ET Marciniec

Heads up, blog readers, especially those of you interested in wild edible plants--I have an exciting announcement to make!

New Wild Food Girl site:

Etmarciniec.com is now the proud parent of a new baby bloglet dedicated solely to the topic of wild edible and medicinal plants as well as other wild food. Please oh please visit wildfoodgirl.com. (And if you want, you can join the RSS feed in the upper right corner.) I've posted two new articles already, one related to goosefoot and the other to cow parsnip. I do not intent to post any new wild food articles here at etmarciniec.com, so please make the move with me if wild edible plants is your reason for visiting this site.

What happens to the old content?

After much thought, I decided to leave most of the old articles up here at etmarciniec.com for ease of browsing, although I may set up a 303 redirect on a few of the most highly-searched pages if I can figure out how on earth to do that without screwing things up, heh.

In the meantime, thanks so much for reading and I hope to hear from you over at wildfoodgirl.com.

-Erica 

Gregg and I have found yet another tasty wild green to supplement our store-bought diet: fireweed!

Not to be confused with other plants referred to by the same common name (I found reference to one in an older wild edible plants guide), the plant of which I write is Epilobium angustifolium.

I first read about it in Gregory L. Tilford's Edible and Medicinal Plants of the West. In fact, the book's cover is adorned with a montage of fireweed flowers atop a blown-up image of a fireweed leaf, so Tilford must think highly of the plant.

So many people have told me that the "bluebell" is edible, and yet, despite my growing collection of wild edible plants literature, I have found only one reference to it as a food source. Thus, much of my evidence for the plant's edibility is circumstantial.

"The leaves are awesome," said my friend Rachel Sowers, a gardener by trade, as we rode up the chairlift late season at Arapahoe Basin. "If you're camping in the backcountry you can add the leaves to a salad. They're super tasty," she said.

And Gregg's sister Wendy has a friend who supposedly "goes gaga for bluebells," but who has, on occasion, eaten enough of the small blue bell-shaped flowers to become sick.

Type "hair boom" into your browser and, with the exception of opinion pieces, you can read the same Associated Press article in newspapers across the country which announces the decision by BP and the U.S. Coast Guard not to use the hair booms made of donated human hair and animal fur to help clean up the oil spill in the Gulf. "We foresee a risk that widespread deployment of the hair boom could exacerbate the debris problem," Coast Guard spokesman Petty Officer Shawn Eggert is quoted as saying.

How, exactly, would the hair booms exacerbate the debris problem?

According to an attractive fact sheet [PDF] by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), "Using Booms in Response to Oil Spills," a February 2010 field test revealed that "commercial sorbent boom absorbed more oil and much less water than hair boom, which became waterlogged and sank within an hour."

Enter Matter of Trust, the 6-person San Francisco based nonprofit that has mobilized volunteers, collected 20 warehouses full of hair, animal fur, nylons, crab traps, and other materials needed to construct the booms, and yes--conducted their own tests.

Plants do seem to grow slowly when you scrutinize them every day, and that's exactly what I've been doing to the few wild plants that endure the firm, rocky soil and high elevation of our backyard. I wonder if they appreciate the attention? (Probably not if they realized that I am diabolically hashing up plans to cook them for dinner...)

As a whole, the wild foods literature speaks highly of shoots and young leaves. The difficulty is that the young plants are often more difficult to identify than mature plants.

I hope I'm not boring you too much with my recent dandelion obsession, but we enjoyed yesterday's dandelion green salad so much that I figured I'd post it now and give the other wild plants a little more time to grow before I start messing with them.  

Since I'm referring to dandelions as "wild plants" here, it's probably a good time to mention an interesting bit I read yesterday in Samuel Thayer's book, The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, & Preparing Edible Wild Plants (2006) in a section about "The History of Foraging and Wild Food Literature." Thayer explains the way in which much of the Native American knowledge about edible wild plants was lost in the early days of European settlement, in part due to the fact that to eat wild plants was stigmatized as "savage" among European settlers. The few plants that were acceptable to eat in times of food shortage, he explains, were "dandelion, chicory, plantain, stinging nettle, curly dock, sow thistle" (and the list continues)--plants that the settlers brought with them. Thayer makes a distinction between these "quasi-wild, human-dependent agricultural tag-alongs that came from Europe" (which he says dominate the wild plants literature), and true, native wild plants.

I doubt I would have picked up this book on my own, but the college where I recently became an adjunct faculty member handed out Double Take: A Memoir (2009) after a two-day in-service on standardizing the curriculum (don't ask), and so I felt both touched (I am always tickled to be given books) and obligated to read it. It is the second book I've read this spring (after Twilight, that brain candy of a book). My understanding is that at some point the college will hold some sort of discussions of Double Take, so maybe I'll attend if I can get the date right. It would probably be useful to have a conversation with live book-readers from time to time, instead of always sending my thoughts out to the (largely, so far) unresponsive interwebs whilst I sit alone in my borrowed high-mountain abode, out of touch with reality, fixating too much on my purpose in life.

