A note to Andrei Codrescu on the launch of his Plague Diaries

Well Andrei, it’s good to see you’re alive. After all these years. Last time I heard from you was in a blanket cc email asking  me whether or not I was dead or alive. Afraid of the outcome, like Schrodinger’s cat, I didn’t know whether to answer it, or to not answer it. Rest assured, I didn’t take it personally. After all it was addressed—or was it undressed—to practically everybody else in Sonoma County. Is you in or is you out?

Yes, I’m delighted to say we’re all still alive and kicking. Gail King and Pat Nolan are on Facebook. Well, Gail is. You know how Pat. Jeffrey Miller is still dead. Hunce Voelcker, too. I wonder if his Brooklyn Bridge castle still stands in the deepwoods of Monte Rio?

I finally got around to scanning my old slides if it. All this free time. If you want to see them, give a shout. It’s fairly quiet in this neck of the woods. No one is out and about, it’s like a rollback in time to the 1960s sans logging trucks. The Summer of Love hasn’t yet happened. We’re all honing our backwoods skills. Victory gardens and foraging. Everybody’s baking bread. We’re all getting fat. And we howl nightly with the neighbors. Lately the coyotes have taken to joining us.

Glad to see you’re here. As you know, there is no there there. On some level, via group memory, we never quite let go of you and your stories. And you’ve no idea who is am, I was one of the young poets taking sprout in poetry’s garden. You are still part of the strange Ur text of our lives. And we’re delighted that you are in fine fettle too. You’re looking good. What a long strange trip it’s been. Carry on.

Bliss Buys Cochran saw my note and wrote: I'm also glad you're still around, Andrei. You probably don't even remember me, but maybe you remember the Sonoma County Stump, where Mo and I both worked. I believe you submitted some articles (a column?), it's been 50 years so forgive me if my memory's vague. I look forward to your Plague Diary and I hope you'll be safe in the epicenter. Tried to friend you, but FB says you already have too many friends—5,000!...never knew they could put a limit on your friends. Wonder if THEY'RE all still around.

I told Bliss that I posted her note to Andrei Codrescu. If you go to his author page you can like it and then leave a message there directly if you would like.

Andrei wrote back: Wow! What a blast from the past. Not quite sure who’s who but I’ve been in touch with Pat. I love his Lufe of Crine, his novels and blog. I’m back in New York after 50 years or do... living in Brooklyn. It’s like I left 10 mins ago — a huge demonstration just went past toward the Brooklyn Bridge, probably about to meet thousands in the other side in the old rad Lower East Side.
I have occasional bouts of nostalgia about Monte Rio but too busy to indulge it. I post 3x/a week a video Plague Journal at codrescu.com/my-news. If you want to see it on FB it’s at the Andrei Codrescu Here page. I wonder what Jeff would have thought about the internet, but he’d have recognized all this, it’s just crazy continued. I like your memoir and yes, I’d love to see those pics. Maybe send by We Share or Mail Drop?
Stay sane compadres, love,
Andrei

I said, Andrei,  Bliss Buys and Joe Leary ran the Sonoma County Stump, I was photographer and poetry editor, probably how I met Pat. But then I began to cut my poetic teeth by organizing readings at the Cotati Cabaret, and Sonoma State, circa 1979. I think you were long gone by then. But the stories of you survived. You were the grand poet in absentía at our gatherings. 

I remember when the Jeffrey Miller’s posthumous book came out, we read his poems from inside a redwood tree. Drinking may have been involved. But Marianne Ware was always championing your stories. You could hardly forget Marianne, Jewish mama as wide as she was tall, and a generous soul to go with it. If we ever get out of this alive, I will start scanning those photos very soon.

• A note to Andrei Codrescu on Life of Crime

Remembering John Prine's Brother at Garbo's

Chicago Sun Times columnist and movie critic, Roger Ebert, wrote "John Prine is the poet of my life. People say he's great, but he's a lot better than that." I recommend reading Roger Ebert's Journal, a column he originally wrote in 1970, "John Prine: American Legend—A Singing Mailman Who Delivers a Powerful Message in a Few Words."

(Ebert's also updated the original story by posting some great John Prine YouTube links. The " Angel From Montgomery" backstory is worth the price of admission.) Bob Dylan once said "Prine's stuff is pure Proustian existentialism." I concur.

