INLANDIA LITERARY JOURNEYS: Bountiful bloom despite drought

By Ruth Nolan

o4ynt0-b88675956z.120160401081556000gjhfnkvc.10 Stories of the rare “superbloom” in Death Valley National Park, exploding colorfully across one of the world’s hottest, driest and lowest regions, have traveled far and wide as late winter transitioned into early spring this year.

Inland residents have the special privilege of living within easy driving distance of Death Valley, and legend has it that this year’s bloom is especially beautiful, following a historic monsoon rainfall in the northern Mojave Desert in October.

Many well-known desert personalities and authors have eloquently publicized the aesthetic influence of desert wildflowers.

The late Coachella Valley artist John Hilton penned a humorous and memorable essay for the old Desert Rat newsletter (circa 1930s-1950s) about the intoxicating power of seeing and walking through the swaths of deep pink sand verbena that carpet fields and sand dunes throughout the Coachella Valley in the spring, their abundance depending on rainfall levels in winter months. In fact, many of Hilton’s most treasured Coachella Valley landscape paintings have sprinkles of sand verbena in them.

Yes, desert wildflowers are beautiful – and especially given that they don’t bloom abundantly every season, and that when they do, their stunning appearance is so short-lived. Soon, the lengthening days of spring and the early summer onset in Death Valley, where temperatures soar high above 100 degrees day after day for months, will burn the yellow and purple wildflowers away and they will be just a faint memory on the raw, scorched landscape. Beyond appreciating the sensory and fleeting beauty of the flowers, which in itself is quite a thing to behold, why should we care about the deeper importance of desert wildflowers?

Native Americans living in our deserts have long relied on plants as critical components of survival, especially as food. Many of the wildflowers you’ll see blooming, not only in Death Valley, but in Joshua Tree National Park, in the Coachella Valley and in the higher-elevation chaparral transition zones of areas such as the Santa Rosa Mountains, have long been important food sources for the Cahuilla, Serrano, Chemehuevi, Timbisha Shoshone and other desert tribes.

I recently observed part of an ongoing yucca harvest workshop involving native desert participants at the Dorothy Ramon Learning Center in Banning. The day I visited, mothers, daughters and other women were busy preparing beautiful, cream-colored yucca blossoms – tinted with green and magenta hues – for a delicious yucca blossom salad, which resembles macaroni shell pasta salad, but tastes much richer and a bit sweeter. This is just one of many ways yucca flowers have been used for centuries in traditional foods, while many everyday items such as sandals and soap have been made from other parts of the plant.

Most people associate the ominous presence of barrel cactus with danger: The sharp, curved barbs can indeed inflict a lot of damage to human skin and body parts. However, the barrel cactus, which grows throughout California’s deserts, produces abundant blossoms – both yellow and bright pink – that have been used by desert Indian people as a food source, like yucca blossoms.

In her memoir, the late Cahuilla historian and culture bearer Katherine Siva Sauvel wrote of her childhood memories of harvesting barrel cactus flowers, a nutritious and sweet snack, from Devil’s Garden, an area near Palm Springs.

Desert wildflowers matter. They mattered in the survival of our desert’s Indian people for centuries, and they matter now.

They are a measure of adequate rainfall that’s crucial for replenishing desert aquifers for human consumption and for the rare riparian areas that provide drinking water for desert animals and sustenance for the many plants that provide life in a land that can be unforgivingly harsh.

This year’s superbloom in Death Valley and the rest of our deserts has given those of us in the Inland region a bit of an uplift in a long, nervous time of ongoing severe drought, which has been only minimally eased this winter by an El Niño that never really showed up with the downpours we had expected.

With the flourishing of wildflowers this spring, we’re blessed with an extra dose of natural beauty that lifts the human spirit and gives us the hope of replenishment, both natural and aesthetic, all from one of the world’s most unlikely places, which we are fortunate to call part of our desert backyard.

David Stone

Love Lines for Your Valentine

Still need to write your Valentine? Use lines from a local poet.

Someone seeking clarification about another’s romantic intent and who enjoys the use of lowercase letters like e. e. cummings might appreciate a line from Cindy Rinne’s “Another Park Poem.” Inspired by a walk in Riverside’s Fairmont Park, Rinne wrote, “did you try to carve the bark/ leave a heart…” Rinne lives in Redlands. Her next work is titled “Quiet Lantern.”

