“Cenzontle: Poems”

Marysville author-poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo recently spoke to Butte College students, reading from his memoir “Children Of The Land.” An immigration advocate and part of the college’s Diversity Speaker Series, Hernandez Castillo was born in Tepechitlan Zacatecas, Mexico, studied at Sacramento State, and “was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan.”

His award-winning book, “Cenzontle: Poems” ($17 in paperback from BOA Editions Ltd.; also for Amazon Kindle) is a kind of ever-changing song: “The song becoming the bird becoming the song.” “Cenzontle,” we are told, “means mockingbird in Spanish and comes from the Nahuatl word centzuntli, which refers to one who holds 400 voices or songs.” The voices are many in these poems, the meanings elusive. 

The young poet grasps for meaning as well. In the title poem, the mockingbird echoes something beyond words even as the poet is trying to find just those words. “Can you wash me without my body/ coming apart in your hands?/ Call it wound--/ call it beginning--/ The bird’s beak twisted/ into a small circle of awe.// You called it cutting apart,/ I called it song.” 

Behind many of the poems is Hernandez Castillo’s own story and the story of undocumented family members, deportations, a severe life in the home country and uncertainty in the States. 

And a father who beat him with a white belt he called Daisy. “And after it’s over, we know we have both become men./ Him for the beating,/ and me for taking his beating.” Yet somehow it’s an act of love: “I love you Daisy.// My father’s hands will love a man/ at the first sign of weakness./ I am weak/ therefore, I gather that he loves me.” It is a complicated relationship.

They all are: “We made love then argued,/ or, argued then made love.// It didn’t matter either way,/ everything had the aftertaste of gasoline….” Then: “I only wanted to look far enough back/ to see where I split in half.// How dumb we were/ endlessly searching/ for a definite shape/ our longing would take.// I leaned into you,/ all of you,/ as if in chorus.” 

The song lives.

“Letting All The Light In: Gracefully Surviving Illness, Injury, And Grief”

Dax Meredith (daxmeredith.com), the pen name of a Chico area author, college instructor and counselor, wrote of her escape from the Camp Fire in "The Sound Of The Snow Geese." But she is also dealing with a years-long debilitating illness. 

“Both the illness and the fire almost killed me,” she writes in “Letting All The Light In: Gracefully Surviving Illness, Injury, And Grief” ($15.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle). “Twice now I have been much closer to death than I like to consider. But I am a better person because of it. … I am more patient, more grateful, more present in the moment each day because of those events.”

This is not a story of “arrival” but an ongoing journey as Meredith navigates the health care system and returns with cautionary tales. 

The book’s three parts include the harrowing memoir of her mysterious illness where, she writes, “The left side of my face was numb for almost a year. … My spine was numb. I remember constant and continual migraine headaches. The pain was excruciating. I remember endless vomiting, blurred vision or partial and temporary blindness, and on several occasions, hallucinations.” She adds: “As a general rule of thumb, hallucinations are just not a good sign.”

The second part features short interviews with two dozen sufferers, of all ages, each presenting the biggest challenge (including grief at the loss of a son and wife, amputation, addiction, miscarriages, multiple cancers, depression), resources used, the person’s belief system (some are Christian, some “spiritual,” some have no professed religious commitment), what others need to know, the roughest parts, and what wisdom has emerged. The accounts are devastating, gut-wrenching, in part because this is you or someone you know.

The final section is practical advice; Meredith covers everything to be aware of, from how to talk with one’s children to fighting the judgment from others and oneself. “I don’t believe all the bad things that occur are a punishment from God. But there are lessons in the bad things that happen to us.”

With graceful kindness, Meredith may well change how you understand your very life.

“Even Broken-Winged Divas Can Fly”

Forty-something Chicoan Jennifer Kuhns (www.jenniferkuhns.net) has published more than a dozen books. “I write children’s books,” she tells readers in her latest memoir, “most of which have a disabled protagonist with a strong and positive character and attitude. Well, maybe a little bit of a snarky attitude … What can I say? I put a little bit of me into all of my characters.”

Her own story is told in “Little Diva On Wheels: Growing Up Differently-Abled” and now “Even Broken-Winged Divas Can Fly” ($16.95 in paperback from Shalako Press) which focuses on her high school and college days. Born ten weeks early, diagnosed with spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy, Kuhns notes that while “my fine motor manual dexterity is basically non-existent,” she has “the ability to memorize like a freaking elephant.”

This “broken-winged diva” has a penchant for literary symbolism, “a strange sense of humor,” a competitive instinct, and self-advocacy.

Her cerebral palsy affects speech. “I can say the word. The problem is ‘saying’ and ‘enunciating’ a word are two absolutely, completely, different animals.” Most of her family members, friends, and those who have interacted with a disabled person understand what she calls her “CP-babblelistics.” She is “greeted, not ignored. I was spoken to, not at. I was not made to feel like I had leprosy. And I was verbally understood.”

Perhaps other adults lack the patience or are afraid, but there is no rancor in Kuhns’ description. Instead, she reveals a well-rounded life, including raising a sheep and an awkward relationship with her mother: Mom is the boss at home, but she is also hired as an aide by the Department of Rehabilitation and so Jennifer is her boss at school.

“I’ve not always been happy about my condition, my situation in life. I’ve been mad, and I’ve been sad, and I’ve hated the body I’m in.” And yet, “I know how to harp like nobody’s business to get what I need, want, or think I should have … not that it always works.” 

A color section at the end showing some of her tattoos (one for each book published), receiving her MA, and newspaper clippings, demonstrates that something very much worked.

“Welcome Back To The World: A Novella & Stories”

Rob Davidson teaches creative writing and American literature at Chico State. His new collection of stories takes readers to the precipices of life. “Welcome Back To The World: A Novella & Stories” ($24.95 in paperback from Cornerstone Press) offers deeply felt characters and a trajectory of hope.

