Alice Walker, who you recently read about in the pages of the AVA, is in trouble again, once again for something that she wrote. The powers-that-be at the Bay Area Book Festival, which will be…
Posts published by “Jonah Raskin”
In France, and all around the globe, eyes are focused on the French presidential election, though not many citizens seem to be hot and bothered about the candidates and the race. In San Francisco, where…
Have you ever felt like a fraud? Maybe you have at some juncture in your own life. Right now I feel like an imposter. I live in San Francisco, but I don't think of myself…
To understand San Bruno Mountain today it helps to know some of its history. After all, it’s probably the last frontier in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nearly 300 years after Christopher Columbus arrived in…
Born in St. Louis near the Mississippi River, the author, teacher and ecologist, Jane Wolff, lives and works in Ontario, Canada. “Up stream” is how she describes her current location. “Water is key,” she adds.…
At San Francisco’s Maison Nico—an épicerie (a grocery) and a café—where I’ve been shopping, eating and sipping wine and coffee at least once a week for the past six months, I’m reminded of Paris in…
I feel doubly or triply connected to the war in the Ukraine because my grandparents on my mother’s side of the family came from the Ukraine, escaped with their lives and little else, though they…
I’m a walker, not a hiker, though my preference for walking over hiking hasn’t prevented me from admiring Sam Tidwell, who went on a long road trip, solo, soon after his 21st birthday and who…
He loved the sounds and the heft of words, though the first words he heard were not English words. Mais non. They were joual, the dialect of working class French Canadians spoken by his parents…