Shadow Mountain Writing Workshop Coming Up Again This Friday 10/23/15

Desert/Mountain writers looking for a workshop? Or unsure when the next workshop begins? Read below, from workshop leader Jean Waggoner:

Shadow Mountain Inlandia Writing Workshop 10/23/2015 with Jean Waggoner

We meet in the Meeting Room at Palm Desert Library from 10:00 am – noon.

Theme for this Friday’s Workshop: Artistic Synergy

Given this inspiration, I guess I’ll have to bring my laptop for sharing:

Minimalist Duets in Sculpture and Dance (from Hyperallergic)

Where Sculpture and Dance Meet: Minimalism from 1961 to 1979 is an exhibition at the Loretta Howard Gallery that explores this overlap. Curated by dancer–turned–dance critic Wendy Perron in collaboration with historian Julie Martin, the show pairs videos of historic performances of dances by Merce Cunningham, Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, and (surprisingly) Robert Morris, with sculptures by Ronald Bladen, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Morris, and Andy Warhol, exploring the dialogue surrounding concurrent ideas of minimalism in dance, performance, and art.

“Musee des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden (read by Tom O’Bedlam) + “The Fall of Icarus” by Pierre Breughel.

Villa Lobos & Ballet

Love in Damascus [music as antidote to conflict]

PROMPT: Think of an artistic event or work that has inspired your creativity in writing or in another form of expression–or see what comes up as you look at these bits that captivated my attention recently. I particularly like the comment cited in the Hyperallergic article, “Sitting in on a rehearsal, the-soon-to-be-sculptor Robert Morris…commented that the best moments were when they weren’t dancing.” I think I feel a poem coming on.

Anecdotes are the Antidote by David Stone

My daughter stormed to bed because she wasn’t getting her way.

“Don’t let the sun go down on your anger, ” called her brother in concern.

“The sun’s already down. It’s dark outside,” she retorted.

Electronic devices with photo and video capability may be ubiquitous, but too many classic moments go uncaptured, whether because they are too dependent on dialogue for a photo to portray, or because they pass in less time than it takes to finger a passcode and press record. Anecdotes are the antidote.

You remember anecdotes? Those short, amusing stories popularly featured in Reader’s Digest’s “Humor in Uniform,” “Out of School,” and “All in a Day’s Work.” Or maybe you think of one of your favorite English teachers or writing textbooks suggesting anecdotes as an attention-getting option for opening an essay.

If you’ve recently listened to a political speech, a sermon, remembrances at a memorial service or a toast at a wedding, you’re more than likely to have heard an anecdote.

I believe the time has come for anecdotes to find as consistent a place on our desks, coffee tables, bookshelves, and screens as photos do. It’s time for us to sharpen our storytelling skills and to store our memories in anecdote boxes.

Selecting a box to store your anecdotes can be as much fun as writing your stories. You can browse thrift or antique stores and find a classic wood or metal card box or maybe a library card file. A search on the Internet on sites like eBay or Etsy will offer you hundreds of creative options. If you’re crafty, you might enjoy making or decorating a box for yourself. You can purchase basic card boxes at office supply stores or in the stationary aisle of a big box store.

Index cards, first utilized by the eighteenth-century naturalist Carl Linnaeus to record and organize information, continue to be an inexpensive and effective choice for writing small amounts of information.

My family records our anecdotes on colored 4″ x 6″ cards, organized by each family member’s chosen color. My fourth-grade daughter enjoys writing hers on pink. My fifth-grade son likes green. My wife writes hers on orange. I like plain, old white cards. We use yellow cards for stories from extended family and friends.

Anecdotes capture a single moment like a haiku. The story of most specific events can be effectively told in three sentences. The first sentence provides the context and establishes the conflict. The second sentence creates anticipation through complication. The story’s essential twist and resolution occur in the third sentence.

My wife told me of her grandmother’s confusion when she immigrated to Canada from England after World War II. “Why have they put the tea in these tiny little bags?” she wondered. She cut apart a box full of teabags every week to fill her canister with loose tea until a friend finally explained to her how teabags worked.

When you prepare to write an anecdote, tell it out loud to someone first to see if it makes sense and has your desired effect. If you don’t get the response you’re seeking, try telling someone else. Begin making changes until you get your desired response.

Make sure you begin where your specific story starts and leave out any earlier events. Be sure you limit yourself to a single incident. Create context in the first sentence or two.