For more than two years now I have been editing a frustrating diatribe destined to one day become a book (please do not ask why I agreed to do it because it is a long story) that is perhaps now at its most frustrating point as I work to confirm and then incorporate all of the missing sources referred to in the text.

It's not that I didn't tell the client two years ago when we started that he needed to cite his sources. I told him, but he said he had them, and we put it off. (As for me, somewhere in the back of my mind I never believed that the book project would come to fruition--so really, what did it matter? Well, it turns out I was wrong.) And, after my speech about "It's not a real book unless it has a bibliography," he enlisted me and a recent college graduate of his acquaintance to research all of his wild claims and attribute them to one source or another. Egad.

It's not usually a good idea to watch a movie before reading the book, because nine times out of ten the book is better than the movie. But when it comes to Twilight--Stephenie Meyer's first book in her bestselling vampire series--there is really no harm done in reversing the order of things. This is because the movie is better than the book.

If you don't know the story already, it is about a 17-year-old girl, Bella Swan, who moves to her father's house in the small town of Forks, Washington, and then falls in love with her classmate, the pale and dreamy Edward Cullen, who turns out to be a member of a coven of non-human-eating "vegetarian" vampires. Over and over again, Bella drones on about how amazingly beautiful, how hauntingly captivating, and how dangerous Cullen is--dangerous because, even though he has chosen not to eat humans, he still has the desire to do so; and because out of all the humans, Bella's scent is the most irresistible to him. 

To date, my book reviews on the blog have focused primarily on works of fiction. Starting today, however, I've decided to record my notes on the textbooks I have been reviewing--design textbooks, specifically. This shift in focus owes to my recent acceptance of a position teaching digital design at the Breckenridge campus of Colorado Mountain College in Summit County. My goal for reading these textbooks is twofold--to help me select an appropriate text for my students, and also to broaden my own knowledge of the subject.

Exploring the Elements of Design is a thin and colorful textbook by Poppy Evans and Mark A. Thomas (2004). I ordered it about a month ago using interlibrary loan and proceeded to read and take detailed notes on the entire book. I thought it was a good read.

Julia Alvarez, author of ¡Yo!, lives in Vermont and teaches at Middlebury College. I noticed it instantly when I read the back flap of the book, since Middlebury has a renowned writing program and is the one college that rejected my application so many years ago. Not to judge a book by its cover, but I also immediately noticed the design and layout of this charming little yellow book, its diminutive size and handwritten script-style font on the chapter headings. ¡Yo! is another one of those books that just feels right in my hands, that gives me pleasure to simply turn the pages.

My uncle gave me the book, figuring it would appeal to me based on my interest in Latin culture and the Spanish language, and perhaps because I am writing my own novel that tells, among other stories, the tale of the daughter of two undocumented immigrants to the United States from Mexico. In Julia Alvarez' story, in contrast, Yo's family members are wealthy political refugees from the Dominican Republic residing in the United States.

This entry is the long overdue "part II" of my notes from reading The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama. As mentioned previously, I write these comments more or less from the perspective of a layperson trying to make sense of the book despite an acknowledged deficiency in political knowledge.  

Chapter 3: The Constitution

Obama talks about the Constitution in Chapter 3, and he is a good person to speak on it, having taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. He presents the contrasting views of strict constructionists--who believe in a word-for-word interpretation--with those of relativists, who believe that the tenets of the document must be interpreted in the context of current realities. After first acknowledging the validity of both sides of the issue (something Obama seems to be very good at), he sides with relativism, preferring a relativist view in particular as it relates to the institution of slavery.

I finished reading The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream by Barack Obama last week--out of order, as I have not yet read Dreams from my Father--but I debated for a while about whether or not to put comments to page, lacking as I do an adequate framework of knowledge about both the structure and workings of our political system and the historical context of politics in this country to come up with what I consider to be a decent commentary.

However, I did take some notes in the course of the reading, primarily in the beginning, and those I will transcribe here, if only because I am sorely lacking a blog entry for this week.

I found Chapter 1, Republicans and Democrats, most difficult for the reason cited above. Obama describes a widening gap between the two parties--that much I did grasp--and with that an increasing polarization of the issues. As a result, he explains, a supporter of one party these days is expected to toe the party line on every issue--so much so that very little can get done in politics, and that the two parties have lost track of the civil conversations that politicians who were nonetheless in disagreement once had, and in which everyday Americans continue to engage. He traces the origin of this increased divide to the civil rights movement, where one side fought for recognition of civil rights and the other sought return to a clear cut, organized, and seamlessly operating country. Obama argues that although the civil rights movement was a necessary step in our country's evolution--one that won important rights for the disenfranchised--it is now similarly important that we overcome that widened political gulf and return to a place where we can have civil conversations about our common needs once more.

