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My family took a six-hour road trip from Oakland to Sequoia National Park last week. My husband, Michael, was the driver. I’m the trusty navigator with maps, AAA tour book and the 800 number that helps locate In-N-Out Burger locations along Highway 99.

My ten-year-old son, Nick, and his buddy, Josh, sat in the back seat, zoning out with iPods and handheld video games. We’d instructed them that electronics would only be allowed in the car while traveling to and from Sequoia. No electronics during the five days in the park. So Nick and Josh were getting in their last fix.

Separation anxiety for ten-year-old boys from electronics is very real. Keep reading …

I met Quincy in July of 1984 at a campground just west of the McKenzie Pass on Highway 242 which runs between the Willamette Valley and the town of Sisters on the east side of the Oregon Cascades. We would spend the next five days together camping out in the wilderness that lies at the foot of the volcanic peaks known as the Three Sisters.

Keep reading …

Emma, my 22-year-old daughter, has long dreamed of Russia. At last she is there, studying for a semester in St. Petersburg. It’s not Siberia, but the vastness that separates us feels like a kind of exile. Keep reading …

During the Christmas holidays and throughout mid-January, I had an issue that no writer would like to have: I could not type! Although I can often type faster than I write, my fingers wouldn’t move – quickly or otherwise – as carpal tunnel had reared its nasty head! The worst fear I had ever had was now coming to fruition: Could it be that someday I could not physically write? Keep reading …

As a South Carolina native, I’ve been a sampler of fine Southern cuisine for many years, and as one of the founders of the Southern Sampler Artists Colony, I was thrilled to be sharing that cuisine with a great troupe of writers joining us for our Eat, Play, Write April writers retreat. Having set up, along with SSAC co-founder Mary Brent Cantarutti, an unusual and far ranging culinary tour, I was looking forward to dining at T.W. Graham & Company Seafood Restaurant, an eating establishment in McClellanville, South Carolina. In fact, T.W. Graham & Company is the only restaurant in McClellanville … and it is enough.

We had just finished Bud Hill’s walking tour of this small coastal shrimping village with its population of only 491 and were Keep reading …

I’ve long wanted to visit Crater Lake, but my husband refuses.

“It’s hot and dry and endless,” he objects, recalling a boyhood vacation with his parents.

So instead I’ve roped our daughter, Emma, into a detour there. Crater Lake will be my reward for driving her back to college instead of putting her on a plane. Keep reading …

It’s one thing to grow up in India’s middle class and travel as a local. But traveling as a well-to-do non-resident Indian who is taking in everything around her as part of her work requires wearing trifocals. I was peering into things that I had taken for granted when I lived in India as a young woman; I wanted to talk to people I would not have deigned to talk to in the past. I was interested in doing things that I’d never have dared to do before. On this trip, drivers became my best friends. Keep reading …

@ 2012 Tami Casias

You know you have to get out when you find yourself ironing rather than writing. So when I needed to travel to my daughter’s home in Nebraska at the same time that I had writing projects due, I started looking at my options. Keep reading …

The concept was simple: attend a sports conference in Hawaii, then – and most importantly – travel to Nepal to run a three-day stage race to raise funds for a small Nepali orphanage. Nobody had explained much about the race, but that part of the journey was destined to become a major adventure.

Keep reading …

Reflections from a Book Passage Travel & Food Writing & Photography Conference Newbie

I used to be wealthy and successful—number one in my industry.

Now I sit on a bench contemplating a “No Barking” sign, the “P” graffitied over with a “B”. I observe the cars are indeed parked in front and the dogs are quiet. I notice a sign saying an 18-pound male cat named PhiPhi has run away and wonder if it was because the other kitties were teasing him about his name.

I recently became an unemployed, broke mortgage banker. After announcing my desire to make a major life change and become an unemployed, broke travel writer, a mutual friend introduced me to travel writing guru, Don George.

Don’s advice? “Come to the Book Passage Travel & Food Writing & Photography Conference. Meet Spud. It’ll be life changing.”

Down to our last $1000, my husband suggested we might want to use that money for groceries; why not wait and go next year? Groceries be damned; I could drop a few pounds anyway. I’m going to the conference.

One minute I’m excited and hopeful for the future; the former confident me has returned. The next I’m petrified about attending, convinced I’m grasping at straws out of pure desperation. What do I know about travel writing? Keep reading …

Each and every member of my writing group is the type of world traveler you might see on the cover of Adventure magazine, wrestling alligators in a blizzard atop Aconcaqua in her underwear … or jumping out of rusty, ill-maintained seaplanes into shallow rivers to commune with piranha. At the end of an exhilarating day riding lions bareback, teaching quantum physics to aboriginal children in their native tongue, and riding over Iguazu Falls in a wine barrel, she might roast her alligator (of course the gator lost the wrestling match!) over the caldera of an active volcano. Upon her Keep reading …

The absolutely amazing Book Passage Travel, Food and Photography Conference begins next week, August 11-14, in Corte Madera.

Writers from around the world will be converging for four days of workshops, panels, consultations, and outstanding presentations. I am thoroughly thrilled to be kicking off the conference with a presentation about The Life of a Travel Writer with one of my mentors from way back: the Grande Dame of travel writing, Georgia Hesse.

I had lunch with Georgia at San Francisco’s Café de la Presse. We talked about travel, then and now, over a salade frisée, a tarte provençale, and a couple of glasses of vin rouge. This prompted a host of questions from me, which Georgia has politely deigned to answer.

First, a few words about Georgia and her illustrious career:

Georgia I. Hesse claims to have been born on the 28 Ranch on Crazy Woman Creek at the foot of the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming. She was graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and studied political science and white wines as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Strasbourg in France. She is the founding travel editor of the San Francisco Examiner (the original Hearst-owned one, she hastens to say) and then of the joined (on Sundays) Examiner-Chronicle.

Georgia has taught travel writing for the 20 years of the Book Passage conference and has lectured at several writers’ gatherings and at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. For several years she had a weekly travel-music program at the once and much-missed S.F. radio station KABL. Her articles have appeared in 20 magazines and 38 newspapers and she is the author/co-author of 14 books, several of them guides to France and California.

Georgia holds the Ordre National du Mérite from the French government and the Chevalier l’Ordre de la République from Tunisia. She has visited all 50 U.S. states and at most recent tally has crossed the Atlantic 174 times and the Pacific 98 times, by airplane and ship. She believes in Paul Theroux’s dictum, “Every step out the door can be a story. Consider San Francisco’s #30 bus.”

Q. Georgia, you were the Travel Editor for the “San Francisco Examiner” and then the”Examiner-Chronicle” at a time when travel was an elegant enterprise; what was your most extravagant journey?

A. The most extravagant in traditional terms surely was a trip back to the time of Maria Theresa and the Hapsburgs, in the glorious first half of the 19th century when Vienna replaced Paris as the center of the elegant earth. Through a wrinkle in time equivalent to that in the current movie “Midnight in Paris,” I fell into the Vienna of Biedermeier design, of gold leaf, crystal, fine porcelain and pastries…into the very night of the Opera Ball in the Staatsoper. Pomp and circumstance, glitter and dazzle, medals and uniforms, sobbing violins and the corps de ballet of the Vienna State Opera, even a few diamond tiaras. “Ah,” said an irreverent tenor, “Strauss is so much more delicious than socialism!” It was so transporting that the next year I went back and fell through that wrinkle again.

Q. On the flip side, I loved your story in “I Should Have Stayed Home.” Do you have another standout in that category? Can you tell us about it?

A. A 12-day rattle and roll across the old Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Express was not as dangerous as the North Pole trip but almost as uncomfortable. I had thought the forest of white birches in the David Lean movie of Boris Pasternak ‘s novel “Dr. Zhivago” seemed endless…but in reality that forest goes on for three days. Following Siberia, Finland seemed like “A Thousand and One Nights.” I was fascinated, in an international relations sense, by every day of that trek, but I’m glad I don’t have to make it again.

And then there was the long time when I didn’t know where in the world I was and it turned out to be Guadalcanal. And then… .

Q. What do you like most about travel today?

A. Most places have bathrooms and most of those are clean, unlike a tent of carpets on the Kenya-Tanzania border.

Q. What do you like least?

A. The crowds and lack of civility at airports and aboard aircraft. Add to that the endless fees and unforeseen add-on charges. I used to feel flying as a great escape. Now it’s an exercise in exhaustion, mental as well as physical.

Q. What place is currently at the top of your list of places to visit and why?

A. Libya, crazily enough; because I’ve never tramped through Leptis Magna.

Q. What advice do you have for travel writers new to the business?

A. Learn how to write and then Stop, Look, and Listen to the world as it speaks to you.

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Good advice from an expert and much more to come. See you at the conference! Don’t forget, there is a special discount for Left Coast Writers®, so be sure to tell them you’re one of us.

—Linda Watanabe McFerrin, travel writer and author of Dead Love, (Stone Bridge Press, 2010)

Photo courtesy of Georgia Hesse

For the past three nights I’ve heard the explosions from miles away. I’m not in Afghanistan or Iraq; I live near San Francisco. It’s just fireworks, bombs bursting in air, going off in the sky over the nearby County Fairgrounds. Keep reading …

Navigating through life as a writer you will, at times, feel crushed like roadkill on the superhighway. It’s unavoidable. My advice, when this happens, is to take a deep breath, chant the philosophical mumbo jumbo (i.e., the pabulum of gurus) “life is a journey…not a destination…life is a journey…” And voila! Keep reading …

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK PARTY: Alan Squire Publishing

Publisher Jimmy Patterson and Author Joanna Biggar share the stage

Monday, May 9, 6pm
Book Passage || Ferry Plaza
San Francisco || www.bookpassage.com

We hope you’ll join us as visiting publisher and author James J. Patterson (Bermuda Shorts) teams up with local favorite Joanna Biggar (That Paris Year) for a night of remembrances. The authors will chat about memoir, or in the case of Patterson … men-moir .. and tell tales about life and love in the city of light and the good old USA.

James J. Patterson grew up with a foot planted in each of two worlds — one in Washington DC, the Capital of the Empire as he calls it, and one in rural Ontario, where his Canadian mother insisted the family spend their summers. His father, one of the wizards of 20th Century newspaper publishing, introduced him to the city’s wheels of money and power, which he would later navigate as an entrepreneur, starting his first business at 20. But those Canadian summers introduced him to a different world – one where a cedar strip boat was better than any car, and where the ghosts of those who’d previously inhabited the family’s island house floated out over the water of Lovesick Lake. It is those two worlds that blend in Bermuda Shorts, a collection on what it means to be a man, an artist, an iconoclast, a patriot, and a lover, as the 20th Century rolls over into the 21st.

A life long student of history, philosophy and politics, Patterson has managed country bands, delivered newspapers, adapted Sherlock Holmes short stories for radio plays, and published a highly regarded sports magazine. As a singer-songwriter, Patterson was half of the political satire folk music duo, The Pheromones, one of the first acts to be featured on MTV and one of the last bands to play on American Bandstand. With the Pheromones, he toured the US for over fifteen years.

Joanna Biggar turned twenty in Paris, where she was a student at the Sorbonne, and went on to earn degrees in Chinese language and French literature. Since then she has chaired a school board in Ghana, traveled solo to remote regions of China, worked as a journalist in Washington, D.C., and taught inner-city school students in Oakland, California, where she lives. She is married, has five adult children and six grandchildren, who love books. A member of the Society of Woman Geographers, her special places of the heart remain France and the California coast.

Anyone who says writing is a lonely business has never spent time with a roomful of hardheaded fictional folk bent on having their way. Unlike boring, predictable humans – and for the sake of story, conflict and change – characters are inevitably ego-tripping demigods that writers must turn into minions with omnipotent appeal. Keep reading …

I feel the dust hit my tongue as I step out of our minibus, avoiding a pair of goats that seem unconcerned that the rest of their flock is twenty yards down the highway. The highway in question – I use the term loosely since the livestock using it outnumber the people – is Burma’s main highway, running north from Yangon to Mandalay. Today my friends and I are heading to Mt. Popa, a sacred volcano in central Burma. Keep reading …

I never imagined how much I would learn by collaborating on a story. What’s even more surprising is that I’ve never met my co-writer, Carolyn Chang, in person. We met through an online Science Fiction writing class. Keep reading …

Talk about spooky characters! I am sitting at a coffee shop in Washington D.C., talking to Oleg Kalugin, former head of KGB operations, getting a warm, fuzzy, feeling … and it is creeping me out. This friendly man, in whom I find it so easy to confide, once received high honors for the assassination of Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov; though KGB chief Yuri Andropov probably ordered the hit. Admittedly, I’m already in a heightened state of excitation, having just visited the International Spy Museum, an operation dedicated to the art of espionage, for which Mr. Kalugin serves as an advisory director, but still ….

I am actually in Washington on government business, Keep reading …

by Terry Sue Harms

Now that my novel, Pearls My Mother Wore, is on the market, I’m satisfied that self-publishing was the right path for me to take. Four years ago, though, when I started writing the book, I felt certain that I’d go the traditional route. Keep reading …

I’m headed to Tres Bocas on the Rio Sarmiento in Argentina’s Parana River Delta. It’s a voyage of discovery. I don’t pretend to understand this country or its people but perhaps I can aim a penlight, which is all I happen to have at the moment, in order to shed a thin shaft of illumination on their wonderful flaws and terrible virtues.

Keep reading …

As the writers head off to Charleston, for another literary adventure with the Southern Sampler Artists Colony, novelist and travel writer Linda Watanabe McFerrin reflects on Southern vistas.