Courageous individuals who are willing to be vulnerable might use lines from Cati Porter’s poem “Clearly.” “Look at me/ and tell me that you want me, that you want to heart/ the distance and that you cannot in the object see/ a flaw, and though I am (flawed) I am for you, and/ there is a small tight thought that is wound in me,/ that knowing that you love, a lightning, a lightning/ on the inside: so that you see; so that you know.” Porter lives in Riverside. Her latest book “My Skies of Small Horses” comes out this month.

Seasoned lovers may like to use lines from “Litany” from Claremont poet Lucia Galloway’s latest chapbook “The Garlic Peelers:” “O love, what is your wish?/ We’ve half again as much to say as we have said./ Set down the goblet, and the carmine wine/ sheets down its sides to pool in the bowl./ Let’s drink our words instead of hoarding them.”

Sweethearts who remind you of characters from the The Big Bang Theory should appreciate lines from Marsha Schuh’s “You and Me in Binary.” Appropriately published in the computer textbook Schuh co-wrote with Stanford Rowe, Schuh imagines a world based on four, considers the dominance of the decimal in our world and closes her poem with pondering the numerical effects of becoming a couple: “Then we unlearn it all /learn to speak binary,/ a better way,/ two as opposed to eight or ten,/ the most significant bit,/ the least significant bit/ one-two, on-off, you-we,/ binary.” Schuh resides in Ontario.

Lovers in a more ambiguous relationship may resonate with lines from the Palm Springs poet and writer Ruth Nolan. In her forthcoming book, “Ruby Mountain,” she writes, “shouldn’t I pretend you did it for love/ shouldn’t I believe it was a mistake/ shouldn’t I wonder why not/ shouldn’t I wonder why. . . .”

Those pained may appreciate the words of the title persona in Nikia Chaney’s “Sis Fuss.” The poem “Syllogizing Sis Fuss” closes: “we all hurt. And if we all/ hurt then we all hurt/ each other and the next.” Chaney lives in Rialto.

Jennifer and Chad Sweeney from Redlands are a couple, who are both accomplished poets. Jennifer provides profundity and striking imagery in her book “Salt Memory.” She writes, “As water poured into the heart flows out the palms, so does love return, as thirst, as satiation—the shape the lost ocean has carved onto the salt brick desert.”

With characteristic quirky humor in his book “White Martini for the Apocalypse,” Chad writes, “It was love./ She taught me to drive her bulldozer./ I taught her to forge my signature!”

In earthier lines from his poem “Effects,” first published in Caliban, Chad writes, “The best sex in the world happens during conjugal visits. I’ve gotten myself into prison twice, just to have it. That’s why I’m calling. Happy Valentine’s Day!” Chad Sweeney teaches creative writing at Cal State San Bernardino.

The longing and transformative power of love comes through in the closing lines of Judy Kronenfeld’s “Listen” from her forthcoming collection, “Bird Flying Through the Banquet,”  “Let your eyes rest/ on my face. Arrest me/ in turn. I will burst/ from the seed/ of myself.” Kronenfeld is professor emerita from UCR.

Ontario poet Tim Hatch gives words to the desire to comfort one’s dearest when he or she is gone: “Scatter my memory where my memories are sweetest. Gulls cry, salt breeze carries me away. When you’re there you can breathe deep, take me inside and remember.”

For a wider array of classic poems to use for Valentine’s Day, search the Poetry Foundation’s website for “Poems for Valentines” or the poets.org site for “love poems.”

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.

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”

A Journey Into the Mojave Desert’s Old Woman Mountains by Ruth Nolan

There are stories in books, and there are stories in words, and there are stories embedded in the landscape itself. Such are the stories found in the Old Woman Mountains, a “sky island” mountain range rising from the low desert floor to as high as 5,300 feet in a remote area of eastern San Bernardino County known as the Heart of the Mojave, accessible only by four-wheel drive vehicle.

There’s the story of the Old Woman Meteorite, the largest meteorite ever found in the United States, which was found here in 1938. There are stories of miners and ranchers, and stories of the desert’s Native American shamans—holy men—praying for visions inside caves, whose ceilings and walls they painted with ochre designs and carved with petroglyphs. There are stories of the fight to stop a nuclear waste site from being built in neighboring Ward Valley back in the 1990’s, which spills from the alluvial fans of the Old Woman Mountains. This is a deeply storied landscape.