The season for wild edible greens is winding down now, at least here at the house above 11,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies. This fact posed a challenge when Cattail Bob Seebeck invited Gregg and I to attend a potluck at his house, since I was determined to bring a dish featuring wild edible plants in his honor. Thankfully, we had nearly a mason jar full of pennycress seeds on hand. Hoping to include a wild green as well, I took a walk around the house--and that's when the peppergrass occurred to me.

I speak here of Lepidium spp., as presented in Cattail Bob's book, Best-Tasting Wild Plants of Colorado and the Rockies (1998). Peppergrass appears to be a hardy plant, as the plants in the back yard have survived several frosts and snowfalls to date. The seeds and leaves have a spicy, peppery flavor that work well raw in salads or cooked in soups and stir fries, although the peppery flavor diminishes with cooking. As Cattail Bob explains, peppergrass will often produce a second crop of small plants in August and September, which explains why we still have some growing in the yard.

As my collection of wild edible plant identification guides grows, I have been able to likewise grow my knowledge of the resources available to the would-be forager.

This review has been a long time coming, but the Peterson Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants: Eastern/Central North America by Lee Allen Peterson (1977, 33rd printing) is by far the most comprehensive field identification guide I have examined, in keeping with the Peterson guide series made famous by Lee Allen's father, Roger Tory Peterson.

[Edit 6/1/10: Since writing this entry, I have acquired Steve Brill's Identifying & Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants, which is also quite comprehensive, and Samuel Thayer's The Forager's Harvest, in which he calls into question the edibility of at least two of the plants recommended by Peterson (certain water lily tubers, which Thayer says are actuallly poisonous.) As you can imagine, that put the fear of god in me--and so now, in an effort to make this review as honest as possible in light of new information, I will pass that concern along to you. As for me--I have the book and find it quite useful. However, knowing at the very least that there is some controversy, I will continue to cross-reference and use careful judgment about plants that are not widely corroborated in print and online references. Just so you know, Thayer asserts that a number of other wild edible plant books out there also have errors, likely caused by some instances of an author copying another author's accounts of a plant without testing it him or herself. So, do with that what you will. And now, on to the rest of the original entry and what I did and still do like about the Peterson guide...] 

One of the definitions of a civilized people, in contrast to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, is the advent of and reliance on agriculture as a food source. Arguably, the discovery came about naturally as people brought back seed-bearing food plants to their campsites and processed them, only to return the next year and find the same food plants growing nearby.

The late author Euell Gibbons reflects on this idea in Stalking the Faraway Places (1973), when he, his niece and nephew, and a team from National Geographic magazine pitch camp near some cliff dwellings in the Utah desert as a part of a foraging expedition. "I found the immediate neighborhood of these ruins very interesting, botanically," Gibbons states. "The rhubarb dock, Mormon tea, prickly pear, and the thistle we had been gathering grew more plentifully near the ruins than elsewhere. Just below the ruins was almost a thicket of serviceberry in full bloom. ....Did these semi-agricultural primitives have anything to do with the fact that these plants grew here?"

Mullein is not a native species. It's another one of a long list of plants that was brought over by European settlers, but far from being considered an invader, it quickly demonstrated its value. Native American tribes adopted mullein for its medicinal qualities (Brill, 1994 ). Today, it is appreciated for being a good soil-regenerator and is common to waste areas, disturbed soil, and roadsides, particularly areas with dry, sandy soil and a high alkali content.

I first read about mullein's medicinal uses in Common Edible and Medicinal Plants of Colorado (1979) by Kathryn G. and Andrew L. March. "A cold can't be cured till it has run its course, but to help one along and relieve sore throat and cough nothing is superior to this gentle herb," they state. "An ounce of the dried leaves or the equivalent of fresh (a handful) can be infused in a pint of water, or better yet, boiled for ten minutes in a pint of milk, strained through a close-woven white cloth napkin to remove fine hairs, and taken with a little honey a half-cup at a time." The March's promise "a mild sedative effect" and that "a decoction or infusion also helps diarrhea."

Owing to the fact that we live above 11,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains, this is not the first early season snow we've had. Several times now we have awoken early morning to see Mount Silverheels in the distance covered in a light dusting of snow all the way down to treeline. We've also hiked up on Pennsylvania Mountain in mixed weather conditions. Occasionally, there has even been snow--or graupel--falling at the house, but each time it's stopped and started melting shortly thereafter.

I'm posting this entry as "Part II" because I wrote an earlier piece on the first half of the book after it rode away from me, along with a backpack full of our belongings, in a New York City cab last month. When I returned to Colorado, however, Gregg gifted me a paperback copy of the book, which he acquired second-hand at the newly-opened Printed Page bookshop in Denver.