Southern Exposure: On the Palmetto Trail

The size of the snake had grown, in the telling, from the length and breadth of my friend Martha’s arm, to the far more dramatic dimensions of her muscular cousin, Dickie’s. I was at a gathering of the Dabbs clan at one of the old family properties by the Crossroads just east of Black River Swamp in the county of Sumter, South Carolina. Martha and I had been hiking along on the High Hills of Santee Passage of the Palmetto Trail when the large green-brown serpent slithered across our paths and disappeared into the waters of Old Levi Mill Lake. Martha was disturbed; I was ecstatic. I let out a gleeful shriek.

The South is intriguing territory. Home of the blues, gumbos, gators, haunts, hollers, swamps and all their quirky inhabitants, it’s also been the stomping grounds of some of my favorite writers—William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee, Erskine Caldwell, Alice Walker, even Edgar Allen Poe—sensual, steamy and sometimes scary as hell. Keep reading …

Moguls skier Alex Bilodeau won the first Gold medal for Canada at the Vancouver Olympic Games and credited his older brother who has cerebral palsy.

At the last Olympics, American skater Evan Lysacek had a disastrous short program performance that took him out of any contention for a medal. This time he won the Gold medal beating reigning Olympic Champion, Yevgeny Pleshenko.

19-year old figure skater Kim Yu-Na from South Korea carried the hopes of a nation and the heavy expectations of gold as she took the ice and turned in two of the most spectacular performances in the history of Olympic Women’s Figure Skating.

So, what does this have to do with writing? Keep reading …

On a sunny July day in Fecamp, Normandy, I stood in front of the stony corpse of an 11th century ducal palace, studying the ruin before me with the eyes of an Independent Scholar. That’s an impressive way of saying that I was a history student without the benefit of credentials, university affiliation, or professors. Keep reading …

Make a New Year’s Resolution to write for Roadwork in 2010. Left Coast Writers on-line column is published bi-monthly, and editor Pat Bracewell is looking for 1000-word essays about writing, travel and any combination thereof from LCW members. Contact Pat at Roadwork@LeftCoastWriters.com.

The tiny Calistoga airport sits at one end of the Napa Valley town of Calistoga, a tourist resort known for its hot springs. Along the town’s one main street are the spas boasting various treatments: mud baths, hot whirlpools, massage. My mother and I have come here for my 30th birthday, but not to seek the waters. Keep reading …

January 21, 2009…For forty years I have been going to the National Mall to celebrate, to witness and to participate in history. I’ve been there to see marathons and hootenannies, Grandmothers for Peace, Students for the Earth, reunions of the Peace Corps, and a Million Men’s March.

In the early days, the days of Lyndon Johnson in the late ‘60’s, the country was torn asunder by what was perceived as an unjust war. Led by youth – and I was then young – thousands came to march against the relentless killing in Southeast Asia in a fruitless and seemingly endless war. Among those who were dying were thousands of my own generation, drafted, disillusioned, and angry.

I was living in Washington at the time, my young husband having been drafted and serving in the Naval Medical Corps. I was impressed that, from all over the country, people of all ages, races, and backgrounds poured into the Capital to march – peacefully, but determined to make their voices heard.

When citizens exercise their lawful right to protest peacefully during times of hardening lines between the government and the people, there is always tension. In those days, tension gave way to lawlessness – in my experience, on the part of the police. I remember vividly days when all of downtown seemed overrun with armed cops in riot gear, their faces impersonal behind their blue masks and shields. I remember marching peacefully with thousands of others crowding onto the Mall near Constitution Avenue, one of my babies in my arms while my husband had the other. Something happened toward the edges of the crowd – police bullying, someone said, but I didn’t see it myself. Everyone started running, panicked. I feared a stampede and with our children there, felt a fear I have rarely experienced.

In those days one did not even need to be marching to get arrested, but merely to be on the wrong street at the wrong time. I remember riding on a bus through a rundown section of town near the Capitol and seeing SWAT-like teams of riot cops sweep in front of the bus, rounding up and sometimes bludgeoning anybody who happened to be on the street. Most of the residents in that neighborhood were black, but on that day and in that mood, the cops were truly ecumenical. Later, thousands in the sweep were arrested without charges and held in RFK Stadium. By that time of course, LBJ was gone and we had moved on to Richard Nixon.

Over the years I went to the Mall on countless other occasions. I went for Smithsonian Folk Life festivals every summer, for Cherry Blossom Festivals in spring (even when it snowed), and, in recent years, to protest another unjust war. Every year that I lived in Washington I went for my favorite Mall holiday, the Fourth of July, with its picnics, long sunsets, bands, merry-making and the crescendo of huge fireworks. The music pretty much reflected the regime; sometimes it rocked, sometimes it was hokey, sometimes it made you sing and dance. On one Fourth during the Reagan years the Beach Boys were uninvited to the party – for being suspected dissidents!

Yesterday I went back to that old neighborhood, or as close as I could get to it at 17th and Constitution. Yesterday I experienced something almost impossible to imagine forty years ago. Yesterday I went down with the multitudes to celebrate the first official event of Barack Obama’s Inauguration as the 44th President of the United States: the Concert on the Mall, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Like all the festivals and celebrations, like all the Fourth of Julys, it was joyful. Like all the marches and protests, it was full of soul and heart and feeling. But unlike the others, tension was replaced by calm; fear gave way to hope. And mostly there was love in a way I have never experienced it in my country.

To witness this and celebrate it, the superstars were there: Bruce Springsteen backed by a gospel choir, and Mary J. Blige making her smooth moves in her snakeskin boots; old guys like James Taylor and John Mellincamp who sang “Ain’t That America,” and Pete Seeger who sang “This Land is Your Land” with all the verses from the Great Depression; Bon Jovi was there, and U2, and Queen Latifah who introduced the voice of Marion Anderson; Stevie Wonder rocked on the piano and Shakira rocked in leather pants; that wild trio, Sheryl Crow and Herbie Hancock and Will.I.Am in his dreds and Scottish tartan. Then, Barack and Michelle Obama singing along with Garth Brooks doing an “American Pie” medley. And finally Beyonce finished it all off with “America the Beautiful.” Not a dry eye in the house.

But as Obama said, “this is not about me,” and it wasn’t about them, really, biggar2 either. It was about us, the thousands of folks who waited in the grey winter light, who shivered in the January cold, who stood for hours to celebrate this moment, to hear these voices, yes, but mostly just to be there. With each other. The family behind me, black, who had driven the day before all the way from Michigan. The young women in front of me, white, who had come from Utah and were so pleased with themselves for getting tickets to the Inauguration. “Think about it. They’re all Republicans in Utah and they’re not coming to this. No big deal to get tickets from our Republican Congressman.” The black woman in the long black fur coat and black hat who stood next to a blond white woman in a white coat and furry white hat who kept hugging each other. The people of every size, color, and contour who spontaneously linked arms, swayed and sang together.

This time was different, maybe because for the first time in my memory all those people were for something – the same thing – rather than against something. This time was different because people were unselfconsciously waving flags when at other times they might have been tearing, wearing or burning them. This time was different because in my memory, the living memory of most folks there, times have never been worse. And somehow we – all of us there, I sensed – never felt better or more hopeful. Nobody, none of us, had ever experienced, or maybe even imagined such a day.

Joanna Biggar lives in Oakland and is a teacher, writer, and traveler whose special places of the heart include the California coast and the South of France. A professional writer for more than 25 years, her poetry, fiction, personal essays, feature, news and travel articles have appeared in hundreds of publications.

Alpes-Maritimes, France

The Cote d’Azur brings to mind luxurious hotels and the cachet of the Mediterranean coast stretching from Cannes to Menton, yet this strip of land is connected to another world. To the north, a mountainous backcountry offers a diversity of cultures and outdoor activities.

Both elegant coast and wild backcountry are part of the Alpes-Maritimes departement, which is tucked along the Italian border in southeastern France. This area of Provence possesses the seaside, the mountains (as high as Mt. Gelas at 10,300 feet) with an alpine landscape of fir forests, and the high rocky land of the Mercantour National Park. So why not enjoy it all? Stay in deluxe hotels, discover ancient hillside villages, puzzle over ancient pictographs, and hike in nature so dramatic it will knock your socks off.

alps22

Although the Riviera boasts its famous hilltop villages, such as Eze and Saint-Paul-de-Vence, the backcountry has its share of ancient villages with narrow cobblestone streets and stone houses. It takes just an hour driving north to reach them. In the Roya Valley, the lovely village of Saorge (11th century) has medieval houses strung together like a necklace across the mountainside. The streets are beautifully hand-paved with water-smoothed oblong river-pebbles. alps31 The hillside village of Venanson seems to float on a ridge, and gives spectacular views overlooking the Vesubie Valley River. And in Breil-sur-Roya, tall, narrow, attached houses have retained their medieval character. This town is only 24 kilometers from the Mediterranean.

For centuries these villages were completely isolated as the main road by-passed them. Instead it ran farther west, over the Tende Pass through the village of Sospel, with its 11th century bridge, which sprouts a medieval watchtower in the middle of the span. The new road was constructed some 30 years ago, bringing the modern world closer. alps4

The Roya Valley has been described as Italian, but with a French accent and sense of discipline. Constant reminders of this mix are evident: flat bread covered with tomato paste (like pizza), espresso coffee drunk strong and black with lots of sugar, and the Breil dialect that incorporates Latin words. On some “newer” buildings (16th, 17th & 18th century), decorative accents and walls painted with warm pinks and yellows give an Italianate flair reminiscent of the Italian Riviera.

History explains this blend, as for centuries the Roya Valley was half French and half Italian. Part belonged to the Duke of Savoy, who favored his land as the best hunting ground. In fact, the upper Valley of the Roya only became part of France in 1947 after World War II, when the people of Tende and La Brigue asked to become part of France. Some of the Riviera, including Nice, did the same in 1860.

In the Alpes-Maritimes, nature has taken its course with great dramatic appeal, cutting away at mountainsides and leaving behind steep canyons with a palette of colors. For example, the Roya Valley has areas of purple rocks with green striations, while the cliffs of the Daluis Gorge are an antique, ruby red, and the nearby Cians is yellow. Some gorges north of Puget-Theniers are black, as if sprinkled with ash, and the Gorge du Paganen’s grey rock would fit right into Dante’s underworld.

In the Mercantour National Park, thousands of engravings dating from the Bronze Age (1800-1500 BC) adorn rocks, for this high place was sacred to the ancient inhabitants of the valley. The surprisingly small drawings were scratched into ochre-colored flat schist rocks that had been smoothed by ice during the Glacial Age. Professional guides lead hikes to the most interesting sites in Vallee des Merveilles (Valley of Marvels) and Fontanalbe and can interpret the engravings. A visit to either site is a full day’s outing. For these trips and other outdoor sports contact professional guides in Saint-Martin-Vesubie and Breil-sur-Roya, north of Menton. Another way is to drive north from Nice on the N202.

alps11 Whatever one wishes for – gurgling streams, perhaps, or deep, dramatic ravines – one is sure to be able to find it here. This includes swimming, kayaking and other water sports, fishing, rock climbing, horse riding, and mountain biking. Within the Mercantour’s rocky terrain lie 4,000 kilometers of marked trails for walkers, hikers, and bikers. The Roya Valley alone has 25 mountain lakes, so gorgeous scenery is a given.

Before World War II, Saint-Martin-Vesubie was a fashionable resort with ten hotels, but during the post-war economic slump tourism fell off. Today, with only two hotels, the place is unknown, when compared to the Riviera. Yet this town, cradled between fir-covered hills, is a perfect base for hiking in spring and fall. Le Boreon, also for hikers, offers cross-country skiing in winter. Alpine skiing is found at La Colmiane.

The spiritual distance of the mountains is greater than the hour it takes to get back down to the coast and its deluxe hotels. Beaulieu-sur-Mer, between Monaco and Nice, has ultra luxurious La Reserve de Beaulieu, resembling an Italian Renaissance villa, with hand-painted furniture heightening the décor of the rooms. Restaurants, rooms, and the heated salt-water pool, are a splash away from the sea. In Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, the deluxe Royal Riviera Hotel claims the largest pool on the coast as well as a private beach. These hotels’ gourmet restaurants attract European royalty.

Local tourist sites include the Italian-style palatial villa and gardens of the Baroness Ephrussi de Rothschild in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. In Beaulieu-sur-Mer, the Villa Kerylos is a pure re-creation of an ancient Greek mansion.

Along the waterfront in Nice and Cannes, locals stroll the palm-lined promenades. In legendary hotels such as the Carlton and stucco mansions, champagne corks pop at breakfast. The towns offer lively outdoor food and flower markets.

The Alpes-Maritimes certainly has something for everyone.

THE DETAILS: Spring and fall are the best times for hiking. Guides are in Breil-sur-Roya and Saint-Martin-Vesubie.
French Government Tourist Office: www.franceguide.com
Air France : www.airfrance.us
Castel du Roy hotel in Breil-sur-Roya: www.castelduroy.com
La Reserve de Beaulieu: www.reservebeaulieu.com
The Royal Riviera www.royalriviera.com

Patricia Woeber was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and moved to the United States at the age of 21. Her travel articles have been published throughout the United States and Canada. In 2004, the French Government awarded her the Medaille d’Or du Tourisme (Gold Medal) for her extensive articles on France. At the moment, she is polishing her book of travel adventures filled with stories of extraordinary situations ranging from wonderful to dangerous.

Is there a better launching off point for positive change than New Year’s Day? Nope, not much beats January 1st as the beginning of the new you. A whole new year awaits for the writer in you to make your mark. Fresh and unspoiled by editor rejections and by your own sketchy writing habits, that fat January is all about possibilities. All the excess of the holiday season, the “might as well wait ‘till the first of the year” procrastination, and the sludgy sloth are but a faint memory after midnight December 31st. You have improvement plans for this New Year. This year you will finish that novel, this year you will send out that stack of short stories languishing in the drawer; hell, this year you’re going to quit smoking, lose weight, get fit, and find your soul mate.

