End of the year message, and happy holidays to all of you

Hi everyone, and thank you so much for your continuing support and messages and commentary from all over the place including, most recently, Latvia. I appreciate it. Just wanted to ask for your patience. My year-end hibernation is coming up.  I am heading toward a summer turn-in deadline for my new book, the same nonfiction project that has taken me into the Everglades and into the High Peaks of the Adirondacks, and also into the Sierra Nevada. And yes, this is the same project that involved a bare-naked campout in mountain lion territory that you’ve probably heard about by now. Gives me the chills just thinking about that one. When the time is right, I’ll tell you all about that, too.  I am now getting myself ready for what could be the last research campout for this book — although there is a chance I’ll add yet another one in…

Straight out of Santa Cruz: Elizabeth McKenzie’s story in the New Yorker

Our friend, the talented fiction writer Elizabeth McKenzie, the author of a well-received novel as well as a story collection, showed a short story to our writing group out in Santa Cruz early this fall. It gave me chills; reading it was a waking dream, and I could not stop thinking about it afterwards. Her story made me think about families and the way nostalgia and loss can warp the way we view the past. It also made me think about the way writers cannibalize memories. Anyway, after reading it, I thought, “wow, if only the world could see this story.” Well, now it can. The story, “The Savage Breast,” appears in this week’s New Yorker magazine. Congratulations, Lisa, and here is a nice review that just rolled in from the literary blogosphere. The author of this piece is Majnun Ben-David. And if you’re thinking that you’re about to hear more from this…

My first-ever interview about my post-Cactus Eaters book covering bare-naked camping and much more

The talented arts writer (and fiction and nonfiction writer) Wallace Baine interviewed me recently about my nonfiction book-in-progress for Henry Holt & Co.  I’ve been keeping mum about a lot of this, and trying, (to quote a former roommate), “not to let the cat out of the bottle” so it was fun to talk about this with him. Here is the story.  This is not a camping guidebook — although I will share some ideas and suggestions — but an affectionate look into camping’s strange and beguiling past. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Angela Davis & Toni Morrison on friendship and creativity

If you are juggling several responsibilities and still trying to maintain an imaginative life, you may find some encouragement in my recent Q & A with Toni Morrison and Angela Davis. Thanks for reading, and sorry for the conflicting fonts.  Dan White: I would guess that even some of your most ardent fans don’t realize that you were an influential editor at Random House for 20 years. At the time, you were bringing out African American voices, including some strong feminist voices, to a wider audience.Toni Morrison: Well, I was determined to do that when I came there. There was a lot of activity going on, a lot of activism, and I thought, ‘I will publish these voices instead of marching.’ I thought it was my responsibility to publish African American and African writers who would otherwise not be published or not be published well, or edited well, and so I brought out…

Cactuseaters feature story with Toni Morrison (read it here. But also read the much more detailed interview that I posted more recently.)

Here is my recent interview about good and evil in literature, among other things. The interview also includes a few words from Angela Davis, who will be introducing Professor Morrison during her upcoming sold-out lecture in Santa Cruz this month. (you can find the same interview online right here.) By the way I am hoping to release a much more detailed and expanded version of this that has a Q and A format and I will let you know as soon as that happens … At 83, Toni Morrison has no plans to retire. At this point in her career, that kind of drive has little to do with unmet goals; the Nobel Prize winner has written 10 novels, a play, and many nonfiction pieces. Her body of work, including the novel Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, is already part of the literary canon. But Morrison, speaking by…

Back from climbing Mt. Whitney at 330 a.m.

My trusty Mag-lite helped me make my way through the inky High Sierra darkness. Had a fine time up there with the exception of that final ascent, which made me quite woozy and a tad nauseous. Went to Dominican yesterday evening for treatment of minor frostbite but I should be just fine. This is the last camping trip for the book with the exception of the upcoming RV tour of the southwest.  By the way, I enjoyed meeting JMT hikers out there and I gave three of them a ride out from Onion Valley to Bishop, where we all shared a good meal at a Mexican restaurant and went out separate ways. More soon. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

On reading The Grapes of Wrath on its 75th anniversary

–> When I was a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University in 2007-8, I used to drive my rattletrap of a car back and forth between San Jose and San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood with The Grapes of Wrathaudiobook playing on my CD player.  I listened to the book twice in a row, all 21 hours and five minutes of it in 42 installments. As the story unfolded, I projected the action onto the land in front of me. While an amoral used-car salesman ripped off desperate “Okies” on their way to California, my own jalopy leaked oil on Highway 280. When Noah Joad disappeared, I imagined him lost in the foothills above Palo Alto. Twice in a row the lapsed preacher John Casy got his head bashed by thug cops while I crossed Church and 22nd Street in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood. “You don’t know what you’re doing,”…

coming soon from Catamaran Literary Reader: Beyond Wild: Gail Storey and Aspen Matis face the wilderness on the Pacific Crest Trail

Coming soon from Catamaran Literary Reader at a bookstore or mailbox near you: the forthcoming issue of our magazine includes my brief essay on women facing the wilderness on the Pacific Crest Trail, with a detailed Q & A with Gail Storey and Aspen Matis and with prominent mentions of Cheryl Strayed and Suzanne Roberts. There is no online version of the magazine at this time but you can find out where to buy it and how to describe by visiting us here.  Also, please get your hands on the current issue of Catamaran, which is another great one, with contributions from Paul Muldoon, an overlooked piece of writing from John Steinbeck, new work from Ursula K Le Guin and Nathaniel Mackey and my interview with Susan Shillinglaw about the 75th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath‘s publication. I hope you’re all having a good summer and I’ll see you out in…

My Cactuseaters Blog Tour

                                Thank you to my friend Samuel Autman for asking me to participate in the Blog Tour, in which a group of writers talk about their latest projects and share a few words about their writing process. So here I am, taking part and passing it on. Read here about Samuel’s writing process. Here goes:1. What are you working on? For the last couple of years I have been working on a book that is now under contract with Henry Holt & Company. The working title is Soaked to the Bone. It is an embodied history of American camping, meaning that I must participate — enthusiastically, and sometimes dangerously — in every form of camping I write about. I am using a combination of research and history and my own adventures to tell the story…

Battered scuzzy copies of the Cactus Eaters …

Lately I’ve signed some seriously scary copies of my book. A few of them looked like somebody dropped them in a lake, rolled them down a hill, or cleaned their showers with them.  I signed them anyways. I am willing to sign anything except for a blank check. In other news, I’m heading to the Hoh rainforest very soon to spend time with the bugling elk and write about “quiet camping” for my new book. Also, thank you for your continued support of my first book. It keeps creeping along, slowly, inexorably, like a slimy but determined hermit crab at the bottom of the ocean. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default