Faded charcoal sky with streaking light, wet pavement, bracing breeze. This is a corner of the stair from the porch to the front path. On and off rain all day, chasing away several days of early June heat.
Light like no other. Like heaven.
Paula Panich
Dreaming and Printing
On Saturday, June 19, our printmaking group will hold a show and sale in Pacific Palisades, Calif. Four of five artists make monotypes, as I do.
Here is one of my monotypes, in a series of ten, entitled Dream Dust .
My artist’s statement:
I spent a quarter of a century writing down the dust of dreams,
in dozens of notebooks.
And then, in 2001, I tossed them into the recycling bin of history.
Years of dreams are impossible to destroy.
Here they are again, shy and winking,
this time dressed in etching ink.
Yet they speak as they did the first time — in tongues, doing the best they can.
Set Your Hair on Fire
It’s true, but not entirely.
The sign is on the outside of my tiny writing cottage here in L.A. It’s actually only two by five inches (the sign, that is), and the garden is yet a dream. Full shelves of books inside. That counts, along with the dream.
But any one of us wanting to be fully alive must spring out of the library, the garden, the studio, and set our hair on fire.
Then wake up with the thought about roasting the hostile crows of the neighborhood, big as chickens.
Dream about leaving them out for the smaller birds, for lunch — a thanksgiving.
And then rejoice when you you see a grizzled, very old, tiny man, trousers patched with duct tape, and hear him say:
“It’s too bad I can’t sing.”
Mountain Stories: Pearling the Mountain, Settling the Sun
San Jacinto Mountains
Idyllwild, Calif.
Fern Valley
7:00 p.m.
A dusky mist pearls the mountain.
In the hollows of our valley walls, midnight blue stretches and spreads.
Light plays along the ridgeline, peachy cottony clouds dare night to fall.
Strawberry Creek runs fat and furious; San Jacinto Peak, far above us, is still cushioned by snow.
Tahquitz Rock is gilded by the sun settling into the Pacific, 120 miles away.
As I am about to reach the cabin, I startle what looks to be a fawn, and she startles me. Her hoofs beat a tattoo; she turns to give a last look, and bounds toward the creek.
What does sunset in the San Jacinto Mountains have to do with my novel, Missing Meg, set in 1932?
My character, Ned Canon, was born here, in 1900. Wild strawberries grew everywhere in summer then, and the valley was emerald with ferns.
A Writer Writes, a Printmaker Prints, a Photographer Shoots
Ron Carlson, a wonderful writer, was my teacher. Is my teacher; each new book teaches. (The latest: The Signal)
About twenty years ago he said: The most you can hope for is time to write, and a place to write. Period.
Any other hope is self-defeating.
But isn’t it easy, especially after a long and glorious labor, to hope. Fat advance, so on and so forth. Terry Gross’s ID on the cell phone.
A New York agent turned down my new novel, Missing Meg, and me, last week. (Oh forget it, says my friend, the writer Maryann Macdonald. “Finding an agent is like speed dating. It only takes one to fall in love with you.”)
But I am a printmaker too, and yesterday, while printing, I experienced the glorious and the luminous — no thought except ink and plate, and a deep deep romp in the fields of the mind and spirit.
And a chat with my teacher, Gary Paller, about the privilege of making art. The absolute privilege of the life of the mind and spirit and to follow an idea until you feel satisfied, and then seeing that next idea. And so we go. Exercising this privilege, and these long disciplines.
I’ll keep looking for an agent, but with a lighter heart. It would be nice . . . but the dailiness of the work is the thing. And the occasional visit of the luminous.
Melrose and Gower, Hollywood, 1937!
Q: What do Katharine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, and my character Ruth in my novel Missing Meg have in common with Gardenburgers and the intersection of Melrose and Gower?
A: Take a good look at this photograph! It was taken in late 1937 from the south side of Melrose, looking east down the street. The “R.K.O. Radio Pictures” sign seen more clearly in the photo faces Gower Street. (The original gate of Paramount was, and still is, just a few blocks east on Melrose, at Bronson.)