What’s that you say? Here it is the second week of January and already you’ve missed your sunrise yoga class for the third time and got lost reading a book instead of working on yours. You do this every year. You suck.

But don’t despair. The New Year, though powerful, is but one of many occasions you can use to identify the beginning of the new you. Chinese New Year comes soon enough in February, and if that passes you by there is always that fire starter, sun-moving-into-Aries first day of spring. Fresh starts crave a precise moment to mark the spot when old bad habits are shed like a crusty scab revealing the glowing newness underneath. Well, maybe that’s a microdermabrasion facial, but you get the picture.

More importantly though, why do we need this totem, a day on the calendar that captures our best selves? I have a theory.

I have a friend who believes in everything––no, wait a minute, that’s me––but let’s just say that everything in the universe is either yin or yang. You know, female/male, expansive/contractive, sweet pink vodka cosmopolitan/deep fried pork sausage. Surely we writers are expansive yin beings. (I’m surprised poets can keep their corporeal form and not just fly away in a beam of pure light.) Thus we need yang energy to balance us, to bring us down to earth. Self-imposed structure demonstrates our attempt to ground ourselves with powerful yang energy. Brilliant yin ideas need some butt-in-the-chair yang work ethic to reach fruition. Every day we seek balance. But if we were completely successful existing on steady sameness, brown rice, and goodness, where would the murder scenes come from? Or tales of the steamy sex of betrayal?

Today I decided to take an inventory of my accomplishments, to see how far I have come with all the personal and professional growth I set out to manufacture last January. I think I was on four diets last year, and I am happy to say that I weigh exactly the same as I did last January. Early in the year, as I channel surfed for the Australian Open (procrastinating on my book proposal) I landed on the best thing I ever saw. Good-looking, happy, sweaty people gyrated to a salsa beat. Exercise? How could it be exercise––it looked like so much fun? I ordered the Zumba tapes with the free Zumba sticks (an unbelievable offer) before the hard-bodied dancers were done dancing across my TV screen. Now, a year later, the unopened box sits on a shelf, a cluttered shelf. Oh yeah, that’s right, that was another thing I was planning on doing. “Clear the clutter” was high on the resolution list at the onset of 2008.

Why do we make these resolutions? Because we’re dreamers. And let’s just give it up to the creative universe for that! Writers are imaginers. We can see flesh and blood on a cold blank page. We can feel the pain of a life not lived or the joy of a mother’s love in people who don’t even exist. We can chronicle our lives and, maybe without realizing it, land on universal truths that resonate with our readers.

Last year at this time I had a few pages about many things, which was the start of my woman-coming-of-a-certain-age food memoir. I was flailing, trying to herd squirrels of thought with little success. I was yinned out. My story was so ethereal and all over the place it was on the verge of disappearing, taking my vision of me as a writer with it. And then the magic happened. The universe delivered someone to help me, a special editor/coach goddess, who incidentally has very tangy yang energy. This January I have three fat chapters and a real honest-to-goodness book proposal. The heft of it in my hand feels like a newborn baby. It feels like a miracle to me. That’s what creation is.

January is the month for fresh starts. That’s the generous, expansive yin of it. January is also a fallow winter month, a time of reflection and a time to draw together. That’s the tightening yang of it. What I learned in this last year is that positive change (the new year theme) doesn’t need to be directed by a judgmental taskmaster. That Zumba guy wasn’t bitching at anybody. That’s what drew me to him in the first place. He and his band of zumba-cisers were working hard, sweat beading up on their six-pack abs, but they were having fun. They were dialed in to their creative energy.

So this new year, instead of eliminating things that give you pleasure, make a list of resolutions to celebrate and savor the wonderful unique qualities that make you you. Take a deep breath of your divine essence, dear reader, and instead of starting the next to-do list, look at all that you have done. I think you will be surprised. dscn0379

Toni Piccinini is a Marin-based writer and the creator and original owner of Mescolanza, a San Francisco Chronicle Top 100 Bay Area Restaurant. When Toni is not teaching Italian cooking classes, (bellatoni@lacucinasemplice.com) or shaking her Zumba sticks, she is looking for an agent to represent her coming-of-age food memoir “A Simple Year”.

YOUR BABIES

You care for them
soap their backs
pick nits from
each strand of hair;
nourish and starve
them for their own
good; discipline
them into line;

They grow, get
rowdy, take on
lives of their own,
so you send
them off make
their way
in the world, earn
some dough.

Then you wait,
and wait and wait
for the news;
Will there be a
train crash?
A cure for cancer
or maybe
the Swine Flu?

Until some
Grad student editor
not much older
than them
(but much, much
younger
than you)

deigns to respond,
No thank you,
in a letter
sealed in
an envelope
stamped and
addressed
in your
own hand.

HOMEMAKER POET

The relationship between poetry and pastry
is sadly quite inverse.

Do one well, the other suffers. An hour
for the villanelle subverts

the flaky crust, but still I keep my hands
in both; I give thanks

for publication that’s been broad and deep
in family praise, and that

for extracting smiles from kids half dead
with ennui

I’ve earned my Pulitzer in pies.

VILLANELLE GENERATOR

It randomly generates end-rhyme
and regular meter, plans for each stress,
gives infinite choices for first and third lines.

A real workhorse muse, it draws tandem lines,
searching each website and database;
it eats text and excretes it as end-rhyme,

slant, near or true. In a few seconds’ time
tercets are teeming. It breeds words like a virus,
spawns infinite choices for first and third lines.

Poetic pirouettes whirl en pointe on a dime
with no mental strain; nuanced phrase after phrase.
While it effortlessly generates end-rhyme.

Quality will rise, as in a short time
programs imprint preferences, continually revise
available choices for first and third lines

and sieve out the drek. Hack poets will wane,
will wander disconsolate the Boolean maze
of the randomly generated end-rhymes.

Here fire derived from an algorithm burns
and warms the icicle heart even of Isosceles
who reads the roulette-wheel spun end-rhymes,
and triages choices for first and third lines.

Rebecca Foust won the 2007 and 2008 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prizes and was a finalist for Poetry’s 2007 Emily Dickinson Award. Nominated for two 2008 Pushcart Prizes, Foust’s recent poetry appers or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Nimrod, North American Review, Spoon River, Women’s Review of Books and elsewhere.

Do you know that in Australia the globes are just like American ones, with Australia on the bottom? It boggles my imagination to think about all those people Down Under knowing they live on the bottom of the world, knowing they’re walking around upside down all the time. This would not be the case, of course, if they simply re-drew all the globes to show the southern hemisphere at the top.Â Why not do this?

What does it feel like to live Down Under? Is it just another aspect of living in a world filled with exported American culture: McDonalds and Coca Cola in every country? What does it take for an American to begin to understand the rest of the world?

What’s Up Down Under, a collection of travel stories, began as a series of letters sent home to friends during the year that I lived and worked in Melbourne. I loved it that our two countries were so similar on the surface, yet Australia presented me with a never-ending series of surprising cultural and linguistic differences. There was an Alice-in-Wonderland-like quality to living in a place where English was spoken, yet often not having a clue what people were talking about:

You’re flying to cans?

He’s wearing a bag of fruit?

I should pass you a tinny?

Between the accents, country-specific peculiarities, and incomprehensible rhyming slang, I was often befuddled. And I enjoyed trying to figure things out. During that year in Australia I caught the travel bug. Soon afterward, I found myself visiting other countries â€“ mostly in the southern hemisphere, many “developing”.

Things do look different when you are not on top. Things look different when yours is not the dominant culture, when you are not white and well fed, or when you have only one set of clothing, which is ragged and dirty and displays the logo of a foreign country’s football team. They look very different when you don’t have access to clean water or electricity, when members of your family suffer from malaria, or when your city has been reduced to rubble by an occupying army.

I met families living at subsistence level in Madagascar. They had to compete with foreign scientists â€“ and their precious endangered species â€“ for the right to live as local families have for generations, eking a living from the small parcel of forest in which they gather firewood, harvest plants, and trap small animals to eat. Same location, but the scientists and the locals may as well be living in parallel universes.

Similarly, I may as well be in a parallel universe when I travel to a place where I don’t speak the language or understand the customs, don’t know how to get around, and don’t enjoy the security and support of a network of extended family and friends.

What’s Up Down Under is an exploration of ways in which to experience the world. The best way I know to do that is to put myself into new situations, new worlds. Worlds where I don’t know what’s going on or who is safe to travel with, where my legs are covered with leeches and I’m slipping down a mountain, where I am confused or frightened or simply have very little sense of context.

Not every story in this book took place south of the equator, but each was entered into with a spirit of adventure and exploration, and with the hope of learning about the world in a new way. I travel in order to have those experiences, and I write in an attempt to understand them. Because in the same way that traveling dislocates, travel writing locates. As a portrait of place, or person in place, travel writing provides a structure for examining and making sense of the unfamiliar, for becoming familiar with the foreign.

Travel has introduced me to what had been foreign. I don’t know what it’s like to live in a city pockmarked by shrapnel, reminded every day of occupation, hunger, and death, but being lost in Sarajevo certainly evoked a different kind of fear than I have ever experienced before. And I have never had to wear other people’s clothing because everything I owned was destroyed, but I now have a sense of what it must be like, and a deep admiration for the courage and resourcefulness of those who live through a direct experience of war.

What has impressed me most is the kindness of people around the world, their generosity, hospitality and eagerness to communicate. In one case it was dramatic: strangers rescuing me from a kidnapper! In others it was more subtle: a rainforest guide quietly slicing lianas to make my hike easier, a museum curator providing special access to ancient goddess figures hidden away in a closet, or a restaurateur whispering a secret recipe for Irish brown soda bread.

I have enjoyed and been inspired by people around the world, and hope you’ll feel some of that inspiration as you read these stories.

Laurie McAndish King’s collection of travel stories, What’s Up Down Under, is a work in progress.Â Her essays have been published by Lonely Planet, Travelers’ Tales, and the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine. Laurie is the publisher of Travel Writers News and co-editor, with Linda Watanabe McFerrin, of two volumes of Left Coast Writers’ Hot Flashes: Sexy Little Stories and Poems.

Normal 0

I was addicted.

Unlike the mid-1990s, when I first started on the long road of attempting to get a novel published, in the 2000′s it was possible to query literary agents by email. No more dropping snail mail query letters with a SASE into the post box and waiting weeks or months for a reply. No more wear and tear on my printer, and no need to schlep to the post office to send out a partial or, if I were lucky, a full manuscript. Now when an agent asked to see all or part of my novel, I could send it as an attachment, or paste an excerpt in the email itself.

When my writing life wasn’t going too well (which, unfortunately, was a lot of the time), I’d send out email queries, about a dozen at a time, to brighten my spirits, hoping a miracle would happen—that I would find the agent who wanted to sell my book. I’d click on the “Send” button as if pulling the arm of a slot machine, then sit back to await my fate. Maybe this was the day my life would change. I fixated on my computer screen like a day trader, watching for the slightest stock movement, clicking the “Get Mail” icon every few seconds to see if a reply had come through.

By early 2006, in the midst of querying on my fifth novel, with the hundreds of rejections of the four previous novels behind me, I had become a full-fledged email query addict. And I was getting results. Along with the quick responses (some received in less than two minutes after sending the query) of “thanks, but not for me,” my luck was improving. Some agents were asking for the full manuscript.

One morning I sent an email query to “Agent X.” A big New York agent and a popular one, I’d been reluctant to pitch to her. This isn’t her kind of book, I thought, while another voice in my head said, “What have you got to lose? It’s just an email.” I held my breath, hit “Send,” and waited.

A reply flew back. “Can you send me the first three chapters by email?”

Uh, sure. In less than a minute she had them.

Next reply, about fifteen minutes later: “I *love* this! Can you send me the rest?”

Stunned, I loaded up the attachment of my 245-page manuscript and sent it on its way.

The weeks that passed turned into a couple of months, and I had yet to hear from Agent X. In the meantime other agents I’d sent the novel to were getting back to me, some with praise, but not one taker; more rejections to add to the not insignificant pile. But I had yet to get a rejection from Agent X.

As luck would have it, Agent X was going to be at a writers conference I was to attend in a few weeks. She, along with fifteen other agents, would be participating in something called Speed Dating with Agents.

I was not a virgin when it came to agent speed dating. At another writers conference a few years before, where I’d been pitching Novel #3, I paid twenty-five dollars for the privilege of crowding into a hotel ballroom with about two hundred other desperate-to-be-published writers, standing for over an hour in haphazard, zig-zagging lines for the chance of having five minutes with an agent. Twenty of them sat at desks lining the periphery of the room, kings and queens holding court, awaiting pitches from the masses. The only difference between this ballroom and the Harris cattle ranch I’d passed many times on Highway 5 on the way to Los Angeles was the absence of the smell of manure. However, I’m sure a plentiful amount of b.s. was being thrown around in that room just the same.

But this was a different conference, a different speed-dating experience, and this was Novel #5. The organizers promised the event would be civilized, not a cattle call. You would sign up for three agents ahead of time and receive a ticket for each, then visit each one in order. A proctor would ring a bell after your five minutes were up, and you’d go on to the next agent on your list.

I’d considered contacting Agent X before the conference, telling her I would be there, but I didn’t want to pester her. Agents don’t like pests, I’d been told many times. She was a busy New York agent and she probably hadn’t even finished reading the manuscript. Besides, she said she loved it—at least the first three chapters. I was nervous, but still held out hope. I hadn’t heard back, but no rejection had arrived either.

As I took the seat across from Agent X at the Speed Dating with Agents event she looked at my name tag with interest. I introduced myself, told her the title of my book, and asked if she remembered me.

She smiled and said, “Of course I remember you. I really liked your book.”

