Year: 2011

I know I have been posting quite a bit about Lucy the iconic goose. Just wanted to mention that there is a memorial service at 6 p.m. today. It would feel kind of weird for me to go to such a funeral, and perhaps hypocritical [I’m eating a glazed roasted chicken for dinner this evening with all the trimmings] but I admired Lucy and will leave some kind of note if there’s a visual memorial. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

This is a much more detailed report than the one I read yesterday. It also includes Lucy video. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

I was saddened to hear that Lucy the Goose, a tireless and resilient Santa Cruzan, was killed over the weekend. She was an older goose — well into her teens, which is pretty old in the goose world. She had dirty gray feathers, a baritone voice that could carry for a half mile, and a bright-orange growth, roughly the size and shape of a walnut, over her upper beak. I know that there is a long and embattled history surrounding Lucy, and that some local neighbors were upset about the noise and droppings, etc. Did this sentiment have something to do with her demise? News reports didn’t say. According to one account, she may have been the victim of an animal attack. I suppose that’s possible, though it wouldn’t have been easy for a creature to get her. She was fairly well-protected behind a fence, and often slept and rested…

Ever read a book that isn’t published just yet but you have a feeling that it will be — and that it’s only a matter of time? That’s what I thought when reading early drafts of Helene Wecker‘s novel-in-progress, The Golem and the Djinni, which has been taking shape in various cafes and BART train rides for the past few years. Helene, an East Bay resident, just found out that her radical (and masterful) reworking of the Golem legend will be coming to a bookstore near you in 2013, from HarperCollins. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

I just found this one online. I remember speaking briefly with the young author in between panels. Anyhow, my brother and I are going to put our own thoughts together about the conference. We’re comparing notes and should post something soon. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

This one goes out to one reader in particular (you know who you are.) Looks interesting, doesn’t it? http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Another great conference. Met many other dedicated, hard-working authors in and outside of my field. Most importantly, I was able to catch up with family and consume about 700,000 calories worth of food. Stay tuned for more detailed thoughts on this. Seems like people really enjoyed our presentation about travel and voice writing. They asked a lot of great questions. I even shot a YouTube video of sorts, though I recorded it when the coffee and gooey cookies were starting to wear off. Who knows what it is going to look like! When it was over, I went back and forth to panels all over the place, taking in other presentations. My favorite was the nonfiction panel, which was fascinating (a couple of the panelists seemed irritated at one another but that added to the drama). Ron Hansen did a great job with the opening keynote; he talked a lot…

See you all in a day and a half at Literary Orange. If you’re going, get there early; I hear that it’s easy to get lost on campus. My panel will speaking at 1030 a.m. sharp at the UC Irvine event center. We’ll talk about voice, place and memoir (I hear that some folks who missed the last Northern California event will be there.) I’m signing books from 1130 to 1230 and then I’ll stay for the whole thing. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Tobias Wolff wishes he could say that reading Thomas Mann started him out on the road to becoming an author. He remembers reading an interview with Susan Sontag in which she talked about reading Mann and Soren Kierkegaard when she was still in grade school. Sontag even managed to meet Mann in Los Angeles when she was a teenager. “She was very precocious,” Wolff said, dryly, during his opening remarks at the first night of UCSC’S Living Writers Series, which drew a capacity crowd to the Humanities Lecture Hall on Thurday. Each one of us has an author like that, Wolff said. “You look back and think about who it was that made you store up extra batteries in your flashlight so you could stay up reading, and put towels under the doorway so your parents couldn’t see the light shining in the room.” For Wolff, a creative writing professor…

I bet you this will fill that auditorium all the way up. Hope to see you there [but don’t take my parking spot!] Wow — this photo is way too big for this blog entry. It jumps right out of the page. Let me try a smaller one tomorrow.All events are free and open to the public. Jump to the full schedule right here. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default