By way of review, Michael Pollan uses the first part of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, to critique what he calls "nutritionism," the tendency of food science and national policy over the last several decades to look at food and healthy eating in terms of individual nutrients, an approach that has allowed the producers of "food-like substances" to make outrageous nutritional claims and in effect wrested the expertise of eating from both mom and the American populace and handed it over to the "experts." As a result, Pollan argues, we have actually become more confused about what we should eat and less healthy as a people.

Despite the fact that Water for Elephants was a #1 New York Times bestseller--among other bestsellers lists--I found it difficult to get into this book at first.

Admittedly, it may have more to do with a personal aversion I seem to have for circus stories, however, and less with the book itself. (Nightmarish recollections of a long ago reading of Geek Love by Katherine Dunn come to mind...) Of course there is also the "what's going on in my life at the time" hypothesis--that how much I enjoy a book depends on inane and inapplicable factors such as how well I slept, how I am feeling, and how busy I am--and that I myself do not know how large a role these factors actually play in my assessment. (This blog book review effort is based around that, by the way; this is my mission to figure out what it is, exactly, that I like and dislike in a novel in an effort to finally churn out all the fiction pieces in my own head one day.)

What a strong impression this book has made on me! I've read many good books recently, but not for a while has a novel engaged my fascination and in turn inspired me to work on my own fiction so much as The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a collection of philosophical essays and musings on life, literature, and art, told through the erudite words of two characters--a low-born concierge named Renée who hides her intellectual pursuits from the wealthy tenants of number 7, rue de Grenelle, where she has lived and worked for her entire adult life; and Paloma, the extremely intelligent 12-year-old daughter of one of those wealthy families, who, seeing the pointlessness in life, has vowed to commit suicide on her 13th birthday.

Empire is the first and probably the last zombie novel I'll ever read. Horror is just not up my alley. The book was loaned to me by a friend because it is a postapocalyptic zombie novel, and I have (long) been working on a piece of postapocalyptic fiction--albeit of a very different variety.  

The book takes place in Jefferson Harbor, Louisiana, where there is a swamp containing a "Source" of dark energy that can bring the dead to life. The undead have caused a viral outbreak--anyone who is bitten becomes a zombie too, and the zombies feed on human flesh. The story takes place many decades after the initial outbreak and is accompanied by older journal entries describing life during the early stages of the plague, although most of the characters have lived their entire lives in the dark times following the outbreak.

I mention this here primarily because Uncle Ken is the OG wild edible plants aficionado in my life (OG stands for "orginal gangster" but has come to mean original, first, or deserving of credit and respect--although I wonder if that term has ever been applied to a forager of wild edible plants before...) Anyway, Uncle Ken is the one who gifted me a copy of Euell Gibbons' Stalking the Wild Asparagus when I was a teenager. He dragged me along trails throught the woods when I was even younger, offering me this and that to taste, much to my mother's chagrin.

We lost our backpack in a New York City cab last week, and with it went our newly acquired book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, by Michael Pollan. The book was gifted to Gregg recently by Bill, and I consider it to be the biggest loss of our whole backpack debacle. I had read almost all of the first section, "The Age of Nutritionism," on the train ride in, and of course that was as far as I got. I liked In Defense of Food enough, however, that I am going to break my own rule and write about a book I haven't finished until a new copy lands in my lap.

The central idea, as proposed in the first line of the introduction, is that we should "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Pollan goes on to describe the historical process by which our food has been (ideologically, hence the "ism" in "nutritionism") broken down into nutrients in the public's consciousness, so that people came to believe they had to shop nutrient by nutrient, knowing which nutrients were "good" and which were "bad," as opposed to trusting their senses as humans had always done before and eating whole foods. One of the many effects of this changed way of thinking about food is that it relegated the expertise of eating to scientists and took it away from the individual eaters, complicating and thereby removing pleasure from the eating process, which, he argues, is a crucial component for human health and happiness.

The Known World by Edward P. Jones is the fictional account of many interwoven lives centering around the life and death of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who becomes a slave owner himself. The story takes place in the antebellum days of Manchester, Virginia, a town and county replete with well-illustrated historical records--all of which are products of Jones' imagination. That black ownership of slaves did occur historically is a known fact, although Jones himself admits to uncertainty about how widely spread the practice actually was.

The background of the story is that Henry Townsend's father, an accomplished craftsman, is eventually able to buy his own freedom from his master, Henry Robbins. Over the years--and it takes several years each time--his father saves up enough money to buy his wife's and then his son Henry's freedom. With Henry, however, the slave owner comes to have a larger influence on the boy's thinking than does his own father. Taking a liking to Henry while the boy is still a slave on his plantation, Robbins treats him "well" and eventually, after Henry is a young free man, helps him to buy his own first slave. Over the years Henry acquires many slaves, much to his father's dismay. When Henry dies, his wife Caldonia is left to run the plantation, which falls increasingly into chaos.