She really liked the book.

“Wow. Thanks. So, I haven’t heard back yet and. . .” I stammered.

“Oh! I guess you didn’t receive the rejection email yet.”

It took a moment for me to process what she’d said. “No, I guess I didn’t.”

“My assistant was sending out a whole bunch when I left for here.”

“I see. Well, was there any part of the book you felt needed to be changed? The voice, maybe?”

“No, the voice was lovely.”

“The protagonist?”

“Charming.”

“The part with the gangsters?”

“No, I liked that.”

“Then, ah. . .”

She looked me straight in the eye. “It’s a wonderful book, but it just didn’t have that certain something.”

But you said you loved it, I wanted to say, but kept quiet. Like dating, it seemed that a novel needed to have chemistry with an agent or else it was just not to be. Clearly this was only a coffee date, with no chance of it turning into a fancy dinner leading to romance.

That evening in my hotel room I called my husband.

“So how was it?” he asked, an urgent tone to his voice.

“Great. Agent X said my book was wonderful.”

“Really? She’s going to take it?”

“No,” I said. “But it was a really positive rejection.”

“But she’s not taking it.”

“No, she’s not taking it.”

I guess you have to be a writer to understand the comfort of a “positive rejection,” and to appreciate the obsession of querying by email to search for that one agent who has to be out there, the one who thinks your book has that certain something.

A few months later Wendy Nelson Tokunaga found a wonderful agent who got her a two-book deal with St. Martin’s. Her debut novel, MIDORI BY MOONLIGHT, was published in September 2007. Her next book, WISHING ON A KIRA-KIRA STAR, is due out in Spring 2009. She is set to receive her MFA in Writing from University of San Francisco in Fall 2008. Visit Wendy’s Web site at: www.WendyTokunaga.com.

Tuesday, February 20
1128 Hours
Scrunched into a slippery orange chair at the DMV, I’m waiting with my 15-1/2 year old son to see what he needs to do to get a learner’s permit. With my Supermom powers of detecting danger where none exists, I’m conjuring up exploding gas tanks, road rage and high-speed crashes. I shudder at the picture of my boy in a vehicle going 65 mph. My nickname as a child was “Chicken Little” for my propensity to worry that the sky was falling.

My cell phone bleats. The moment I hear the robotic voice saying “This is an urgent message from the Federal Disaster Medical Response Team,” adrenaline pumps through my body. The neurotransmitter fires up my sympathetic nervous system – heart, lungs, blood vessels, bladder, gut and genitalia. Yes, even them, although I’ll try to wait until tonight in bed to act on it.

The voice continues, “We have been placed on Advisory status for a possible mission as soon as tomorrow. You may respond by doing one of the following:

1. I will review the website information and update my availability soon.

2. I am not available to deploy or assist with a mission for the next few weeks.”

I’m always ready to go. The team consists of a bunch of crazed medical professionals who combine cynicism and compassion, often in the same sentence. I would trust them with my life; in fact, I have. Yes, I’ll go.

More than that though, it’s the survivors, raw and real, who touch me. They’ve been through brutal, life-shattering events; I see their pain, their resilience, and the very depths of who they are. I have perceived terror, rage, gut-wrenching loss, and amazing spirit in survivors. Villages, homes and families destroyed in a nanosecond – the tsunami, Hurricane Katrina; life is fragile and precious. We’re small, and nature’s big. As a disaster mental health worker, I go to bear witness; I hold them and their stories. I am humbled, powerless to do any more. Of course I’ll go. Kate_sri_lanka.butterfly.sm.jpg

I will admit, too, that the prospect of avoiding up to two weeks of math homework with my son compels me to say yes, yes, yes, count me in. I hit “1″.

Yet, this notification is odd; always before, we’ve been told where we were going. I can’t access the team website from the DMV, so I call my husband and beg him to do a Google News search. He says, “I hate to disappoint you, but nothing’s happening – no tornadoes, tsunamis, floods, fires, or terrorist attacks. Sorry, sweetheart.”

I’m drumming my fingers and tapping my feet; the purgatory of the DMV is eternal. Finally, the clerk calls us, elucidating the process my son must follow to be licensed. I bolt out and race home, speeding, distracted, setting a very bad example for my soon-to-be-driving boy.

Jamming my key into the door, I throw my purse down and power up the computer. I chant, “come on, come on” as it slowly awakens. I pound in my password and get into the members page of the team website. Mystery solved – we are activated for “Operation Burnt Frost, a Space Object Re-Entry Mission.” Chicken Little was right, the sky is falling. “A US spy satellite…is now nearing the point of re-entering the atmosphere. The satellite carries hydrazine as a fuel source.”

Hydrazine? What’s that? “Hydrazine is a toxic substance with varying health effects…inhalation can cause respiratory tract irritation, seizures and other CNS effects, and death in larger doses. In addition to the hydrazine, there is a very remote possibility of trauma from being struck by falling debris.” Falling debris? The speed of the satellite is 27,000 mph. The only intervention for that kind of trauma is to call DMORT, the Disaster Morticians.

I pull out my huge, black duffle bag and rifle through my gear. I could probably charge my cell phone, iPod, and camera with the electricity surging through me, but I plug everything in to be sure, making a note to remember to pack the chargers. I gas up the car; last time I forgot.

The moon is in total eclipse tonight; the red light eerie. The news is terrible, with lots of name calling – “renegade,” “rogue” and “derelict.” I’m tempted to offer a bullying seminar – “Words can hurt.” There’s no mention of all the other spy satellites that have tumbled down, no mention that government officials said, only two weeks ago, “A disabled U.S. spy satellite is likely to break into small pieces when it falls to Earth within weeks, posing little danger to humans.” Personally, I’m rooting for the rogue.

CNN reports a direct hit at 7:26 p.m.; now the terms are “Herculean,” “heroic” and they’re bragging that they only had a four-second window of opportunity to fire the missile. They nailed it. The Department of Defense said it wouldn’t know for 24 hours whether the fuel tank had been hit or not.

Sleep eludes me; still I buzz with excitement. I clutch my cellphone in my hand; when we were deployed for the San Diego wildfires, the call came at 4:00 a.m. First thing in the morning I check the team website and CNN, even before the coffee is made. Nothing has changed, so I get my son off to school, and I go to work.

At 11:00 a.m., we get the news: “We have been stood down from advisory status for the satellite re-entry; fuel tank destruction has been confirmed.”

While relieved no one has been hurt, I’m disappointed; I wanted to go. With a sigh, I turn to my client who is, like me, a suburban, menopausal woman. I bear witness to her pain, her struggles, and the emptiness in her life. I’m heartened as she descends to the core of her psyche; together we grieve her losses and celebrate her resilience, her amazing spirit. I see anew that we fall and then, we fly.

When Kate Amatruda, MFT, CST-T, BCETS, EMT, DMAT, DSHR-DMH is not responding to disasters, seeing clients, or doing math homework with her son, she’s scrying for an agent for her novel, a salsa version of Pride and Prejudice with a gender twist.

Wendy Merrill’s March/April column, “How Chasing Mr. Wrong Led to Mr. Write,” is still front and center at Roadwork on the Left Coast Writers site – http://www.leftcoastwriters.com/category/road-work/ – but you’ve already read it, right? Now, if you haven’t submitted something to Roadwork yet yourself, what are you waiting for? Contact Pat to submit your story or to pitch an idea. Roadwork@Leftcoastwriters.com.Are you ready for Roadwork?

Roadwork is the LeftCoastWriters.com on-line column about travel, writing and the writer’s life. All members of Left Coast Writers are welcome to submit an essay of 800 to 1000 words to editor Pat Bracewell at Roadwork@Leftcoastwriters.com for on-line publication. A new Roadwork column is posted on our website every other month.

The reason I attended the Maui Writers Conference that year was not because I’d dutifully saved my money, planned ahead, and was finally ready to put myself out there after years of hiding behind my fear of being rejected in a noble effort to publish my yet-to-be-written memoir. No, the real reason I decided to attend the conference that year was simply because I was chasing yet another good-looking-commitment-phobic-he’s-just-not-that-into-me man/boy with mother issues with whom I’d had a brief affair while on vacation in Maui, and I wanted to appear to have a legitimate reason to return to the scene of the crime.

I’d known about the Maui Writers Conference for years, but always had a good reason not to go. Like I wasn’t ready to show my work to anyone, or I felt too fat to wear a bikini, or God forbid I might actually have to write something if I attended a writers conference, or nobody likes me everybody hates me I think I’m going to eat a worm, and so on. But upon returning home from my vacation fling, before I’d even unpacked my suntan lotion, I sat down at my computer and registered for the upcoming conference. (Apparently lust trumped fear.)

Clearly I was a glutton for punishment, but after all, the title of my memoir was Falling into Manholes, so this rerun could be considered fieldwork, right? Perhaps my travels to distant shores to date unavailable men would be tax deductible, I reasoned (or rational-lie-zed), and made a note to ask my accountant.

Okay, so my motives for attending the conference were a little skewed, but it’s not like I was completely unprepared. In the previous eighteen months I’d published two personal essays in small press anthologies, crafted a pretty good book proposal, and scored a literary agent. So, when Labor Day weekend rolled around, I packed a bikini and my worst intentions, and off I went.

Upon my arrival, instead of focusing on the conference, I was preoccupied with checking for messages from Cliff. We’d planned to meet several days later, but I couldn’t imagine why he didn’t want to rush to my side! To pass the time until our rendezvous, (or more specifically to keep myself occupied while waiting to be dumped), I wandered around the conference until I stumbled across a giant banner that said, “Jay Leno’s Pitch to America.” A line of would-be-authors were waiting to pitch their story ideas to the cameras in the hopes that they would be one of the few selected to be aired on the Jay Leno show. I’d never pitched my story out loud, and the prospect of doing so for the first time in front of a giant camera was horrifying, but I was looking for distractions, and this fit the bill. Terrifying and potentially humiliating, it sounded like the perfect dating substitute.

When it was my turn, I stood trembling at the microphone and blurted out, “Falling into Manholes is a funny, insightful book about how I learned to take the “me” out of men.” OMG, I thought, did I say that out loud? I was feeling as though the only way this whole experience could be worse was if I were naked, when the male producer asked, “Can you give us an example?”

I froze. I hadn’t written the book yet and wasn’t prepared with a glib answer. Before I could stop myself I enquired, “Can I say blowjob on national television?”

Naturally, the producer said, “Sure!” so I proceeded to tell a story about “Brad,” that involved “presidential sex” and Christmas shopping, before slinking away, determined to go into denial about what I’d just done. They won’t pick me anyway, I thought, proceeding to my next humiliation stop: pitching my story to the Editor in Chief of Putnam, Neil Nyren.

Sitting across a little table from Neil, I was nervous. He looked serious, deadpan and bookish – not at all the type of person that I’d envisioned might be interested in my memoir, but I plunged ahead. Anything was better then obsessing about Cliff.

“I don’t think this is really your kind of book,” I began, “but you’re the biggest publisher here, and you’ve been around forever and know everyone, so I’d very much appreciate your feedback on my little project.”

At this point I lowered my face into my hands, as though to collect myself, and as I jerked my head back up, like an actress hurling herself into character, I launched into my schpeel.

“Falling into Manholes is a collection of coming-of-middle-age stories about looking for love in all the wrong places – food, alcohol, drugs, men – and finding it, in yourself.” (The finding it in myself part was not quite true yet, but I was optimistic that my book would eventually have a happy ending – and not the massage parlor kind). I talked for a couple more minutes, during which time Neil maintained his poker face, but after I finished, he told me he liked my idea, and asked me to send him the essays I’d had published! As I took his card and rushed back to my room to email him the essays, I started getting excited about something I couldn’t have articulated at the time. Something that felt like hope.

Two days after Neil returned to New York, he emailed that he loved my essays, and requested my book proposal. Several days later he told me that one of his women editors read my proposal and came into his office demanding that he “Buy this book right now so Wendy will move to Manhattan and be my new best friend!” That comment alone would have won my heart, but in the end Putnam paid me to write my story. Cliff may not have wanted me, but Neil did, and so did Jay Leno (I was “bleep job” girl on Pitch to America). And so it was that chasing Mr. Wrong led me to Mr. Write.

And as for the book, well, my relationship with my book had only just begun. Now all I needed to do was write my way towards that happy ending.

Wendy Merrill’s memoir, Falling into Manholes: The Memoir of a Bad/Good Girl, will be released March 27, 2008. Check out www.fallingintomanholes.com for details and events.

They called us the ‘Thelma and Louise’ of journalism. But when we first set out in 1993, doing America for our Washington-based wire service, we weren’t quite up to the part. Though she took to calling me Thelma and I took to calling her Louise, we were really just plain Ann and plain Joanna, unarmed, harmless and quite unlikely to kill.

That was then. Soon enough we were ready to kill— each other. It wasn’t just that I am tall but she is taller, that I was on my way to becoming bi-coastal, while she was already seriously bi-polar (as likely to be found in the North or South Pole as North or South Carolina). And it wasn’t just that her sporty little red Acura said “Forty and divorced” while my beaten-up red wagon said, “Divorced with kids.” It wasn’t even, strictly speaking, that she is a Carolina mountain girl who believes the basic food groups are caffeine, nicotine and bourbon and that driving into dawn is fun, while I am your basic Californian, believing in beaches, wine, a.m. beauty rest and that a bare-bones room includes a spa. What nearly drove us to homicide was that she is a photographer, chasing the light, and I am a writer, chasing the word.

There were many lessons to be learned. They flattened us so often, we came to call them roadkill. Then the definition expanded. It grew to mean not only what we found, but what we did, what we ate, what we became – and on bad days, what we looked like.

