Favorite Things: End-of-Summer Round-up
Petaluma Poetry Walk, July/August issue of Made Local Magazine, and a book review.
Books: Summer by Edith Wharton (How to Read a 100-Year-Old Book Without Thinking Maybe You Just Aren’t Into It)
I just read Summer by Edith Wharton. It’s more of a novella at around 150 pages but even so, I thought it might be hard to get into right away language-wise since it was written 100 years ago.
Pro-tip: I checked out the audio book from the library on the Libby app and started listening to it. It steeped me in the author’s style of writing enough that after a few chapters, I was able to dive into reading the actual book without being caught up in the strangeness of the language. (And maybe it wasn’t as strange as I thought it might be!)
It is totally worth absorbing this slice of New England life from the early 1900s from the perspective of a small-town young woman who learns about life over the summer. (Spoiler: women didn’t have many options for how to live their lives) In fact, the style of it reminded me of a contemporary novel but with scores of everyday elements and particulars that are long gone today.
One thing that’s striking about Summer is the amount of detail from the natural world that the main character Charity observes and moves through without her observations actually being about nature.
The slow worlds of walking, sitting in a library, bicycles and horse-drawn carriages throughout her life’s landscape of trees, mountains, plants and weather are on one level just the surroundings that she moves through and not “nature”.
But also, the descriptions of various places reflect her inner landscape and are used to show the energy of her situations and and draw out our feelings as the reader about her situations. The harder the circumstances, the harder the weather, for example.
It felt very 100 years ago to consider the living world this way partly because of the slowness of it. It’s a little like learning another language to read something from the mind of someone writing in the early 1900s. And the voice and story of a young woman of that era also feels somewhat like secret information, since so much of the information we know from that time is from the perspective of a man’s world.
Petaluma Poetry Walk
11am-8pm, Sunday September 15, 2024
Last year I read from my book 1912, Poems of Time, Place & Memory at the Petaluma Poetry Walk. The PPW has been going since the mid-90’s when I first attended it in the 90s on the deck of the Apple Box Café facing the Petaluma River, so it was one of my longtime dreams to be one of the presenting poets!
This year, I’m producing the event, along with my co-producers Dave Seter (this year’s Sonoma County Poet Laureate! Congrats Dave!) and soon-to-be emeritus producer, also a poet and publisher, Bill Vartnaw.
We have a stellar lineup of 25 poets reading throughout the day at eight venues. See the full schedule below!
Made Local Magazine Late Summer Issue!
Last fall I was hired as the editor of Made Local Magazine. It’s a farm- and food-forward magazine showcasing all things local in Sonoma County. Our latest summer issue is out right now on the stands (and online here).
As a longtime local of the Marin-Sonoma area, it’s so exciting to be able to curate a close-to-home collection of stories from Sonoma County—and of course the main challenge is choosing from the huge amount of marvelous things to share!
Read it today online or if you are in the county, pick up a hard copy (locations listed on our website) —there’s nothing like a real magazine to peruse!