And the stories of the Old Woman Mountains continue to unfold, to this day. One such story is one I am part of. It’s a story of the blessing and dedication ceremony that took place this past May 23, on an unseasonably cool and cloud-graced afternoon, where several dozen adults and children representing several desert and other Native American tribes, educators, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) personnel, local ranchers, Sierra Club volunteers, and members of the desert advocacy and protection group, the Native American Land Conservancy, gathered for a ceremony to dedicate and bless the restoration project at the Old Woman Mountains Preserve, sponsored by the NALC.

On that day, those who gathered in the Old Woman Mountains in the Heart of the Mojave watched as Anza-Cahuilla tribal member Michael Madrigal and Agua Caliente Tribal Specialist and member Sean Milanovich cut the ribbon across the new entrance gate to the 2,500 acre preserve, which was acquired by the NALC—formed in 1998—as part of the group’s long-term efforts to protect and preserve Native American traditional cultural properties, as well as to pass along what NALC Executive Director Kurt Russo calls, “the spirit of place” to both native and non-native members.

On that day, those who gathered, including members of the desert’s Cahuilla and Chemehuevi tribes, as well as members of the Lummi tribe from the Seattle area, grew silent as Madrigal and Milanovich gathered everyone in a circle, at the base of an area of sacred rocks protected by a newly-erected protective fence, and began to perform desert Indian bird songs, using traditional gourd rattles to keep time as a line of dancers standing in front of them followed their lead.

As Madrigal and Milanovich sang, gourd rattles firmly and purposefully in hand, and the dancers followed along, a fat hummingbird appeared above their heads, looking down on those gathered around, before buzzing away. Then, high above, circling into the clouds, two turkey vultures rose above our heads, seemingly drawn into the power and beauty of the bird songs, which have been sung by bird singers here and across the California deserts for centuries by Native Americans who have lived and spent time here in the Old Woman Mountains and beyond, living purposefully and sustainably with the diversity of resources the desert has long provided them.

“It has been a great honor to take part in the dedication project at the Old Woman Mountains Preserve,” says Madrigal. “I feel we came to honor the long-standing relationship between this sacred place and indigenous peoples of the region. The life-giving and healing spirit of the Old Woman Mountains Preserve welcomed us—as we prayed and sang in recognition and thanks for the opportunity to reconnect ourselves with the sacredness of this place where countless generations have come to give thanks, to pray, and to seek greater vision.”

The NALC acquired the Preserve in 2002, with the intent of protecting and preserving this critical Native usage area, as well as providing cultural sustenance and continuity to promote cross-cultural understanding of the value and significance of Native American sacred lands. In addition to opening the Preserve to hikers and visitors, who can use beautiful new kiosks to guide them, the NALC has also created the Learning Landscapes program, which brings Native youth, elders and families to spend time at the preserve, so that the stories long told here can continue to unfold.

According to Russo, the NALC was able to complete the project with a $376,000 grant from the California State Parks Off Highway Motor Vehicle Recreation Division grant program, and more than $100,000 from the Bureau of Land Management. Members of environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and private landowners also participated in the project. “It was a great collaboration,” Russo said.

As the vehicle I rode in left the preserve for the rugged four-hour journey home after the Old Woman Mountains Preserve blessing ceremony and dedication of the Old Woman Mountains Preserve, I looked to the sky once again. Three huge, red-tailed hawks, the biggest I’ve ever seen, rose into the sky from one of the range’s many peaks, circled above our caravan of SUV’s, looking down on us, then disappeared again into the heart of the range.

Michelle Gonzalez

Workshop Feature: Inlandia Creative Writing Workshop – Riverside

Workshop Leader: Ruth Nolan

215/60/91

Getting on the 215 to San Bernardino meant
we were going to grandma’s house.
Passing the 5th street exit,
then getting off at Baseline
meant I would be
making fresh flour tortillas on Saturday
and walking to St. Anthony’s on Sunday.

Going on the 60 meant
a trip to the drive-in movies
right by Rubidoux mountain
where you can see the truckers pass
on the freeway as they honk their horns.
I climb into bed at 1 am after
trying to stay up for two movies.

The 91 freeway to Riverside meant
possibly going to the mall,
getting new shoes for school
or maybe even a long trip
to the sandy beach.