Roadkill is a disorienting concept. Sometimes it encompasses the simple need for geographic realignment, such as when we looked up to see we were at the corner of Baghdad and Grapefruit, moving right along toward the intersection of Deglet Noor and Bliss. Our impulse was to cry out: “Where the hell IS this, and what are DOING here?” The answer to the first part — the reality check — we could get from a quick glance at the map. The second, but tougher, question, had an unfailing answer. We were doing what we were always doing, getting the story.

That simple act frequently required major effort just to avoid going astray.

Because of time and budget constraints, we often practiced what Ann dubbed “drive-by shooting,” praying that light and necessary interviews would magically line up like a perfect page layout so we could get in and out of one place and on to the next.

But for the most part, not going astray meant in the most basic way doing whatever it took to get to the story. Hence we trashed cars by driving them into the mud and sand, turning interiors into the middle-aged equivalent of a girls’ dorm. We also hitched rides — in pick-ups, rowboats, an ill-fated tuna trawler, and a canoe that carried us through a reptile-infested swamp. Once, pursuing wild horses across the open plains, we rode stylishly in the back of a flatbed truck outfitted with plush leather seats lifted from a Cadillac.

Sometimes, driving through America’s potholes, with the wind and the weather, or the strange yellow light of a tornado on the horizon, Rush on the radio, Ann smoking furiously and me Coughing with Meaning, we got down to bedrock soul-searching. Like the timeless question from that old Ladies Home Journal column: “Can this marriage be saved?”
Meaning, of course, beyond the California Yankee and Carolina Belle trying out friendship, the working marriage between writer and photographer trying to create the story.

In both instances, the answer was already a given. It was, even on that very first trip down the California coast, when we were about to trash our very first car loaded with essentials: my stuff — old blue suitcase, road maps, sunscreen, towels, notebooks, laptop; her stuff — duffel bag, one black cosmetic kit including hair conditioner that promises to make your hair carry on even if your brain goes dead, contact lenses, a bunch of cameras, and about 350,038 rolls of film, though I may have miscounted. (I should have gotten the hint when I visited her Capitol Hill apartment once, and she offered me a refreshment, then opened the fridge to the appalling sight of a bottle of bourbon and about 1 millions rolls of film).

But it was in my car that she started in with these annoying questions, such as: what were the tires like and did I have gas and had I had the oil changed in the last hundred years? Then she said in her kind of off-hand way, “Oh, hell, darlin’, I’m sure you’ve got it all together. Even the emergency tools.”

“You mean like this?” I said, pulling out the corkscrew I always keep on the driver’s side just in case. Then I hit the accelerator, lurching off to find stories for America’ s senior citizens. And she hit the country music station, pronouncing for the first time in our recorded history: “OK, kiddo, we can do this. ”

In June of this year Writers Workshops International organizers, Barbara Euser and Connie Burke took yet another group of writers out on an amazing travel writing adventure. This time the participants journeyed through County Cork, Ireland. Writers Linda Watanabe McFerrin and Joanna Biggar directed workshops in between the far-ranging peregrinations. This, again, is some serious “Roadwork.” The anthology containing all of their stories will be out in December, distributed nationally by Travelers’ Tales. Meanwhile here are some excerpts from a few of their delightful stories…

Ann Ure
Fritz wasn’t the best-looking guy in the seaside village of Myrtleville, but he was the first one I met. He gazed at us from the lawn of the Bellevue B&B as we pulled up. Friendly yet cautious, he approached and greeted our group of writers in a rather perfunctory manner. He avoided making direct eye contact with me, though it was obvious that he sized up each one of us before returning to his post at the edge of the lawn beside the inn’s lovely dining veranda.

Fritz wore his reddish brown hair short. Relatively young, there were telltale flecks of white in his eyelashes and beard indicating that he’d been around the block a few times. He also appeared to be a bit scraggly, but in that way that the Irish can work unkempt to their advantage. Despite his stern demeanor and rather short stature, I immediately found him attractive.

“What’s his story?” I asked Benny and Gaby Neff, the husband and wife proprietors of this charming County Cork inn. Benny was the first to answer, and he did so with a sigh and a shake of his head.

“That’s Fritz,” he said. “He’s from Crosshaven, about two miles down the road. He hangs about more than we like, but he’s okay.”

I didn’t understand, and continued my probe. “You say he hangs about your property?”

“Yes. He’s in love with our Daisy,” Benny replied, “but she’s not the least bit interested in him. I guess he’s not her type.”

“What’s Daisy’s type?” I asked, my curiosity having been tweaked.

“The big guys,” Benny confided, “Labrador retrievers, mostly.”

Photo by Mary Jean Pramik

Doreen Wood
The fabled conviviality of Irish pubs was about to become a reality for me on that bone-wet night in Myrtleville, County Cork, Ireland. Several years ago I’d had a great personal loss followed by many lonely nights and I’d longed for gatherings around a big round kitchen table. Now, bright blue eyes stared at me as I pushed open the rough-hewn door of the Pine Lodge pub. I was cold and the luminescent swinging “Murphy” sign had beckoned me as I’d abruptly left my walking companions. I must have been a sight, with my wind-blown platinum hair and my cheeks freshly pinked atop my shimmering ruby red raincoat. Fifteen men looked at me as if I were a phenomenon they were going to thoroughly enjoy.

“Well, well, come in,” called the red-haired man perched on the bar stool nearest the doorway. “Sit down.”

I didn’t yet know that any unfamiliar face in this neighborhood would be looked at with concerted interest, or as I came to call it, gleeful scrutiny.

Photo by Connie Burke

Gail Strickland
That is the first time I hear Cobh described as The Holy Ground, but after he explains it to me, I hear it everywhere. I find an old sea chanty in an Irish folk song book called “The Holy Ground.” When I ask Michael, our taxi driver, about Cobh, “Oh, the Holy Ground,” is his answer, a response I will hear time and again. Everyone I ask about Cobh gives me the same answer, and they never utter the words without going deep within to a pool that is their past and their hope for the return of loved ones – loved ones who seldom returned home. Each inward gaze, disconnected from whatever liveliness surrounds them – a pub, taxi, restaurant – is like an empty chair left waiting at their kitchen table.

A few days later on the bus touring southern Ireland, I talk with Sister Eily, and begin to fully understand how those departed never faded to mere memory. Sister Eily is a feisty, red-haired Irish Catholic nun. She sits in front of me and tells stories about her family, whispering her last story to me, a memory of the final days with her aging mother. There were tears in her mother’s eyes, as she lay in bed resting, and Sister Eily asked her mother if she was uncomfortable or needed something.

“No,” her mother answered in a voice frayed and worn. “I’m thinking of the day Gulann (her younger sister) went to go to Cobh and I made her that gray coat.”

Photo by Connie Burke

Mary Jean Pramik
The open frame bodhran sets the heartbeat of Irish music. A large circle of wood, capped at one end by a smooth sheath of sheepskin, the drummer cradles the bodhran under his or her arm and hugs it tight against the body while sensually massaging the taut skin from the inside. With the other hand, the musician twiddles the double-headed beater or tipper against the outside surface.

A skilled bodhran player is a prized find for traditional Irish music groups. This frame drum is an exciting instrument in the right hands, layering a subtle sound to Irish folk music. To the untrained ear, the bodhran appears to be an easy path into a band and free pub ale. Not so, since the bodhran player works to match the tune and the melody.

One of Josef’s music teachers explained it: “The drummer does not keep the rhythm. The drummer paints, he fills in the spaces of absence.”

Photo by Connie Burke

For more information about Writers Workshops International and upcoming travel/writing opportunities, write to: Leftcoastwriters@aol.com.

Working at home means I see what goes on around the block during working hours. The woman who lives across the street may wonder what Buddy, her white terrier, does all day alone while she’s at work, but I know. (A lot of standing on the couch, making nose prints on the window, and barking at people walking by.)

Home during daylight hours, I see things my commuting neighbors never know about. I see the stay-at-home dad buckling his toddler son into his car seat for outings. I see the Asian couple with their conical hats going through the recycling bins. On nice summer days I see the man a few doors down pull his BMW out of the garage and park it on the street. He’ll tinker with it for several hours while listening to the Giants on the radio. He always knocks off in the late afternoon, opening up the parking space to the first of the nine-to-fivers returning home.

I see all these things, the pets acting out, the immigrants smelting a living from our refuse, and the comings and goings of people who, like me, don’t seem to have anywhere else they really need to be during the day. I see all these activities, and I follow them, because the sometimes banal, sometimes eccentric pastimes of my neighbors fill a niche I might otherwise be stuffing with daytime television.

One day in late January, though, was a little different.

“There’s been an accident with one of your neighbors,” the officer told me.

I wasn’t exactly surprised—in Oakland, you don’t glance out the window to find multiple police cars on your street unless something is very wrong. There had been three cars that I could see, one parked hurriedly at a skewed angle, partially blocking the street. A blond woman was standing on the sidewalk, talking to one of the officers. From my third-floor nook, I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I could see she was in tears. She motioned for the man to follow her up a short flight of stone stairs into a courtyard. Halfway up, she suddenly dropped to a crouch and took her head in her hands. In a moment, the spasm of grief passed, and she and the policeman continued up the stairs and out of my sight.

The officer in blue hesitated a moment after informing me of the accident. I hesitated, too, uncertain whether or not I had the right to ask what kind of accident required the services of seven police cars—the three parked on my street, plus four more I’d just discovered around the corner. An empty, idle ambulance stood by as well.

We both stood there in awkward silence, and it was then I realized that silence was another oddity. Shouldn’t seven police cars and an ambulance make some noise? I hadn’t heard a single siren all morning. What kind of accident requires such a huge emergency response but no sense of urgency? My sense of dread mounted. I shuffled my feet uncomfortably. The officer was dressed so smartly, and I was wearing sweats and the wild hair I’d slept in. I almost hadn’t come out to talk to her at all, embarrassed by my disheveled appearance and the fact that if she asked what I’d been up to that morning, I couldn’t really say.

It was the officer who spoke first. “Actually, your neighbor seems to have taken his own life.”

I gasped. “That’s horrible,” was all I could think to say. “Yes,” she said, “It is.” She gave me a sad smile and put a hand on my shoulder. Had she done this for the crying woman, too? I wondered how she could stay in touch with her compassion in her line of work without burning out. She must have to preside over “accident” scenes all the time. “You might not want to go down that street,” she suggested, gesturing toward the ambulance and the knot of uniformed men and women milling around it.

Was it a gory scene? I don’t know—I took her advice and didn’t venture around the corner until much later in the day. By that time the police had gone, as well as the ambulance. If there had been a coroner’s van, I’d missed it. The tearful blond was nowhere to be seen, either. I expected yellow caution tape, but didn’t find any. The normalcy was eerie.

It was dusk. Soon, my other neighbors would start straggling home, reclaiming their street parking and greeting their pets without ever knowing that Buddy had spent the morning exchanging barks with a K-9 Unit German Shepherd, or that the last car in their parking place was black and white with flashing lights. They would start dinner, crack beers, and check phone messages as if it were a normal evening. And for them, it would be. They would have no idea that death had swept through Eastlake that morning like a tornado, cutting a swathe of destruction through one building, and leaving the rest of the street as untouched as the Emerald City.

Nicole Clausing is a freelance writer based in Oakland, California. Her writing has been published in The Christian Science Monitor, Going Places Magazine, and on the Travelocity.com web site. Her award-winning essay, “A Tale of Two Turkeys” will appear in “Best Women’s Travel Writing 2007.”

For a short spell in April of this year a small group of Left Coast Writers became part of the world that inspired Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner and Harper Lee. Their hosts, Martha Greenway and Mary Brent Cantarutti, both South Carolina natives, invited them to visit the rural South and write about it—definitely “Roadwork” as we see it. Here is a collection of excerpts from works-in-progress.
— Linda Watanabe McFerrin

Ann Ure
God only knows what they thought when they saw us coming. There were five of them. Five country boys with farmers’ tans dressed in worn t-shirts that advertised whiskey and motorcycles. They wore Wrangler jeans—the kind that George Jones wears. Smokes protruded from their back pockets. They wore baseball caps too, and work boots. Each had driven there to meet us in his truck, each truck towing a small boat, not much bigger than a canoe, and fitted with an outboard motor.We looked like ladies from another time and place—possibly from another planet. Since most of us were from California, we might as well have been from some other planet—or Disneyland, a place that most good old boys would not have visited because it was in California.

There were eight of us: eight ladies who didn’t know what we were getting into, so we had prepared ourselves for the worst. We were dressed in long-sleeved shirts, full length pants. We wore wide-brimmed hats to ward off the sun. Evelyn’s was huge and had a yard of fine netting that draped around her face. She looked like a beekeeper. A couple of us wore scarves around our necks to protect them too. From what? We didn’t know.

When we arrived at our meeting point we slathered on the sunscreen. And then we applied mosquito repellent. Lots of it. Less is not more when it comes to mosquito repellent. As a final step, before approaching our young, country guides, we placed Jackie O. sunglasses underneath our hats and above our scarves to protect our oh-so-sensitive eye areas from any kind of assault. Then, as ready as we’d ever be, we departed the parking lot and toddled towards our destiny.

They sized us up quietly and dutifully dressed us in life preservers. We gingerly stepped into the waiting boats, tucked our purses, cameras, binoculars and journals between our knees, took deep breaths and one last lingering look at the shore, then pronounced ourselves ready to enter South Carolina’s Sparkleberry Swamp.

Anne Woods
There’s only one way to skin a chicken, but in the South there are thousands of ways to prepare grits. One cup coarsely ground corn meal—yellow or white—to four cups liquid is the basic recipe. Everyone seems to have his or her own way. However they are prepared, Southern grits are smooth as a South Carolina accent. Smooth as the accent that explains how grandmother taught her daughter and her daughter taught her daughter that grits are best made with chicken stock instead of just water. That the liquid should be brought to a rolling boil and the pot taken off the burner just as the grits are added. That they should be left to plump and soften in the residual heat. That a grating of cheese into the pot just before serving never hurt anyone. That the perfect grits begin not in the kitchen, but at the mill—preferably a stone grist mill because it keeps the temperature of the corn lower than any other milling process and results in a more flavorful meal. Yes, at the mill, that’s where good grits begin.

