by Paula Panich
The San Jacinto Mountains, above Palm Springs, California, shoot up 10,804 feet from the desert without, as one writer has it, the geologic fanfare of foothills. I’d come in January 2006 to one of its mountain towns, Idyllwild, to try to recover some shred of a self fractured from a September move. I left a […]
Categories: Mountain Stories • Tags: CA, Idyllwild, Palm Springs, Riverside County, San Jacinto Mountains
by Paula Panich
The small Southern California town of Idyllwild, in the San Jacinto Mountains above Palm Springs, is about two and a half hours east of Los Angeles. The town is a mile high, not incorporated, and is home to about 3,000 permanent residents. I began spending time here in early 2006, when I met Anna Bielecki […]
Categories: Mountain Stories • Tags: CA, Idyllwild CA, Riverside County, Southern California Mountains
by Paula Panich
Maryann Macdonald’s Latest Book: When I lived in London with my family in the mid-1990s, I went to a meeting that haunts me still. A woman spoke about trying to use her dreams to recapture three lost years of her life. As a three-year-old French Jew, she was taken to a small village to […]
Categories: Literary Essays/Book Reviews • Tags: Children's literature on Holocaust; World War II, Hidden Children of World War II, Maryann Macdonald
by Paula Panich
Talk about waking up to language! This is from Italo Calvino: Letters 1941-1985, translated by Martin McLaughlin, and to be published in May by Princeton University Press. (I will buy it IMMEDIATELY!) This letter (a fragment of which is below) is believed to have been written in 1969. Dear Mr. Ricci, […]
Categories: Literary Essays/Book Reviews • Tags: Books, Italo Calvino. Writing, Letters of Great Writers, Writing Inspiration
by Paula Panich
Amazing things can come your way if you allow yourself to wander, especially through footnotes. Real footnotes, in books. Which is how I was introduced to the celebrated German critic, Walter Benjamin, and his essay, “The Storyteller.” I was in the Round Reading Room at the British Library in Bloomsbury, reading about fairy tales. I […]
Categories: Literary Essays/Book Reviews
by Paula Panich
The textures of Tuscany in the warm low light of autumn were too rich to ignore.
Categories: Place/Gardens
by Paula Panich
I’m teaching a class in the UCLA Extension Landscape Architecture Program called Making Space: Four Voices, Four Writers, Four Landscapes. We’ve become interested in the anthropology of space, that is, how language, culture, and experience shape our perception of space. (In the article below, by the way, there is a reference to “Edge” — that […]
Categories: Literary Essays/Book Reviews
by Paula Panich
The day of the Resurrection or the resurrection or just any Sunday, depending. But I thought to comment on my previous post, “Eating Icons,” first published in a longer form in the oldest extant magazine in the country. I love history, so I like that about The North American Review. My true mentor in essay-writing […]
Categories: Literary Essays/Book Reviews