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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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. 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. I recently had a chance to spend three days (plus an evening) in the beautiful city of Lisbon. Cobblestone streets, wide open plazas and the gentle churning of the Teju River, all accompanied by the zhhh-zhhh sound of spoken Portuguese. Once I'd learned how to properly order uma bica e um pastel de nata, my most basic needs were met. There was rain, and plenty of it. Living with drought teaches you to love precipitation in all its forms. I destroyed a pair of leather boots walking through history in the rain, and discovered my umbrella has holes in it. I enjoyed every minute of it. Before the trip I got hold of a copy of The Lives of Things (Objecto Quase), a collection of short stories by José Saramago, the Portuguese writer who took the Nobel for Literature in 1998. The first story in the collection tells his imagined history of the actual deck chair whose collapse led to the unexpected death of right-wing dictator António Salazar in 1968. The Centaur is his brilliant and breathtaking story where its horse and human halves are at war with each other, physically, emotionally and erotically. How, for example, can a horse lie down to sleep in a way that will also be comfortable for a man? A political parable, to be sure, but also a heartbreaking story. I stopped in at Livraria Bertrand, located aptly on Rua Garrett, as any book lover must. After all, it claims to be the oldest bookstore in the Western world. There I picked up a copy of two books by Portugal's wonderfully oddball poet, Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), Disquiet Lisbon and a bilingual edition of O Que O Turista Deve Ver/What the Tourist Should See. Like Saramago, Pessoa is one of Portugal's great literary treasures. In addition to his own poetry, he's particularly known for creating a host of alter egos who wrote poetry, were published in leading journals of their day, and even reviewed each others' work. Any chance it's coincidence his last name is also the Portuguese word for person? A day later, I'm walking under the giant cedar in the middle of the Jardim do Príncipe Real when I spot a VW camper van by the side of the road with matching shelves, quite obviously selling books. I go for a closer look and discover Tell A Story, a small mobile bookstore in a refitted VW camper van that has recently branched out into publishing English language translations of Portuguese writers. Turns out I've already bought two of their books. Disquiet Lisbon is their truncated edition in English of Pessoa's larger work, The Book of Disquiet. I'd also bought their edition of Jesus Christ Drank Beer by Afonso Cruz, a prize-winning novel I can't seem to find anywhere on the English interwebs. The guy I chat with at the Tell A Story van says literature and bookstores are doing fairly well in Portugal, and he suggests a trip to the bookstore at LX Factory, the former textile manufacturing facility-turned-hipster art center. It's a loooong walk down there, and along the way I'm stopped by French tourists in need of directions. Never mind the fact I was fairly lost at that point. But I eventually find my way to the expansive, book-filled Ler Devagar. The bookstore's name translates as "read slowly." Which of course I think we all should do. There's so much more to literary Lisbon: watching tourists take photos of themselves arm in arm with the statue of Pessoa; the antiquarian bookstore with dozens of political posters from the anti-colonial movements in Angola and Mozambique. I'll just end here with a quote from Pessoa's disquietude, and a few more photos. "The part of my life not wasted in thinking up confused interpretations of nothing at all, has been spent making prose poems out of the incommunicable feelings I use to make the unknown universe my own." A few years back I had the good fortune to travel to Egypt on vacation. We hit all the usual, amazing places: the pyramids of Giza; the beautiful mosques of old Cairo; the tombs of the Valley of the Kings, Karnak, Luxor; and Abu Simbel. Less than a week after we got back home, the country exploded in protests, and suddenly everyone around the world had heard of Tahrir Square. And everywhere I went there was kushari, the national dish of Egypt. Like ramen in Japan or burgers in America, you can find fancy kushari made with high quality ingredients at good restaurants, but you'll probably want to grab a greasy pile of deliciousness in a cardboard to-go container on the street or in a fast food place. It's easy to make, and all the ingredients are familiar and easy to find. I was so taken with it that I made this "prezipe" to show how to make it. Enjoy! |
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