Walkin' with Joaquin

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  Terry Tierney read first, choosing two perfect poems by Miller: Sea Blown (which seemed, to me, to be about an unpublished writer, a perfect companion to Columbus ) and Mount Shasta , an ode to the white mountain.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...