Still, I had a lovely time climbing around in the underbrush, eating probably more huckleberries than I collected and joking around with mom, even as the mosquitoes made a decent lunch of us as well. We spent about a half hour and collected half a small berry container of them, which my four-year-old niece (one of two young'n's who call my mom "grandma") later helped us to devour.

Well, the blog experiment was going great until I hit the road to do some extended visiting in Connecticut and New Hampshire last week. I was blogging just about every day, which was the goal. The Googlebot was visiting regularly; my visitor count was up, and life through the interwebs was generally rosy.

I must say that my original intentions were good. I packed up a few topics I wanted to cover on this trip. I brought along the newest addition to my wild edible plants library, the Peterson Guide to Edible Wild Plants by Lee Allen Peterson, son of Roger Tory who wrote many of the Peterson guides. Since Lee Allen Peterson grew up in Old Lyme, Connecticut, just across the river from my parents' house, I was excited to have that book and start foraging when I got here. I was also thinking I'd finally be able to respond more thoroughly to Steve in Minnesota (I haven't forgotten; I swear!) regarding edible flowers, since the northeastern plants are probably much more similar to what grows in Minnesota, and because I'd have Lee Allen Peterson's guide.

This is the start of an annotated list of online resources about wild edible plants intended to help new and seasoned foragers find additional information. I'm planning a series of these posts, followed by a completed resource list that will probably live at a page of its own, perhaps on a new site dedicated solely to wild edible plants. In the meantime, I hope this helps you find the information you're looking for.

Identification:

• http://foragingpictures.com - A substantial online photo library of wild edibles, inedibles, and toxic plants in various stages of development, put together by Don Wiss while on foraging tours with "Wildman" Steve Briss in the New York City area.

Resource List:

• http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/tracer-bullets/edibleplantstb.html - This Library of Congress Science Reference Service compilation includes an extensive list of resources--books, journals, and online resources--related to wild edible plants. It is so extensive it almost makes me want to stop putting together my own annotated list! (Although...I did not find Cattail Bob on there.) 

These "rules of engagement" are a compilation of information I've put together from many sources over the years for the safe and sustainable foraging of wild edible plants.

• Make sure you identify each plant correctly before tasting it. Use a wild edible plant identification book with pictures or illustrations and compare it carefully to the plant in question. If you are not sure, give the plant a few days to grow some more and double check your hypothesis before trying it. YOU are responsible for making sure a plant is edible before eating it.
• Know the plant's look-alikes, especially the toxic ones. Most wild edible plant identification guides have information about toxic look-alikes to watch out for.
• Try only a small portion the first time, one plant at a time. Wait a full day to see if any ill effects have occurred. If not, increase your consumption the next time and perform the same test. Everyone has the potential to react differently to what they eat--even (or especially) commercially available food.

Have you ever visited a blog, thought up some quirky comment to post, only to be discouraged from doing so by the complex signing-in process required? Well, as of this morning, that shouldn't be a problem here at etmarciniec.com.

In my last couple of entries about wild edible plants, I repeatedly cite Cattail Bob Seebeck, author of Best Tasting Wild Plants of Colorado and the Rockies (1998). Today I figured I'd take a moment to officially review his guide. 

Over the years I've used many wild edible plant guides, so I feel comfortable saying I know a great one when I see it. In fact, until further notice, Cattail Bob's guide is my absolute favorite. Some of the salient features of Best-Tasting Wild Plants of Colorado and the Rockies include the following:

• It has four (4) full-color pictures of each plant at different seasons of the year.
• It separates plants into high and low altitude.
• Each entry has a chart describing the growth phases of the plants by month and altitude. 
• Look-alikes for edible plants are listed along with their toxicity.
• There is a separate section on toxic plants including pictures to help distinguish toxic plants from edible ones.
• Each entry has suggestions for how to prepare and eat the plants.

The Little White Trip - A Night in the Pines by Peter Joseph Gallagher is definitely "a trip," as the author wrote on the first page of the copy he sold to me in person back in 2007 at Venice Beach, California. "One of the first to take this trip," is what he wrote, followed by a thank you.

I didn't buy the book because of the back cover description, which starts, "They say that killing with a knife is the sex of murder." I can't even sit through an entire horror movie, so serial killer stories don't usually make my reading list, especially ones that mix murder and sex, which is what I thought about when I judged the book--at first--by its cover.

I also did not purchase The Little White Trip because I was intrigued by Matthew Thomas' forward, which explains that Peter Gallagher was, in fact, the ghostwriter commissioned to tell Thomas' true story, but who Thomas realized should get credit for it as the writer in the end. (Good for you, Matthew Thomas!)

