by Paula Panich
Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger’s third book, was published in 1961. The the two long stories had been published previously in The New Yorker, in the Fifties. I had a hard-cover copy. I suspect I had requested it as a Christmas gift. I was in the eighth grade; I can’t imagine where I had heard […]
Categories: Writing/Artmaking
by Paula Panich
Writers are notorious for their superstitions and fixed habits. Certain pens, chairs, desks, talismans, even teacups. I’m at work on a novel, set in 1932 Hollywood. I seem to have to start working in the dark. If I can see the dawn, the day is already making its claim on my imagination. A disadvantage is […]
Categories: Writing/Artmaking
by Paula Panich
On Saturday, January 23, I taught a writing workshop at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanical Garden in Arcadia, in the San Gabriel Valley.(www.arboretum.org) It was the first day of sun after several of rain, and it looked as though the world were new. As my friend Judy Horton says, winter in Southern California: […]
Categories: Food
by Paula Panich
My forty-year affair with Chekhov began innocently enough, with the plays. Perhaps it was The Cherry Orchard. Not quite sure. But when I read his short stories, and then the letters — oh those letters — no retreat was possible. He was mine. We had a 150th birthday party for him here in Los Angeles, […]
Categories: Writing/Artmaking
by Paula Panich
The sky a perfect Mediterranean blue; layered, complex birdsong, dusky fragrance of wild thyme; a big spider lazily scuttling across the narrow village road. I sit in front of the village’s only bar-cafe, closed now at 11:00 a.m. for the day, this being low season, and a Monday. The church bell chimes, once. On the […]
Categories: Place/Gardens
by Paula Panich
Not sure how it happened, but I have a three-thousand-mile garden. One part is in Northampton, Mass., the other, much smaller and less labored over, is in Los Angeles. Please don’t ask where in Los Angeles — it’s in the city, close to the middle of the city, between downtown and the beach. (People in […]
Categories: Place/Gardens
by Paula Panich
These are my dear friends, the writers Maryann Macdonald (light) and Patricia Marx (dark). They are standing in a miraculous place — the damp, underground (o.k., basement) room where Marilynne Robinson wrote one of the great novels of the late 20th-century — Housekeeping. Maryann and Trish, who live in Manhattan, visited me in Northampton, Mass. […]
Categories: Writing/Artmaking
by Paula Panich
My amazing, gifted friend, Phyllis Odessey, is horticulture director for a New York City park. But her “park” is really an island, Randall’s Island, and she is in charge of garden-making on a scale most of us can’t imagine. But on her own “plot” — a hundred acres in the wilds of Vermont — she […]
Categories: Place/Gardens