An Erratic Week in an Aberrant Spring

After a weekend of stunningly perfect weather (bright blue skies, mild wind, brilliant sun), last Monday arrived cold and rainy, a thick sky of grim nimbus clouds and a wind too full of itself. Cloudburst, downpour, sprinkle, drizzle, rinse, repeat. The view out the office window was grey, grey, grey, all day. Still, not much daunts the intrepid Amateur Campus Naturalist and so, jamming the hat down to my ears and cinching tight all openings of the raincoat, out I went. Sticking to a route under overhangs and close to trees, I avoided becoming completely drenched while freshening my lungs with oxygen-rich air. Win, win, win. At least for me.

We're not used to this sort of wet and variable spring in Sonoma County. All this cold rain and dreary grey feels more like epileptic relapses into winter. April showers bring May flowers in other parts of the country. Here, the ultra-pleasant and dry weeks of April merely launch us full-tilt into summer; by mid-May, telltale patches of brown will line the crests of the hills as the winter rains recede into the water table. This spring though, with rains every other week, the hills are staying green, and with rainfall totals above normal, the three-year drought has been conquered. (Fingers crossed on that one.)

Walking just inside a silvery curtain of rain under the Salazar overhang, I wondered where the cliff swallows hide in all this wet. The birds had arrived per usual in mid-April, with their radio-static buzzy clicks, swinging freely over the quad in waves, then winging over the playing fields, scooping up their bug lunches. Certainly nest building has suffered from rain delays; under the eaves high above, I could see only the most rudimentary lines of daubed mud sketching in the nest foundations. How will this affect raising and fledging the next brood?

From Salazar, I hopped, skipped and skidded around the gym and up into the Kenneth Stocking Native Botanical Garden. Under the tree-canopy, the rain was but a minor nuisance. I wandered along the spongy floor of dense leaf-litter and needles, breathing deep, the air fragrant and damp, and stopped to watch through crossed tree branches as the lessening rain dimpled the pond. Suddenly I heard dee! dee dee dee! dee! shockingly close to my head. I spotted the commotion right away:  two spry chestnut-backed chickadees bouncing around the branches and twigs just above me, gleaning insects and bugs as fast as they could to feed their fluffy, demanding, just-fledged progeny, three lumps-on-a-branch, barely moving, except to open their beaks for food or to dee! deee! deee! for more.

Obviously, this aberrant spring has had little effect on these adorable (admit it, they are) little busybodies.   And it probably won't do more than slow down the swallows as they follow the inevitable course of actions leading to the next generation. Nor will it interfere with our own about-to-fledge graduates who, in about two weeks, will fling up their black caps, tassels and all, and come rain or come shine, fly on.

Settler's Chase

My friend Doris Eraldi's second book, Settler's Chase, will be released in July 2010 by Berkeley. This is a sequel to her book, Settler's Law, also published by Berkeley in 1998. Now, it seems like a long time between books, and it is, but I happen to know that she's written at least one whole novel in between,while training a slew of horses, teaching horsemanship, coaching young riders and in general gallivanting around. No moss grows under her hooves. Anyway, as a first reader of her first book, I am now an eager awaiter of her second.

I'm starting to send out the scholarship award letters for the Napa this weekend; how exciting! It's also the first hot-hot weekend of the year, 80's for at least an hour or two this afternoon, the sky brilliant and sun all over the place. Feels like the conference is about to start any minute.

"The Oracle of Stamboul,"

Michael Lukas, a fiction participant at the Napa Valley Writers Conference last summer, wrote to say that his novel "The Oracle of Stanboul," has been purchased by HarperCollins and will be released in February, 2011. WhoooHoooo!  ZZ Packer's group will remember seeing his first chapter.

From Michael's website:

I enjoyed reading the chapter which he submitted for his application; I particularly remember the image of hoopoes circling the harbor and the town and then settling, "coating the town like frosting," which opens the book. I look forward to reading the whole thing, printed and bound.
A thousand and one congratulations, Michael!

Napa Valley Writers Conference - Summer 2010

Still time (just!) to send in an application to the 2010 Conference; check the website and fire away!

Michael Byers

It might take a little searching to find Michael Byers's first book "Coast of Good Intentions" a collection of short stories, but it is well worth it.  He writes with that quiet authority that holds us in the palm of his hand, guiding us to the end.  Charles Baxter said his stories are "wise, beautiful and necessary, " and I couldn't agree more.  "Long for this World, "a novel, is on my stack and I can't wait for his newest work, "Percival's Planet," due out August 3rd, 2010. Just after the Napa Writers Conference! Arghsnarfle!

