I am thirty-two years old and this is the first time I have lived east of the Mississippi river (save for that disastrous six-month stint in the interior swamp of Florida when I was eleven years old-but that’s another story).

I am a Western girl-born and bred. And yet my relationship with my geography has always been complicated. Growing up in Arizona and Colorado, I was half-raised by my Yankee grandmothers who told me stories about ‘Back East’ and the family pedigree, whose roots trail back to the ships following the Mayflower. I listened and absorbed and when I visited Rhode Island or Connecticut, I was sort of awed by towns founded in the 1600’s, particularly since I was a product of Western Suburban Sprawl–those tract homes of the 1970’s and 1980’s that ate up prairie and desert and foothills. One of my favorite activities as a child was going to look at model homes with my grandmother. But I also grew up camping and skiing. I spent most of my twenties rock climbing and hiking up mountains and being always a breath away from wild land.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I was not raised on a mountaintop with a pack of wolves as pets and the ability to make fires with just a shard of glass and some half-wet kindling. (Leave that to my Alaskan friends!) And yet….the landscape, the short but vivid history of the West, the scale and grandeur and harshness and even the quick and neat carving of wilderness into the suburban—all of it was so much a part of me that I couldn’t see it.

When I moved out to Pittsburgh for graduate school, I was more than happy to be leaving Boulder, heading east, closer to where things were created, where they were happening.  I didn’t think I would miss Colorado in the least. But now, six months in,

CONTINUE READING…..

I’m going to Prague this summer in order to check out the Libri Prohibiti, which is an archival research library that collects Samizdat and exile literature.

For those of you who don’t know, Samizdat was a dissident form of literature that arose across the Soviet bloc, in which people secretly reproduced state censored publications ( by typrewriter, carbon copy, or small self-bound books). One of my favorite books, The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, was circulated in just such a fashion, as were the early poetry of Joseph Brodsky and Vaclav Havel’s famous The Power of the Powerless. Being caught creating or possessing censored literature was severely punished in all Soviet bloc countries, so the stakes were extremely high.

I became interested in Samizdat on a trip to Slovakia and the Czech Republic in 1999 and it features prominently in my novel Hello Sparrow. One of the most interesting aspects of the movement was the way in which what circulated varied from country to country based on the differences in state power, state control of culture, and historical self-awareness of the people of each country–for instance, in Czechoslovakia, political tracts and essays that reinforced autonomous Czech culture were popular, while in the U.S.S.R. and Poland, fiction and poetry (both satirical and tragic) were widely circulated.

The Libri Prohibiti includes more than 29,200 monographs and periodicals, about 2,900 reference resources, and over 5,000 audiovisual materials.  I hope that being able to read the papers and books, interview some Czech writers during the Prague Writer’s Festival, and visit with professors at Charles University will help create a more solid, historically accurate, foundation for this novel.

Since my interest extends past Samizdat–to all exiled texts and authors (Eduardo Galeano is a favorite, as is Edwidge Danticat), I am looking for connections and clues between the two. Likewise, I am fascinated (as a writer of literary fiction) with the state of the publishing industry in the US, the corporate bookstores hold over publishing houses, and the lack of a true underground forum for literature, and the parallels to state censorship in Soviet bloc countries. I have many questions I hope to explore!

BTW: Here is an interesting article on a self-published author who staged a guerrilla reading of her work at a Barnes and Noble in NYC last month. It makes me wonder if this is a burgeoning movement? Are we seeing the real rise of underground literature in the US? One can always dream…

“At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.”

_Annie Dillard

I’m back. Much has changed in the few months I have been away. I have moved from Colorado to Pittsburgh, PA to attend the MFA graduate program in writing. I love the program and everyone I’ve met through it. The city? Well, I’m still trying to explore–hard to do when it is raining ice. Yes, you heard me correctly. Raining ice. The weather is definitely hard to get used to, as are the french fries on the salads and the maze of city streets, hills, alleys that end in brick walls, streets that end in rivers, and bridges that form complete loops from which one can never escape.

What I am excited about is writing on here again more regularly, about all sorts of topics–sharing quotes and books I love, interesting information, short stories as I get them written, pictures, and more.

Ready, set, go…

It’s spring. Well not officially, but with the time change and the (fairly) beautiful weather here in Colorado, I am feeling the primavera, and in its honor, I would like to share the best gardening book of last year.

Permaculture is one of my favorite gardening philosophies, and though it is an incredibly simple and understandable series of concepts–revolving around mimicking the way that plants grow in nature, paying attention to the landscape around you for clues on how to best implement growing techniques, and creating relationships with plants and animals that are mutually beneficial–many people think that permaculture is very complex or that it works okay for farmers but isn’t applicable to backyard gardeners. “Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture”  will quickly disabuse you of that notion.  Author Toby Hemenway, a professor at Portland State University in Oregon, provides an easy to read and informative  understanding of permaculture principles and how to apply them to building and maintaining a sustainable permaculture practice in your home yard. With both beginner and advanced practices and plenty of pictures and diagrams, this book has enough information for novices and master gardeners alike. I highly recommend “Gaia’s Garden” as a must read before you plant your garden this spring and go– to guide for all the seasons to come.

You know that bump on the upper inside corner of your middle finger, the one you got as a kid from all the cursive handwriting in school? Do you still have it? Did you ever? Experts now say that the ‘writer’s bump’ or callus is almost completely disappearing, what with the rise of computers and the fact that students no longer seriously learn the Palmer method of cursive handwriting in school. Which got me to thinking–has the rise in using computers to type affected the quality and/or output of creative writing? In what way has it changed what we write and are there benefits to switching back to longhand? CONTINUE READING…..