by The AVA
Best Wine Industry Writing: Will Parrish’s on-going series about the industrial booze business’s many depredations, social and environmental. Worst wine writing: A tie between the Chronicle and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat whose staffs turn out on a daily basis endless versions of this paragraph: “Winemaker Katy Hammond found an intense expression, evoking thoughts of [...]
Greetings one and all. If you are sitting comfortably then I shall begin. Well that’s Christmas/Whatever-you-call-it ‘done and dusted’ and now on to Act 2 — New Year’s Eve! Try to enjoy yourselves and if someone is behaving badly just smile and walk away. You know it makes sense. With all the excesses of the [...]
by Steve Sparks
I met with Terry at the conference room upstairs in the Farrer Building in downtown Boonville where she had arrived just before me with coffee and cinnamon rolls from Mosswood Market next door. Things had clearly got off to a good start. Terry was born in Santa Monica, southern California to parents Muriel Berg and [...]
The possum baby slashed and jerked its way around Joanna’s uterus in a river of milky white mucus and blood. “Ya muthafuckin’ beast!” she wailed at it, her back grindin’ into the bed while she sank her chewed up nails into that greasy motel mattress. “Get outta that dirty place! Get outta me!” Child rearin’ [...]
Before the Judicial Council was voted in by the people of the State in California, the local judge was a Justice of the Peace and was known to the people as a J.P. He would be a local man elected to office by the voters of the district and he was supposed to handle all [...]
The Turks were so patient for putting up with me this fall as I cycled around the western half of Turkey. I cringe now when I recall the many times, while in conversation with strangers, that I lifted my feet and showed them the mucky gobs of fig seeds mashed into the underside of my [...]
by The AVA
NOT SO TABOO Editor, This week’s letters section is a fine demonstration of why sex, religion and politics are traditionally taboo topics in “polite” company. An observation: Sex, religion and politics are, aside from the weather, the only things that matter. So it follows that people tend to become crazed and irrational, even violent when [...]
by Todd Walton
“To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.” — Nadia Boulanger During the four years in the early 1990’s when I ran the Creative Writing program for the California State Summer School for the Arts, I oversaw the work of two hundred teenaged writers and worked intimately with [...]
It’s been a triumphant month for Big Oil. First, the Obama administration teamed with the Chinese delegation to scuttle the timid climate agenda at the Durban summit. Then recidivist offender British Petroleum won the rights to drill once again in the perilous depths of the Gulf of Mexico. And last week the Interior Department gave [...]
Too bad Kim Jong-il kicked the bucket last weekend. If the divine hand that laid low the North Korean leader had held off for a week or so, Kim would have been sustained by the news that President Obama is signing into law a bill that puts the United States not immeasurably far from the [...]