Check out his site for more info, reviews, and yes! bonus chapters from the new book Especially check out the Essays and Stories tab. A super piece on revising, Faking Shapely Fiction, particularly pertinent for those lucky folks in his workshop at Napa. I have a feeling his lecture is going to be a must-go. And IF we're lucky, maybe he'll have some pre-release copies of "Percival's Planet." Just hoping.

Unbuilt Projects now being built! *

Fabulous news from the Lisicky front: his book, "Unbuilt Projects" will be published Fall 2012 by Fourway Books.  Here is a link to his blog- post running a video of him reading some pieces from the it. Congrats, Paul!

* sorry, couldn't resist.

A Bad Day for Daphnia

They arrived sloshing around in four tightly-sealed jars tucked into corn-oil based pellets in a brown rush-shipment box. A quarter of them had croaked and were encapsulated in a thin moldy shroud, drifting in the dubious-looking water. The rest of the water fleas, after surviving this long, dark journey would soon be plucked from jar with an expertly wielded pipette, plonked onto glass slides and squished under the clamps of a microscope. Oh, the indignity of it all.

Daphnia

Reading a new brain book,"Rewire Your Brain," by John B. Arden, Ph.D. (Maybe when I'm done with the book I'll be able to refrain from pronouncing that as Phud. With apologies to all my Phuddy Phriends).

However.

In the book is this paragraph (pg 3,4), which I found compelling enough to read out loud to my sister:
"The corpus callosum of a woman is denser than that of a man. This means that the two hemispheres of a woman's brain work more evenly together. The female brain is more symmetrical. The male brain has an asymmetrical torque, which mean that the right frontal lobe is larger than the left frontal lobe, and the left occipital (back of head) lobe is larger than the right occipital lobe."

To which my sister remarked: "So ....we can legitimately say that they are warped, right?"

"Or that they are legitimately warped," I replied.

Take your pick. In reality, I suspect that this arrangement has its advantages, for both genders.

WIR: Wellspring, Part 4: Random Notes

Random Notes from the last few days.

The more birds I learn to identify, the more birds I see, both individuals and new species. It's sort of spooky. Now that birds are not just blue/somewhat blue, mostly brown, all black, raucus or quiet but rather Steller's jays, scrub jays, western bluebirds, white-capped sparrows, ravens, woodpeckers, chickadees, I've come to notice all the other birds that before escaped my notice: northern flickers, phoebees, juncos, yellow-capped sparrows, acorn and downy woodpeckers. Because they were all there. Without the name, I just didn't notice them. The world has expanded with the simple act of identifying, of recognizing and remembering.

This evening, as the sun faded, the birds burst out in a collective chorus, the squawks and peeers! of jays, the buzzzzy chirps of a Bewick's wren, the melodies of finches, the calls and clucks and squeals that I don't recognize (yet), often overlapping, resembling those wonderfully chaotic moments when an orchestra tunes up, though this would be more like tuning down, the last vocal hurrahs before dark.

Walked down to the river. On the way back, I found a collection of heart stones arranged on a bald spot in the grass near the edge of the bank. Suddenly it seemed like the best place for the three weighing down my jacket pocket. How many do I really need? So there are here.

Writer in Residence: Pt 3: Elk, California

Last Thursday, a side trip to Elk, a small town on the very edge of the coast, clinging like a limpet to bedrock jutting out into the Pacific.

....let's get a closer look at that bedrock...

I was hoping to visit the Greenwood State Park Visitor Center and Historical Museum, but alas, due to our rotten state budget, it was closed.

...but I got a shot anyway.

And besides which, there is a certain historical quality to the town in and of itself.

This is what I call the South Shore...a sand-barred cove with the Greenwood Creek seeking the ocean.

and this is the North Shore...stony bluffs, broken, toothy rocks strung out into the ocean. 

Usually, the ocean is the ceaseless noise of Elk unless, like today, it's the wind. A fierce sort of wind, with a stern roar that overwhelms mind-chatter. A wind that requires buttoning up, requires pulling down into one's self, requires paying attention, watching where it comes from, where it's going to. The scuttle of clouds against the brightest blue sky. Little birds tucked under low bushes.  Hawks and ospreys struggling, flying into the wind at a stand-still before tilting a wing and swinging around to try again later.

The sort of wind that livens the blood, stirs up the appetite and makes ducking into Queenie's Roadhouse Cafe more of delight than ever.

hmmmmm, corned beef hash, eggs over, a small tower of toast...

Writer-in-Residence: Part Two

Today, sun. Lots of it. The meadow held the warmth all afternoon, the air hot enough to bring up thoughts of swimming. Thoughts only and then quite fleeting. I wouldn't even stick a tiny toe in the river; it is galloping for the coast at what looks like several knots an hour to me.

