Cameron’s new children’s book, National Monuments of the USA, hadn’t gone to print when she and I met up for tea at the annual science writers conference in Memphis last October. She was still fact-checking and finalizing, and having a (tiny!)(Cameron: big!) freakout about how the book would be received. To teach history to children […]
So I finally read Craig’s book Stone Desert, and I’m glad I did. It’s a republication of an earlier essay collection alongside his original journals – sketches, scribbles and notes he made in his twenties while hiking and paddling through desert canyons in Utah, along the Green and Colorado rivers. For me, the book was […]
Lately I’ve been having recurring nightmares about packing. In the dreams I badly want to get somewhere – onto a plane, off of a bus, into a boat – but I can’t, because I have too much shit. I can’t jettison anything in the dream, and yet there’s no way to get everything into my […]
Walking south along the beach towards Los Angeles this weekend, my friend and I were talking about all the arbitrary things that can alter a life’s trajectory, like where you’re born or if your parents went to college. As we walked, we noticed hundreds of tiny sea creatures scattered like dark blue flower petals along […]
Dear LWON readers, This is California’s only major free-flowing river, 400 miles north of San Francisco in the Klamath Mountains near the northern border with Oregon. That outrageous aquamarine color comes from a rock called serpentinite, which contains a vivid, yellow-green mineral with the equally delightful name of lizardite. Could I see the bottom of […]
I wrote this post in 2019, and am still gobsmacked by flower hormones. Last November, my mother gave me several crumpled paper bags full of flower bulbs for my birthday. Daffodils, hyacinths, snowdrops, paperwhites — the bulbs promised frilly, fragrant bounty and I couldn’t wait to plant them. Then life got hectic. The bags sat in a […]
When you’re exceedingly tiny, you can live almost anywhere – in an eyelash follicle, between grains of sand, or on an insect’s wing. You can probably find food and plenty of it, whether you prefer dead skin cells, blood, sap, or rotting vegetation. You can also get away with almost anything, like the male, deep […]
My grandmother used to take me to master classes at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, where young musicians from all over the world came to train. After buying our $10 tickets, we’d stand in the line of mostly senior citizens waiting for the doors to open. I’d hold her hand and […]