Although I usually prefer the succinctness of anecdotes in three sentences, many people use more. Reader’s Digest seeks stories of 100 or fewer words.

Determine the central point/turn of the story you’re telling. Leave out everything that does not bear on this point/turn. Include only the essential characters. Stop immediately after the story’s central point or turn.

I prefer to keep my anecdotes in a box instead of a journal. I can revise an anecdote as many times as I want. Since I write them on paper index cards, I can simply throw the card from an earlier draft in the recycle. The box also makes it easier for our family to keep our memories together.

Recently, my daughter wrote, “Near the end of recess, I sat down with a friend to talk. Suddenly a bird pooped on my arm. “Eww!” we yelled, and then burst into giggles.”

That’s the version that she put into our anecdote box. She told me the story first on the way home from school. She retold it to her mother and brother at home, and then we worked through a couple of drafts together after supper. I love the pride she takes in crafting her stories and signing and dating the back of each card.

I hope you’ll share one of your anecdotes with me in response to this column on the PE Inlandia Literary Journeys’ blog.

On Glen Hirshberg’s Motherless Child by Victoria Waddle

Glen Hirshberg is a Shirley Jackson Award winner as well as a three-time International Horror Guild Award winner. Motherless Child makes clear why he has been thus honored.

I might have passed up this October must-read except that I was familiar with the author as a short story writer. And I might have missed those stories except that I often seek writers who are connected to the Inland Empire in some way. Previously, Hirshberg was a professor of fiction at Cal State San Bernardino and helped to launch the MFA program there.

It’s not often that readers have the joy of finding genre fiction of literary quality. Add to that a vampire who uses his Twitter base to hunt his prey and this tight piece of writing (it’s well under 300 pages) is a great read for any horror fan, teens included.

Bad girl Natalie doesn’t immediately realize that her wild night with pop singer The Whistler and best friend Sophie has done her damage forever. That’s really forever rather than a lifetime; she has been turned into a vampire. The Whistler hopes to make Natalie his eternal companion. As he sees it, she is his Destiny. He turns Sophie just to give Natalie someone to hang with while she figures out what has happened to them both, while they finish their transformation.

When Natalie does realize what has happened to her and Sophie, both women give their babies to Natalie’s mother with instructions to take off and never let the women know where she has gone with the children. The ensuing loneliness and desire would be enough to keep the reader charmed, but when ‘Mother’–the woman who turned The Whistler–figures out that her eternal companion hopes to forsake her for another, she is having none of it. Mother is amoral, cunning, willful, and violent. In the midst of all the grief and longing, we are thrust into spine-tingling episodes and suspenseful cat and mouse chases.

Not your typical vampire book, Motherless Child is about many things, and most surprisingly–if you allow the title to color your guesses about the nature of the book–it is a book about the ferocity of mother love, its limitless nature.

Through well-drawn characters and continual suspense, Hirshberg pulls the reader in quickly and never lets go. With the story very nearly concluded, he manages a final plot twist that both shocks the reader and leaves the reader deeply satisfied.

A sequel, Good Girls, is coming in February 2016. I’ll leave the light on.

On Dr. Clifford Trafzer’s A Chemehuevi Song: The Resilience of a Southern Paiute Tribe by Ruth Nolan

The story of Willie Boy, a love struck young Southern Paiute-Chemehuevi man who murdered for love and eluded the San Bernardino sheriff’s posse for days, is a true and timeless and living story, one that’s colored the storied inland southern California landscape where it occurred in late Sept.- early Oct, 1909.

It’s a tragic story of young, forbidden love that reaches “Romeo and Juliet” proportions and whose tellings and re-tellings in the decades since—through books, articles, theater productions, and film, told largely by Anglos—have continued to evolve across the cultural and geographic divides that comprise the Inland Empire and Mojave Desert as well as the Anglo-European worlds of the early 20th century and the ancient culture of our region’s Native Americans.

Now, a compelling and exciting new book about the Willie Boy incident, “A Chemehuevi Song: The Resilience of a Southern Paiute Tribe,” published this year by Indigenous Confluences Press, has risen on the horizon, written collaboratively by Dr. Clifford Trafzer, distinguished history professor at UCR who was appointed Rupert Costo Chair in American Indian History in 2007, along with members of the 29 Palms Band of Mission Indians in eastern Riverside county, who are descendants of the family members involved in the Willie Boy incident.

