dry
moisture clings to mesquite beans
you died in mid-spring
your dandelion eyes
blink on sun-lidded breezes
one last wink, all mine
it’s time to change rocks
the frog is ready to leap
fondle the trigger
by Ruth Nolan
Andreas Canyon Haiku Series
copyright (c) 2010 by Ruth Nolan
In memory of P.H., 1985-2010, he hiked there, too, more than once and he climbed the razor-wire fence to see what was beyond where we weren't supposed to go
...and thanks to my friend and haiku goddess, Deborah P. Kolodji, for guiding the Andreas Canyon Haiku Walk and Write with me this past May....and for inspiring me to write these tonight.
fan palm oasis
everything stings, sticks or stabs
beauty killed you too
yellow butterflies
cottonwood fluff, deep water
burial at noon
we walked the canyon
two dragonflies, orange, blue
one loses a wing
heatwave: I seek shade
you’re hiding behind the sun
I can’t find you
lavender half dry
moisture clings to mesquite beans
you died in mid-spring
your dandelion eyes
blink on sun-lidded breezes
one last wink, all mine
it’s time to change rocks
the frog is ready to leap
fondle the trigger
by Ruth Nolan
Andreas Canyon Haiku Series
copyright (c) 2010 by Ruth Nolan
In memory of P.H., 1985-2010, he hiked there, too, more than once and he climbed the razor-wire fence to see what was beyond where we weren't supposed to go
...and thanks to my friend and haiku goddess, Deborah P. Kolodji, for guiding the Andreas Canyon Haiku Walk and Write with me this past May....and for inspiring me to write these tonight.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Red Arrow Gallery, Joshua Tree: Desert Poetry & Prose, Saturday July 24, 7:00 pm
In case you can't read the tiny print: it's at the Red Arrow Gallery, in downtown Joshua Tree, 61597 Twentynine Palms Hwy (Hwy 62). For more information, visit Red Arrow Gallery at www.theredarrowgallery.com, email info@theredarrowgallery.com or call 760-366-3700. The reading is free to the public, and will feature free wine, cheese and crackers, for attendees. You can also email me at runolan@aol.com
The reading starts at 7:00 pm, and I am honored to be reading with critically-acclaimed writer Deanne Stillman author of Mustang: the Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West - A Los Angeles Times Best Book, 2008 and winner of the California Book Award Silver Medal for nonfiction. Deanne is also author of the outstanding, award-winning book Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave, , which Hunter Thompson called "A strange and brilliant story by an important American writer."
I will be reading my prose and poetry from the anthology I've edited, No Place for a Puritan: the literature of California's deserts (Heyday Books, 2009) and also new desert writing I have been generating. Copies of the anthology, along with Phantom Seed: a literary magazine of California desert poetry & prose, a magazine I co-edit, and copies of my two poetry chapbooks, Dry Waterfall and Wild Wash Road, (both on Petroglyph Books) will also be available for sale.
A BIG thank you to gallery owner & writer Cheryl Montelle for organizing and hosting this in her super-cool high desert gallery!! Thanks, Cheryl, for all you do, for so many desert-related artists and writers, and the desert communities!
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