When I hear the name Hayao Miyazaki, I think of clouds. Like the kind we see in Cannon Beach on magical evenings after the sun has set, when gold lines our horizon and pink rims giant, puffy pillars. I think of long grass, like on our sand dunes, bending gracefully before mounting winds. And I think of flying images from his films: robots, planes, pig pilots, cat busses, girls on broomsticks, skyscraper-tall gods walking through forests… [Read More]
The Value of a Good Story or Feeding the Wolf Within
Wintertime for me has always been a time of introspection and recounting. I grew up in Alaska, in a culture dominated by the traditions, myths and stories of the tribes native to that titanic place. Stories were the textbook and sustenance of many long winters for me. Oral traditions from all over the world are rooted in histories so long that they cannot be mapped.
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The Eagle’s Epitaph – The Multiple Lives of the Screaming Eagle
Although it is as difficult to project as well as portray the cumulative history of a nation or a people through a single individual, it might be rational to attempt a history of media through a particular newspaper. In the case of the North Coast Times Eagle, the history it projected was a local and out at the edge projection of journalism that might seem paradoxical if not antithetical to mainstream media, which claims its history the center stage of American journalism. [Read More]
Jetties of Consciousness
Jetties fascinate me. They teach me poetry and physics, life and death. They represent solidity and evanescence, ambition and ignorance. They are black and jagged, gray and serrated. They whip up a kind of slippery, spraying, salty ocean margarita I love imbibing. If anything can be said to be rock and roll in nature, an oxymoron of course, jetties are it.
The Death Seeker (Short Fiction)
I live in a land where people come to die. Some intentionally. Some not. Take Phillip Barnes, for example. He drove his ‘95 Jeep Wrangler Sahara away from the city on August 29th. He was bipolar. Had a gun. Left his wallet home. Traffic cams showed him heading our way. No one’s […]
Why I Moved to Astoria
About eight years ago, the same day that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, my family and I moved from the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle to Astoria — specifically to the Emerald Heights Apartments, past the Alderbrook neighborhood at the very eastern edge of the city. So many times was I asked why I moved to Astoria that I actually started a website with that domain (I’ve since taken the site down). [Read more]
Peninsulas and Islands: A Tale for Coastal Communities
Charles Le Guin’s novel, North Coast, is a peninsula of a story. Set in the fictional community of Bridger Bay, the protagonists—Kim, the narrator, and Steve, who becomes his closest friend and briefly his lover—reach out between individuals, cultures, and elements.
Lifting hearts is as important as fundraising to our community
I moved to the Oregon Coast ten years ago after visiting to participate in a week-long painting workshop. During that visit I fell in love with the natural beauty of this place, the kind and progressive people I met, and the air of inclusion I found in the organizations, activities and events in the area. This was quite a change from the atmosphere in the California town where I had been living. [Read More]
Little and Big: a story about a town
Once upon a time there was a little town by a big ocean. It was a wise little town. Long ago it had looked at its dunes and beaches, its big trees, its marsh where the red-wing blackbirds sang, its little streets and little grey shingle shops and houses, and said: This is all good.
Unclear Cuts 2: The Metaphysics of a Designer Forest
How can human beings, with our arrogance so many orders of magnitude greater than our understanding or our reverence, hope to recreate the intricacies of these familial relations between different types of trees, plants, fungi, and fauna?