“The Willie Boy incident in 1909, which played out across the national media, was a watershed event in the history of the members of the Southern Paiute-Chemehuevi tribe who lived at Oasis of Mara (now 29 Palms Oasis) at the time,” says Trafzer, who presented a lecture at the UCR-Palm Desert campus this past October 5, to discuss his new book. “A Chemehuevi Song” is, he says, a song in itself, a song which began for him when he came to participate in tribal activities with members from the 29 Palms Band of Mission Indians in 1997, and has continued to emerge as he’s worked with tribal members to this day.

The book, while giving Native accounts of the heretofore highly disputed story of Willie Boy—especially the claim made by the San Bernardino sheriff’s posse in 1909 about Willie—also sheds light on how the incident forever and radically changed the lives of the extended family members and other Chemehuevi living at 29 Palms in 1909, as well as shaping the lives of their descendants to this day. In fact, the Oct 5 lecture was attended by many members of the 29 Palms Band of Mission Indians who worked with Trafzer to complete their book and who also spoke at the lecture, including elder Joe Mike Benitez, Dean Mike, and Jennifer Mike.

More than anything, according to Trafzer and Chemehuevi contributors, “A Chemehuevi Song” stands as a testament to the power of perseverance of this small, nomadic band of Native people, who have been largely marginalized by European settlers, other Native groups, and until now, their stories have been largely overlooked. The book reveals how members of this Southern Paiute band have survived the past two centuries without rights to their Mojave Desert homeland, or any self-governing rights, and in fact were largely “forgotten” until the creation of the 29 Palms Reservation in 1974. Since then, the tribe has formed its own tribal government and now a thriving gaming industry.

Trafzer worked with the Chemehuevi for more than 10 years, gathering stories from the tribe and other Chemehuevi across the Mojave that demonstrate how they’ve survived using sacred songs and other cultural practices to persevere with strength and independence, in spite of great odds, including the tragic and family-shattering Willie Boy incident.

By focusing on individual and family stories, “Chemehuevi Song” offers a new structure for how tribal histories can be presented and shared, and also, critically, offers firsthand indigenous accounts of the events surrounding the Willie Boy tragedy as well as how this crucial event has impacted tribal lives, even to this day, and strong evidence presented by the tribe as well as by other historians and other Native leaders in recent years has presented strong evidence that Willie Boy got away, escaping the posse not through suicide but on foot, and lived for many years afterwards in remote parts of the desert.

“A Chemehuevi Song: The Resilience of a Southern Paiute Tribe,” is a compelling and necessary read for all who are interested in Inland Empire/desert regional literature, as well as those with an interest in our region’s American Indian history and cultures and their emerging, strong voice in shaping the literature here. For this powerful new publication brings together a chorus of voices, present and past, to tell the story of the tribe’s persistent efforts to gain recognition, independence, and also to tell their own stories of their history and landmark cultural events.

This is more than a book. This is a song, comprised of many voices, a song that rings out powerfully as it’s sung across the land.

(Never-ending?) “Cognitive Passes” by Judy Kronenfeld

I reminded myself, this past week, just how faulty first drafts of poems can be, when, a few days after I wrote it, I looked again at a new poem I had been somewhat excited about. As I set to work trying to remedy the poem’s flaws, feeling that sense of chagrin that so often accompanies early, uncritical excitement, some part of me thought Be kind to yourself, be patient. It so often takes numerous “cognitive passes” over the developing draft. The idea that any work of the imagination, intellect, or both, gradually gets worked into shape has helped me so much, both in teaching—of expository writing, creative writing, and critical writing on literature—and in my own writing of all of these kinds, and I think it has helped students, too. I recall encountering inexperienced students in composition classes, whose underlying idea of the essay was that it should spring whole from their minds, like Athena from Zeus’s forehead, and who were stymied by that belief. The inception of an essay, poem or story (if not the actual beginning of the finished work) may be more like trying to grab the tail of a dream as it scampers off in the light of dawn. My advice: grab anything you can, and set it provisionally down. Don’t abandon it because it’s utterly incomplete, its purpose and potential development obscure. A will lead to B, then maybe, yes, a cross-out of A, but B leading to C, D and E, along with many indirections that may find directions out (to apply Hamlet’s words to our purpose). The notion of “cognitive passes” recognizes that there is just so much the mind can take in at one time, it reminds us to be kind and patient with ourselves. Successive layers of underbrush may have to be cleared away before one can see the shape of the ground. In writing an essay, sentence grammar may have to be clarified in order for the writer to understand her own thinking about cause and effect. Diction may have to become more exact before the writer really senses what she is writing about, and once diction and grammar are more precise, the larger structure the whole should have may become more clear. And there’s no necessary order of march. What’s heartening is how improvement in any aspect throws another necessary step into relief. Time is the writer’s friend in this process, although, so often, especially for students, it’s hard to build it in. Even a few days between messy rough draft and the next try can radically improve the writer’s perception, and start her on the path to becoming her own editor.