I have an interesting John Prine segue too via his brother. Circa 1980, John Prine's brother played John's songs for drinks at our Russian River Writers' Guild Monday Nite Poetry & Prose Reading series at Garbo's bar in Guernewood Park, CA. That's how I first learned to really listen to the words of John Prine's songs as poetry.

Ironically, it was songs—Irish ballads that first led me to writing. But that's another story. Prine always had such good angst-riddled lines: "You've broken the speed of the sound of loneliness...How can you ask about tomorrow?" My kind of lines. I was living in a perpetually warped möbius strip time.

(In the 1980s, we were living under a dark cloud: many of the gay club owners who housed our poetry venues were succumbing to a mysterious disease. Nobody knew what it was. Or its name. But we personally knew the names of the fallen: Peter Pender, the pianist/gold medal figure skater, bridge/chess champ who owned Fife's Resort with partner Hugh Ross, Stumptown Annie's owner, decorated Vietnam Purple Heart veteran, Leonard Matlovich, the first gay man to "come out" while in the military—was no longer looking like Kevin Spacey. It was too much to bear.

There was also my neighbor, handsome Bill Dutra, the original Marlboro Man, his beautiful face ravaged... Note Bene: I can't find info on Bill on the internet but he may have been Christian Haren. The info on Christian (or Chuck) fits—he owned The Chocolate Factory in Guerneville. But I can't find a photo.

Bill showed me an old tear sheet photo of him as the Marlboro Man—which I recognized. Bill told us amazing stories of being an actor, working with John Wayne—how I found out Dr. Kildare was gay—and stories of Key West. So all the pieces fit—just not the name of the Castro Street Cowboy.

I could have confabulated the name—but I've an uncanny memory for details. Whoa! Now I've segued so far from my story, I'm even scaring myself. So sorry. Another story, another time. (The Russian River basin attracted many Hollywood types, Fred MacMurray, Raymond Burr, Irene Dailey all lived in its watershed.)

My personal John Prine favorites were the songs that had recently made the charts. I loved "Paradise," but we all called it " Daddy Won'tcha Take me Back to Muhlenberg County," a song Prine says he wrote for his father. There's some good backstory video on the song here.

When I was a senior in high school in 1969, the town of Paradise, in Muhlenburg County, was drowned by the floodwaters of the Green River when a dam was erected, so barges could get to the Peabody coal fields. All about progress.

For the Duration

Marianne Ware, poet, novelist, & the grand dame of belles lettres—the epistolary packin' mama mentor of countless Sonoma County writers—passed away on her 74th summer solstice. Too soon. We expected her to be here much longer to greet the return of the sun. Now something of the sun is gone from us. Eclipsed.

I first met Marianne through Lee Perron—they were coordinating the Russian River Writers' Guild.  I was newly arrived to poetry, and before I knew it, I was roped into the Writers' Guild, which became both my teething ring and my training ground.

Little did I know, I was also fresh fodder—grist for the mill—to help run it. And later, I was left holding the bag. But I learned to stick it out for the duration. At the time, I was living out of my car after a bad breakup. She even found me a place to live—at her daughter Laurie's cabins.

Because Marianne was adamant that prose also be represented at the RRWG reading series, and because of her, I learned to dabble in prose. Dyslexic that I am, I discovered what writing—like people—came in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Not just poems and stories, but letters, notes, lists. They all served to inform.

Marianne brought the light of writing into the lives of so many of us. She encouraged us to find our own true authentic voice. To spread our wings and to fly close—but not too close—to the sun. She always encouraged the next generation of fledgling writers: Doug Powell, Glenn Ingersoll, Trane deVore. The Guild offered a platform for new and established writers to read together.

We booked poets & writers—even musicians from near and far to share their love of the word. Utah Phillips, Rosalee Sorrells, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Ed Balchowski. Some of the writers she encouraged made it to the big stage: Andrei Codrescu, Michael Oandatje, D.A. Powell, Jane Hirshfield come to mind. But  the history of the Guild is a whole other story. We are here to honor Marianne today.

Marianne Ware obit (photo)

Sylvia Tota

A chance encounter with a stranger on a Vienna-bound Budapest train that I nearly missed, some two decades ago— literally landed me in the lap of a rather irate Hungarian lady. She was disgruntled. I had nearly fallen off the moving train, I had enough adrenalin to lift an elephant so we got off to a rocky start.

Sylvia Tota was returning home to Miami after a fruitless attempt to get two novels published, "Sárga Nárcisz," and "Különös Karnevál," by a famous Hungarian writer, Fedor Ágnes—a challenge as Jewish Holocaust writing was banned in Hungary for so long.

