I have an article in The Writer about book trailers. Publishers are starting to make advertisements for books very much like movie trailers. I explored this phenomenon in the current issue of the magazine–check it out on newsstands if you want to know more.
My book review on A Reliable Wife, a first novel by Robert Goolrick, is up on PopMatters. A sample:
A Reliable Wife is the first novel by Robert Goolrick, whose previous memoir The End of the World as We Know It dealt with his abusive childhood. Set in 1907, the novel is about Ralph Truitt, a wealthy man in a small Wisconsin town who has put an ad in the newspaper for “a reliable wife.” But Catherine Land, the woman who gets off the train to marry him, is anything but. She carries with her a blue bottle of arsenic that she will use to murder Truitt and take all his money. Catherine wants “love and money” in this life, and while Truitt supplies the money, the love must be with her “useless and beautiful lover,” who she has left behind her in the big city.
The tone Goolrick establishes here is florid and descriptive with moments reminiscent of Jane Eyre, if that book were set in America and if Jane Eyre were an opium-smoking prostitute. Certainly the frozen landscape of rural Wisconsin works as well as the moors of England to portray isolation and severity. But this gothic landscape …
Cliffhanger! Read the rest here.
I have a couple of articles in this issue of the Pacific Sun. One is about Davidson Seamount, a giant underwater volcano that they are just now starting to explore. They have found amazing sea creatures down there. Excerpt:
In the waters off Monterey, 10,000 feet below the ocean surface, is the lost world of Davidson Seamount. Down there in the darkness, pink bubblegum coral stands 8 feet tall. Spiny pink-and-white crabs scuttle across rocks. Sock tunicates bob in the current, tethered to the ground by only a string. It’s a place so pristine and full of potential that it was recently made part of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, which spans from Marin County all the way down to Hearst Castle.
I also wrote about the living roof on the Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park for the same issue.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to Voicetrax, a voice-over training school in Sausalito and wrote about my experience for the Pacific Sun:
As with most people, I don’t like hearing the sound of my voice. Even though I know that my voice sounds different in my head than it does to other people, hearing it played back to me is always a little unsettling. So, standing in a recording booth behind a microphone, about to record a mock voice-over audition at Voicetrax, a voice acting school in Sausalito, is a tad uncomfortable for me. It doesn’t help that outside the booth, a room full of advanced students is listening to my every word.
I’m supposed to read a monologue where tap water tries to convince the listener that it is better, cheaper and fresher than bottled water. Through a window in the booth, I can see Samantha Paris, owner of Voicetrax, sitting behind recording equipment. A successful actress who was the voice of Roxy in the 1980s cartoon show Jem and the Holograms, Paris is a compact and bright-eyed woman in her late 40s.
Through a speaker, she tells me to practice reading the monologue before we record it. The mic goes off and it’s suddenly quiet in the booth. I look down at the script in front of me. “Hi, it’s me, Water,” I mumble, trying to summon high school drama class to my mind.
As someone who works at home, I felt a special affinity to my article on coworking in Northbay Biz Magazine. Coworking is a trend where creative professionals such as writers, software developers, graphic designers, etc., go in together on the rent of a space and use it as a shared office. The idea is to cut down on the loneliness of working by yourself and increase productivity by sharing your day with other creative workers. There’s a coworking office in Penngrove, and I got to meet the people running it and see their work situation firsthand. While I’m not ready to give up working in my pajamas yet, I thought it was a pretty cool set up.
Excerpt:
Working at home may mean you get to keep your own hours and work in your pajamas, but it also has a downside. Too often, working by yourself can leave you lonely and floundering at the keyboard, fighting for focus and productivity. For some creative professionals, the solution to this problem is to take their laptops to the nearest coffee shop. For others, there’s coworking.
Coworking is a movement where freelancers co-lease space and use it as a shared office. Although this movement started in urban areas like New York and San Francisco, Sonoma County’s SoCo Depot was created earlier this year.