There is a sort of opposite to this messy, but ultimately cumulative process. Sometimes, when we are struggling with something we have written before it approaches wholeness (I have experienced this with poems), we can feel so ungrounded that the structure, or an image, or the rhythm or sound of a phrase appears to need changing every time we look at the work, and we find ourselves re-configuring one of these elements, and reverting to the status quo ante the very next day, and we keep doing this over a period of time, flailing. The mind is so flexible; it is all too easy to see the “rightness” of conflicting possibilities at different times. Maybe this is all part of the process—of poems, at least—finally a process of not having it every which way, of eliminating some paths, as well as of preserving the mystery and richness of the ones we choose.

It is amazing and intriguing to me, that the process of rereading one’s own work (especially if one is lucky enough to be able to put it away for some time between reads) seems to glean continued insights, new nuances. I find this to be true as I reread the new poetry manuscript I have begun to send out. Every change (such as a recent removal of some of the poems) has the effect of highlighting an aspect of the manuscript that was not quite fully illuminated for me previously, of throwing something else into salience. At the moment, thankfully, that new nuance I perceive feels as if it enriches the manuscript, rather than making me want to edit it further. For the moment, at least, I am at peace.

Inlandia: Past, Present, and Future by Cati Porter

People poured out of the elevators and onto the rooftop of the Riverside Art Museum last Friday night for the Totally Amazing Kickoff Event for the Marion Mitchell-Wilson Endowment for Inlandia’s Future. The invitation read, in part, “Marion would want you to attend.” With a 60″ banner of Marion flying at the entrance, she was definitely there, watching over all of us. Marion had many friends, and it was my privilege to be counted among them.

This was an event to remember.

With a drink in their hand, old friends and new listened to live jazz. Emceed by the #1 New York Times bestselling author Teresa Rhyne, and with speakers Heyday founder and publisher Malcolm Margolin, acclaimed photographer Douglas McCulloh, and award-winning local treasure and inaugural Literary Laureate Susan Straight (“There should be a statue!”), there was no shortage of talent present, and the space buzzed.

When the night was over, Marion’s wish had come true: We reached our goal of $100,000.

This is the power of friendship, and of community. I am in awe of all of you.

Some have asked what this endowment is going to do. In short, it will ensure the future of the Inlandia Institute and further the good work that Marion, Inlandia’s founder, set out to do.

Inlandia, since its inception, has provided hundreds of programs, and served many thousands, including creative literacy programs for youth.

SCIPP (Students and Coyotes Instruction in Poetry and Prose) at Bryant School of Art & Innovation in Riverside, a program created by Inlandia’s third Literary Laureate Juan Delgado, helps kids learn to write their own stories, songs, screenplays, and poems, present them in front of an audience, and allows them to see their work in print in a small book.

Other in-school presentations have included authors like Straight and Gayle Brandeis, inspiring the next generation to read and to write.

We’ve also brought puppetry programs to schools through Puppet Palooza, and writing workshops and readings to at-risk youth through a partnership with the Women Wonder Writers program.

Inlandia isn’t just for children, though; Inlandia offers creative literacy programs for adults, too. Our free creative writing workshops program has grown from one held in downtown Riverside to a half-dozen held at local libraries across the region, as well as an annual Family Legacy writing workshop for seniors and a Boot Camp for Writers series of workshops.

Inlandia also publishes books of local interest and national importance. In November of last year, we published No Easy Way: Integrating Riverside Schools – A Victory for Community by Arthur L. Littleworth, which tells the story of the 1965 voluntary integration of Riverside Unified School District, which spurred a series of community conversations that brought people together to talk through tough issues.