In “Unfinished Business,” Mark, a single dad with his daughter, Claire, attending Sac State, learns that his wayward ex-wife, Solange, has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. And now Mark will be forced to take her into their household.

“The Photograph” is about a campus budget analyst captured on film by a famous street photographer. “I like predictability and routine. I favor a closed system with known parameters.” Then he becomes the star of a prestigious gallery exhibition.

“Buxiban Blues” is set in Taiwan at one of the many buxibans or “cram schools” for learning English. Director Will is an American ex-pat who pleases the parents because he’s white; his star teacher, Margaret, California-born with Chinese ancestry, has a more difficult time. “They were two loners and outcasts, each lonesome and sad, each struggling to find new footing in the world.”

“Packing Out” is a harrowing tale of Jon’s fishing junket with his gruff father which goes tragically wrong. In “Search for Florence” actor Van Wheeler searches for legendary Michael Florence in Spain, finally relying on intuition, “an urging beyond language or reason, what could only be described as a yearning.”

In “Parallel Lines” Grant is a middle-school student who falls for classmate Melinda Díaz and must confront his pal’s racism. In “Welcome Back to the World,” the novella traces the aftermath of Dennis’ decision to leave a Buddhist monastery after seven years. He must face trauma, betrayal--and his own hollowness.

Davidson’s stories are like the Zen koans Dennis describes. “A koan doesn’t point the way directly, but works subtly via innuendo, suggestion, and ambiguity.”

Rob Davidson is Nancy Wiegman’s guest on Nancy’s Bookshelf on Northstate Public Radio, mynspr.org, Wednesday, November 27 at 10:00 a.m., repeated Sunday, December 1 at 8:00 p.m. He’ll be signing books Thursday, December 12 at Chico’s 1078 Gallery beginning at 7:30 p.m. The public is invited.

“Number Mania: A Visual Exploration Of 0 To 100”

Chico mathematician Scott Lape, aided by Madrid-based illustrator Víctor Medina, will make readers fall in love with digits. Even if you don’t like math, he has your number. Actually, 101 of them.

In “Number Mania: A Visual Exploration Of 0 To 100” ($19.99 in hardcover from Odd Dot/Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group) Lape and Medina provide a carnival of number lore on every page not just for kids ages 6 through 12 but for adults as well. 

We’re surrounded by numerals, in street signs and digital clocks, but things get really interesting when we start counting. “The number representing a group of objects only has meaning if there’s somebody looking at the objects, counting them, or wondering, ‘How many are there?’” 

Each number has its own mathematical personality and each colorful, whimsical page looks at how the number is expressed in other languages, its factors, a bit of numerical history, and a section that’s just wild about that number. There are 64 colors in many Crayon packages; Forty-Four is a small town in Arkansas; “The traditional gift for a 70th wedding anniversary is something made of platinum (element 78).” Bowling balls can’t weigh more than 16 pounds.

You’ll see 36 on a yardstick, of course, but also “there are 36 counties in Oregon. There are 36 black keys (and 52 white keys) on a piano.” In Judaism, “the commandment to be kind to strangers is found 36 times in the Torah.”

Zeroing in on nothing, Lape writes that “The idea of ‘none’ being a number took a long time to catch on…. The first known use of a small circle to represent zero was in 876 CE in India…. Now we have a bunch of words that mean 0: nada, zilch, zip, diddly, and diddly-squat! … There used to be a town called Zero in Iowa—but sadly, its population is now 0.”

You’ll have fun with this book. Count on it.

Scott Lape will have a book signing at the Chico Barnes & Noble on Saturday, November 23 at 1:00 p.m. And listen to a recent Nancy’s Bookshelf interview with the author by host Nancy Wiegman at www.mynspr.org/show/nancys-bookshelf.

“And I Love Her Still”

Chicoan Pamela Dean “was a wildland firefighter in the early 90s and worked on engine 4 out of Adin,” a small town (fewer than three hundred residents) in Modoc County. Though an injury ended her career, “she was proud to be a part of the group of women who forged the way.”

Adin in 1988 is the scene of what is billed as a “heartwarming romantic comedy,” but what Dean delivers is so much more. It’s a literary tour de force that propels the reader to the very end and takes no prisoners along the way.

“And I Love Her Still” ($19.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) introduces two combustible characters in Kenny, a beautiful badass woman firefighter and EMT (who handles a chainsaw with finesse), and 32-year-old Patrick, a handsome but disillusioned Seattle mystery writer who inherits a ranch near Adin. Sparks, as they say, will fly. 

Kenny and Patrick narrate alternate chapters throughout the book, always in the present tense, and the reader listens in. They are no strangers to barnyard epithets or explicit descriptions.

“Her features,” Patrick muses to himself, “are a contradiction, sweet and innocent with a touch of sin. … She has dark-brown eyes and a bunch of freckles across her nose and cheeks. She is tanned … and damn is she fit.” “He is actually kind of adorable,” Kenny thinks. “Bumbling professor kind of cute. I mean looks-wise he is a hot professor type. Dark hair and brilliant blue eyes.”

As self-deprecating Patrick gets to know the ranch that belonged to his late great-uncle Mitchell, and read his cowboy poetry (and eventually write some of his own), he finds he’s entangled in something of a family mystery. Kenny is plagued by Ryan, a young crewmember on the prowl for women, and the love lives of both Kenny and Patrick are pretty much on the skids. Until they meet.

I couldn’t put it down.

The author will be having a book signing party November 13 at the Blue Agave Room at Tres Hombres from 6:00-8:00 pm. The cover painting is by local artist Virginia Wright who will be offering hand-painted bookmarks at the signing.

“Stand Easy: Creating A Small British Pub And Considerable Comradeship In The Corner Of A Garage”

For Chicoan David Bruhn it happened almost by chance. After weekly mountain biking with longtime friend Pat O’Connell, the two would “sit at a small bar in my garage and enjoy a beverage—he a bottle of water, and I a bottle of beer. (I attribute these choices to his having served in the U.S. Air Force and I in the U.S. Navy.)”

