Four horror reads off the beaten path Horror crosses human boundaries in a way other works of fiction struggle with. Humor, for instance, is notoriously difficult to translate, as the comedic power of wordplay doesn’t always work across cultures, and nothing kills a joke more than the expository annotations required to bridge the gap. Horror, […]
Book Review
Posted inArts + Scene
Won’t Fade Away
Poetry is a discipline that escapes my writing and, like anything out there minted in a different factory than my own creative forge, intrigues me. Looking through the windows at the production line, I’ve seen quite a few shapes of blurry contradiction that seem to make up the important qualities of the form, once you […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Ghost Forest’s Haunting Histories
Likely to become a classic, Greg King’s first solo book The Ghost Forest is aptly titled — a must-read that deftly chronicles how 96 percent of California’s old growth redwood forests fell to the saw. The award-winning journalist begins his complex, multi-generational narrative with his own entry into environmental activism. In 1986, while researching logging […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Character Study
Ash Davidson showed up in Klamath in March of 2014 to interview people for her book about the last years of old-growth logging. But even though she had lived in Klamath as a child, she didn’t know anyone there anymore, and few of her would-be informants even returned her phone calls. Fortunately, her mother had […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Parsing the Witch Hunt
Humboldt author Doug Ingold’s new novel There Came a Contagion lays out a dystopic vision of a countryside gripped by drought and famine, where frightened people seek scapegoats. Religious and civic leaders rise to prominence by mastering the articulation and gradual augmenting of that fear, assigning blame to outsiders in ways that dovetail with extant […]
Posted inArts + Scene
History and Mystery
Zooming from London, W.E. Roberts said of his new novel The Rivers, which is set in Humboldt County, “The book was written because I’m an actor, because I like a good story and I thought there was a story there,” Roberts explained, leaning forward into the screen. “I’m really an actor who came to writing […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Women Behind the Trees
On Nov. 10, 1924, the Pacific Lumber Co. began secretly logging its timberland near the mouth of the South Fork Eel River. The plan was to cut a right-of-way through the forest that would allow the company to reach Bull Creek Flat, about a mile away, and then level thousands of acres of old growth […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Liberation through Cultivation
As the cultivation of cannabis transitions from illegal backwoods growing to a multi-million-dollar industry, some wonder: 1. Can we slow, if not stop, the inevitable corporate takeover of weed? 2. Can cannabis be cultivated in a way that is beneficial both for the earth and for the people who have historically produced it? According to […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Street Poetry
If not from spotting him around Old Town, you may recognize Bob Hager from his Oct. 26, 2017, Journal cover story “Homeless Survival Guide.” Hager is a veteran and he and his late wife, Kathleen, had been homeless off and on for decades and were evicted after a long-term stay at the Budget Inn in […]
Posted inArts + Scene
‘This is the Land We Dream of, the Land that Belongs to Us Again’
This week author Brando Skyhorse visits several locations in Humboldt County for a pair of readings and discussions. Skyhorse’s first work, Take this Man: A Memoir, in which he recounts the quirks and the tragedies of his childhood in Los Angeles, generated much praise. His first novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, is the 2018 […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Word Girl
Amy Dixon, the protagonist of Carlene Meredith Cogliati’s To Durchhalten, loves words — their shape on a page and their sound, which she can almost taste on her tongue. She collects words not only for their intrinsic value and usefulness in expressing her feelings, but also to bolster her Spelling Bee prowess. So on the […]
Posted inArts + Scene
American Prometheus: Carnegie’s Captain, Bill Jones
Why did tycoon Andrew Carnegie keep Bill Jones’ portrait in his bedchamber? Gratitude? Because Jones, the engineering genius, made the Carnegie-owned Edgar Thomson Steel Works (ET) the world’s most profitable steel mill. Guilt? Just two days after Jones’ death, Carnegie’s business representative and attorney visited Jones’ grieving widow, Harriett. They persuaded her to sign over […]