#46 And Now for Something Entirely Different: Back to the Beginning

            I started this blog oh-so-long-ago to report on what it was like to leave behind my urban life and start a new career. And then urban life came crashing in, taking the form of a giant corporation's

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.