I've always wanted to keep a list of the books that I've read, so now I'm going to do it here on the blog. These are in chronological order to the best of my ability. This is a work in progress as I am certain to have missed more than a couple in recent history, nevermind the long-term work it's going to take to excavate the books I knew from my more distant past.

After some consideration I've decided to do this twofold.

• First is the list of books, posted in this entry. I am only including books that I finished.
• Next I am going to track down my comments for however-many of these books I have in my journal, and post them as separate blog entries according to the approximate date in which I finished reading them. Future book commentaries, then, will be future blog posts.

Part of me is hoping that if I start to keep a bibliography of my life it will help to inform and direct my future writing.

Lies My Teacher Told Me is a nonfiction history book consisting of the author's attempt to debunk various myths, untruths, and omissions in American history as taught to high school students through US history textbooks. The author analyzes 12 textbooks, mostly traditional texts but also including two "discourse" style books, around specific events in US History.

Throughout Lies, Loewen illustrates how Anglo centric the textbooks are in their selection and presentation of material, how they tend to present one-sided stories in order to preserve the "heroification" of certain historical figures (like George Washington, Christopher Columbus, Woodrow Wilson, and Helen Keller). For example, most of the textbooks paint a glowing picture of Columbus and how he "found" the "New World" (despite the land's previous occupation by indigenous people, the facts that many other explorers may have been in North America previously, and that Columbus enslaved and murdered thousands of indigenous people).

Mark and I had a brief conversation yesterday about the importance of protecting one's public identity, prompted when I asked him his opinion of that fact that I've started using my name for my blog URL, eHow, and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Mark is extremely cautious about protecting his public identity, particularly online. Images of the writer at Burningman, he argued, could affect her negatively should she seek future work promoting public education.

I had it in my head when I left the PR job that I wanted to become a "real" writer, not a writer bound by the perspectives of the organizations I represented.

A couple of things happened to me back in those PR days. For one, the line between truth and fiction became blurry for me. If a public leader needed a quote but didn't have time to come up with something, I wrote it and ran it by him or her for approval. If a story had to be developed but I hadn't yet talked to the parties involved, I wrote a draft purely on how I imagined it and then inserted the information I gleaned after the fact. 

The second thing that happened is that my own opinions took a back seat to my craft. I felt, to quote Pink Floyd, "comfortably numb" out of pure necessity. It's hard to acknowledge anything negative--I mean truly acknowlege--and then turn around and write only the positive side of the story. So I developed the habit of ignoring my own critique of the system in those instances when something fishy seemed afoot or even when I knew something was outright wrong. Instead I dived into my work to get it done, and then at the end of the day dived into other things--exercise, friends, hobbies, travel--by way of distraction.

I had a recurring idea that I didn't like the work I had dedicated myself to--and by extension the person I had become--but again, like my other misgivings, I went to lengths to ignore it.

I picked up The Bean Trees at a rummage sale (one of my favorite places to go book shopping). I almost didn't take it, but in the end I'm very glad I did.

The story is about a young girl who gets away from her go-nowhere town just as soon as she's saved up enough money to buy a car. She's not sure where she's going so she just drives. Then at one of the stops on her trip, a Native-American woman puts a baby girl on the passenger seat of her car and tells her to take it. She continues onward, now caring for a small child she nicknames "Turtle" who, it turns out, has been sexually abused. Eventually she stops out of necessity because her car dies, so she calls that city her temporary new home. There she meets a handful of characters who become her new family.

Am I allowed to give a shout out to my own website from my own blog? Sure I am; it's my blog, right?

First of all, I can't take all the credit for extremesideslipping.com. This niche-snowboarding-humor website is in fact a collaborative effort between myself and Gregg Davis (greggdavis.com). It's a ridiculous site through-and-through, but (when I'm in the mood to write for it) I can't express enough how fun and satisfying it is after so many years of writing sappy PR gobble-de-gook from the perspective of what I though one organization's public wanted to hear. It is refreshingly amazing, now, to write irreverent, virtually nonsensical stuff. (Perhaps that is my calling after all, hah!)

Anyway, if the description--"irreverent virtually nonsensical stuff" is appealing to you, then check out extremesideslipping.com.

Uncle Ken gave me West with the Night to read on one of my many book-foraging visits to his home library. Originally published in 1942, one of the things that continues to capture my imagination about West with the Night is what Ernest Hemingway wrote about it in a letter to Maxwell Perkins:

"Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer's log book. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers. The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people's stories, are absolutely true....I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book."