Coming in 2016, look for more books by local authors including the local signing sensations The Why Nots, an all-women’s musical group that has been performing together for forty-five years, and one on noted and noteworthy architect Henry Jekyl, who left a legacy of beautiful Riverside homes, and a few mysteries, by Dr. Vince Moses and Cate Whitmore.

In addition to those, we will also be publishing the winners of inaugural Hillary Gravendky Prize, an open poetry book competition with both a national and a regional winner, judged by award-winning CSUSB faculty poet Chad Sweeney. We are thrilled to announce that Kenji Liu (Monterrey Park, CA), was awarded the National prize for his manuscript Map of an Onion, and Angela Ina Penaredondo (Riverside, CA), was awarded the regional prize for her manuscript All Things Lose Thousands of Times.

Inlandia is also proud partners with local libraries and other arts organizations to provide other opportunities for literary engagement including the Riverside Public Library, where Inlandia recently began an outdoor summer reading series during Arts Walk, Literature on the Lawn; Poets in Distress, a performance poetry group, will be presenting on October 1. We also have a brand-new partnership with UCR’s Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts, the Conversations at the Culver series where just this past week we kicked off the series with Pulitzer Prize finalist and UCR professor Laila Lalami.

We also take pride in participating in community activities, from Riverside’s Day of Inclusion and Day of the Dead festivities, to the Native Voices Poetry Festival in Banning at the Dorothy Ramon Center to Western Municipal Water District’s Earth Night in Garden in April. Inlandia will also be a part of the upcoming Long Night of Arts & Innovation on October 8 and the Riverside Festival of the Arts on October 10, with interactive literary activities, including a Long Night of Arts & Innovation-sponsored Poetry Box: Bring a poem you wrote at home or write one on the spot and drop it in the box for a chance to win the Long Night Poetry Contest. One poem will be selected for publication on the Long Night of Arts and Innovation website.

Marion once said that Inlandia was “on the cusp”. I think whatever comes after the cusp: we’re here. Welcome to the future. Inlandia means a lot of things to a lot of different people. But to me, Inlandia means all of us. We are all Inlandia. Thank you.

Announcing the Winners of the Hillary Gravendyk Prize!

Dear Readers,

It gives me great pleasure to announce the winners, runners-up, and finalists of the inaugural Hillary Gravendky Prize. We received many outstanding submissions for this open book competition, and thank you all for your patience and support of this new endeavor.

The winners of the inaugural Hillary Gravendyk Prize poetry book competition are:

Map of an Onion by Kenji Liu (Monterrey Park, CA), winner of the National prize

All Things Lose Thousands of Times by Angela Peñaredondo (Riverside, CA), winner of the Regional prize

Each winner receives a standard book publishing contract and publication of their book, a $1000 honorarium, and twenty complimentary copies. We look forward to bringing these books into the world in 2016.

About the winning manuscripts:

Kenji Liu’s illuminated Map of an Onion is a koan of deconstructions which interrogates within the fissures of difference those spaces within us and between us, as charged spaces of potential and becoming. A book-length question in a hard, graceful calligraphy, asking deeper, asking better, what does it mean to be a self, this Self, to “translate this search / between my family’s four languages,”—emergent, reassembled of ancient molecules and sculpted by all the forces of culture, history and bloodlight into a man? If “nations need a parable to reinvent themselves,” Kenji Liu’s Map of an Onion may be that parable.

—Chad Sweeney, from the judge’s statement

Elastic, dimensional, all-together convincing, Angela Peñaredondo’s debut All Things Lose Thousands of Times wields the language as a mountain wields a storm, in phrases that pivot, reverse, wander, tighten, leap and fall through geographies of the body, an inward archipelago of experience, individual and collective, all past and flooded, all future and on fire, bearing unflinching witness to courage, revelation and sexuality, to life and to the lives of women where “their mothers have turned into mangroves” and where “her father found us / as I knelt before her, knees / on church-cold tile.” A profoundly alert and loving book that sings and celebrates the cosmic interplay of forms. This is what poetry can do. I feel rescued by it.