Colleen McFerrin
As we turned up a narrow channel I finally saw it: a very round, brown, dappled creature, almost the color of the branch, coiled around one of the tree limbs. It was a poisonous cottonmouth snake.

I had started out on a perfect spring day at high noon, on a jewel of a waterway, known as Sparkleberry Swamp in South Carolina, south of Sumter near the town of Pinewood. Named for the Sparkleberry bush that grows throughout the area, Sparkleberry Swamp is also know as Upper Santee Swamp. It’s part of the Santee Cooper Lake System comprised of Lake Marion and Lake Moultrie. The South Carolina Public Service Authority created these lakes between 1939 and 1942 as a hydroelectric project.

On this particular afternoon the bright light was harsh. It pierced through the lacy canopy of tupelo, ash and giant bald cypress, their great trunks submerged below the liquid surface, and reflected against the water in the midday sun. Just staring at where the dark shade met the light was hypnotizing. My eyes wanted to hold on to the cool, dark shade, but were forced into the light as the boat maneuvered through the trees. Over and over my eyes held … and then released. It was then that I realized I could get lost in the swamp. Not just turned around. There were no identifiable bright orange markers or bold, arrowed signs pointing out the watery path. The order of the swamp is random, disorienting. Time slows down. Familiar sounds are replaced with wild quiet, and the light plays with your eyes.

Marianne Betterly-Kohn
Ghost veils

Spanish moss drips
from oak and elm,
hangs like gray veils
on a ghost bride.

Wind moans
through the branches
while they cry.

Some say spirits
live in trees.

I think the moss
mourns
young brides
who lost their lives
before their innocence,
like the orange blossom bride
buried in her wedding dress

The gray moss
wraps each tree in a web
but unlike a victim,
the tree welcomes its invader
and wears the long, tangled threads,
as if floating down the aisle,
while Carolina breezes swirl
its ancient silks,
antebellum lace.

Do pregnant whales get morning sickness?
How do you protect yourself from writing scams?
Androgynous hermaphrodite pronoun?
Useful websites for writers?

These are some of the thousands of questions asked and answered by fellow writers on NaNoWriMo forums. While NaNoWriMo may sound like a tiny rhinoceros, it’s actually short for National Novel Writing Month, which happens each November through www.nanowrimo.org.

I’m all over the place as a writer: poetry, short stories, children’s fantasy and picture books, essays, plays, novels—several novels, each a decade in the works. And since poetry is my foundation as a writer, I choose each word and comma with a surgeon’s precision, a meticulous and exceedingly slow process. While ideas strike with the frequency of summer lightning in the Canadian Rockies, their manifestation is more like tracking the exact moments and influences that shifted the genetic code from protozoa to bald eagles.

However, NaNoWriMo offers an opportunity to approach writing like a drunk skunk weaving its way through manzanita and spraying at every twig snap. The goal in joining NaNoWriMo is to produce at least 50,000 words in November, an average of six and a half pages each day. There’s no cost. Just log in and participate in whatever way feeds you as a writer.

I learned about it four days before its start and viewed this as an opportunity to complete the second half of the novel I’d been working on for the past year. However, one of the rules is to begin a new piece of writing. At first I reasoned that new is new; however, the website explains that writers are too attached to plots and characters already in process for this focused period to do its magic. While the site encourages writers to outline in advance, the first word of one’s novel does not touch paper until November 1. It made sense and, of course, lightning struck immediately so on the first of November I began writing a novel that I hadn’t even imagined four days earlier.

NaNoWriMo’s site provides fantastic forums that enable writers to network so they can ask others for specific information regarding obscure historical periods or grammatical rules, or play games to relax from the task of generating 1,700 words a day, or discuss the balancing act of jobs and children during this highly productive month. Even though the organizers refer to how tiring this process is, I was undaunted. I’m a writer. I write almost every day and have since I was twelve so I was in it to see what neural connections would shift and develop in a month of releasing my editorial eye in favor of the fun of zipping down the ski slope of who-the-hell-knows-what-I’m-writing-as-long-as-it-totals-at-least-fifty-thousand-words!

Of course I made my 50,000, but it was exhausting, and also exhilarating, demanding, and one of the best things I could have done. It enabled me to find ways to generate work more quickly. More importantly, I found that remaining focused on one project deepened my writing. For example, my character is obsessed with bones so I read everything I could on bones and observed bone connections everywhere—it didn’t hurt that Halloween and Day of the Dead were at the beginning of NaNoWriMo—and metaphors arose that normally wouldn’t have because I was so immersed in osteology. I discovered the benefit of having a unifying theme/obsession in a novel-length work and of really digging in at the beginning of that first draft.

NaNoWriMo brings together an international network of people focused on producing the first 175 pages of a new novel. It enables participants to connect with and support one another, cheer each other on, share excerpts if we choose, or simply write in our normal isolation, perhaps peeking into forums, and finally getting credit for those first 50,000 words that often remain uncelebrated at this stage. NaNoWriMo even enables writers to meet and continue as groups beyond November, by interest or location. It’s a lot like Left Coast Writers, without Izzy’s or those great Salons.

If this weren’t enough, participants receive a signature halo if they donate at least twenty dollars, tax deductible, to defray the cost of running the NaNoWriMo site. Half the money donated beyond 2006 costs will build children’s libraries in Vietnam.

And if novels aren’t your thing, or if, like me, you work in multiple genres, you may want to consider signing up for Script Frenzy, which will launch June 2007. Same organizers, new genre. In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, no matter what, just keep writing!

Elizabeth Weaver will read an excerpt from “bonegirl,” her NaNoWriMo manuscript, at the LCW reading series at the Ferry Building on September 10, 2007. Please come and hear what 1,700 words a day inspired. She’ll also be reading poetry April 9 for this same series in celebration of National Poetry Month.

It was nearly twilight as I navigated my way on foot down the steep curves of the only street that winds through Positano, Italy. I had arrived by ferry the night before, but had had little chance until this moment to experience Positano itself. Now, having watched from my hotel terrace as the late October sun turned the town’s cream colored houses to gold, I had ventured out to see what the place had to offer. The sun had disappeared behind the limestone cliffs that ring the town when I emerged from a stairway into a little piazza. To my surprise I found myself facing a large ceramic plaque proclaiming that John Steinbeck had once lived there, and that he had immortalized Positano in an essay that he wrote forHarper’s Bazaar in 1953.

Jolted by this appearance of a fellow Californian in a place where I hadn’t expected to meet him, I made a mental note to look up the Harper’s essay when I returned home. As I write this, three weeks post-Positano, my memories of the town still fresh in my mind, I find that Steinbeck’s fifty year old assessment of Positano still rings true:

Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone. John Steinbeck.

I spent only a single day in Positano, and I left wishing that I could linger. Steinbeck lingered for eight years, turning his writer’s eye on everyone he met. His essay is filled with an assortment of town characters: the mayor, the postman, the shoemaker, even the town healer. He throws in a little history and a handful of hilarious anecdotes, and he pinpoints Positano’s attraction to writers:

Nothing in the little town is designed to disturb your thoughts provided you have a thought. John Steinbeck

I formed my own thoughts about Positano not in the town itself, but high above it. I had come to Italy on a walking tour, and our Positano itinerary took us to the finger-like limestone cliffs that tower above the Bay of Sorrento. We spent the day on the Sentieri degli Dei, the Path of the Gods, walking through a rolling fog that obscured Positano and its tiny harbor far below. Our group of fourteen was guided by a rugged Amalfian named Vincenzo, a man with a passion for the beauty of this coast. Although Vincenzo fretted about the clouds that shrouded the vistas he’d promised us, it seemed to me that the fog imparted an eerie loveliness to our trek. On previous days we’d hiked in the sun past the farms and lemon groves of Sorrento and Capri, our passage punctuated by barking dogs, crowing roosters or bleating sheep. But on this day we walked in near silence, the fog cupping us like a gloved hand. Trickling water blackened the walls of fissures that gaped in the limestone rocks. Cypresses rose through swirling mist like dark sword blades. It was impossible to walk through this landscape and not think about the ancient past of this place and of the people who’d walked these hills over the centuries â€“ peasants, soldiers, perhaps even emperors. I pondered the name, Sentieri degli Dei, and wondered if the ancient inhabitants of Positano believed that the gods themselves walked here. It certainly had a hushed, otherworldly feel to it.

We met few other hikers this late in the season, but one local fellow, walking purposefully towards town with a bag clutched to his side, paused when our guide addressed him. After a brief exchange the man agreed to show us what he had found in some secret dell far off the path. Furtively, as if he feared we might snatch away his treasure, he opened his bag and gave us a quick glimpse of an enormous porcini mushroom. Highly prized by mushroom lovers, the porcini has been called one of God’s great gifts to humanity. I began to wonder if the name of this trail might have less to do with the ancient gods and more to do with its proximity to porcinis.

Further on we rounded a ridge and saw the centerpiece of our walk, Monte Pertuso. It means “hole” Vincenzo explained, and sure enough, there is a huge hole in the center of the cliff. It looked to me as if an angry giant had thrust his fist through it. Local legend offers an even more dramatic explanation: the Madonna, in a contest with the Devil, made the hole by simply touching the rock with her hand.

Returning to Positano, we climbed down stairways clinging to houses that seemed to be piled on top of each other. Steinbeck’s description of the town is still apt:

Its houses climb a hill so steep it would be a cliff except that stairs are cut in it. John Steinbeck

He predicted that Positano’s inaccessibility would keep the tourists at bay, but he was only half right. The tourists come all summer long. Ferries deposit them at the foot of the town and tour buses disgorge them along the coast road high, high above it. From both directions they tackle the steep passageways to browse in shops that sell clothes, jewelry, pottery and art. The tourists don’t stay, though. They continue on to Amalfi or Sorrento. Perhaps, like me, they wish that they could linger. I wonder how many of them notice Steinbeck’s plaque and, upon returning home, track down his essay. For me, it was like bumping into an old friend in an unexpected setting, and discovering in his words the same sense of timelessness that I’d felt in Positano.

Roadwork Editor and Oakland writer Patricia Bracewell has written non-fiction for Skirt Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle and American Baby.

Discovering the Heart of Copper Canyon

A lone Tarahumara woman sits in the shade of the trees on the edge of the cliff above our hotel. I watch her from the hotel terrace about a hundred yards below. I can tell who she is from the bright pink skirt, yellow print blouse and the green scarf that frames her dark hair and skin. She sits quietly after a long day of weaving baskets and dealing with tourists – a difficult transition for a shy tribal woman whose culture is not open or aggressive.

I am traveling with my husband on a guided tour of Canyon del Cobre, known in English as Copper Canyon, Mexico. Legend says the name originated from the intense yellow-orange reflecting on the sandstone and shale cliffs. This relatively unexplored area is located on the western side of Central Mexico in the Sierra de Tarahumara. The western entry point is Los Mochis, a harbor town that services the agricultural valley on the continent side of the Sea of Cortez across from the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula.

A chartered bus had taken us on the paved road from Los Mochis to its end-point at the town of El Fuerte, located at the base of the Canyon. From there, the Chihuahua-Al Pacifico train line is the only way to proceed. The air was heavy and wet as we drove to the train station the next morning under dark skies. From the bus window, we watched children walking to school. Their dark hair and complexions were enhanced by their uniforms: white shirts and black pants and skirts. Backpacks bobbed as they walked. The schools are K-6 and 7-11. Then those who qualify are off to the university. The rest stay to live and work in this rich agricultural valley.

The train sped along, climbing out of the valley. Oak, manzanita and madrone trees soon filled the hilly terrain. Our guide, Bryan, pointed out the sesame fields as the train rolled past. McDonalds buys all of these seeds for its sesame seed buns through a distributions system set up by local food brokers.

We soon reached the section of the track that rises quickly to 4200 feet by snaking back and forth over three levels of tracks across and through these cliffs, using a system of switchbacks and tunnels that is one of the engineering marvels of the world. As I finished lunch in the dining car, I looked down on Temoris, where the climb began, and watched a waterfall tumble from the side of the cliff.

A few minutes later the train arrived at the San Rafael switching station and stopped to change train crews. Tarahumara women and their children came to the train windows with their hands full of baskets to sell. One woman had a baby on her back, tied on in bundle fashion with a large blanket. I noticed the cement block homes of the train crew behind the tracks. Their children, wearing the same uniforms we saw in El Fuerte, were coming home from school.

In another 15 minutes the train arrived at Posada del Barranca, the stop for our hotel. We were now at 7200 feet. The view from our room balcony was of the jutting canyon walls thickly covered with green vegetation and, about a hundred yards down the cliff face, a cave dwelling of a Tarahumara family. Wooden boards seal off the opening of their cave and provide a front door entrance as well some protection from the elements. I could see the family members walking the trails and doing household chores on the ledge in front of their home. Archeologists theorize that the Tarahumara were contemporaries of the Anasazi, “The Ancient Ones,” from the American Southwest.

Bryan led us down one of the rock and dirt trails to the Tarahumara dwelling. He told us it is known only as Cueva del Chino, a name of unknown origins. As we stood beside the family garden of squash, peaches and apricots, he and the patriarch, El Chino, a man of about 60, greeted each other by lightly touching the fingers of their open hands in the accepted manner. Soon El Chino treated us to a demonstration of traditional Tarahumara violin playing using his hand-made instrument.

