unnecessary gargantuan cement river smashing through the wetlands and forests outside Willits.
Despite the
aspersion of “unemployed hippies” cast at environmentalists protesting the
imposition of the Caltrans bypass, actually most
of us do have jobs, though some are retired and working on avocations, including
preventing climate change—the focus of my blog and spare time during 2013.
I myself am
actually employed, too, as a writer and
editor. As I explained in blog posts way back, I spent nearly thirty years in
classrooms as a teacher—from high school English to college writing and
education courses. The attention I put into my students’ essays and lives was
tremendously rewarding, but I needed other outlets for my writing than
correcting and encouraging students on their papers.
Of so many
delightful students I’ve had over the years, one was Sadie Margolin at Merritt
College in 1996. She came to class one day and told me her father wanted to see
me. I was used to communicating directly with parents of my high school
students, but this was college, so I told Sadie, “If you have a problem with me, you need to talk to me about it and not get your father
involved.”
 |
| Malcolm Margolin |
“No, no,”
she told me, “my father wants to see if you’d like to do some editing work at
Heyday.”
Of course, I
knew of her father, Malcolm Margolin, as most folks in Berkeley do, and as do
those who have read about California’s Native peoples and local natural history.
In 1974 Malcolm published The East Bay
Out, a guide to East Bay parks and trails that includes the history—going back
to the Ohlone Indians and the Spanish incursion—and natural history of the area.
Malcolm created his own company, Heyday Books, to publish that book. In 1978, also
through Heyday, Malcolm published The
Ohlone Way, a well-researched description of the culture of the Ohlone
Indians, told in a richly imaginative way. 
Having seen
my editing marks on Sadie’s papers, Malcolm hoped I could be as encouraging and
constructive in my comments on manuscripts coming into Heyday. Following up on
his offer, I had the opportunity to edit the memoir of Darryl Babe Wilson,
called The Morning the Sun Went Down,
about his childhood among his Pit River people (Achumawe and Atsugewi) and the
ways Darryl imbibed their legends and spiritual relationship to the land around
what is now Mt. Shasta.
Babe’s
memoir was not the first I had edited. I had the opportunity to work on another
memoir a few years earlier, called Ruth’s
Journey: A Survivor’s Memoir by Ruth Glasberg Gold (University Press of
Florida, 1996).
Through connections with a family friend, I’d spent three
weeks in Miami with Ruth, helping her shape her memories of a family and life growing
up in Rumania, all tragically lost in the Holocaust. Her book is a powerful
evocation of the horrors of that experience and the determination of a
survivor.
I enjoyed
editing memoirs—then and now: the intimacy of working with people on their
life stories, walking into the door of one's home and heart through the stories
shared. However, after a few editing projects with Heyday while also
juggling teaching responsibilities, I had to focus my energies. My students won
out at that time.
By 2010 I was ready
to return to editing and writing. I also returned to Malcolm to see what
work he could help me find. He helped connect me to Ariel Parkinson.
 |
| Ariel Parkinson |
I was pleased to work with Ariel on her memoir, simply called Ariel, once a month or so at her home. Witty and iconoclastic, Ariel is now a
retired painter and designer of stage scenography. Ariel’s husband, Tom
Parkinson, was a professor at U.C. Berkeley in the 1950s and '60s. He was the reigning expert on the
poetry of Yeats. Together, their friendships included Robert Duncan, Kenneth
Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg, and other luminaries of what Ariel calls “The Berkeley
Renaissance.” With poetic imagination, Ariel tells story of her life among poets
and artists in Berkeley from the late 1940s through the wilder days of the
1960s. (See an article about Ariel and her work by clicking here on The Monthly.)
I had the
distinct pleasure of sitting with Ariel in her Berkeley hilltop aerie and
reviewing her manuscript with her, getting her to tell me more about some of
the clearly delightful stories that she had told too cursorily, asking her to
expand on her reminiscences of important figures in literary and political
culture of that time and place. Her book was then beautifully designed by
Cheryl Koehler and published by Ariel Imago Press, supported by Ariel’s
daughters Kathy and Chrysa.
While
immersed in Ariel’s memoir, I met up with Malcolm Margolin again, and he asked
me about other projects I was working on. I thought to tell him about this “little
project” I’d done in the evenings, during the winter I had moved to my cabin in
the woods in Willits. That conversation led to the publishing of Literary Industries: Chasing the Vanishing West
by Hubert Howe Bancroft, Heyday’s re-issuing in January of my great-great-grandfather’s 1890
autobiography.
Born in
1832, H.H. (as we referred to him in my family) became a book collector and a
historian of the West. He is now best known for the Bancroft Library named for
his collection of 60,000 books, archives, oral histories, and more, which he
sold to the University of California at Berkeley in 1905.
H.H.’s memoir
tells the story of how he grew up in a Puritan community in Ohio, how he came
to California in 1852, and the development of both his archival collection and
eventually 39 volumes of the Pacific West, called Bancroft’s Works.
Ahead, I’ll
delve more into how I got involved in editing H.H. Bancroft’s 800-page tome,
now a beautiful edition of 250 pages with illustrations from the Bancroft
Library. And that story also leads to
what I worked on next, a biography of Malcolm Margolin and his literary industries.
So my life in a cabin in the woods has led me to fulfilling my dreams of
redirecting my writing to projects beyond students’ papers. And, while seeking
to redirect the Caltrans Willits bypass, I’ve had much other work to occupy me.
Indeed, many of us working to stop what we see as the insanity of the bypass
have often sacrificed precious time—whether constructing blog posts, attending endless
meetings, studying the environmental reports, writing letters to editors and
politicians, standing by the roadside with banners, or climbing trees to
prevent their destruction.
The choices
we make! The history of Willits and this struggle deserve a book, too. One day...
In the meantime, more stories ahead of a writer in the woods outside Willits.
In the meantime, more stories ahead of a writer in the woods outside Willits.