One of the coolest parts of my job is that I get to go experience people’s lives every now and then. Last week I interviewed local artist Mike Garlington for the North Bay Bohemian. I visited Garlington at his studio and watched him take a picture of a girl with a live ferret in her mouth for his twisted fairy tales series. I know! Then Garlington very generously showed me how to develop photos in a darkroom. Here’s an excerpt:
Michael Garlington is photographing a woman with a ferret in her mouth. The ferret stands on a stump, its head deep in the back of the woman’s throat. It is licking saliva off her tongue, its white feet trembling to keep balance.
The woman is Cassidy Slater, one of many models who pose for Garlington for no payment other than a print of the photo. Slater is the model Garlington calls when he has a particularly weird concept, because, they both explain, she’s “up for anything.”
Today, Slater is wearing a drop-waist dress and her long hair is in ponytails. She’s sitting by a fence at the end of the country road outside of Petaluma. Garlington, who is standing a few feet away with a Polaroid camera, tells her to look at him while the ferret is in her mouth.
“That’s so good,” he says, looking through the camera. “The eyes will be like, ‘Am I doing something bad?’ Oh, this could be such a good fairy tale. ‘Hungry, hungry Etta, sitting by the fence.’”
I wrote an article on homeschooling for this week’s issue of the Pacific Sun. I grew up in a church basement school and have been around homeschoolers all my life, so I was surprised to learn that a. a lot of people actively dislike homeschooling, and b. homeschoolers are very protective of what they do, to the point that it was difficult to get people to talk to me. Much of what I found out when I did talk to them surprised me. Excerpt:
Ever since homeschooling came under fire last February, Marin homeschoolers have been nervous. A ruling from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal in a case looking into abuse in a homeschooling family stated that parents must have teaching credentials to educate their kids, something that has never been required before.
“When that court case came down, people freaked out,” says Tamara Markwick, a homeschooler living in San Rafael. “It seemed like the majority of the way people are homeschooling might become illegal. People didn’t want to talk to the press and have their name out there. They didn’t want to say something that could come back and bite them.”
Well hello. I interviewed singer Nellie McKay for the North Bay Bohemian last week. It is on newsstands now. Excerpt:
Nellie McKay may have artistic ADD. The singer-songwriter, who performs at the Mystic Theatre on Aug. 18, doesn’t just write songs. Recently, McKay has acted on Broadway and in the movie P.S. I Love You, shown up in rap videos on YouTube and written book reviews for the New York Times. This is on top of recording three albums of her own music, most recently Obligatory Villagers, released last September.
“I’m jack of all trades, master of none, you know,” she said in a recent phone interview. “I have a short attention span. I wish it wasn’t so, truthfully. But there are two ways to approaching something creatively. One is to focus on the good stuff and aspire to be like that. That’s the depressing way. The other is to focus on all the bad stuff and pat yourself on the back when it comes out OK. That’s my approach.”
I plan so see McKay when she performs in Petaluma on Monday. Here is a sample of her music for the uninitiated:
I have an article in this issue of The Writer, which you can get in the magazine section of your local bookstore. It’s about product placement in books. How often are publishers putting paid mention of a product in books? Is this something writers may have to contend with in the future? Given the way the book market is going, is product placement in books, as the headline says, inevitable?
Check it out if you have a chance.
I have a couple of articles coming out. In the most recent issue of Bay Nature, I wrote an article looking at the Pacific leatherback turtle. This amazing turtle–the biggest turtle in the world, in fact–migrates through the Bay Area every year. I would love to see one. Here’s an excerpt:
Go sailing off the coast in late summer and you might not notice a Pacific leatherback turtle when one swims past you, even though it is the largest turtle in the world—it can grow up to 1,500 pounds. A solitary creature, it glides smoothly through the water, its mottled blue-gray back blending in with its surroundings and obscuring its huge bulk. From beneath, it is covered with white spots, which help it blend in against the sun-dappled ocean surface.
More here.
In last week’s Pacific Sun, I wrote an article on the newest wedding trend: green weddings. Some people are trying to make their weddings more environmentally friendly. Take a look at the article here.