The sun made for some true basking on the porch though, watching red-shafted northern flickers (Colaptes auratus cafer) investigate the eucalyptus, stab for ants in the grass and dash around, with orange wings, white body in the air. Otherwise, the flicker is one fine dapper dandy of a dresser: soft grey basic coat, like dress-up flannels, with a tidy black ascot at the throat, a speckled waist coat and a striped jacket over that. The male sports a flamboyant red mustache-- or is it lipsitck from his lover? He only needs the sporty fedora ... with one of his own feathers in the brim.  My camera sucks at getting bird pix (no real telephoto, slow as molasses) so I'm posting a link to about a thousand pictures of the creature.

In contrast, I just have to say, those Acorn Woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus) are too much. As I said, they look clownish, with white eyes in a half-mask of white, a black bill and red topi. In flight they remind me of the Harlequin, black wings with a wide white stripe, a black back but a white rump. From the rear, as they fly away from me, they seem to be making wing-angles in the air; flying towards me, they just seem....goofy.

This is by far the best photo I found online, at Steve Velo's pix.
These are very interesting birds, residing in sizeable groups of 4 or 5 or more, and sometimes several groups at a time.  They are larder-hoarders, hiding acorn like squirrels in granaries by drilling holes into old trees,  stumps, the side of the water tower, then stuffing acorns in the holes, which the birds defend against all comers. Pretty fascinating.
We think of it as storage, maybe they think of it as art.

Jeepers, sounds like our family, stuffing things in boxes and bundles and defending them against anyone with plans to "organize." Must have some woodpecker in our DNA.

Writer in Residence - Trial Run

To write about Wellspring Renewal Center, is to write about nature. The place sits just outside the hamlet of Philo, California, in Mendocino County; 50 acres of woods and meadows with the Navarro River running right through it. One long meadow, hemmed with small oaks and manzanitas along the north bank, parallels the river. Across it, redwoods spire to the sky, filling the horizon, topped only by trees of the hill commanding the horizon.  Hendy Woods State Park is adjacent to the property, across and to the west down the river; it feels like the redwoods go on forever. Which they did once, but no longer.

The buildings cluster on the northern, top edge of the gently sloping meadow which rolls down to the deep banks of the river. In recent summers, the river has slowed down to barely more than a large creek in spots, winding in a shallow trench across the rocky river bottom; this winter the channel is filled all the way across as an astounding volume of water barrels out to the ocean. Nevertheless, the river hasn't risen to the top of these banks in living or even recorded history. If it did - now that would be scary-or a different eon..

The meadow runs east to west the long way and thus is graced with sun the full day long. The cabin I like to claim has a generous porch facing south, overlooking the meadow, several majestic oaks, the scrim of trees and brush hiding the river and the redowwds across the way. The river, even as full as it is right now, sits so far below the tall banks it is invisible; only the noisy rush and tumble of the high water gives it away.

To write about Wellspring is to write about nature; it is to write about the birds first, for they truly abound. Acorn woodpeckers, clownish in their half-masks of yellow and black, flit about, working their way, knocka-knocka-knocka, around the tall wooden water tower and the oaks; they are everywhere with their a-whacka-whacka-whacka calls. Vultures wheel around the sky, blue, grey or blustery. The call of hawks and ravens echo off the redwoods; closer by I hear the brash squawks and burry chirrrs of the scrub and Stellar jays, the funny whistles of the northern flickers, the pips and peeps of towhees, juncos, phoebes, sparrows, chestnut-backed chickadees.

(psssst: don't take this Writer-in-Residence bit as official, it's not authorized in any way by the Wellspring Renewal Center. I just wanted a project. Anything to distract me from the dang-blasted novel.)

Wrting, writing, writing, keep those authors writing....

On my way up to the Wellspring Renewal Center for my Personal Writing Retreat (created by moi, funded by moi), I stopped at my favorite Indy Bookstore (Copperfield's Books in Petaluma, but of course) for some reading material. Some inspirational and reference books to keep me on task, some sexy-trashy magazines for the downtimes: Best American Essays 2009, a pocket-sized field guide to birds in California and The Writer mag. Yeah, so now you know, sexy-trashy = writer's mags.

But wait, before you dismiss outright, here's the article that got my attention in the middle of yesterday afternoon on a long covered porch in full view of meadow, with redwoods and mountains. " 'Writer in Residence' ? Sign me up!" by Kathy Stevenson...aside from the wonderfully complex instance of punctuation, I was struck by the circs that opens the essay: Alain de Botton had the gig of Writer in Residence for a week at ... wait for it....London's Heathrow Aiport. That's right: he spent a week at the airport * and wrote it up for a book.

Now how cool is that? Kathy Stevenson thinks like me: "Where do I sign up?" she asks.

As you imagine, these gigs are not growing on trees, and Kathy Stevenson puts her fertile good mind to use and comes up with all sorts of alternate locations where she might shine, W-I-R at Godiva Chocolates, for instance.