—Chad Sweeney, from the judge’s statement

We are also thrilled to announce the following runners-up and finalists:

National Runners-Up:

City of Incandescent Lightbulbs by Matthew McBride (Machiasport, ME)

Superstition Freeway by Miles Waggener (Omaha, NE)

Regional Runners-Up:

Through Barricades: Ghosts by Vickie Vertiz (Monterey Park, CA)

Seeds Spent Plants Sow by Kiandra Jiminez (Moreno Valley, CA)

Finalists:

Now, Someday by Micah Chatterton (Riverside, CA)

Betrayed with Trees by James Ducat (Redlands, CA)

The Water in Which One Drowns Is Always an Ocean by Jeff Encke (Tukwila, WA)

Requiter by Kristen Hanlon (Alameda, CA)

Breaking Earth and Other Poems by Scott Hernandez (Riverside, CA)

Flooded Field by John Johnson (Petaluma, CA)

A Western by Genevieve Kaplan (R-LaVerne, CA)

Hole in the Horizon by David Madull (Oakland, CA)

Ornithology by Kevin McLellan (Cambridge, MA)

Why I Cannot Love Picasso by Devon Miller-Duggan (Newark, DE)

Storage Shed by Rich Murphy (Marblehead, MA)

Better Looking by David Oates (Portland, OR)

With Porcupine by Jacob Oet (Solon, OH)

Foul Hook by Sarah Pape (Chico, CA)

How to Disappear by Claudia Reder (Oxnard, CA)

What Magick May Not Alter by J.C. Reilly (Atlanta, GA)

The Scientific Method by Kim Roberts (Washington D.C.)

Lost on My Own Street by Tim Staley (Las Cruces, NM)

The Way a Wound Becomes a Scar by Emily Schulten (Key West, FL)

A Girl Could Disappear Like This by Deborah Schwartz (Jamaica Plain, MA)

Pocket Guide to Another Earth by Mike Smith (Cleveland, MS)

Tenderized Vows by Amy Jo Trier-Walker (Churubusco, IN)

The Auguries by Abigail Wender (New York, NY)

Thank you all for letting us share in your journey, and we hope you will consider submitting again next year!

Everyone has to Grow Up Sometime by Victoria Waddle

With the flap over Harper Lee’s new book Go Set a Watchman still simmering among readers I know, I have to admit that I’m surprised at how virulently both professional reviewers and ordinary lovers of To Kill a Mockingbird hated the fact that Go Set a Watchman finally made it into print.

Sure, it’s not the example of craftsmanship that To Kill a Mockingbird is. But then, in the last few months it’s been well established that it was an early draft of that novel, one that is set some eighteen years after those hot summer days of the Great Depression when Atticus stood up against his friends and relations in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama to defend an African American man against rape charges.

Like many people of my generation, I was worried about reading the story of a lesser Atticus. A few years ago, during the years-long fiftieth anniversary celebration of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, I was in the independent bookstore Bookshop Santa Cruz and saw a bumper sticker for sale: “What would Atticus do?” That this is practically blasphemy in the comparison of Atticus to Jesus didn’t matter. I loved it and bought multiple copies, distributing it to some of my favorite English teacher buddies.

So I found it ironic that in Go Set a Watchman, Jean Louise Finch asks the very question “What would Atticus do?” The answer is not what Jean Louise had hoped he would–and not what all the folks with images of Gregory Peck standing in the courthouse, worn out from Tom Robinson’s defense, had hoped for either. (If you are over forty, Gregory Peck is so melded in your mind with Atticus Finch that you can’t even pretend they are different people.)

So what if Harper Collins manufactured a fake literary event? People are free to respond as they see fit. There was no order that readers rush to get the book at midnight of its publication date. Take away the ‘New Harper Lee Book Discovered!’ nonsense, and I’m glad that Go Set a Watchman was published. It’s a great example of how a pretty decent book becomes a great book in the hands of a great editor.

The best parts of Go Set A Watchman are not those that are causing controversy, but rather Jean Louise’s reminiscences of her girlhood (as ‘Scout,’ of course) and the author’s beautiful evocation of small town Southern life in Maycomb. It is easy to see an editor reading the manuscript and pointing out these passages to Lee. “Here’s your story. Write it.” Anyone who is a writer–whose secret desire is to become a published author–would do well to read both books and note how completely the story changes. That so much work went into a manuscript that the author had considered fully realized may give the struggling writer the faith to press on, to discover the heart of her story and start again.

For junior high and high school students, reading Go Set a Watchman just before reading To Kill a Mockingbird would provide an excellent opportunity to understand why their teachers require several drafts of important papers and why they are taught to peer edit one another’s work. Besides the clear superiority of the sections of Go Set a Watchman that deal with Scout’s childhood, there is a lesson in the mess that Jean Louise tries to sort out about her father’s views of race and segregation. Lee turns rather long speeches about ideology into dialogue, a mistake that writing teachers refer to as ‘info dumps.’

