Walkin' with Joaquin

Since the “cyclone bomb” in January , the rain has continued. March came in like a lion and seems to be going out like a lion as well, with pouring rain and power outages and c-c-c-cold temperatures that make the clueless say "I thought it was supposed to be global warming." The giant, mature trees that are now coming down now with heartbreaking frequency all over town—on highways, city streets, back yards, buildings—all over the Bay Area, are coming down for a reason. Stressed by drought, unable to withstand the rare 80mph winds, many are also at the ends of their life spans. It's hard to imagine this land without them all, but when they were founded, San Francisco and surrounds were treeless, rocky places. There was a tree-planting frenzy in the latter part of the 19th century, a cultural dream of a gentler future. I was delighted to discover, recently, that California’s Arbor Day was started by none other than our own passionate poet and planters, Joaquin Miller! He, I

As part of Oakland's citywide day of service, the Berkeley Branch of the California Writers Club is again hosting an Earth-day writing event at Joaquin Miller Park. Join the "Wolf Pack" writers of the California Writers Club in putting pen to paper and "Howling at the Moonshot." As the weather takes its revenge, we need to continue to inspire and guide others in new ways to forge a new relationship to nature—which always wins.  If you are working on an earth, nature, or climate-related project, please join us at the Ranger Station in Joaquin Miller Park for a few hours of hard work. We'll have lots of prompts and ideas available, too. Write your letters, articles, op-eds, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama, science fiction or cli-fi. Come any time during this 3-hour focused writing window. Write indoors or find a spot outside to focus on your words. When we're ready to put our pens down we'll go outside to share our works, for our second annual &quo

We cannot overstate the significance of what just happened here in Oakland! Concept art courtesy Sogora Te' Sequoia Point, which teens in the 50s and 60s used as a necking spot (ahem, how many Oaklanders were made there?) and from the looks of all the broken bottles and butts is still a prime party spot, is no longer Sequoia Point. And it has been returned to its proper place in history, as Ohlone land. Not a reservation, but a rematriation. Those five acres have been renamed Rinihmu Pulte’irekne , which means "Above the Red Ocher" in the Chechenyo language, which was spoken by the people of this for 1000 years. (The East Bay has been inhabited since 4000 B.C.) With a few other Friends of Joaquin Miller Park , I attended the Land Back ceremony in December. Festivities began at dusk, with a shivvering crowd gathered around leathered and feathered dancers from different tribes dancing on the near-freezing patio of the Chabot Science Center. They led the crowd in pra

Last fall and winter, I marveled at the mushrooms and wowed at the water . Life things and other urgent projects have cut down on my marveling and wowing time in recent months, but when I started walkin' in 2023, well, it was like six months of wow in a week. More like woah. Woah.  The New Year's Eve "cyclone bomb," which they warned us about after the fact, was a feature of the coming "atmospheric river" that they'd been talking about for weeks. Many of us shrugged, preparing for storms but skeptical of the creative spin that must be put on each weather event now, to out-do all those "weather-'pocalypses" that we had a decade ago. (Are we post-apocalypse? Is this the new normal?) Weather cycles come and go, so we shall see. But until this year it was really hard to imagine things getting worse. I moan a lot about erosion, either on this blog or to anyone who will listen. But this year it's more like an explosion. Today on my walk from

I couldn't get up to the Park again today...I miss it...but I did submit this report about my wanderings in the Memorial Grove to the CWC Bulletin .  Walk with me, through the Park where poets lived, and try to imagine an Oak Woodland down there, not a town creeping up the hill, not a temple pointing to the sky, not a stadium, airport, and in the distance, the jutting middle finger of a bigger city. Try to imagine humans seeking truth, seeking each other, feeling the sky is enough, seeing it through impassioned verse and purple prose. So inspired, that over the years they saw the view through to become a park. These Hights that once swarmed with artists, with storytellers, all with the call of some frontier or another in their veins.  As the CWC Writer-in-Residence I walk and write weekly in the Park, dodging bicycles and poison oak, spying on crows and squirrels, snacking on miner’s lettuce and berries, trying to build a bridge from that world to this one, and to what comes next.

This year, for California Writers Week, I once again assembled a group of poets and authors to read out the works of early California Writers on behalf of the California Writers Club. I stood at the top of the Cascade, which finally began to flow again earlier this month, and oriented guests of "A Reading in the Redwoods" to the legacy of this wooded slope.  "It was not just a few famous writers who gathered, here," I said, sharing the image of a hillside swarming with seekers of inspiration that had filled my imagination just hours before when browsing the vivid Joaquin Miller archive . "This hill was a commune of creatives, nearly a century before Hippies were invented, a spectacle and a sanctuary."  Terry Tierney read first, choosing two perfect poems by Miller: Sea Blown (which seemed, to me, to be about an unpublished writer, a perfect companion to Columbus ) and Mount Shasta , an ode to the white mountain. He followed with a delightful poem called