There was a time when I wanted to be a park ranger when I grew up. My family usually spent our summer vacations walking sun-dappled trails beneath pin oaks, slippery elm and loblolly pines, cooking over a kerosene-powered Coleman stove, and sleeping in a pop-up camper. For a writer, maybe the next best thing to being a ranger is the national parks' Artist in Residence programs.
I've been selected to be an Artist in Residence - we're called AIRs for short - at Mesa Verde National Park. For two weeks in September I get to live in the park, explore archeological sites and stare up at the stars at night. While I'm there I'll teach a writing workshop combined with a reading of my work, on Friday, September 16 at 7 p.m at the Chapin Mesa Museum. Everyone is invited and you don't have to have any prior writing experience. America's public lands are an important part of our cultural heritage, and the human history of Ancestral Puebloans in what we now call the Four Corners region is long and deep. I'll spend my time getting to know both through my writing practice, with a particular eye to the impact of climate change. As a lead-up event to my residency, I held the #ParkLit Hashtag Book Festival on August 20, which as far as I know is the first book festival ever to take place entirely on a hashtag. If you missed it you can catch the proceedings on the festival page or read my writeup on the popular travel blog WeSaidGoTravel. My reading list for the residency keeps growing, including everyone from Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey to Terry Tempest Williams, Simon Ortiz and Craig Childs. So if you're looking for me, I'll be the one with the notebook, pen and battered paperback, somewhere in the vicinity of this cliff palace.
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Last Sunday in Vista Hermosa Natural Park three other local LA writers and I each read original short stories about The End of Water. In their stories we met a weatherman who tells uncomfortable truths, a species of whale that may be extinct (and may always have been), a carwashero seeking justice for his father, and a scientist testing her theory that we can solve the problem by turning wine into water. These stories were originally read by actors as part of the 2015 LitCrawl in LA. The participating authors were Chris Iovenko, Henry Hoke, A.R. Taylor and me, Bronwyn Mauldin.
The End of Water wasn't an ordinary literary event, though. I organized this reading to be part of VisionLA '15 Fest, a climate action festival that brought together artists across Los Angeles to demand our leaders take meaningful action to stop climate change at the UN COP '21 negotiations in Paris. After the reading the four of us had a chance to talk on video about climate change, what we expect from our leaders and what artists have to offer in this struggle to slow the warming of our planet. That last question is a particularly important one. People tend to think of artists in terms of the final product: a book, painting, dance or play. But what we really have to offer is in the way we think. We have the ability to imagine a world that doesn't exist. We are constantly in a state of combining ideas and materials that don't obviously fit together, thereby reinventing the world. For example, imagine if we replaced our planet-harming industrial-scale infrastructure - especially around transportation and energy - on a human scale? If we can build a network of small farm-to-table food systems, why not a network of small roof-to-laptop electrical grids? Vista Hermosa Park was a beautiful location for the reading, and holding outdoors turned out to be perfect. The park is almost hidden on the edge of downtown LA. It was designed as a watershed, complete with green roofs, native landscaping and a cistern under the parking lot to capture any runoff. If you've never visited, I highly recommend it, as a break in the middle of the work day or on a lazy weekend afternoon. Here are a few photos from the reading. Enjoy! Three years of Los Angeles LitCrawls, and I'm still batting a thousand. This year, a story I wrote about a carwashero in search of justice called "Beans and Rice" appeared in the LitCrawl session called Water, Water, Anywhere?, co-sponsored by the New Short Fiction Series and City of LA's local Metropolitan Water District. Actor Holger Moncada, Jr. read the story and did a great job bringing it to life. Here's a pic of him reading live at Pitfire Pizza during our round of the LitCrawl: Last year at the LitCrawl I read a poem on the topic of guns, with the LA Word group. Things were a little lighter at the first LitCrawl, where I read a true story about a run-in with a kind-of-creepy Santa Claus.
All the stories in our session this year were on the theme of water and drought, a topic that's top of mind here in LA. The other three stories by Chris Iovenko, Henry Hoke and A.R. Taylor were terrific. We're planning to reprise our session as part of the upcoming VisionLA '15 Climate Arts Action Festival in early December, so stay tuned for more details. Earlier this month I traveled to Chicago for a couple of book appearances, and discovered a city so literary I couldn't begin to cover it all. I read trivia questions about solar power in a bar where I met a couple of terrific local writers, visited more than half a dozen bookstores, prowled through Printer's Row (the midwest's largest outdoor book festival), visited the Balzekas Museum which is America's only museum for Lithuanian culture and history, and read at one of Chicago's newest bookstores, City Lit Books. I spent one day getting around on the local bike share system, Divvy, which works particularly well because the city is so flat. It made me ever more impatient to get bike share in LA. I also bought way too many books.