But at the end of the day,
I was always glad to be home
where I have my new daybed
and flower bed set
that matches my sister’s.

Midnight Drives

On the third of our many dates,
we drove down the 60 freeway
around the midnight hour
to see the glimmering meteors.
We talked about how
beautiful the sky would look
once we got to the badlands,
small, but still beautiful.
I imagined it would look like
a brighter version of the moon,
glowing in the darkness
all alone.

We passed the exits with the stores
and other signs of life,
until we reached our destination.
The headlights lead the way
to the dark hidden spot.

We got out of the car and
sat on his dusty hood.
Looking up, all we saw were
the shadows of clouds
covering the dark sky.
There were no meteors to be seen,
but somehow, that was fine with us.
We decided to stay and talk awhile.
He asked, “Have you ever made a wish,
on a shooting star?”
I lie and say, “No.”
It’s too early to tell
all my secrets.

Michelle Gonzalez is a longtime member of Inlandia’s Creative Writing Workshop in Riverside. She earned her BA in English from the University of California, Riverside. She also received her teaching credential from University of Phoenix and MFA in Creative Writing from National University. For the past 29 years she has lived in Riverside and has no plans on leaving the Inland Empire. Her poems have been published in National University’s literary magazine and other local magazines such as Slouching Towards Mt. Rubidoux Manor and 2011 Writing from Inlandia: Work of the Inlandia Creative Writing Workshops. Recently she has published her book of poems, Morning in the House by the Field.

Contributor Biographies

Cynthia Anderson is a writer and editor living in Yucca Valley, CA. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, and she has received poetry awards from the Santa Barbara Arts Council and the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. Her collaborations with photographer Bill Dahl are published in the book, Shared Visions.

Lee Balan was the first editor and art director for Beyond Baroque Magazine in Venice, CA. His poems and stories have been featured in several magazines including Phantom Seed, Sun-Runner, and Storylandia. He was the facilitator for the Tenderloin Writer’s Workshop in San Francisco. His background in mental health has been a major influence on his work. Lee has been the featured poet at several events and venues including the Palm Springs Art Museum. Recently, Lee self published his first novel Alien Journal.

Nancy Scott Campbell has been a desert hiker and resident for more than twenty years. She has been a mediator, has taught English as a second Language, is a physical therapist, and is delighted with the workshops of the Inlandia Institute.

With their girls grown and independent, Marcyn Del Clements and her husband, Richard, have more time to pursue their favorite activities: birding, butterfly and dragonfly watching, and fly-fishing. Marcy is published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Appalachia, Eureka Literary Magazine, Flyway, frogpond, Hollins Critic, Literary Review, Lyric, Sijo West, Snowy Egret, Wind, and others.

Mike Cluff is a fulltime English and Creative Writing instructor at Norco College. He has lived steadily in the Highland and Redlands area since 1998. His eighth book of poetry “Casino Evil“ was published in June 2009 by Petroglyph Books.

Rachelle Cruz is from the Bay Area but currently lives and writes in Riverside, CA. She has taught creative writing, poetry, and performance to young people in New York City, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Riverside. She hosts “The Blood-Jet Writing Hour” Radio Show on Blog Talk Radio. She is an Emerging Voices Fellow and a Kundiman Fellow, she is working towards her first collection of poems.

Sheela Sitaram Free (“Doc Free”) was born in Mumbai, India and has spent equal halves of her life in India and in the United States. Her BA in English Literature and Language, MA in English and American Literature and Language, MA in Hindi, PhD in the Contemporary American Novel-novels of John Updike-and her twenty four years of teaching all across the United States in Universities, colleges, and community colleges reveal her lifelong passion for the power of words, especially in the context of world literature and writing. Her collection of poetry entitled “Of Fractured Clocks, Bones and Windshields“ was published in February 2009 and nominated for the Association of Asian American Studies as well as the Asian American Workshop awards in 2010. She has been writing for over 20 years, but it was the Inland Empire that inspired and motivated her to publish; she has simply loved being a part of it for 9 years now. It is home to her and she draws a great deal of material from it in her poetry.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya is a clinical psychologist in Claremont, California. She has been writing since she was nine. In another life, she was a German Literature major and read poetry for credit. She has placed poems and photographs in many publications, including Off the Coast, Umbrella, Abyss & Apex, qarrtsiluni, Poemeleon, Lilliput Review, In Posse Review, and Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. She was nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize. Her first chapbook, Eggs Satori, received an Honorable Mention in Pudding House Publications’ 2010 competition, and will be published in 2011.