The bar was something like a British pub, and over seven years, with input from a group of friends, it took on real character, befitting the real characters who frequented “Stand Easy” (a military term meaning “take a break”). And now Bruhn has published an account of its construction, filling it with a hundred photographs and diagrams, stories from the friends who meet there regularly, and an assortment of British pub jokes.

“Stand Easy: Creating A Small British Pub And Considerable Comradeship In The Corner Of A Garage” ($23.50 in paperback from Heritage Books, Inc.) is not just about the artifacts that populate the pub, including a hand-made chandelier of 9 wine bottles with their bottoms cut off, but “about building friendship and espirit de corps.”

Bruhn writes that “moderation is the key” during “our weekly use…. The Stand Easy is formally open between 5:30 and 7:00 p.m. During this time everyone enjoys at most two drinks and a home cooked meal prepared by my wife Nancy or Rich Varlinsky.” (Recipes in an Appendix include Nancy’s Kickin’ Crab Corn Chowder.)

Friends’ stories add to the ambience of the book, from Deadhead Grace who dated Neil Young to Rich and Cindy’s Mexican Riviera cruise. 

In 1989 sociologist Ray Oldenburg argued that “third places,” like local bars, were democracy’s grassroots where people, putting aside the demands of work and home, could meet for lively conversation, lessening some of the division that characterizes the moment we are in. Among Stand Easy’s small group of friends, the garage pub is indeed a “great good place.”

David Bruhn is Nancy Wiegman’s guest on Nancy’s Bookshelf on Northstate Public Radio, mynspr.org, Wednesday, November 6 at 10:00 a.m., repeated Sunday, November 10 at 8:00 p.m.

“Whispers In The Dark: Three Stories Of Terror”

Imagine Chico writer N.J. Hanson penning a scary story about a writer penning a scary story about “a man who moves into a new house, one he gets for a very reasonable price, which is also haunted by the spirits of the family that was murdered there.” Imagine further that the writer penning about the spirits finds on a stormy night that he, too, must deal with one of those spirits because of the pen he is penning with.

Hanson’s story is called “Inked In Blood,” one of a triad of tales perfectly pitched for the pumpkin season. “Whispers In The Dark: Three Stories Of Terror” ($6.95 in paperback from Ink Drop Press; also for Amazon Kindle) also includes “Roadside” and “Wingbeats In The Night.” 

“Roadside” is about just desserts, some might say. It begins gruesomely enough: “With a heave and a groan, he threw the body off the bridge and watched it splash in the river below. The concrete cinder block tied to it quickly pulled the corpse down to the bottom, where the dead girl’s arms, legs, and hair listed almost delicately in the current. … The man got back into his truck, the old engine of his ’73 Chevy rumbled to life when he turned the key, threw it in gear, and drove away. It was time to find a new girl.”

It ends, as one might guess, gruesomely enough.

The longest story, “Wingbeats In The Night,” takes the narrator to Mexico “to visit ancient sites of Aztec and Mayan ruins. … I planned a trip to visit the ancient city of the Sun Pyramid.” Big mistake, actually. His guide is a sketchy character but the narrator’s intense interest in the legends of these cultures drives him onward. 

The “bat god of the underworld, Camazotz,” “a human-bat hybrid,” is on the pyramid above the image of “a man held down by his arms and legs across a sacrificial altar, his chest cut open, and his heart held towards the sky in the hands of a priest”—but, this being the diabolical Hanson, it isn’t just ancient history.

Close the shutters and make way for the shudders.

“Heretic Too!: An LGBTQ-Celebrating, Divine Violence-Denying, Post-Christian Universalist’s Responses To More Of Evangelicalism’s Concerns”

Chico writer Matthew Distefano, theological provocateur and Tolkien-lover, returns for another jab at the conservative evangelical tradition he grew up in. “Heretic Too!: An LGBTQ-Celebrating, Divine Violence-Denying, Post-Christian Universalist’s Responses To More Of Evangelicalism’s Concerns” ($19.99 in paperback from Quoir; also for Amazon Kindle) is a sequel to his earlier “Heretic!”—though this time he calls himself not a heretic but an “apostate.”

Though “I still think Jesus is the bee’s knees” (and so, he adds, is Buddha), “I don’t necessarily care about all the ins and outs of the faith. I no longer care about the Apostles’ or Nicene creeds, or any of the creeds for that matter. I no longer consider myself part of the Church…. Instead, I’m way more interested in who Jesus was as a human being, why it’s important to study his life, and, if you’re so inclined, to put into practice his ethical teachings.” 

Later, though, Distefano notes that “I live on the fringes of Christianity,” and its pull continues to be evident in each chapter, which critiques many of the teachings found in evangelical circles. “It’s not that I don’t care for what Christians have to say, it’s just that I’ve become more enamored with Buddhism than I ever thought imaginable,” and “one can be a Christian and practice Buddhism.”

The bottom line is that through the strife of our present life, “love wins”—or should. Distefano wants to dismantle the doctrines that, he says, separate person from person, and that includes hell, marriages with gender-assigned roles, and heterosexual sex as the only “normal” kind (the author has come out as bisexual). The book ends with impassioned letters against Christian nationalism and the rise of Trumpism.

“Often times,” he writes, “I am cheeky, and sometimes I can be rather biting.” His theological explorations are peppered with barnyard epithets which, in an odd way, are the sign of his caring. He envisions love abounding (which doesn’t mean anything goes), a world with the sensibility of the Hobbits’ Shire, a place one can enjoy good pipeweed (in his case, cannabis) and talk with friends far into the night.

“Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against The Far-Right Takeover Of Small-Town America”

“This is a story,” says Sacramento-based social-justice writer Sasha Abramsky, “about the forces tearing at America’s twenty-first-century fabric. It is about a country that, pushed to the emotional and political limits by Trump, by COVID, and by the endless misinformation and echo chambers of social media, has found itself on the edge of a precipice, with political violence normalized and with wild conspiracy theories too often framing public discussions.”