Aside from that, the story is Markham's account of being a bush pilot in Africa in the 1930's. She is a remarkable and brave woman in a time that women were not piloting planes around Africa; in fact, very few people were doing it at all. I like the writing style very much, aside from the sometimes not-so-enlightened race references that date the work and offend me somewhat. But it was good, too, to read the descriptions and the stories of Africa--both its landscape and its people--from her unique vantage points in the air as well as on the ground.

I am working on two books at present, and they are in various phases of finishing:

• Mama Lilia
• The Juana Chronicles

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Mama Lilia - The Mama Lilia book, which is as yet untitled but which I will refer to like so for lack of a name yet, is the fictional story of two college girls, one undocumented and one fully documented. These girls, named Amy & America, become fast friends as college mates often do. Throughout the course of their relationship, they hatch an unlikely plan--that Amy will try to sneak America's grandmother, who has been deported to Mexico, back into the United States. In the end, the fantastic plot becomes somewhat of a media debacle, with part of the story told through the often humorous accounts of the reporters covering it. Meanwhile the girls' lives become so intertwined that they end up embroiling their families and loved ones as well in a redeeming yet preachy tale that is sure to liven the reader's sympathy and  imagination. (This is my book that is most complete to date, thanks to Nanowrimo.org. I wrote it in November--50,000 words--and have been editing and making changes at a snail's pace since then.)

The Juana Chronicles- I started this story (which will be referred to as The Juana Chronicles until I think of a better name) 10 years ago. Originally the date of the so-called "apocalypse" was supposed to happen at the year 2000, the start of the new millennium. So much for deadlines, hah! To date I have 10,000 finely sculped and well imagined words, a number upon which I plan to improve by next November's Nanowrimo at the very latest. Anyway, the story takes place in a fictional immediate post-apocalyptic era--where the "apocalypse" is caused by the confluence of natural and human disasters, leaving a world suddenly devoid of the basic structure of society and survivors left to fend for themselves by adapting to their new world order. The story stars a female heroine who travels far and wide to conduct reconnaisance on family and friends in the aftermath, and who finds out a thing or two about her world and herself along the way.

It wouldn't be a new blog site without the obligatory "I have decided to start a blog," would it? So that's what this is.

My first thought in starting the project was to have a place to catalog the last 10 years of my writing, but since it seems such a Herculean task after all I am going to start with just the recent stuff and then venture boldly forth with actual blogging.

It's definitely a whole different beast than the other websites I've done with html editors. Almost makes me think I'm going to have to become a programmer so I can tailor it to do exactly what I want. In the meantime, a shout out to Gregg for helping me set this up.

We'll see what comes of it.

I have decided to compile my recent articles in this blog; they are accessible under the "articles" category. The majority are published works featured either in newspapers or magazines. I have included in each entry the publication outlet and date of publication, with tearsheets and links to the publishers wherever possible.

The Book Doctor is a first person account by a narrator who makes her living helping a motley crew of people to finish and/or doctor their books. The characters, to me, are hard to read, vapid people who are cognizant of the lie they are living but persist nonetheless. I found it hard to like these characters.

The book resonated with me, however, because of a crazy project I have embarked upon assisting a client to complete his self help book for girls, which is both amazingly sexist and nonetheless honestly intended to help people. So that makes me a "book doctor" too. The book was recommended to me by my friend Heather for this reason, and gifted to me by my friend Cathy.  

At the very least, The Book Doctor made me feel like I could write my own book. I read it right before starting my NaNoWriMo novel project, so it was good timing.

Grandma Marciniec gave me Tuesdays with Morrie after reading it herself.

Morrie, Mitch's old professor, is dying, but looking at life positively, treating it like he is giving his final class on death, to the very end. He stresses the importance of human relationships. I agree.

Tuesdays with Morrie is a small book and super easy reading, so it was relaxing and nice while also uplifting for me--and probably for grandma too, as we had both recently lost someone close to us. It's a good book for making sense of death and life without too much mental strain.

[Article] - Published in the Fall 2008 issue of 32 Degrees magazine, a publication of www.thesnowpros.org, Lakewood, CO

Snowboarding is not always easy. For instructors who like to push themselves, it's usually a challenge. And sometimes, it can be downright scary.

If I were to pick one term to describe my first run at the 2008 Rider Rally, held April 20-25 at Mammoth Mountain, California, scary is it. The last stretch of the Panorama gondola ride is breathtakingly high, and if that weren't enough to take one's breath away, the steep, impenetrable boiler plate on Cornice Bowl certainly was. Fortunate was the rider with a finely tuned edge; less fortunate were the rest of us.

Terrified to turn, I got on my heel edge, really low, and butt-checked my way down in a directional slide as I fought to maintain control of a falling leaf. And I like ice.

The Naming of the 2008-2012 National Teams

[Article] - The article below is the unpublished version. An editor-revised version was published in the Fall 2008 issue of 32 Degrees magazine, a publication of www.thesnowpros.org, Lakewood, CO

"To a new team and new friends," toasted a group of candidates for the AASI National Snowboard Team, some of whom ended up making the new team--and some who did not.

