Happy Pride month! I am so excited to be living in a time when the LGBTQ+ community has experienced so much progress that we are able to have an entire month dedicated to celebrating our culture and raising awareness. As with any and all things that involve humans, it is not perfect. But I have […]
It’s Personal
Posted inLife + Outdoors
A Totally Biased Review of an Elementary School Play
Full disclosure: Since I was a kid, I’ve hated school plays. With their choruses of singing first-grade elves, their trays of stale refreshments and drama coaches who may have previously worked as prison guards, there was little to love. All this to say that the musical adaptation of Disney’s Moana just presented by the tiny […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Liking the Cage
When I was 23 I arrived at the same correctional facility that my father was sent to a week before his high school graduation in 1972. This would be a recurring theme in my life, repeating the timeline of my father’s experiences. Rehabs, jails, overdoses, best friends dying young, drug psychosis, dysfunctional family split-ups and […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Youth Struck
I don’t consider myself an activist. I am way too hypocritical for that. I don’t often participate in direct actions. I don’t like the earnestness, the black-and-white rhetoric, the us-vs.-them polemics or the chest-pounding spectacle of moral superiority. I’m not convinced the effort results in much change, anyway. I’m an academic and my research on […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
10 Rules for Living in a Yurt
When my husband and I arrived in Humboldt a year ago, like many newcomers, we struggled to find a place. We spent weeks in $100-a-night slum-o motels while looking for housing. If the motels didn’t bankrupt us, the rental companies with per-person applications fees would have. Eventually we, like the holy family, finally found that […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
You’re Doing Good
Dear readers, As of Wednesday, I’ll no longer claim the job title “journalist.” It’s not a title I ever thought I’d carry, but my team at the Journal thought I was worthy of it and it’s been a fun few years attaching it to my name. I’m going to a new job where I’ll get […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
A Mother Gets Through Graduation Season
As June approached, I opened my mailbox to an assorted collection of high school graduation announcements. Just as it once seemed that everyone I knew was birthing children, it now seems that everyone I know is graduating children. How well I remember the chaotic pace of the senior year. Eighteen years of parenting coalesce down […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Reflections on Black Bear
I never would have written a book like this 50 years ago when we first started the Black Bear commune. We knew we had to keep secrets then. People mostly had only first names and even if we knew their last name it might have been invented. Maybe they were avoiding the military draft. Maybe […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
A Country to Call Home
It’s 8 a.m. in Ioannina, (pronounced Ee-Yah-neena) a college town of about 100,000 people that dates back to the 6th century in the Epirus region of Northwestern Greece. The town is situated next to picturesque Lake Pamvotis with the snowcapped Pindhos mountains as its backdrop and a centuries-old Byzantine Castle perched on its western shore. Ioannina […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Excerpt: ‘The Recipe for Chimichangas, or How I saved the Commune’
I promised more about the commune. First thing to understand: As a crowd of people intent on building a utopian community in the wilderness, we didn’t bring much baggage. I mean physical baggage, like tools and working trucks. There was no shortage of what we call psychic baggage and some fraction of it was useful. […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Five Ways to Honor the Departed
The last joke my grandmother told was a yellowed newspaper clipping, left in an envelope in her desk drawer for us to find after she died. It was a humor essay by a man who described the effort it took in his life to accumulate all his possessions, and how little fun it would be […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Oldylocks and the 3,000 Stairs
If anything was to dispel my notion of being a young person who deserved some kudos for “adulting,” it was going back to Humboldt State University at 37. Compared to my classmates, I wasn’t just “adulting,” I was a full-ass adult on the parent-age spectrum. Among the underclassmen who use “retro” and “’90s” in the […]