Abramsky, a correspondent for The Nation, wonders whether the “corrosive forces” of “the nativism and the xenophobia, the distrust of sexual and cultural and racial minorities” will “burn out in the face of growing public unease—and even repugnance—at all that is lost when extremists seize the helm.” 

He's convinced that “it is in local communities throughout America, in ordinary places such as Sequim, Washington, and Shasta County, California, that this challenge will be met….” Both areas are explored in depth in “Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against The Far-Right Takeover Of Small-Town America” ($30 in hardcover from Bold Type Books; also for Amazon Kindle).

He begins with the COVID crisis in Sequim (“pronounced ‘Squim’”) “a town of 8,000 residents on the Olympic Peninsula,” which becomes a center of anti-vax sentiment--to the consternation of public health officer Dr. Allison Berry, “scared of white supremacists and misogynists who want me dead.”

In Shasta County, “public health officer Karen Ramstrom, along with her supporters in county government, were facing a similar set of terrors.” The stresses of the pandemic, Abramsky notes, forced people to the extremes. If health officials erred in inconsistent masking mandates, some of those who were infuriated found a home in a Republican Party “larded with violent rhetoric.”

Some Shasta County supervisors also pushed back on California’s open-carry gun ban and its mandated machine vote counts. “By 2023,” Abramsky writes, “there was an omnipresent background hum of extremism and a growing presence both of disinformation and of paranoia in everyday life.” Yet by the end of 2023 Abramsky finds hopeful signs both in Sequim and Shasta County. 

It’s a complex and nuanced story, a plea for a measured response when “chaos comes calling.”

“Meditations For Mortals: Four Weeks To Embrace Your Limitations And Make Time For What Counts”

British author Oliver Burkeman (oliverburkeman.com) invites readers dogged by perfectionism and proliferating to-dos to join him on a mind retreat. Enter “Meditations For Mortals: Four Weeks To Embrace Your Limitations And Make Time For What Counts” ($27 in hardcover from Farrar, Straus and Giroux; also for Amazon Kindle).

Each week’s theme (“Being Finite”; “Taking Action”; “Letting Go”; and “Showing Up”) explores what he calls “imperfectionism,” a realization that “the day is never coming when all the other stuff will be ‘out of the way,’ so you can turn at last to building a life of meaning and accomplishment that hums with vitality.”

Instead, accepting our limitations “is precisely how you build a saner, freer, more accomplished, socially connected and enchantment-filled life – and never more so than at this volatile and anxiety-inducing moment in history.”

Burkeman draws on insights from philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual writers of various traditions to open a door to what theorist Hartmut Rosa calls “resonance,” the world’s “capacity to touch, move and absorb us” when we recognize we are not, and can’t ever be, in total control of it.

He suggests some practical considerations, always recognizing they are not absolutes; we do indeed need to exert some control over our environment and sometimes must to do that pressing to-do. But if you can, he writes, “treat your to-do list as a menu”: “It’s surprising how many things do become more appetizing once you’re encountering them not as chores you have to plough through, but as options you get to pick.”

And this for people-pleasers: “It’s a fool’s errand … to make your sense of feeling OK dependent on knowing that everyone around you is feeling OK, too.” Be careful about worrying that others are thinking bad things about you; likely they’re not thinking of you at all. Novelist Leila Sales writes that “when I don’t respond to someone’s email, it’s because I’m busy, but when other people don’t respond to my emails, it’s because they hate me.”

“This, here and now, is real life. This is it.” Choose from the day’s menu, and go for it, even if imperfectly.

“Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation On Race And The Meanings And Myths Of ‘Latino’”

“Like ‘mutant,’ ‘Vulcan,’ or ‘Wookiee,’” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Héctor Tobar, “’Latino’ and ‘Latinx’ and ‘Hispanic’ are the made-up words of storytellers describing a group of people engaged in an adventure. Latino people are brown, Black, white, and Indigenous, and they are European, Asian, and African. Some of us speak excellent Spanish, but many more of us do not.” 

Still, there are historical ties: “This diverse group of people is joined together by shared roots in the upheavals and the crises set in motion by the building of the United States into a global superpower, and, further back in time, by the Spanish Crown’s attempt to build an empire in the Western Hemisphere.”

Tobar (hectortobar.com) is a Professor of English and Chicano/Latino Studies at UC Irvine and the author of “Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation On Race And The Meanings And Myths Of ‘Latino’” ($18.99 in paperback from Picador; also for Amazon Kindle), the 2024-2025 “Book In Common.”

Book discussions are scheduled throughout the academic year at Chico State (www.csuchico.edu/bic), Butte College, and in the community. The website notes that “Latinx students make up 37% of Chico State’s student body and over 30% of Butte College’s students identify as Latinx. Both of our campuses are Hispanic Serving Institutions” with the emphasis on “servingness.”

Tobar’s compelling prose blends the complexities of history, and his students’ experiences, with his own narrative including visits to his ancestral homeland, Guatemala, where he was conceived, and Los Angeles, where he was born, and where in 1967 a white supremacist moved next door. Later, James Earl Ray would become Martin Luther King Jr’s assassin.

Paradoxically, “The people now known as Latino seem to be perpetually on the brink of being the next group assimilated into whiteness (following the Jews, Italians, and other groups), only to be racialized as a dark other.” Though “race” is a biological myth, “We know race shapes how people see us, that it is a category into which our bodies and our histories are supposed to belong.” 

For Tobar, the question “Who am I?” would take an entire book to answer. This is that book.

“Don’t Pity The Desperate”

Anna B. Moore (annabmoore.com), who teaches writing and literature at Chico State, dedicates her debut novel “To teenagers: glorious, brilliant, devastating. We fail you. We forget. I’m sorry.”

