Amy Ettinger & Dan White reading announcement at SJSU

It’s official. We’re now part of the line-up for the fall season. Here is the announcement that has been posted on the Web. Hope to see you all there, and to clarify, this will be in San Jose. We will both read brand new material. (no Cactus Eaters recitations.) I am excited and nervous.  I’m thinking of reading two short, somewhat related pieces, one from a book-length project, and the other a stand-alone essay. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Now reading …. updated

Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? I got plenty of strange looks from people who saw me reading this on the bus in Santa Cruz. They must have figured it was a self-help book in reverse. In one sense it is. This memoir does not provide any soft and fuzzy pathway to creativity.  Winterson’s adoptive mother is an accidental mentor who shaped her daughter’s language while providing a reason for her creativity. The mom — identified here as “Mrs. Winterson” — gave her something to work against. What really struck me here is the amount of light Winterson lets in. The ultra-religious mom is frightening — she sometimes locks her daughter in a coal hole — but never comes across as a monster. Worth re-reading to see how she pulls this off. I would have gone through this a third time but it was borrowed and…

Amy Ettinger & Dan White reading at the Martin Luther King Jr. library in San Jose

Hi, everyone.  I am very excited to announce that my wife, Amy Ettinger, will read with me on October 10, 7 p.m, at the Schiro Room, adjacent to the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, located in Martin Luther King, Jr. Library at SJSU, not to be confused, under any circumstances, with  the Steinbeck Museum down in Salinas, although my mentioning of this distinction will probably cause even more confusion.  A reception will follow. Amy Ettinger has written for the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Huffington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, Sierra, Backpacker and other publications. Her personal essays delve into issues ranging from parenthood, childhood, mortality, creative competition among spouses and growing up on “the other side” of Silicon Valley. She will read a selection from her recent work. I am a former Steinbeck Fellow, an occasional teacher and freelance travel writer, the institutional voice of…

Cheryl Strayed at the Capitola Book Cafe: “My feet are fine. They’ve been restored to their original beauty. It’s taken a while for my toenails to grow back.”

Plus: Mary Karr sings and dances, and much more. Well, it’s been a very eventful month here in Santa Cruz, and since I always bring my little black notebooks to all these events anyhow, I figured I’d share a few journal highlights with you.  Never, in all my years, did I think I’d get to see the great memoirist and poet Mary Karr shimmying, shaking her hair, stomping her boots and singing back-up vocals — and in one case, lead vocals! — with songwriting legend Rodney Crowell at the Rio Theatre right here in Santa Cruz.  In a couple of instances, I had to pinch myself to see if I was hallucinating. Was Mary Karr really up there on the stage, enthusiastically harmonizing to –>“It’s Hard to Kiss the Lips at Night that Chew Your Ass Out All Day Long?” Karr, who must have very good genes — she looked…

Former pirates go legit: KZSC radio celebrates 45 years

Here’s a little story I wrote about a tiny station whose small “pirate” crew made their first broadcasts during the summer of love, and once tried to use an upside-down garbage can as an antennae. It’s an unlikely success story that continues to the present day. In 1967, the year of the Summer of Love, a group of UCSC students started an FCC-unauthorized campus radio station that broadcast from a clammy basement and tried to use an upside-down garbage can as an antenna. The broadcasters initially put egg cartons instead of acoustic tiles on the walls, and the disc jockeys played the psychedelic single, “Incense and Peppermints” by the Strawberry Alarm Clock, so many times the record cracked. They kept on playing it anyhow. “When I left campus, [the station] was very shaky,” said Marc Okrand (Stevenson College ‘70, interdisciplinary studies), who went on to have a far-ranging career that…

Banana slug cookies are selling out (plus, books)

Hi, both of you. I hope you’re well. First of all, I just wanted to let you know that the banana slug cookies are selling exceptionally well. The bakery actually ran out of them over the long weekend, and now they’re into the second printing. Oops,  I mean, baking. In some ways this is even more fun than the publishing thing.  My cookies, unlike my writings, do not provoke extreme emotional reactions. No one can go on Amazon and describe my cookies as arrogant or overly profane. They just gobble them up, wash them down with a nice cold glass of milk,  and that’s it. Today I went into the bakery and I vowed to keep my mouth shut, just this once, but just when I was walking out the door, I turned around and said “Those are MINE! I designed those!”  Now for those books I was talking about….

Help the Capitola Book Cafe “thrive and survive” this Sunday

I hope to see you all at the festive fundraiser at the Capitola Book Cafe.  I’m not an owner of the bookstore or in any way employed there, but I hang out there constantly and wrote a huge portion of my early draft of The Cactus Eaters there. It’s also the place where I met the writing group that helped me get that early manuscript into good enough shape to get a scholarship for graduate school (it would have been impossible to attend without it; now I’ve rejoined that same book group, and they’re helping me move forward with a brand new project, so I guess you could say that a big part of my literary life is tied up with this one store.) Aside from this, I’ve seen so many great writers there over the years and consumed about 10,000 cups of coffee. A bunch of writers who live…

Hell yes: my Banana Slug Cookies shall return!

Not to get you overly excited but I just heard that my big claim to fame — the Super-sweet Extra-Crunchy Banana Slug Cookie with gloppy yellow frosting-– is going to be resurrected soon. Apparently, the Buttery Bakery in Santa Cruz is going to bake up another limited run of these cookies (which I invented and designed all by myself, including the cookie cutter, not to brag or anything like that)  in honor of the upcoming UCSC commencement ceremonies. The fact is, you won’t meet many author types who dabble in baked-goods design. A few of them treat baked items with outright contempt. (I was shocked and upset to read that my favorite fiction writer, Junot Diaz, doesn’t like cookies at all.) Anyhow, I’m amped up about this and ready to take on the big corporate cookie producers. Watch your back, Entenmann’s. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default