While in town I picked up a copy of Newcity, which had a fantastic cover piece on Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago. It's a great overview of who matters in literary Chicago, from bookstores to local indie presses to the literary editor at the Chicago Tribune. Turns out, I'd met one of the city's literati, Eric May, while doing trivia at Sheffield's bar. It wasn't until I got back home that I found out The Rumpus had listed my reading at City Lit Books on their "Notable in Chicago" events listing for that week. The Rumpus! It pairs nicely with being listed as one of the Top 5 Things to do in Seattle the weekend I read at Elliot Bay Bookstore. Here are a few pics from my Chicago literary biking adventure. Some of them you might have seen already on Instagram or Twitter. You don't have to be a poet laureate to appear on GuerrillaReads, but we're always proud to say we knew ya when. Big news today in American poetry is the announcement of Juan Felipe Herrera as the next US poet laureate, the first Latino to hold that position. But you can call him PLOTUS. Way back in 2010 I caught up with Herrera for this fantastic guerrilla reading (along with Michael Medrano and Anita Hernandez) of his poem "Arizona Green (Manifesto #1070)." If you think poetry is old fashioned or boring or irrelevant to your life, you've got to watch this video. Herrera isn't the first poet laureate we've featured on GuerrillaReads. The City of LA's current poet laureate, Luis J. Rodriguez, also did a terrific guerrilla reading for us.
I launched GuerrillaReads as an online video literary magazine back in 2008 to help writers in all forms and genres take advantage of the opportunities created by online video, while also trying to make both the real world and the internet a bit more literary. Go out and do a reading in a place that's meaningful to your work, a place where people might not expect literature. Video it and share it with us. Think of it as an electronic zine, with a strong DIY ethos. Over the years we've featured Naomi Hirahara, Peter J. Harris, Terry Wolverton, Reyna Grande, Jen Hofer, Melinda Palacio, Susan Straight and many other writers, poets and more. You don't have to be anybody's laureate to do a guerrilla reading. Just be the best writer you can be and share your work with us. Here's how to submit. A big GuerrillaReads congratulations to California's own Juan Felipe Herrera! An old friend comes to town to read from her new book at a local bookstore, but you're too busy with life to make it to the reading. You feel terrible about it (I know you do because you sent me that kind email with such a heartfelt apology). The good news is that there are many other things you can do to support your crazy writer friends, some of them from the comfort of home. I recommend the following five, in no particular order: 1) Write a review on Amazon. It doesn't have to be long, and it doesn't even have to be positive. Just be honest and be yourself. Say what you liked and didn't like. When it comes to online book reviews, silence is more deadly than a bad review. Bonus points if you also post the review on Goodreads. 2) Give a copy to a friend. Movies are advertised on billboards and TV, but people learn about books by word of mouth. If you liked the book, pass it on. 3) Get your book group to read it. Many authors are willing to join the book group discussions and answer questions either live or via Skype or FaceTime. 4) Throw a literary party. Bring together a group of friends and invite the author to read and talk about her book. Your friends will be impressed that you have an honest-to-goodness writer friend, and your author friend will be deeply grateful. 5) Ask your local library to buy the book. Your library's website probably has a form to submit a request. Or just ask your favorite librarian. Come watch genuine Hollywood actors read my work on stage, Sunday March 8 at 7 pm, part of the New Short Fiction Series, at the Federal Bar in North Hollywood. Ticket info here.
I've been a bit busy lately, traveling, reading, and somehow finding time to fit in a bit of writing too. On February 6, I read at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. It was a great chance to catch up with old friends and meet some new ones. The Stranger listed my reading at one of the top five things to do in town that day. Then I traveled to Charlotte, NC, in between winter storms to read on February 22 at Park Road Books, another great indie bookstore. I baked cookies (we authors aren't above bribing potential readers!), sold all the books in stock and had a great conversation. As we reminisced about 1989, someone reminded us of another major event I hadn't remembered when I wrote my Year in Review, 25 Years Later blog post: Hurricane Hugo. Hurricanes don't usually travel so far inland, and this one knocked out power, tossed Charlotte's famous trees around like they were matchsticks, and left almost 100,000 people homeless from Cape Verde to Lake Erie. Coming up on Sunday, March 8, my work is getting the New Short Fiction treatment on stage at the Federal Bar in North Hollywood. Professional actors - they have IMDb entries and everything! - will be reading four of my short stories. Click here for more info and to buy tickets. We're calling the event, Democracy and Other Stories. I'll also be appearing on a panel on Community Supported Arts: A New/Old Way to Think about the Relationship Between Writers and Readers at the Mennonite/s Writing VII: Movement, Transformation and Place writing conference in Fresno on Friday, March 13. Rhonda Langley, Julia Baker and I will talk about our independent projects seeking to connect readers and writers, in the busy postmodern era. Rhonda and Julia have a couple of great projects that you should definitely check out if you can't make it to the conference. I'll be talking about GuerrillaReads and an essay I wrote about applying food movement concepts to literature. In the more distant future, I'll be traveling to Chicago in early June for appearances at the Reading Under the Influence series and City Lit Books. More details coming soon. |
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May 2018
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