It’s the 1980s and high school junior Myra, drug of choice alcohol, on Elavil for depression, secretly and compulsively pulling out her hair, is put into a rehab center by her father, Keen. It’s called OPP, “Our Primary Purpose,” located in Iowa City, Iowa with its program based on the “Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book.” 

“Don’t Pity The Desperate” ($17.95 in paperback from Unsolicited Press) searingly and with keen observation enters deeply into Myra’s consciousness on her sixty day journey at OPP (that’s when the insurance runs out). The brutal honesty demanded of those in group sessions called Community fracture her self-understanding.

“Why had so many awful things happened to all of them? Myra did not feel like a kid, an adolescent, a young person. None of them did. They felt bruised, marred, wise with age, as if they had been living through the hardest parts of their lives.” As Counselor Rachel says: “Addicts’ lives can go three ways … Jail, insanity, or death.”

Moore takes readers into the unspoken world that shapes Myra’s response to OPP’s rules, especially “No Contact if counselors discovered your relationship with another patient or if they thought your friendship was destructive.” She is separated from Charlie, the boy she thinks loves her and who violates his “No Sex” contract. 

Though Myra gets drunk on a day pass home, is called to account as no way to deal with the death of her mother in a car accident, she is also asked to choose a Higher Power to aid in her recovery. Myra begins to “fake it till she makes it,” praying “for love to help her: to take away her obsessions, her worry, her fear.”

But this is not a story of easy redemption; far from it. In a teenage world of speed, cocaine, heroin, beer, glue, downers and Jim Beam, sobriety comes an hour at a time. Would the Higher Power help? 

Just know this: At one point Myra hugs a counselor; her name, it turns out, is Grace.

Dan Barnett teaches philosophy at Butte College. Send review requests to dbarnett99@me.com. Columns archived at https://barnetto.substack.com

“Vintage Birds: A Guidebook And Matching Game”

“Watching a woodpecker drum on a tree,” writes Chico ornithologist Roger Lederer, “or a flock of waterfowl cackling overhead, we can immerse ourselves in the present moment. … For over fifty years I have led birdwatching walks, and I still revel in seeing the excitement in the eyes of amateurs and professionals … when they spot or hear a bird doing something they have not seen or heard it doing before. It happens on every trip.”

Enter nineteenth-century artists John and Elizabeth Gould. From 1830-1881 the Goulds, and other artists, published “3,100 unique images … many being the first illustrations of previously unknown species.” The Goulds focused on birds of Britain, Europe, Australia, Asia, New Guinea, even the Himalayas, rivaling in artistry the work of American John James Audubon.

Lederer has gathered twenty-five of the most stunning images from the Goulds’ publications into “Vintage Birds: A Guidebook And Matching Game” ($29.95, boxed, including the guidebook and fifty cards, from Hardie Grant Books). The game is simple; cards are spread out on a flat surface, face down, and players take turns turning over a pair, hoping to find and remember the matches, each with one of the vintage illustrations.

The guidebook introduces the Goulds, discusses “what makes a bird?” (including what to feed them), provides rules to the game, and then, in glorious full color, tells the story of each of the birds, mostly from territories outside North America. The images on the cards match chapters in the guidebook and Lederer envisions players saying something about each bird image revealed.

The male plumage of Pink Cockatoo from Central Australia “is soft-textured white and salmon-colored with white, red, and yellow erectile crest and orangish underwings.” The Eurasian Hoopoe’s “common name is derived from its ‘oop, oop, oop’ call” as is its scientific name, Upupa epops.

The Snowy Owl nests “on the treeless tundra above the Arctic Circle … the heaviest of all North American owls” weighing up to 6.5 pounds. The male Lesser Florican on the Indian subcontinent may jump almost ten feet six hundred times a day to attract a female (who “responds by whistling”).

Readers will whistle as well at these extraordinary vintage birds.

“The Fran Lebowitz Reader”

Raconteur Fran Lebowitz notes that “success didn’t spoil me, I’ve always been insufferable.” Perhaps best known for her first books, “Metropolitan Life” and “Social Studies,” the New York-based wisecracking sarcasm-machine was the subject of a 2021 Netflix limited documentary series, “Pretend It’s A City,” directed by Martin Scorsese.

Both books, which skewer all things New York but don’t stop there, are brought together in “The Fran Lebowitz Reader” ($18 in paperback from Vintage; also for Amazon Kindle and in audiobook format read by the author).

“The first pieces in this volume,” she notes, “were written in my early twenties—the last, in my early thirties.” In the 1970s and 80s, when the book’s dozens of short chapters were written, the internet wasn’t a thing and phones still had cords. The discerning reader will note that what was then considered fair game for a humorist may not be politically correct today—but, come to think of it, Lebowitz would wear that charge with distinction.

Groups of people are not for her. “… my two greatest needs and desires—smoking cigarettes and plotting revenge—are basically solitary pursuits.”

She’s not totally anti-social. “My favorite way to wake up,” she writes, “is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish.”

Lebowitz is a dispenser of advice and observation, called for or not.

“So you want to be the Pope? … Women interested in this job should be warned of the almost insurmountable odds against them.” “Sleep is a genetic rather than an acquired trait. If your parents were sleepers, chances are that you will be too. … Sleep is death without the responsibility.” “Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.”

Lebowitz “off the cuff” will be appearing at Chico State’s Laxson Auditorium on Thursday, September 19 at 7:30 p.m. Ticket prices range from $55-$69; Chico State students and those under age 17, $17. Details at chicoperformances.com.

“Tías And Primas: On Knowing And Loving The Women Who Raise Us”

“I come from women,” writes Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez, “who protected any sense of dignity they had left with elbow grease and determination. This world prioritizes the men in their lives more than them at every turn. What all this translates to is that the women I love were often very judgmental.”