Sylvia told me harrowing stories of her escape from Hungary that made the hairs on my arms stand straight as soldiers. She was a literary agent—and friend of Isaac Bashievs Singer. I was on my way to Russia to marry a pop singer—who loved God more than me. She advised, No. Marriage is a business arrangement.

Then she rescinded once she saw the photo of Valera. She said If I waited I'd rationalize, and spoil it. It took a long while for her yenta advice to settle in—at the eleventh hour as I was about to board that final train from Amsterdam to Helsinki and Moscow. I never got a chance to tell her how it all came out.

We had become fast friends on that fateful train ride, she roundly kissed my goodbye on both cheeks—I felt as if I'd been adopted — and she pressed her address and phone number into my hands and admonished me to call her if I ever was in Miami. I never did. Guilt follows me.

I'm a terrible letter writer—not that I'm a terrible writer—it's just that I write many letters in my head. Some make it to paper—few ever get mailed. So email and the internet's been a godsend for keeping in touch. But in 1991 there was no internet—no email. Faxes were cutting edge technology.

I transcribed one of those letters I never sent—to my friend, poet, Celia Woloch—a piece about Sylvia Tota, called Budapest Nights. I later tried to find Sylvia on the internet as I had long since lost her contact information. I've been to Miami three times since then and still haven't kept my promise. But I think of her often.

When I visited the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach, it was as if Sylvia was by my side—a tour guide in spirit. Maybe it's because I had told her of working with Joe Rapoport and The Holocaust Oral History Project in Sonoma County, CA ("Joe Rapoport, The Life of a Jewish Radical", Temple University Press, 1981.) My friend, the late Marianne Ware, self-professed red-diaper baby, was instrumental in educating me. Whatever the connection, it all coalesced, and became part of my zeitgeist.

I'm quite active on Facebook—it's a great place for writers to keep in touch. I have my own private page and another open to the public "fan" page. Imagine my surprise when I found a note from Sylvia's daughter on my fan page.

Hi Maureen, you don't know me personally but you did meet my mother Sylvia Tota, on the way to Vienna on a train from Budapest! I just read your blog "Budapest Nights" and tears were down my face… Please link to me on facebook so we can chat! Regards.

A flurry of emails ensued and now we're connected and now I have her phone number. I guess Sylvia didn't want us to lose touch after all. I can't wait to find out the backstory. Did anyone ever record Sylvia's story?

Another how many degrees of separation gift from Facebook. The other one was long lost distant cousins from continents apart, finding me out of the blue. But that's another story I'm not ready to write.

To read the original story:
Budapest Nights

Journal fragments Travel re-entry is never easy.

How Grief Comes in

My self-proclaimed Jewish Mama friend of 30 years died, & 24 hours later, it's hit me—I am incapable of multi- or single-tasking—because I'm ADDled, & I got a huge parking ticket, a flat tire—missed a chance to see a concert with Andy Irving (Planxty) & now I need a Jewish Mama to recover from loss of my Jewish Mama. I'm drinking wine & eating everything chocolate. Wonder how chocolate and bagels and lox would go?

Weird, how grief comes in. I was good for about 12 hours (call it shock)...then every task became impossible to complete. I was absolutely attention-deficit. I've learned to compensate well–and hide it even—until something comes along and unmasks me. Dyslexia coupled with ADD/ADS are a double whammy—that Camus quote I posted about expending extra energy to appear "normal" —or merely comes at a great cost. Ha!

I tried driving in rush hour traffic. OMG! That's why I came home. I was a menace to society behind the wheel. It's like having PTSD. I was like that for a long time after a horrific car accident in 1997. Everything was hard to do—just going to the store was a major event. How grief comes in, on cobbled stepping stones, small islands in the stream.

Memorial info here: Marianne Ware

Please share your stories, poems, photos or leave condolences on Marianne's Memorial blog. I will post updates on it as well. Spread the word. I've lost contact with so many Sonoma County poets: Anne Erickson, Lee Perron, Peggy Ellingson, Gerrye Payne, Laura del Fuego, Simone Wilson, JJ Wilson, Richard Benbrook, Doug Powell, etc. We're adding poems. Do visit her page.

Marianne Ware

Longtime friend—poet, novelist, and grand madame of belles lettres, the epistolary packin' momma and mentor of countless Sonoma County writers, Marianne Ware passed away this morning on June 21. Marianne was co-founder of the Russian River Writers' Guild —an organization I was part of for over 15 years—and she was an English and Creative Writing instructor at Santa Rosa Junior College.