It was just after 8 pm, Friday, May 2, 2008. Candidates for all four disciplines of the PSIA-AASI National Teams--including alpine, snowboard, nordic, and adaptive--had been gathering since 7:00 PM on the 3rd floor of Main Lodge at Mammoth Mountain, California in anticipation of the new teams' announcement.

The Role of the Instructor in the Age of Freestyle

[Article] - The article below is the unpublished version. A much-revised version was published in the Fall 2008 issue of 32 Degrees magazine, a publication of www.thesnowpros.org, Lakewood, CO

March 15th-16th turned out to be another weekend of variable Vermont weather as Killington Resort played host to the final stop of the 2007-08 Chevy Grand Prix following contests at Breckenridge and Tamarack earlier in the season. Featuring halfpipe and slopestyle competitions, an overall tour purse of $300,000, and a Chevy Avalanche for each of the tour winners, the Grand Prix drew riders from the USA and abroad including contenders for the 2010 Olympics. The event also made Killington history as one of the biggest snowboarding competitions the mountain has ever hosted.

A long list of instructors signed up to work as slippers, starters, security, and hospitality. A few even labored into the night setting up flood lights on the new Superpipe, an 18-foot tall, 440-foot-long beauty that everyone was dying to hit. In the process, they got to see the event through from practices and qualifiers to finals, mingling (and sometimes riding) with the competitors, and gaining an appreciation for life on the pro circuit.

Encouraged by my boss--eastern division AASI examiner and development team member John Hobbs--I spent three days traipsing around investigating what the Grand Prix has to do with snowboard instruction.

[Article] published in The Sheet, Mammoth Lakes, CA, 4.07

It's not a good idea to sweep methamphetamines under the rug--a point with which users, recovering addicts, dealers, and former MLPD Wildlife Specialist and "Mammoth Not MamMETH" sticker creator Steve Searles are all likely to agree.

Often referred to as "meth," methamphetamine is a highly addictive central nervous system stimulant that can be injected, smoked, snorted, or ingested. It is cheaper and more long-lasting than cocaine and can be made easily enough in the comfort of your home or in a mobile meth lab out in the forest--which, rumor has it, is not unseen in these parts.

"It's more than an epidemic," said S.G., 18, a petite local girl who is approaching five months clean after an arduous 6-year battle with the drug.

[Article] published in The Sheet, Mammoth Lakes, CA, 2.10.07

On Sunday, January 28th, the skies opened and dropped five inches of fresh snow on the ill-fated June Mountain, which would close for the season by the end of the day. The slopes were packed with school groups floundering happily in the powder. Local poachers ducked furtively in and out of the trees, quickly shredding up the new snow along with the bases of their boards. The weekend would prove to be one of the busiest of the short and bittersweet season.

[Press Release] unpublished excerpt, Inglewood, CA, 2.06

On the afternoon of February 23rd, Maria Jimenez received a call to accompany her daughter Luz to school on Friday, but no one could tell her why. The surprise was bigger than either mother or daughter had imagined--out of 50,000 high school students across the nation to submit entries to Oprah Winfrey's National High School Essay Contest, Morningside High School's Luz Jimenez had been named one of the 50 winners.

The essay topic--"Why is Elie Wiesel's book Night relevant today?"--was no light matter; students had to delve deep to relate the Nobel laureate's Holocaust memoirs as a teenage boy to the present day.

[Press Release] published 8.05 in several local papers, Inglewood, CA

If you happened to walk into one of the four classrooms hosting the Inglewood Unified School District's Summer Bridge Mathematics program this July, you might have been surprised to encounter students playing games. Far from an idle pursuit, however, game-playing was the main attraction of this year's program--and an effective strategy for preparing new 9th graders for high school math.

[Press Release] published in several local papers, Inglewood, CA, 1.05

Inglewood's 22nd annual Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration and march shifted gears this year, opening with the ecumenical service usually reserved for the parade's end. And, for a pleasant change, the service was packed with young people.

The day began with a rousing and creative performance by Morningside High School's dance troupe, elevating spirits in preparation for the march to come. This year's theme was "Here I am, send me," which helped students to connect Dr. King's teachings with their own role in helping to make his dream a reality.

[Press Release] published in several local papers, Inglewood, CA, 11.04

On Wednesday, November 10, 2004, the Inglewood Unified School District approved the construction contract submitted by FTR International, Inc. for the Crozier Middle School project, which is slated to begin construction in December of 2004. The project entails 44 new classrooms, a gymnasium, kitchen, administrative building, library/multimedia center, and sports fields. Crozier will be the 3rd major Measure K project to be undertaken, following comprehensive projects at Parent and Centinela schools completed in 2003.