The info dumps containing views on the NAACP and whether the South is ready in the 1950’s to be fully integrated are now historical arguments–and Jean Louise’s father, aunt, and uncle all land on the wrong side of history. These ideological issues are the trigger that forces Jean Louise to see her father as a man and not some sort of infallible god. We readers of To Kill a Mockingbird, like Jean Louise, are unhappy to be disillusioned with Atticus. Too bad. A break with a parent’s conscience and the formation of one’s own is a necessary ritual of coming into adulthood. It, too, is an important lesson for teens to derive from the books they read. For those of us adults who want too much to cling to an idea of Atticus as the father we all wish we had guiding us through life–well, it’s never too late to realize that our conscience and our actions are in our own hands.

Fire On the Mojave: Stories of Fire in the Deserts and Mountains of Inland Southern California by Ruth Nolan

“Fire up Thunder Creek and the mountain / troy’s burning ! / The cloud mutters / The mountains are your mind…” — Gary Snyder

On a 110 degree June day in 1983, I was on a bus heading towards the San Jacinto Mountains, part of the Mojave Greens blue card wildfire crew. As we descended from Victorville, our home base, through the Cajon Pass and east along Interstate 10, the header of smoke on a massive—and rapidly growing—wildfire enticed everyone on the crew. Whistles and shouts of excitement quickly gave way to silence as we neared our destination: a fire camp being hastily erected at a park in Cabazon, where we would disembark from the bus and wait for our firefighting assignment.

Just before we arrived, one of the guys on the crew made a loud and sarcastic comment: “I’ll bet it’s those Morongo Indians from the reservation again, setting fires. They do that all the time, so they can get some work, putting those fires out!” Everyone laughed nervously, and I wondered if his statement was true or not, but there was no time to find out. I was too busy bracing myself to get ready to hike up the imposing slopes of the northern face of Mt. San Jacinto—one of the steepest mountain escarpments in North America—and face heat, smoke, and other dangers I could only imagine, all as part of a day’s work cutting fire line to help stop the spread of the wildfire.

More than thirty years later, as I embark on a year-long, multimedia sabbatical project, “Fire on the Mojave: Stories from the Deserts and Inland Southern California Mountains,” I haven’t forgotten that crude comment. For a long time, I’d brushed it off as an urban legend, a culturally insensitive and blatantly untrue fabrication, which indeed it turned out to be.

However, I’ve learned that our Inland and Desert Native American tribes have a long, intimate relationship with wild land fire management, developed, through centuries of living in close relationship to the land, a thorough knowledge of the vital role that wildfires in our foothill, mountain and deserts play in helping sustain a healthy ecology here. As it turns out, our region’s Native Americans have long been far ahead of the curve of later 20th and early 21st century wildfire management policies, and we have much to learn from their traditional wisdom and experience.

For example, research by noted Native anthropologists and scholars Thomas C. Blackburn, Kat Anderson, and Dr. Lowell Bean, in the book Before the Wilderness: Environmental Management by Native Californians (Malki Press-Ballena Press), reveals that our region’s Native American people did indeed sometimes light deliberate fires right here in our mountains and deserts, as did Native people throughout California.

However, far from resembling the types of careless human behaviors that tragically fuel many of today’s wildfires—a carelessly dropped cigarette butt, or an abandoned campfire, for example—fire strategies practiced by our local tribes played a vital role in their ability to survive and live sustainably in our rugged geographic landscapes. In fact, wildfire agencies such as the United States Forest Service are increasingly turning to this wisdom as a critical resource in wildfire management as climate change, the current historic drought, and increased development in areas known as the “urban-wilderness interface” fuel larger and more dangerous fires throughout the Western U.S.

According to these researchers, records demonstrate that desert Native American people of the past routinely burned stands of Native palm trees—another important resource—as a means to kill off pest and disease, and to help favor new palm growth and germination. They also set fire to mesquite groves—which provided a vital food source—as a way to kill mistletoe from the trees.

The Cahuilla, Kumeyaay and Chemehuevi, Indians, among others in our area, also burned grasses in the desert and mountains here as a way to strengthen the population of deer, antelope and rabbits, another important food source. Clearly, these people possessed an intimate relationship in the behavior and uses of wildfire that enabled them to survive here in some of the harshest of geographies.