Which  is when I wondered: couldn't I be the Writer in Residence at Wellspring?

* cool photo on  that link

link to article on Kathy Stevenson's blog

3 a.m.

Sky padded with fog, silvered by a thickening moon; a secret privilege to be awake feeling this quiet.

The jangle of day is not far ahead but for now not even the refrigerator hums and the owls are still.

Absolutely a Big F'ing Deal

Just have to shout YAHOOOOIEEEE for the passage of the Health Care Reform Bill! To quote Joe Biden, yes, indeed, it's a big f**king deal. And I have to hand it to Obama, he's not sitting on his laurels; in the week since, he's given the Won't Do Party (the  Great Obstructionists Party, whatever you want to call it) plenty of fodder to choke on: a jobs bill passed, a seder in the White House, an end run around their inability to cooperate by appointing officials during recess and today, he popped up in Afghanistan. He's a blur; they don't know where to focus or when to get riled up next, and by the time they do, he's onto some other thing they can't stand. Good for him! The Republicans showed their stripes as rabble-rousers and leaders of the ignorant. Their fears, their over-the-top rhetoric about Health Reform and what they think it will do to America....well, it just tells us more about them, about their ignorance and deep prejudices than it does about any of the issues.  I predict that their resistance to Health Care Reform will hurt them in the next round of elections, even as they continue to bluff and posture otherwise.

Back in the day, the rhetoric about Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid was just about as vitriolic and insensible, and yet now I don't think there is one American who doesn't view either program as their inalienable right. Not even rabid right-winger Republicans. Except for GW Bush, perhaps, who seemed to think that the social security funds were fair game for the stock market. I don't hear anyone singing that tune now - no, siree bob.

And credit goes to Nancy Pelosi, too, who fought the good fight, didn't give up and produced results. Now is the time for us to support her: click to StandWithNancy

Paper Fan Shout Out

Wanted to thank anyone and everyone who not only read the Paper Fan story, but jumped over to Girls Write Now or bid for it on E-Bay. Someone won the fan for $21.50, a fair showing for the item+story, I thought. (Is this the sort of someone who will do something creative with the story+item, and send  a photo of it into Sig Obj, as some bidder/buyers do? one never knows... ) But! more importantly, the money pot is filling up for Girls Write Now, well over $300 and rising.

There are more items+stories to bid on, so if any of you get E-bay fever....

But here's a nice shout out to Significant Objects from Girls Write Now that features a very familiar fan...

and if you enlarge the type, some familiar words... at least to me.  

Fanning the Flames of a Bidding War....

oh, dear...I forgot to mention that Japanese  Fan item is only up for bid for a week at Significant Objects...and the week ends tomorrow morning at 6 am!  so ...if you intended to bid but procrastinated, the time is now! 


The fan is at $20 now (a steal for that and an inspiring story!) but the S.O. organizers are hoping to get a significant amount of money to give to for Girls Write Now. This wonderful organization, singled out by Michelle Obama for its successes, "provides guidance, support, and opportunities for New York City's underserved or at-risk high school girls, enabling them to develop their creative, independent voices, explore careers in professional writing, and learn how to make healthy choices in school, career, and life."


You can read more about at:  http://www.girlswritenow.org/gwn/

And if you have the inclination, swing by http://significantobjects.com/2010/03/03/paper-fan/   tonight!


Muchos gracias, in advance!

Fan Mail from Your Favorite Flounder-er

Hey, guess what! Significant Objects just posted a story I wrote about this sweet Japanese fan.  As I've mentioned before, I have been fascinated with Josh Glenn and Rob Walker's project which seeks to show how our emotional entanglement with an object increases that object's value. All that makes sense, of course. But the beauty of the Significant Objects project is that they've devised a method to measure that increased value using the auctions on E-Bay.

So, here's the deal...swing by and read the story, then click the link that takes you to the ebay auction for it..and bid, bid, bid! You may win ... and if you do, you gain three things: the sweet little fan, a copy of my story to have and to hold, and the warm feelings of contributing to a very worthy cause, Girls Write Now.

And I'd love to hear what you think of the story, too.

True Confections & NPR

Off to the side is a brilliant red and white Follower Badge belonging to Katharine Weber.  It is the image of her book cover (on the left)  of her latest novel, True Confections, which was published  January 5th, 2010... and has already garnered a very tasty review from NPR  Her blog, Staircase Writing, is one of my fav go-tos on my bloggy-bloggy list, so there is no excuse for me not trumpeting her pub date earlier. But do visit her blog for candy-lore, "staircase moments" and book-tour reports. And I'm sure you'll be tempted as I am to snag her book, too. It looks delectable. Like chocolate.