An immigrant to the U.S., Nicaraguan-born, the author “was raised in Latine neighborhoods until I moved away from Miami to Nashville, Tennessee … to attend Vanderbilt University and pursue my master of divinity degree…. My childhood household was very traditional and conservative, based on a patriarchal family structure in which men lead and women follow…. I am a non-white, non-Black Latina and identify as brown.”

Her new book is a compelling meditation on “Tías And Primas: On Knowing And Loving The Women Who Raise Us” ($30 in hardcover from Seal Press, also for Amazon Kindle, to be published September 10)—but not just aunts and cousins; there are matriarchs and best friends as well, all presented in the book as an “amalgamation of many people to create these specific archetypes,” sensitively illustrated by Josie Del Castillo.

These include Latinas who are pushed to be perfect, widowed and divorced aunts, the cousin who doesn’t like other women, the queer aunt, the aunt who is “scandalous,” and more. “I am writing this to rip these tías and primas from the clutches of sexism, homophobia, fatphobia, colonization, stigmatization of mental illnesses, male gaze, and rape culture.”

And “I write,” she says, “to help others feel seen…. I am all of the women in this book, in one way or another. They represent my inner fears, my deepest struggles, my best qualities, and my demons…. As I heal, I find myself writing about the women in my life. May it do for you whatever it needs to do.”

Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez will be speaking on “Self Preservation for First Generation College Students” Thursday, September 19 at 11:00 am at the Butte College Black Box Theater (ARTS 160). The talk is free and open to the public. For more information contact Amy Antongiovanni (Antongiovanniam@butte.edu) and see butte.edu/diversity.

“Out Of The Darkness: The Mystery Of Aaron Rodgers”

“It was a sunny afternoon in Malibu in February 2024,” sports biographer Ian O’Connor writes, visiting Aaron Rodgers who was “working on his tan while I fact-checked anecdotes and claims from the 250 interviews I conducted for this unauthorized book.”

The book is “Out Of The Darkness: The Mystery Of Aaron Rodgers” ($29.99 in hardcover from Mariner Books; also for Amazon Kindle). The “long-shot kid from upstate Chico” might not “lead the Jets to their first Super Bowl appearance since they won it all in January 1969”; yet, as the new season beckons, one never knows.

“Rodgers,” O’Connor writes, is “the most compelling and polarizing figure in professional football, hands down… I wrote this book to explain why.”

What follows is an account of Rodgers’ life, beginning with Pines Elementary in Magalia and concluding with his move to the New York Jets and his season-ending injury early in the first regular game of the season. O’Connor takes the reader inside Rodgers’ most crucial games, at Pleasant Valley, Butte College, Cal, the Green Bay Packers, and the Jets.

But the book captures Aaron’s personal odyssey as well against the backdrop of strained family relationships (O’Connor flew to Chico to take Rodgers’ parents, Ed and Darla, to that fateful Jets game), the sometimes prickly relationships with teammates, friends, and coaches, and the ever-present question of what is next after a Super Bowl ring (with the Packers in 2011) and MVP awards attesting his status as one of the greatest QBs in history.

Butte College is especially formative. Smart as a whip, Rodgers finds a mentor in coach Craig Rigsbee. It is 2002; Aaron is 18. Rigs overrules his staff and makes Rodgers “the guy.” O’Connor writes that “it was a decision that set up the most important season of football that Aaron Rodgers would play—ever—and leave Rigsbee as the man most responsible for changing the trajectory of his career.”

Despite his “self-generated controversies,” O’Connor notes, friends “talked often about Rodgers’ generosity, his outsized heart, and the money he had donated in the wake of the great wildfire and the great pandemic.” 

This, too, is Aaron Rodgers, Chico’s son.

“Dancing On The Ceiling”; “Dancing In A Minefield”; “Dancing In A Storm”

Chico novelist, poet, and former foster child Hope Hill finds in her free verse a kind of liberation. In three books of poetry, texts are centered on each page but without titles or periods and flow as if they were ribbons dancing in the wind. 

Each book, independently published, is $5.00 in paperback (also for Amazon Kindle). “Dancing On The Ceiling” is a meditation on suffering. “Every adult says/ The nightmares in daylight/ Will never go away/ But you have to get over it/ The truth is, you can’t/ Cause the nightmares/ I have in daylight/ Are one hundred percent real/ Not monsters under my bed/ But people attacking me/ Bad memory after bad memory/ Flooding my mind/ Searing my brain” the poet writes.

“Dancing In A Minefield” is explicit about poetry as therapy. “Can you explain/ Why I must pour out these words/ Or risk losing my sense of self?” And: “I could no more cease writing/ Than I could unmake myself”—and yet there are moments that nearly do unmake the poet:

“I’m dancing in a minefield/ Twirling amidst the explosions/ Wondering when I’ll shatter/ And fall apart once more” but then: “As I write I find the truth/ For I have answers I must find/ And they are hidden in my mind” amidst trauma, fear, shame. “Being mentally ill/ And disabled as a result/ Of said mental illness/ Means that PTSD/ Affects every aspect of my life” the poet says.

“Dancing In A Storm,” the third volume, is “about survival”: “I’m writing this/ For future me/ I want to remember/ That I fought/ To stay alive/ It wasn’t always easy/ But it was always worth it/ And when the storm clouds lift/ As they always do/ I’ll remember/ That the sky/ Was crying for me” writes the poet.

The poet’s task is not to escape the past, but to integrate it with one’s very self. “I’m autistic/ And changing that/ Would mean I wouldn’t/ Recognize myself/ I don’t know who I’d be/ Without it”—Hill’s writing takes the reader on a harrowing yet celebratory journey as the poet is “writing myself sane.”

“Ember”

Early on in Chicoan Douglas Keister’s new novella (his forty-seventh book), a beautiful, 37-year-old woman asks her coffeeshop companion a question: “So, Jeremiah Quincy Jensen the Third, how did you become interested in cemeteries?”

Jerry, as he likes to be called, is a taphophile, “a cemetery lover,” giving lectures on cemetery symbolism and publishing books on it as well. As the 54-year-old academic shares a bit of his story, it’s clear for both of them something else is going on. 