Valerie Henderson is an MFA Fiction student at CSUSB. More of her work can be found in The Sand Canyon Review.

Edward Jones is a graduate of UC Riverside’s MFA program and has been published in Faultline, Crate, Mosaic, and Inlandia: A Literary Journey.

Judy Kronenfeld is the author of four poetry collections including “Ghost Nurseries,” a Finishing Line chapbook (2005) and “Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths”, winner of the Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize (2008). Her poems, as well as the occasional short story and personal essay have appeared in many print and online journals including Calyx, Cimarron Review, The American Poetry Journal, Fox Chase Review, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, Natural Bridge, The Hiram Poetry Review, Passager, Poetry International, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Stirring, The Women’s Review of Books, and The Pedestal, as well as in a dozen and a half anthologies or text books, including Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California (Greenhouse Review Press/Alcatraz Editions, 2008), Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease (Kent State University Press, 2009), and Love over 60: An Anthology of Women’s Poems (Mayapple Press, 2010). She is a lecturer Emerita—after twenty-five years of teaching in the Creative Writing Department at UC Riverside. Her new poetry collection, “Shimmer,” has just been accepted by WordTech Editions.

Associate Fiction Editor Ruth Nolan, a former wildland firefighter and native of San Bernardino and the Mojave Desert, teaches Creative Writing and Literature at College of the Desert in Palm Desert. She is a poet and prose writer with works forthcoming in New California Writing, 2011 (Heyday, 2011) and in Sierra Club Magazine. She is editor of No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California’s Deserts (Heyday, 2009) and a contributor to Inlandia: A Literary Journey (Heyday, 2006) She has collaborated on two film projects, “Escape to Reality: 24 hrs @ 24 fps” with the UCR-California Museum of Photography (2008), is a writer for a film in progress, Solar Gold: the Killing of Kokopelli (2011), and represents our region’s deserts in the “Nature Dreaming: Rediscovering California’s Landscapes” public radio series sponsored by Santa Clara University and the California Council for the Humanities (2011) She lives in Palm Desert.

Cindy Rinne has lived in the Inland Empire for 29 years. She is an artist and poet. Her poetry includes nature inspiration, parts of overheard conversations, observations on walks, life events, and her response to her own artwork and the works of others.

Except for a short-lived adventure to Long Beach, CA, Heather Rinne has lived in the Inland Empire her entire life. She grew up in San Bernardino and attended college at Cal Poly Pomona where she received a BFA in 2008. She loved and still loves exploring the art community in the downtown Arts Colony. A fire took her parents’ home, the home where her childhood memories lived, in the fall of 2003. Even with the unexpected chance to move, her parents decided to rebuild on the same lot. Back in the place where she grew up, she makes new memories. She currently works as a Graphic Designer and Photographer out of her home office and dances at a studio in Redlands. She enjoys Redlands because it has a lot of history and is only a short trip to the desert, the city, the mountains, and the ocean.

Ash Russell is an MFA candidate at CSUSB. She has been telling stories since she learned how to speak and writing since she learned to string the alphabet together. She relearns regularly that the magnitude of space is emotionally devastating.

Mae Wagner is firmly rooted in the Inland Empire area and sees Inlandia stories everywhere just waiting to be told. She says, “writing has always been a passion, but was largely relegated to the back burner while she focused on raising a family, earning a living, and going to school.” Over the years, as a longtime Inland Empire resident, she has written for a public relations firm, the Riverside Chamber of Commerce, The Chino Champion newspaper, and had several columns published in the Op-Ed page of the Press-Enterprise when it was locally owned, including a noted investigate journalism series focused on a landmark environmental case involving the Stringfellow Acid Pits in Glen Avon, just west of Riverside. She currently writes a column for her home town paper in Hettinger, North Dakota and is enjoying being a member of the Inlandia Creative Writing Workshops, which she has attended since its opening session in the summer of 2008.

As a child, Rayme Waters spent some time each year at her grandmother’s house in Rancho Mirage and watched the desert cities grow up around it. Rayme’s stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Dzanc Best of the Web and have been published most recently in The Meadowland Review and The Summerset Review.