The families in this group, now about 17 strong, work corn fields and orchards that stretch for miles through the canyon. Their homes, a few under construction, made from wood and cement, thread their way along the ledge of the cliff from the original cave. Other groups of Tarahumara families live deeper in the canyon, some over 100 miles from the nearest roads. They travel the distance by foot over the course of the day on trails that weave through the forests and along the canyon walls. Reflecting on that, I now understand their name for themselves, Raramuri, The People of the Swiftly Running Feet.

The Tarahumara will stay in this canyon as their ancestors have for centuries, adapting to their environment and surviving with their culture intact. We will move on to another valley town in a lower part of the Canyons. I know, though, as we reboard the train, that my visions of the deep and verdant canyon walls glistening from the sun and of the Tarahumara people and their enduring way of life will remain with me forever.

Marsha Black has been traveling and writing about her travels for many years. She is a businesswoman and grandmother with a passion for photography and a great traveler’s tale. Her photography is exhibited regularly at Reed’s Camera Shop in Walnut Creek and at Brewed Awakening in Berkeley and on her website, www.visualtravels.com. She has been published in travel journals and webzines such as International Travel News and American Women Road and Travel.

My story begins with a community of a thousand men and women. Okay, okay, mostly men and let me tell you, I didn’t mind that one bit! We were traversing the east coast of Tassie (that’s Aussie slang for Tasmania, that island to the south of Australia that once got left off an official map. That ought to tell you a thing or two about how isolated some of the folks here might feel. Who can blame them for doing things their own special way?)

But back to my story. Where was I? Oh yes, traversing the east coast of Tassie. Well, this was a truly good bunch of folks. Their only goal was to enjoy themselves and their beautiful surroundings on two-wheeled transportation. Now, if you cycled for countless hours up and down hills (of which there were MANY), around lakes (and sheep), over rivers (and the ubiquitous sheep turd) you might build up quite an appetite by the end of the day. And we did. But being Aussies and all, we also built up quite a hunger and longing for a pint or three. Or four. Or five. (Here was living proof of that beer statistic I remember reading before setting out on my Australia adventure. Aussies consume the most beer per head than any other nation on this planet.)
What does that have to do with the plight of poor Piggy Boo, you ask? I’m really glad you asked. Remember the stuff I told you about Tassie getting left off the map? You know, about people here doing things their own way? Well, one afternoon, as we (our cozy group of a thousand riders) pulled into another small town, instantly tripling their population, we proceeded to fill the nearest pub. The pub was part of a small farm, nothing unusual in this part of the world. All the blokes (Aussie speak for guy) started drinking pints of stout, the most potent of beers. I watched the dark liquid pour like molasses straight down their gullets. The stout was quite cheap, a dollar fifty I think. That’s when I noticed the sign up on the wall behind the bar. It simply read:

STOUT FOR PIGGY BOO
50 CENTS

Strange, I thought. Who or what was PIGGY BOO? And why would they sell stout cheaper for this PIGGY BOO? Could it be the “Local of the Month”? My curiosity, never something to be held back, soon got the better of me.

“Who’s Piggy Boo?” I asked the bartender.

His face had the burnished good looks of someone who spent all day outdoors. He turned, and his blue twinkles took on a mischievous smile.

“Our pig. Want one?”

“Your pig drinks stout?” I forgot to close my mouth.

“Yeah. Loves it.”

This I had to check out. I tossed a few coins on the counter, grabbed my brown bottle of molasses and made my way to the door. A small crowd had already gathered around Piggy Boo’s pen. A bottle tipped slightly. The stuff oozed out. The pig pushed his lower lip forward, never missing a drop.

I swear Piggy Boo was smiling.

Christine Krieg considers herself a citizen of the world. Born in Australia, she stayed just long enough to acquire a bit of an accent before moving to Germany. She grew up there and finally settled in Northern California. She tasted the intoxicating power of travel in her thirties while sitting in a tiny plane over the Amazon rainforest. Ever since, she has photographed and written about her adventures to foreign lands. Her last journey took her to the rainforests of Borneo in search of orangutans in the wild. As a full-time photographer, Christine creates beautiful author portraits as part of her work. She also donates time and talent to Left Coast Writers to capture our monthly speakers. Visit her website and check out her beautiful images at www.cksworld.com.

by Cheryl McLaughlin

It was one of those third-shift nights. I was done with the busyness of the day and the silence of nighttime surrounded me like a huge bubble—that safe place where I could finally hear myself think—when I sat down to write yet another practical, bulleted how-to article, “The 7 Keys to Managing Competitive Stress.” But this wasn’t just any article. It was an opportunity, for I was one of the few professionals—and the only woman—asked to be a contributor to The Sport Psychology Manual for Coaches, a publication which would be used to train coaches throughout the country. Once again, I was up against a should have been done yesterday deadline and I was praying for clarity.

What are the 7 things coaches need to know to help their athletes manage competitive stress? I asked as I placed the numbers 1 to 10 down the page. (It’s helpful to brainstorm a few extra for good measure.) I set the alarm on my ACT contact management software to beep me in five minutes and jotted down notes. Short, timed writes, I’ve learned, help me write fast and freely.

When the tone rang, I stopped, sat back in my chair and looked at my list. Fifteen pretty good ideas.

Not bad. The challenge was to choose the seven best and put them in order.

I placed a 1, 2, or 3 beside each idea. 1 would be the most important, 3 the least. I was hoping for seven 1′s or a combination of 1′s and 2′s, though in reality it is never that easy. But this time, I was lucky. Five 1′s emerged and two 2′s. Perfect.

I set my ACT again for five minutes and asked myself the key question for Point #1. What are three things coaches should know about competitive stress? I scribbled down notes as if taking dictation. (Have you noticed how much easier it is to write when you’re responding to a question?) I continued this process for the other six points. Within an hour I had a detailed outline.

Writing these articles had become second nature to me, as they are a staple in the game of success in the professions of both sports and business.. You write articles that people can scan easily; you highlight the key points and use sidebars to provide essential information in as few words as possible for those who don’t have the time or the desire to read.

I looked at my notes. The information was clear enough. The part I struggled with was getting started. That damned first line. Yes, I know you shouldn’t start there, but I’m always listening for that launching pad for the piece.

But this night when I sat forward to bring my fingers to the keyboard, I was like that wiggly child who drives teachers crazy—shifting in my seat from cheek to cheek, my upper body writhing as if I was wearing an itchy wool sweater, and my knees bobbing, sometimes together sometimes alternately—pulsating. I know I don’t sit well, but this restlessness was making me crazy

I leaned forward again to type, opting not to start with that dreaded first line.

My brain felt cloudy, as if filled with mushy cotton balls. What I really want to say is, I typed to get started. My fingers responded stiffly, jerkily as if they were translating barely perceptible Morse code messages from my brain.Â I write best with my eyes closed, when I can feel what I want to say and my fingers flow—just like when my flute seems to sing the song in my soul. But this night as I focused on what I should say—on what I needed to say—a piercing pain in my left eye and pressure like a vise gripped my brain and made it impossible for me to think clearly, let alone write. This shouldn’t be that hard!

I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply into my belly, held my breath for as long as possible and exhaled slowly to the count of eight—a tool to quiet my overactive, left, logical mind that can think too much and kill the performer.

YOU MUST LEARN TO WRITE DIFFERENTLY. It was that deep voice from the volcanic underbelly of my soul. I’ve heard it before, but this time I was shaky. What does that mean?

I closed my eyes again, taking another deep breath, hoping for an image to come up on my mind’s movie screen. A curvy, white Casper-like presence with a cherubic face smiled at me as she squeezed her way out of a nearly closed jail-like box, and the meaning became clear: the curves of my artist’s soul must be freed from that how-to bulleted box.

I need to go write stories.

by Robin Sparks

There are the plans you have for your journey, and the plans your journey has for you.

Things to do in San Rafael, Argentina:

1. Get an appendectomy.

We were watching the gauchos gallop into town when it was decided that I should see a doctor. I’d felt queasy all day, but, when it began to hurt when I breathed, I knew it was more than the bottle of Malbec wine we’d drunk the night before.

During the 30 mile ride on dirt roads to the hospital, I had time to think. I’d entered that travel place where you go from being captain of your itinerary, to tossing the itinerary out the window. Its very possibility keeps many would-be travelers at home, but it’s a place that travel writers secretly love to go.

The on-call doctor at the private clinic looked like he’d stepped off the set of General Hospital. He called the surgeon to come in, late Saturday night or no. As an interesting aside, each doctor from that point on, the lab doctor, Dr. Castro, the surgeon, was more Calvin Klein model-esque than the next. What are the odds? The only way to explain it is that in Argentina you get into medical school based on your looks.

The nurses have an entirely different set of requirements.

A handful of expatriates and a couple of Argentines, some of them strangers an hour earlier, had gathered in the examining room to help. There was Johnny from South Africa, who had survived 14 heart attacks at the age of 35. There were Annette and John, Brits who traveled the world on motorbikes before ending up in San Rafael to try their hands at farming, and there were Angel and Rosie, he Argentine, she Mexican, along with their daughter Candy. They’d recently moved to San Rafael, Argentina from Las Vegas. Did you get all that?

Fifteen-year old Candy was unflappable as my interpreter until they got to ”medical stuff”. Great. Argentines speak Castillano. I speak uh, Spanish. It was a Three Stooges comedy of mis-translation.

The surgeon checked me in for overnight observation, whereupon I paid $30 per day extra for the one air-conditioned patient room in the clinic. I couldn’t see how anyone could heal in this nearly 100 degree heat. Through the partially open doors of rooms up and down the hall, I’d seen visitors standing over beds, vigorously fanning patients. At the Policlinica patients are required to have a friend or family member stay in their room at all times to help with their basic care…an ingenious solution to health care costs, but a tricky one when you are a stranger in town.

As it turns out, my new friends fought over which one would remain in my room throughout the night.

Next morning the pain had subsided, so I figured I’d be heading home and was a bit embarrassed that I’d caused such a ruckus over nothing. The docs came in to make rounds, said a few words to each other, and suddenly I was being loaded onto a gurney and wheeled down the hall to surgery. I tried to talk Dr. Castro into letting me fly to Buenos Aires for the operation. He assured me that it wasn’t an option.

Under the operating light, they strapped me to a table, tied both my arms straight out at my sides, stuck IV needles into my arms and I lay there like Jesus Christ.

My last thoughts as the gas mask came down? A story I once read about a surgical patient who was paralyzed by the anesthesia but remained wide awake throughout the surgery, able to feel everything, but unable to let anyone know. I ran a quick inventory: Hearing? Yes. Sight? Yes. Speech? Nope. Sensation? No…Except, I discovered, my neck and head, which I began to wag violently back and forth with a look that I hoped shouted No, No! No! I’m not asleep yet! Your anesthesia isn’t working!…

The upside down face of the anesthesiologist came into focus. ”Robin?

”Fineeshed?” I couldn’t think of the Spanish word for ”Over.”

Ow. I’d been hit in the gut, hard. How much time had passed? I asked. (In my groggy post-surgical state, I spoke fluent Spanish). Thirteen minutes. Had it been my appendix? Yes. Had it burst? No.

”12 centimeters long!” someone announced as if I’d given birth to something wondrous. Which in a way, I guess I had. My appendix, an organ normally around 2 inches in length, had been found poking up into my chest cavity, a fully erect 7 inches. Yes, I’m proud.

The next morning, Dr. Novak, I mean Dr. Gonzales, stopped by my room, and after checking my stitches, said, ”You can put on your makeup now.” I chose to believe that he meant that my prognosis was good. Dr. Castro came by too, and announced that he’d made the scar small enough that I could still wear a bikini.

A few hours later, a nurse summoned my friend, Susan, out into the hall. She returned carrying a package wrapped neatly in white butcher paper. “What’s that?” I asked. “Your appendix.”

We left it sitting there on my nightstand until the next day when I summoned a nurse to please take it away to la basura.

”La postal?” she asked. ”No, no. Don’t mail it, throw it away!”

It may be a global world, but it’s still a babel world in lots of ways.

Two days later, and I’m back ”home” on the ranch surrounded by the warm people of San Rafael, Argentina and doing well, thanks to everyone here.

Gratefully,
Robin

Robin Sparks is in Argentina as the new editor of EscapeArtist Travel Magaine (www.escapeartist.com) to be launched in April, 2006. She’ll be back in the Bay Area in April. In June Robin will join Larry Habegger in Turkey for their writing workshop, The Personal Travel Story. Check it out under the Journal link at Robin’s website www.Robinsparks.com.

By Deborah Griffin
Roadworks: Deborah
I pressed the bumper sticker onto my dashboard. Good Girls Go to Heaven, Bad Girls Go Everywhere. It was my mantra for the trip I was about to take. For the first time in my life I would be on the road with no destination. Every other trip I’d taken was charted to within an inch of its life, mapped and reserved ahead with a quota of miles per day. Not this one. Part spiritual quest, part art journey, this would be a trip with time to think, to make decisions about the rest of my life. On the passenger seat lay a new journal, its smooth pages ready to record with words and sketches the adventures that lay before me.

As I drove west toward the unknown, the idea of â€˜bad girls’ kept playing in my brain. Bad girls, as opposed to good girls who never got dirty, never quit their jobs or left their husbands; who raised good little girls just like Mommy, and worked hard to get into heaven. But what if bad girls really do go everywhere, including heaven? I was about to find out.
Roadworks: Deborah
My first stop was a buffalo preserve in Medicine Park, Oklahoma. I set up my tent and tried to sleep despite the calls of wild turkeys and the wailing of a fellow camper’s violin that out-screeched the birds. Outside my tent the raccoons provided percussion, creating a sloshy rattle of ice against the inside of the cooler they couldn’t quite break into or drag away. I sat up in the cocoon of my sleeping bag and by the light of a flashlight wrote the first words on my fresh new pages. What in the name of heaven am I doing? Hunched over my journal, I wrote until my hand cramped, then spent the rest of the night rolling from rock to rock.