“They were seeking common ground not so much to find a shared interest,” Keister writes, “but to find a way to explore the palpable chemical connection they both had felt the second they met. Love at first sight seemed trite and hackneyed, but that’s exactly what it was.”

The woman, with her “vibrant red hair,” is named “Ember” ($10.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle). “The word ‘ember,’” she explains, “means a small spark or flame, a symbol of a fire that burns deep within. It can also signify the fading remains of a past emotion.”

Jerry understands; while Ember Owens is good at “finding and losing boyfriends,” Jerry lost the love of his life some two decades earlier. Amber (so like Ember) had married Jerry after her first marriage--to moneyed charmer Jason Lewis who turned “jealous, possessive and violent,”--disintegrated. Jerry and Amber were celebrating Amber’s thirty-third birthday when Jason intervened. Amber did not survive.

As the relationship between Jerry and Ember deepens, with the sex extraordinary and fiery, both suspect their own motives. Jerry wonders whether showing Ember his late wife’s grave at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in New York makes Ember a kind of substitute. Ember wonders if this is just another encounter, destined to fizzle, never enabling her to come to terms with her rape as a teenager and giving up the resulting child in a closed adoption.

Their love will be tested as a sinister plot comes to fruition while they are visiting Sleepy Hollow. Jerry, ever the professor, explains some of the symbols on the gravestones that signify membership in secret societies. And then their lives change forever.

It’s a romantic thriller with, ahem, a great plot.

“The Adventures Of Wild Willy: True Stories From 1940-1980”

Born in 1933 in Los Angeles, writer-artist Wilma Rae Forester moved to Chico with her family around 1940 and “finally settled in the barren wastelands of the eastern part of town called Pleasant Valley. Ours was one of only two houses on Cactus Ave. … It was great horse country and easy to access Bidwell Park.”

She and her young chums certainly did horse around back in those days, and Forester recounts some of those memories (with real names and only just a tad exaggeration here and there) in “The Adventures Of Wild Willy: True Stories From 1940-1980” ($25.49 in paperback from ReadersMagnet LLC, readersmagnet.com; also for Amazon Kindle).

“I married very young and had two sons and later a daughter…. The R.G. Rolls family moved to Forest Ranch in 1964. I married Jacques Gubbels in 1997 and we still live in Forest Ranch. I have trophies and ribbons from riding and painting” but her Christian faith sustains her along with her “children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.” 

In 1945 it took months but the family nursed a downed bird they called “Goose Gander” back to health with masking tape and a cardboard box. Then, hearing another flock overhead, the bird flew up to join them, slowly rising and circling the barn as if to say thanks. But there was a surprise: “We finally found his picture in our ‘Book of Knowledge,’ and Goose Gander was not a goose. He was really a Trumpeter Swan.”

Years later, housewife Wilma and friend Marge, both riding motorcycles, found an old logging road above Forest Ranch and made their way down the mountain to Butte Creek. And needing to get home by entering into a “no trespassing” area owned by “a cranky retired sheriff who lived all by himself” near the creek they found him “holding a rifle and packing a pistol on his hip.” Did I mention two big dogs? It took real smarts to get away.

The book is filled with Forester’s paintings and youthful shenanigans, but most especially is an homage to her home: “I love Forest Ranch.” Her memories, now in this time of challenge, are especially poignant.

“Christ Or Caesar: Church And Nation In Christian Perspective”

“Christian symbols and prayers among the mob storming the U.S. Capitol. Nationalistic celebrations and politically partisan sermons in churches. … The relationship between church and nation in the United States is a source of much confusion and strife.” 

So write Presbyterian elder Allan H. Harvey and Senior Associate Pastor Carl S. Hofmann, both of Grace Commons Church in Boulder, Colorado. Hofmann was the guest speaker, via Zoom, at a Chico discussion group considering the authors’ book, “Christ Or Caesar: Church And Nation In Christian Perspective” ($5 in paperback from Barmen Publishing).

Harvey and Hofmann describe themselves as “non-fundamentalist Protestants who seek to follow Jesus but recognize that our writing, like our lives, will inevitably be imperfect and is not the final word.” They invite Christians and others to consider what it means “to give our allegiance to Christ alone, not to any ancient or modern political Caesars.”

Intended for a general audience, the first two chapters provide Biblical context, about Abraham, Egypt, and Babylon and then for Jesus, the Church, and Caesar. In the Old Testament, “God’s people are to carry out their international mission to bless the people of all nations and ethnic groups.” In the New Testament, Israel’s mission is fulfilled in Jesus; in him “God enfolds, heals, and redeems all nations, not just particular ones.”

When Christians seek to wed the church’s mission to the authority of the state, as the “German Christians” did under the Nazis, and often in church history, such nationalism becomes idolatry. Jesus’ followers expected him to overthrow the Roman power and “make Israel great again”; but he said his kingdom “was not of this world.”

The authors consider the “errors of Christian nationalism,” how it distorts American history and seeks to use secular power over others; it is, they say, “theologically wrong.”

The final chapter considers the practical: it’s not about “gaining power for ourselves. Instead, we should be giving ourselves away for the good of our neighbors around the world.” It’s difficult to discuss with family and friends, Hofmann told me; it requires discernment and much prayer; the bottom line: “our ultimate source of hope is Jesus, not politics.”

“Out Of Ukraine”

Chicoan Emily Gallo’s new novel builds and builds in intensity.

It is Winter, 2020. In San Francisco, Eric Stover tries to comfort his wife, Heather. They are a 40-something couple unable to conceive. Perhaps a decade earlier Heather had given birth to their daughter, Chloe, despite issues in her pregnancy, but Chloe had lived only for a short few years before her life was claimed by cancer.

And now their doctor is recommending IVF through a surrogate. A few weeks later Eric discusses their plans with his mother, Abby, and his step-father, Brian. They are supportive but, like Eric, wonder about the expense.

