William S. Burroughs has an imposing appearance. He looks down on one from a height of more than six feet, but he seems even taller than he is. The man is slender, almost to the…
Posts published in “Essays”
I am Kurt Vonnegut. Oh, Kurt Vonnegut may appear to be a brilliant, revered male novelist. I may appear to be a mediocre and virtually unknown female newspaper columnist. We may appear to have nothing…
Highway 128 is a favorite drive of mine, winding through the Alexander Valley from Napa County (though the prerequisite here is that you must like the looks of vineyards), then on from Cloverdale to the…
Just past the stroke of midnight in the Monday pre-morn of August 3, Ron Carey, Teamster president, called a strike against UPS. What we have here is a struggle over the basic tilt of the…
I told the mighty editor last Tuesday morning that I’d been to Reggae on the River, and he gave me an incredulous guffaw as if I’d confessed to joining a Robert Bly men’s circle. His…
In the fall of 1971 I was about to be cut off at the knees if I didn't “do something productive” with my life. I was 17 and had been out of school for a year, a casualty of “dress code” politics. (I'd braided a foot-long eagle feather into my hair in honor of the first Native American Week, and when I refused to take it out, they kicked me out.)
It was raining Sunday, nobody else from the AVA wanted to go, I would miss the 49er’s game on television, and I had almost no confidence in the leadership abilities of the persons organizing Headwaters…