As many of you know because I talk about it all the time on social media, there are certain phrases and usages that drive me around the bend and other ones I completely adore. My preferences aren’t predictable, even for me. Sometimes I’ll forget all about them until an innocent stranger uses one and sets […]
At some point every January for the last ten years, I’ve taken an inventory of my books — the books I’ve written — for tax purposes. This is a little random, as I have boxes of my first poetry book in my shed from when the publisher closed its imprint, and I never count those. […]
Once upon a time, in 1999, I bought a house. My first house. An uninhabitable house. This is a long story, so I’m going to leave lots of it out. Not just one house: an acre of land with two houses on it, both uninhabitable, and a small studio off the back deck, 10 x […]
When you’re a writer, people always ask when you began writing. The answer is often, “Oh, when I was eight,” or “I’ve been writing all my life.” I didn’t write until I was 35. When I was eight, I was drawing floor plans for log cabins in the wilderness, and trying to listen carefully when […]
Two interesting things about living in a smaller town intersected in my mind this week. One is how much I form relationships with buildings. People do this in cities, too, but because there are so many options in cities, it can be overwhelming. In smaller places, your choices are more manageable. There are five buildings […]
As many of you know, we’ve been wrestling with drought in California for the past several years — I think officially the number is five years. Here in the foothills, our usual natural disaster is wildfire, and drought makes fires more likely, more dangerous, and harder to fight because water reserves are low. This means […]
I have some wonderful friends. One of them loaned me her house last month, which overlooks the entrance of Tomales Bay. The town and the beach are both named Dillon Beach. If there is no fog, you can see across the bay to the Point Reyes National Seashore and then south to where the sun […]
Over the course of my life I’ve envied several friends for their incredible sense of design. One of them is Jacquie, who lives in California’s Sierra foothills, overlooking the south fork of the Yuba River. Jacquie lives in a two-storey handmade house that she and her ex- built together decades ago. Constructed of wood and […]
I want to show you some clips from a talk I gave on creativity, but the constraints of this blog site prevent me from just putting the video here. However, if you click on the “continue reading” note at the end of the boxed paragraph, below, you’ll be taken to the right page — on […]
Every morning for the last several years I have jumped out of bed, raced into some clothes, and driven on automatic pilot over to my favorite café for breakfast. “Breakfast” = coffee, some sort of protein, and a whole wheat bagel or equivalent. “Coffee” = a latte. The food plan I follow asks me to […]