Oh hello. It has been awhile. Well, we’ve been busy. For one thing, we’ve been driving around the country in our camper van. Here are the places we went:
Yosemite
Bryce Canyon
Dinosaur National Monument in Utah
The Rocky Mountains
The Oregon Coast
If you want more pictures, you can Follow Me On Instagram.
What have you been up to?
I wrote an essay for Ploughshares on Student Debt and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the novel written by Betty Smith. It looks at the difficulty of paying for school, both now, and in Smith’s time. Things have changed, but not enough.
I wrote an article for Longreads. Check out Ghost Writer: The Story of Patience Worth, the Posthumous Writer.
One day in 1913, a housewife named Pearl Curran sat down with her friend Emily Grant Hutchings at a Ouija board. Curran’s father had died the year before, and Hutchings was hoping to contact him. While they’d had some success with earlier sessions, Curran had grown tired of the game and had to be coaxed to play. This time, a message came over the board. It said: “Many moons ago I lived. Again I come — Patience Worth my name.”
This moment was the start of a national phenomenon that would turn Curran into a celebrity. Patience Worth, the ghost who’d contacted them, said she was a Puritan who immigrated to America in the late 1600s. Through Curran, she would dictate an astounding 4 million words between 1913 and 1937, including six novels, two poetry collections, several plays, and volumes of witty repartee.
Kyle’s dream has come true. We bought a camper van.
It’s a 1996 Roadtrek Popular 170. Here’s the inside:
It has a toilet, shower, fridge, and two beds. Pretty good for a van-sized RV.
We went to Knapp’s Castle, the ruins of a mansion in the Santa Ynez Mountains.
It burned down in 1940.
An opera singer used to live there.
I wrote an essay for The Washington Post! It’s about how becoming a mother has made me a better writer. A sample:
Throughout my pregnancy, I weathered comments about how difficult writing would soon become, all while obsessing about how I would juggle caring for a baby and finding time to write.
I shouldn’t have worried. In the five years since my son’s birth, I’ve written two novels, won grants and residencies and broken into many national publications. Before becoming a mother, it took me 10 years to write a novel. I never won grants or residencies pre-birth, because I rarely applied for them and, despite my skills and experience, I was intimidated to approach national magazines. Now I don’t have time for any of that angst because the babysitter is leaving in an hour.
Read I thought having a baby would hurt my career. I was wrong.
I have a new Learn To Write From The Movies up at Barrelhouse. It’s about Kill Your Darlings, a movie about Allen Ginsberg starring Daniel Radcliffe. A sample:
Lesson 4: Do Weird 1940s Drugs.
Naturally, Burroughs suggests they do drugs. He’s William S. Burroughs. But it’s the 1940s, so drugs are limited and strange. They settle on Benzedrine, which Hollywood studios forced Judy Garland take when she was a child. It contains amphetamine. They take it by squeezing a white substance that looks like butt medication into coffee.It turns out that Benzedrine is productive to art. In a creative frenzy, the men rip up Burrough’s books and tape them to the wall. When I imagined the invention of the cut-up technique before, I didn’t picture it happening in a cracked-out meth den. Who knew?
A couple of weeks, friends invited us to spend the night in a cabin in Mt Tamalpais. Can you believe the view off the balcony?
We had a great time: lots of hiking, board games, listening to people playing music, and seriously, check out this view.
And at night:
And in the morning:
I wrote an essay for the Poetry Foundation on the poet George Sterling and the Carmel artist colony. It’s a crazy story about artistic utopia, California Bohemians, scandals, affairs, and a suicide pact. Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and HL Mencken were all involved.
Here are some things we’ve been doing lately:
Disneyland
Even though I’ve lived in California all my life, I’ve never been to Disneyland. So we took Gideon down there, and had a great time.
They do what they do well.
Hikes
This is my favorite time of year to be outdoors in California. Everything is green and cool, the birds are super active, and there are yellow flowers everywhere. So I’ve been going on a lot of hikes.
I was excited to discover a new hike near my home that I didn’t know about. It was eight miles uphill, but I hardly noticed because it had gorgeous views of vineyards and forests the whole way. And then we were on top of a mountain!
Othello In Ashland
As I mentioned before on here, I’m making my way through all of Shakespeare. So for Valentine’s Day, Kyle and I went to Ashland and saw Othello at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
It was a good production.
Check out Learn to Write from the Movies: Magic Beyond Words: The JK Rowling Story. Here’s a sample:
Lesson 3: Don’t Bother To Write Until A Creepy Ghost Appears To You In A Dream.
Good news. You don’t have to sit at a keyboard struggling to write every day. In fact, you don’t have to write at all. If you’re meant to be an author, the story will come to you. In Rowling’s case, it appears as a scary Harry Potter ghost child who glares at her while lightning flashes in the background. I thought she was going to scream, but it turns out it was inspiration.