One of the many goals of my “Fire on the Mojave: Stories from the Deserts and Inland Southern California Mountains” project is to include representations such as these, from the many story-threads in our region’s longstanding history and relationship with wildfires, both present and past.

It’s unlikely that wildfires will be leaving our region anytime soon, and in fact of such unprecedented influences such as climate change, it may well be the stories of wildfires, beginning with the people who have been present here the longest, that in the end allow us to continue to survive and even thrive in a place where wildfires have long scarred, shaped, and helped regenerate the land we call home.

It’s been many years since I faced that wall of flame, with its impressive white header of smoke billowing high up into space, as a frightened but enervated young woman on one of our local wildfire crews, but the story of that fire in the San Jacinto Mountains near Cabazon, and the strange rumor I heard, stay with me to this day, as vivid and clear cut as a forest of trees after flames have scoured the land clean, leaving only the lonely, haunting black skeletons of what were once lush green trees, buried in foot-deep ashes.

Starting from there, I begin my journey today, telling my own fire stories and learning much from the fire stories of those who were here long before I was born.

Follow Ruth Nolan’s “Fire on the Mojave: Stories from the Deserts and Mountains of Inland Southern California”

Remembering Tigger by Carlos Cortes

Sometimes writers just have to write. It happened to me, unexpectedly, a few weeks ago during an Inlandia creative writing workshop here in Riverside.

Jo Scott-Coe, our gifted workshop facilitator, gave us an assignment. For the next meeting, bring a book that has been important in your life.

I brought William Maxwell’s short novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow, a simple but mesmerizing story of a killing in a small Illinois town and its ramifications for the community. The book focuses on the personal journey of one young man who, years later, re-reads newspaper reports of the incident and tries to re-imagine the killing and its aftermath through the eyes of different members of the community.

I began reading it early one evening in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, hotel. Although I had to teach a class the next morning at Harvard, I could not go to bed until I finished the book well after midnight. Re-reading that novel and admiring its artistry and insights have become a recurring part of my life.

At our next workshop, Jo asked each of us to choose a brief passage from our book and copy it down. Despite my skepticism about the assignment (seemingly shared by some other participants), I dutifully copied three paragraphs in which the aftermath of the killing is unexpectedly and poignantly viewed from the perspective of one protagonist’s dog, who is ultimately put to sleep.

Jo then asked us to write something prompted by what we had just written down. Almost without thinking, I began writing about Tigger, our wonderful kitty whom we had to put to sleep last summer. Out came the story of Tigger’s last day, told mainly from his perspective. When I got home, I immediately sat down and expanded that story, tracing the course of that fateful day by shifting among perspectives, as did Maxwell: first mine; then that of the veterinarian; then Tigger; and finally my wife, Laurel.

At our next meeting, Jo asked us to read one page from something we had written. I chose the middle page from my three page Tigger story, providing perspectives from the veterinarian and from Tigger. The ensuing discussion provided suggestions, which I considered while making revisions. But when it came to Laurel, who is also in the workshop, she merely shook her head and said, “I don’t know why Carlos wrote this. I just don’t know why.”

I sent the revised version to my network of friends who read and comment on each others’ writing. I was particularly interested in the comments of Ellen Summerfield, a glorious Oregon poet, and Steve Petkas, a perceptive Maryland wordsmith. Ellen, a minimalist, usually looks for ways to cut; Steve usually looks for ways to expand.

Both liked the story but, predictably, they gave contrasting advice. Ellen said I should drop the first two sentences, completely. She was right. Steve suggested that I expand the vet’s section, but I didn’t because it would have outweighed Tigger’s tale, the core of my story. Fortunately, Steve, a long-time dog owner who is generally dismissive about things written from animal perspectives, said Tigger’s section worked for him.

However, as I finalized my essay, Laurel’s comment continued to echo. Why was I writing this story? Suddenly it came to me. Because I had to. I couldn’t let our magnificent friend go without memorializing him.

When I asked Laurel to expand on her comment, her answer was simple. Why had I written about Tigger’s death and not his life? As usual, Laurel was right. My three-page essay about Tigger’s passing was just the beginning of my journey. Tigger deserves more. That’s when I decided to write a book about Tigger’s life. Because I have to.