Marianne wanted to hold an "Awake" while she was still living, but her illness took her too soon. She slipped into a coma soon after she made a decision not to receive treatment for a systemic infection that caused the amputation of her right leg. We don't know what her family has planned for a remembrance service, as she didn't want a memorial service.

There's a short bio of her here.

Unlimited Publishing LLC, California Writers Club, Redwood Branch

And I've made a blog here for Marianne so people can post their stories.

Bay Area Writing Project

Well, well, well, I never got to begin the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project (maybe next year) but I did take a writing workshop with the Bay Area Writing Project (BAWP) at UC Berkeley on Saturday morning.

My partner, Neil, a struggling, newishly employed English teacher at a continuation high school, was all gussied up and heading for the door. I asked, "where on earth are you going? It's only 8 AM. There's no school today." He mumbled something about attending BAWP but said he didn't think I could go too because I wasn't a teacher.

Ever the one to take "no" lightly, I fired, "Nonsense. Of course I can go."

Besides, the arts organization I teach through, California Poets in the Schools, AKA (CPITS) and BAWP have had a longstanding relationship, with Neil's mentor teacher, and BAWP coordinator, Judy Bebelaar, having served on the CPITS board. Few non-profit arts education can claim such a fabulous English teacher/poet as a board member as Judy. We served together. Oh, and she belly-dances too. I was the one who suggested that Neil mentor with Judy in the first place. Sheesh! Besides, the workshop was free.

And with less than 10 minutes warning, I managed to pull it together and blearily find my way into some reasonably unrumpled clothes, brew a vat of tea and then write write write. Not exactly a novel, but something to publish nonetheless. (What a portmanteau word is that!)

Saturday was one of those achingly beautiful Indian Summer days where the warm Santana winds had whipped the marine haze to the hinterlands and the coastal mountains ringing the bay were scimitar sharp silhouettes of indigo verging on violet against a cyanide sky.

The Bay was a cerulean mirror with gleaming jade islands, and on the Berkeley campus the liquidamber trees threatening to burst into pyrotechnic splendor.

(One NaNoWriMo mini contest is to submit your worst constructed sentence or paragraph to Red Room and the previous two paragraphs could easily qualify under the purple prose, or maybe the puce adverb category...)

Or maybe they could be a dishonorable contender for San Jose State's Bulwer Lytton Fiction Award for the world's worst opening sentence of an imaginary novel. ("It was a dark and stormy night..." You know the one.) My friend, writing teacher, Marianne Ware used to egg us on with a plethora of adjectives and adverbs to enter bodice-ripper sentence each year. But I just wasn't rotten enough. One of her students did win the dubious award.

But I digress, we were ensconced inside the hallowed halls of academia all day...the siren call of reflected light off the Bay plashing through the windows proved to be too much, so I snapped lots of photos of the participants and of poet Adam David Miller, whom I hadn't seen in years, between writing pages and pages of persuasive essay/personal memoir and travel memoirs.

From Bay Area Writing Project 11/15/08

But then I'm used to dividing my attention/ time. A Sagge, less than a week away from my birthday, with a Gemini rising, I secretly think my creativity is closer to the surface when I'm slightly distracted. No room for the censor to just say "no."

Now, Neil works from "No, you can't do that..." thing. It's a Scottish thing. Or maybe a UK thing. Or an escaped Beatles lyric. Fear of censure, fear of breaking rules, fear of disrupting societal norms, fear of drawing attention—are deeply ingrained. "I got something to say that might cause you pain.... No. You can't do that..."

Poor guy, even his initials have "No" embedded in them NONeill... Yeah, and denial is a river in Egypt. Having spent the summer in Scotland, I saw firsthand, the subconscious cultural artifacts at work, in situ. Not that I can begin to understand it, but I have a better understanding of it.

American culture is based on "Yes we can" and Europe is "No you can't." Cultural divide, cultural watershed.

Garbo's denizens

The Russian River was an interesting place to be in the late 1970s and 1980s. I met so many people in those days, (daze). So many roads intersected and overlapped that after a while it all became a blur.

I met all manner of folks famous and formerly famous...including the lead singer from It's a Beautiful Day, a gorgeous blond guy with the voice of an angel who was reduced to pumping gas into my VW bug at the Guerneville Flying A station...fallen from grace.