Film posters plastered on both sides of the building advertise R.K.O.’s Stage Door, released in October 1937. Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Adolf Menjou and Lucille Ball star in the film, directed by Gregory La Cava.
The car in the foreground is parked in front of a small, set-back apartment building, which we cannot see in the photo.
Across the street from the hidden-from-view apartment building, a bit further north on Gower, Katharine Hepburn had a secret entrance to the studio, a small unmarked door. (Or so our Paramount tour guide claimed.)
In 1974, a very nice and very young Greek-American man named Cosmos bought the apartment building, tore it down, and built Astro Burger, now a Hollywood landmark. In 1986, Astro Burger introduced a vegetarian menu — including Gardenburgers, invented by Cosmos’s friend, and marketed first by Astro Burger.
The R.K.O. building was long ago folded into Paramount, the radio tower is gone, but the globe remains to this day.
But on January 15, 1932, Ruth, a character in my novel, Missing Meg, is eastbound on Melrose, and turns north on Gower. She is driving in her champagne-colored Packard and is heading to Beachwood Canyon. Imagine.
You Say Wistaria, I Say Wisteria
In Sierra Madre, California, they say wistaria. And they think they’re right. For close to a century, Sierra Madre has celebrated their vine, one of the seven horticultural wonders of the world, in March, when it blooms in all its glory.
In 1918, during a fundraiser for the American Red Cross, 12,000 people showed up to bask in its pendant lavender beauty.
And so it was yesterday, March 14, 2010. Only now the vine, Wisteria sinesis, covers an acre, weighs 250 tons, and has its place in that book I don’t have to mention as the world’s largest blossoming plant.
The vine started its Sierra Madre life in 1894 from a one-gallon pot purchased from the Wilson Nursery in Monrovia, for seventy-five cents. Alice Brugman is said (and said again and again) to have traveled by horse and buggy to fetch it.
The vine eventually collapsed the house, but Mrs. Brugman, a true plant fanatic, just built another nearby.
The gorgeous trellised vine now spans the yards of two lovely homes, whose owners are obviously game enough to allow about 7,000 people to traipse through their yards one day a year.
Here’s what a visit looked like eighty years ago. Is it possible that the three people who appear in my version of their lives (in my new novel, Missing Meg) were among the guests?
It’s Southern California. Anything is possible, including the vibrant presence of the world’s biggest flowering plant.
Don’t miss it next year. (See www.cityofsierramadre.com)
By the way, the botanical name for this plant of Chinese origin is taken from Caspar Wistaria (1761-1818). So: Sierra Madre is right.
How I Spent $1.50 and Changed My Life
On June 1, 2009, I wrote the first page, and then some, of my novel Missing Meg.
Thirty months! A long or short gestation, depending. But it is a novel, 75,000 words, something that didn’t exist on the last day of May in 2009.
Such a short time when you think about the quarter-century of writing that came before. Or the half-century of reading.
But there were some guideposts. In 2007, I read Walter Mosley’s fine little book, This Year You Write Your Novel. His advice: Work on it every day, no matter what. The book must have planted a seed. Two years later I wrote that first line: June 1, 2009.
We moved into our 1921 bungalow in Los Angeles in March, 2009, where a 100-square-foot writing cottage sits right out the back door. Before dawn, the cottage awaits its writer. I went to work on a short story, my first in years.
Then Libby Simon and I went to a clutch of antiques stores in South Pasadena. This was in early May. Libby is a life-long Angelena. She knows all about the history of her city.
In one store, I plunged my hand into a small bin of yellowing papers. Out came this letter. I read it. I said to Libby: Wow! Read this! What if I write a short story filling in these delicious blanks?
The letter reads, in part: “You are a lucky girl, Mildred, to be getting out of this family.”
So I spent $1.50. And everything changed.
Very soon it will be out of my hands, and, if you wish, into yours. Stay posted.