Blurry eyed over coffee the next morning, I made a decision. If I was going to spend weeks in my tent, I was going to have a comfortable bed. I broke camp and headed to the nearest shopping center. A friend would one day christen the little pavilion I put together that day The Taj. I purchased a blowup mattress, foldable cot, table and chair, a Persian design rug, luxurious comforters and linens in jewel colors. My lantern wasn’t pierced tin and amber, but it provided sufficient light for reading and journaling. I hit the road again, wallowing in my luxury and in the glory of having no agenda or schedule, no friends, husband, or family with needs to satisfy. I had only to satisfy myself. I stopped at gila monster museums, Route 66 diners, wigwam curio stands, and natural wonders. I visited caves.
Roadworks: Deborah
I loved the caves best. I loved the coolness, the thrusting stalagmites and the clinging stalactites. For me the caves were a physical metaphor for the emotional place I occupied — a going-inside place with a view to the world from the entrance. My favorite caves were the ones I could hang out in alone. In one I sat and traced the name of a former occupant. Margaret Marion had written her name in pencil on the surface in 1912. Years of limestone deposits had slowly covered it over until it lay sealed beneath transparent layers, unerasable. Was that what I sought? Some way to leave my mark?

One morning at dawn I sought spiritual enlightenment in the mouth of a cave above the campground at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. The valley below was filled with a plethora of purple, lime and scarlet tents, which the early morning mist and campfire smoke obscured then revealed at the whim of the wind. The veil of time seemed to thin, the colors faded and the encampment below could have been this century or during the time of the Anasazi, a thousand years before. I closed my eyes, sat crosslegged and heard a raven cry and a mother calling her child. I smelled food cooking, breathed in juniper, sagebrush and the cool, damp smell of time that permeates all caves.

Here in this holy place, where people had come through the ages to seek answers, I was ready for the Spirits to speak to me. I tried to concentrate, then tried to just be. And I found, not sustenance, light or counsel, but a sudden realization. I was done with caves. I was ready to go back and deal with my life: end my relationship, find a job, move out of stasis and do the next thing. I wasn’t empty-handed, though. I would take with me pages and pages of observations and sketches and forty days of experiences that would take me years to assimilate.

I made that trip in my thirty-fifth year, and even now in my fifties I sometimes go back to those journals. I find insights, or maybe a descriptive memory — birdshadow dancing on peach canyon walls, the giggly sound of white throated swifts, the tinkle of goat bells rising 1000 feet to crenellated cliff edges. I smile at the story of the woman who brought me leftover cake and anecdotes about her artistic granddaughter. I see again the conference-bound executive who shipped his suit ahead and rode his motorcycle across the desert, telling me his life history late at night while sand dunes leaned close.

Mainly I go there for the memory of days and days without agendas or plans, for the joy of simply being, with nothing to do but whatever shows up. Today, with every hour filled to the brim, that is my current version of heaven.

Deborah Griffin is an artist and writer living in Alameda. She exhibits regularly at the Alameda Art Center and the Frank Bette Art Center and has been published in Goddess Magazine and Skirt! Magazine, and will be included in the upcoming Hot Flashes II in 2006.

By Marsha Black

By December of 2001, a quiet blanket of winter white covered Yosemite Valley. The event was so unusual that it made the local news for a week, catching the attention of Bay Area residents, including my husband and myself.
I think most of us needed relief from the personal and national disasters of 2001. We certainly did. Mentally and physically exhausted, our enthusiasm and energy flagged. Our bodies ached. Instinctively, we turned to Yosemite’s familiar retreat, hoping that the pristine beauty would refill our spiritual and physical reserves.

The morning after our arrival, we woke to the first indication of hope. Looking out to the meadow behind the Ahwahnee, we were rewarded with a vista of white-cloaked trees. As the sun rose slowly into mid-morning, we watched the limbs release their snowy mantles, creating a translucent cloud of powder. I felt my spirits rise as each bough bounced back, freed from the strain of heavy snow.

Yosemite Three Brothers
A drive over the rough valley road took us to another meadow. The sun had hidden behind dramatic clouds and the air felt noticeably colder. Following the light, I scrunched and pounded through white drifts to the middle of the field, finding new strength in the physical effort and in the anticipation that something special was just ahead.
Yosemite Half DomeWhen I turned around, I faced Half Dome in all its majesty. Nature’s own spectacular backdrop, it dwarfed a snow couple that had been built in the meadow below. I felt myself smile as the scene before me crowded out any last subconscious visions of past events. Part of the healing of nature, I reminded myself, is about perspective.

At day’s end, we made a final stop at a bridge spanning the Merced River. The setting sun angled across the valley floor and the water snaked gracefully through the bright meadow. Merced RiverWatching the river scour the rocks and streambed, I felt my own body continue its cleansing process. My shoulders became more pliant, my neck less stiff, my facial muscles less tight. The lingering headache I’d brought to the valley with me had disappeared. I reflected on John Muir’s belief in the healing power of the wilderness, and of Yosemite in particular. A remarkably insightful man, I thought.
Yosemite Bridal Veil FallsHand in hand, my husband and I walked back to the car, lost in our memories of this quietly restorative day. It would snow again that night, we were sure, and we were quite content to take what came our way.
About the Author

Marsha Black has been traveling and writing about her travels for many years. A businesswoman, grandmother and passionate photographer, her work is exhibited regularly at Reed’s Camera Shop in Walnut Creek and at Brewed Awakening in Berkeley. She has been published in travel journals and webzines such as International Travel News and American Women Road and Travel. She lives with her husband, Dale, in Pleasant Hill, California. See more of her photos at her website: www.visualtravels.com.

By Nancy E Rapp

In the fall of 2003 I found myself intrigued by the lyrics of Loreena McKennitt’s song,

Dante’s Prayer.

Cast your eyes on the ocean
Cast your soul to the sea
When the dark night seems endless
Please remember me.

I wondered what it was that McKennitt wanted us to remember about Dante, who was, to me, a rather mysterious figure from the Middle Ages. I did a little research into the historical Dante Alighieri, and some of what I discovered struck me as significant in today’s post-9/11 world.

Dante began to write The Divine Comedy two years after he was exiled from Florence for political reasons. I found it fascinating that he did his finest work during the nineteen years that he was barred from his beloved city, forced to rely on the charity of foreign patrons. He expressed his distaste at the burden of his outsider status in these lines:

You shall leave everything most dearly loved!
You shall discover how salty is the savor
Of someone else’s bread

Paradiso XVII
For Dante, a native of Florence where even today bread is made without salt, the taste of salted bread was a visceral symbol of his exile. Perhaps it was that sense of displacement, that loss of all that was familiar and precious that compelled him to begin the poem that would become his masterwork. The sympathy that I feel for the tragedy of his exile however, is tempered by the knowledge of how passionate he must have felt about his great poem.
Pincio Gardens, Rome

What, then, is the â€˜salted bread’ of our lives? Maybe it is the bizarre and frightening array of headlines that bombards us daily. More than ever before, I am aware of the cracked mirror of history, the collapse of governments and the breath of the cold river of the future ahead of us. Natural and man-made disasters are on the menu â€“ and sometimes seem like the main course â€“ of our contemporary times. The choices that we make to survive, physically and mentally, are crucial. In an atmosphere like this, how do we create anything of beauty?

After 9/11 my own passion for creating something new in the world was stunted by picture after picture of black smoke rising into the perfect blue of a September sky. Perhaps that is why I was so struck by McKennitt’s song and its suggestion that we look to the past for examples of courage in unsettled times. In reflecting back to Dante’s time and place, I sought new ideas and a fresh wave of inspiration. I imagined Dante’s hand as he began the first line of what would become The Divine Comedy. Carefully he would dip the quill into ink the color of overripe blackberries. He would tap the sharpened tip lightly against the rim of the container, then place it against the vellum and begin to write. The rest of the world â€“ sorrow, exile, the hatred of men â€“ would fall away. Despite everything thrown into his path â€“ war, unjust prosecution, permanent banishment from his home and the seizure of his family assets â€“ Dante prevailed, and by prevailing he left us a blueprint to follow: Never lose sight of the goals that you have set for yourself.

I often think of Dante’s wanderings as I am walking the hills of Marin under a cloudless sky that can be both horizon and ceiling. As I run my fingers across the wind-tossed velvet of new clover or scan the variety of wildflowers within my reach, I am humbled by nature’s beauty. The oak and laurel trees in the distance stand as tribute to a vastness that I can never completely understand. On days like this, the recognition that “Nature is the Art of God” (Dante’s words) is one compelling reason to keep going. To turn away from Nature is to turn away from Art, and from Life.

Though we share this humble path, alone
How fragile is the heart
Oh give these clay feet wings to fly
To touch the face of the stars

Surely in these words McKennitt has described the writer’s task â€“ to touch the face of the stars, to travel as far as you can with your imagination as companion. It is what Dante did by penning his magnificent poem. And, in his case, the image of feet on a humble path is not merely symbolic. He spent almost twenty years traversing the Italian countryside in his exile. Nevertheless, when he died in Ravenna in September, 1321, he was buried with a crown of laurel in recognition of the stature that he had attained through his writing. In spite of adversity, Dante had created a masterpiece

It will soon be the fall of 2005, and I have not yet regained the feeling of security that I enjoyed in pre-9/11 days. Maybe I never will. However, if I can sit in the warm afternoon light of autumn with a plate of fresh figs, golden pears and tart olives for a snack, and a pen and paper for my words, then maybe, for today, it is enough.
Nancy E. Rapp is one of the founding members of Left Coast Writers. Although she grew up in Southern Illinois, she has lived in Marin County for the past 33 years. She is married, with two grown children. When she isn’t contemplating Dante over a plate of figs, Nancy can be found at the Marin County Library, where she has worked for many years.

by Claire Savage

When I first heard about the trip to the Arctic, visions of polar bears, reindeer, and jolly old Santa Claus danced in my head.Â Childhood fairy tale scenes of The North Pole were all I knew of land and sea beyond latitude 50 degrees north, having never ventured farther north than Vancouver, British Columbia.Â In spite of my fairy tale images I still feared the journey to this remote hinterland.Â Would the barren landscape and frigid temperatures be too much to bear?

Layers of protective clothing in tow, I departed from San Francisco with an overnight in Ottawa.Â And after a short three-hour flight, I saw sunlight radiating off the landing strip on Baffin Island in the city of Iqaluit.Â Â “Welcome to Iqaluit’s Spring Festival” read the banner in the lobby of the Frobisher Inn.Â For three days each year, the city of Iqaluit (I- KA-loo-it) celebrates the return of the light, longer days and warmer weather.Â This year, in addition to hosting Inuit traditional games and events, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference invited members of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the National Resources Defense Council, politicians, artists, journalists, and, to top it all off, actors Jake Gyllenhaal, who starred in the movie “Day After Tomorrow,” and environment-conscious Salma Hayek.

I felt honored to be a part of such a group, my role being a member of the team that was to create a performance art piece on the ice.Â All of us had assembled there to draw attention to the precipitous rise in temperature of the Arctic, the dangerous melting of the sea ice and the deleterious impact on the lives of the Inuit.Â As a canary in a coal mine warns of leaking gas, perhaps the changing climate of our northern neighbors foreshadows drastic environmental changes for the rest of us living farther south.Â We had come to the Arctic in the hopes of sending a message of warning to the world.

While the celebrities, politicians and journalists were speaking at a press conference indoors, a team of seven of us, led by artist John Quigley, worked outside preparing for the aerial art event to take place the next day.Â Low winds and sunny skies supported us as we marked out a grid within which hundreds of people would gather to form a large image.Â First, we staked out four corners of a square with 200 foot sides, placing in each corner a pink flag.Â Then we marked 20 points at 10 foot intervals along each side, thus forming the grid.Â Several more flags were placed inside.Â By the end of the afternoon a field of pink flags danced against the ice and sky.

The next day, in even less hospitable weather, -25Ëš Fahrenheit with 40 mile-per-hour winds, we were back outside to “draw” the image within the grid.Â The image of a drum dancer flanked by the words ARCTIC and WARNING in English and LISTEN written in Inuktitut, the native language of the Inuit, appeared in flags on the sea ice just in time for hundreds of local residents and school children to file down the hill and take their places somewhere upon either the picture or the words.

Along with 50 other people, I lay down on the ice and became part of the lower fringe of the drum dancer’s jacket.Â Next to me a little Inuit girl in tennis shoes, her ankles bare between the tops of her socks and the bottom edge of her jeans, unprepared for an hour-long event in the bitter cold, cried frozen tears.Â I wrapped my arms around her and gave her my scarf in a futile attempt to protect her from the cold.

A short while later, after photographers flying overhead in a helicopter had taken pictures of us on the ice, we joined hands to form a great circle.Â After a moment of stillness we raised our arms into the air and sent our message out.

The sun shone bright and warm the day we departed.Â Surrounded by a large group of townspeople, I was heartened by the strength and grace of this community, who have survived for generations in the cold, creating a rich and meaningful culture.Â The paradox is clear, we all desire warmth against the cold.Â But our lifestyle, by over-warming the earth’s atmosphere is devastating all of our future lives.Â The Inuit are only the first to experience the consequences of this paradox.

Gazing out the airplane window on the ice below, I wondered whether our efforts were of any consequence, whether the press conference, the aerial art event, or the news coverage could possibly help stem the tide of our planet warming up.Â Who will hear the call?Â Who is listening?Â Are we all like a mythical Cassandra predicting the world’s fate, but doomed never to be believed?Â And in the end, will anyone live happily ever after?

Claire is raising her daughter and writing in San Rafael.