As a Russian River Writers' Guild poetry coordinator of Garbo's Bar along with Marianne Ware, Lee Perron, Donna Champion and Jim Montrose, we met parades of writers and musicians. Among the notable:

Madame Blavatsky's sister...so very occult and Russian and old with her dyed coiffed hair, heavy mascara and shawls!

John Prine's brother sitting at the bar with Sam the Bartender. I learned John's songs from him...The Jungles of East Saint Paul.

Utah Phillips came through once a year or so, often with Rosalee Sorrells or Bobbie Louise Hawkins in tow. He and Ed Balchowski, a Spanish Civil War survivor, would dust of the war songs.

May Sarton's sister came to the series for a while...I could go on....

Living in the moment, we never thought it would end, then AIDS struck the gay community and it foundered.

Peter Pender, chess champ, Leonard Matlovitch who made the cover of Times: Military comes out of the closet...that's how I found out Hoover was gay. Something Thorman???...the guy who founded Gold's Gym, a real pendejo...

Bill, the first Marlborough Man lived in the cabin across from me....whod'a thunk that handsome cowboy hunk on horseback we saw on all the billboards and back of magazine covers, was gay. The KS ravaged his face...

Letters to Paul Evans

Paul, obsessive ramblings, Lughnasadh, Aug. 2, 5 AM, 1996

Have you ever had the experience of making mental notes to say this or that to someone, some thing terribly important (or at least half-way intelligible) and in their presence (either in person, or via the phone), despite best intentions, you turn featherbrained on yourself, betrayed by a cheesecloth-that-stands-for memory/mind: whatever thoughts you had, driven clean out of your head, only to re-emerge at the oddest hours—say, at 5 AM, in a strange flat (and country) not your own—even the cats have deserted you because your tossing and turning like a crazed narwhal reminds them of the bilious sea, and water is not their favorite subject, unless fish are involved. (As the actress Tallulah Bankhead said, I nevah drink the watah, dahling, fish fhuck in it. By the time it reached the public, it was piss versus fuck. As if piss were preferable to fucking. You tell me why San Francisco society (or my computer dictionary) was not ready for that Anglo-Saxon word. My first and only opera I attended (Madame Butterfly), there she was in a peacock sequined gown, brandishing a cigarette holder longer than her arm, with a sotto voice that carried across the marble lobby into the streets. Fresh from the hills, I was wide-eyed in amazement, but that’s another story.)

In my case, this mental indulgence is exacerbated by bad cramps tempered with aspirin, cognac—one gets these images of wheels spinning in the muddied ruts in the backroads of the mind, and ends up having entire one-sided conversations that never actually reach their intended victims. Hence, the letter format. The good news is that I don’t write them often—who has the time to write to anyone—I’m a lousy correspondent—either dead silence for years, or a series of volumous ramblings like this one.

Sonoma County Poet Laureate nomination

Sonoma County Community Foundation arts fellowship award

RRWG anthology, A Stone's Throw, The Paper, Sep 20, 1990

RRWG anthology, A Stone’s Throw reading

The Paper’s Summer arts issue: Attuned to the Land

The West County Muse

Attuned to the land

POETRY

BY SUSAN KENNEDY

Photo by Maureen Hurley

POETS AMUSING THEMSELVES at the 13th annual Hart Crane Birthday Party (Crane was born 101 years ago, July 21. Left to right: west County writers Ann Erickson, Betty Garrett, Gail King, Hunce Voelcker, Pat Nolan and Paul Mariah.

Forestville poet Maureen Hurley describes her writing as ‘Formed by the bending of land along the fault line where I’ve lived all my life, where, if you put your ribs to the ground in the yellow summer grass, you can almost hear the earth shifting.”

Maureen Hurley, Forestville ("I am a landscape poet; I paint images with words"):

IN MARY BIANCHI'S GARDEN

Sweet Life Cafe, Santa Rosa, Mar 5, 1989, Maureen Hurley, Marianne Ware

Obligatory Hug, Feb - April 1989, Russian River Writers' Guild, Maureen Hurley & Marianne Ware

RRWG 10th annual erotic poetry reading at the Burbank Activity Center

Obligatory Hug, Dec. 1987, my calligraphy (not my layout!)

 

RRWG reading at the Burbank Activity Center with Maureen Hurley, Steve Petty, Michael Larrain, Donna Champion, Marianne Ware, Pat Nolan, Jonathan London, V Weinberg,