It might not be true that every family has one cool thing about it but at least I can say that my family does. Sixty-three years ago my father was teaching at Oswego State Teacher's…
Posts published in “Essays”
The favorite books of one's youth can be dangerous stuff. One of the highest-risk authors for me turned out to be Ernest Hemingway. His writing almost killed me in at least in three ways. That…
Mount Nyiragongo’s eruption and earthquake, and the aftershocks that continue to shake the Democratic Republic of Congo remind one that the Christian God of that Christian country—brought to Africa by colonialism—has always been a meteorological,…
Graduation season is everywhere, and be happy if you needn’t sit through yawn-inducing ceremonies celebrating the most recent students bumped from the educational assembly line. School administrators permit speakers to address graduates only if they…
From his cell within the Mendocino County Jail, Dr. John Wheeler told Ukiah City Press editor A.O. Carpenter that he was innocent of any connection to the ambush murder of two Mendocino City citizens in…
My parents had many droll and irreverent friends, among them their orthopedist, who declared (most likely after a few belts at one of their circa 1950s cocktail parties) that the human knee was God’s little…
Before I went to bed, Mommy told me tales of genies, demons, and magic. One story, relayed to her by an uncle in Lebanon, haunted me for years. Long ago a farmer’s daughter named Livy…
Albion's Pebbles Trippet grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. As our nation is now acknowledging, in 1921 the prosperous Black section of Tulsa, Greenwood, was utterly destroyed by the White Citizens backed by Law Enforcement. I asked our…
(Ed note: We are reprinting this 2009 Steve Sparks interview of Don Shanley, a long-time resident of the Anderson Valley who survived, just barely, some of the most intense combat in Vietnam.) * * *…