So begins a harrowing and desperate journey that will take Eric and Abby (substituting for Heather, felled by Covid at home) to at least five countries, all in an effort to bring their newborn daughter “Out Of Ukraine” ($14.95 in paperback, independently published, emilygallo.com; also for Amazon Kindle).

Abby, a writer, is an anxious sort, worrying about what might go wrong, not only with the surrogate in Ukraine, but how they might surmount the Covid delays and the bureaucracies that speak other languages, as Eric and Abby await receiving little Jillian Irina. 

Then, with Jillian in Ukraine, Eric and Abby must wait for her birth certificate to be registered and her passport application to be processed. The word comes that the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv is closing and then, on February 24, 2022, Russia invades Ukraine and the trio must flee the country. Eric and Abby are by turns resourceful and deeply afraid for Jillian.

Gallo recounts the many hours walking with Jillian in the freezing cold in an effort to reach the Polish border. “They walked on and the closer they got to the border, the more crowded it got. ‘I wish we could find out what’s going—.’ His sentence was flattened by a huge explosion. People screamed and started running in every direction.”

There is much, much more to come. Readers will find they are turning pages far into the night.

Emily Gallo is Nancy Wiegman’s guest on Nancy’s Bookshelf on Northstate Public Radio, mynspr.org, Wednesday, July 24 at 10:00 a.m., repeated Sunday, July 28 at 8:00 p.m.

“Moonbound: A Novel”

Robin Sloan, author of “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore,” spends his time in the Bay Area and San Joaquin Valley, but, he writes me, in 2021 and 2022 as he was “shuttling around in your part of state” he was making voice notes for his new book, “Moonbound: A Novel” ($29 in hardcover from MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux; also for Amazon Kindle and audiobook formats).

It is, he writes me, “A novel dreamt up (in part) on the road between Capay Valley and Oregon House,” and, as his ten-year-old son Orion says, after Sloan read him the book, it’s YA (Young Adult) but something even younger children could enjoy—if they don’t mind the intensity of a post-apocalyptic world, in the year 11,377, full of talking beavers, giant flies, and dragons made up of information.

About those dragons. Back in the year 2279, the Anth (“for that is what humans called their civilization at its apex”) created seven engineered intelligences, the “dragons,” and sent them out on a spaceship. Instead of opening a door into the universe, the dragons on their return built a base on the moon, pulverized a chunk of their new home and created a dust cloud around Earth so it would “forevermore hide from the cosmos.”

The Anth tried to fight back, but most all humans were destroyed. It was “a bummer so colossal that it was definitely … the worst thing that had ever happened” in Earth’s history. 

Thousands of years passed and one of the mini-intelligences, engineered by the Anth as a “Chronicler,” found itself inside a boy named Ariel, 12. 

The Chronicler tells the story, about how Ariel, escaping from the Wizard Malory, who had somehow created him, finds his destiny. But Sloan, with sly humor, upends standard fantasy tropes. There’s a sword in a stone for Ariel to pull out, but he ignores it and finds a very different, talking, sword. (More details: robinsloan.com/moonbound.)

Sloan upends the whole idea of “destiny” in the book (the first of a planned series) so surprises abound as Ariel ventures out into a world brilliantly imagined, where, with every page turned, readers will ask: “What happens next?”

“Hunting Tehama County’s Forgotten Emigrant Trail”

“With the discovery of silver in Nevada,” writes retired U.S. Forest Service archaeologist Deborah Tibbetts, “Red Bluff merchants saw an opportunity to tap into the business potential of supplying those far off mines. The Tehama County Wagon Road was built in 1863 to compete with John Bidwell’s Humboldt Wagon Road from Chico, which he built in 1862 to take advantage of the growing markets of Susanville and the Nevada and Idaho mines.”

There’s a mystery not far from the path of the Tehama County Wagon Road: a hidden trail, maybe running parallel in places with the Wagon Road, that existed in the 1850s to facilitate gold seekers looking for riches in the county (which, Tibbetts notes, “had little gold”). This trail is mentioned by Cottonwood resident Myrtle McNamar in her book “Way Back When,” published in 1952, but its existence had disappeared from memory.

So, under the guidance of federal archaeologist Eric Ritter, Tibbetts, who graduated with a degree in anthropology from Chico State, along with volunteers, did fieldwork in 2012, 2015 and 2017 as part of the Passport in Time program. 

Moving through overgrown brush in places, looking for swales (“vehicle and animal-created linear depressions”) and, using metal detectors, finding plenty of artifacts (such as hand-forged metal oxen shoes), the team documented its findings Tibbetts has published as “Hunting Tehama County’s Forgotten Emigrant Trail” ($19.95 in paperback from ANCHR, the Association for Northern California Historical Research, anchr.org).

The route “came off Lassen Trail at Deer Creek Meadows and traveled westward through Childs Meadow and Battle Creek Meadows (Mineral) eventually reaching the old Apple Ranch in Paynes Creek….” Tibbetts is careful to provide the larger context of the times, as the book’s subtitle suggests: “An Archaeological Survey And Brief Historical Overview Of Transportation Routes In Tehama County, California.”

Maps and photographs are included with special attention to listing artifacts, including wagon-related items such as “square nuts and carriage bolts.”

Not all sections of the emigrant trail could be studied since many areas are on private land. But it’s a start, and readers will be ushered into the hard but glorious work required to bring to light that which has been forgotten.

“If I Have To Grow, It’s Good To Know—Because Every Story Matters”

Paradise resident and Camp Fire survivor Bobbie Merica is a preparedness trainer. In various natural and human-caused disasters, first responders will encounter those with traumatic injuries and local leaders will be tasked with helping a community respond both during and after a disaster.

To make training as realistic as possible, Merica’s company, MoulageConcepts.com, uses 3-D mock injuries (“moulage” is French for “casting a mold”) that can be applied, like makeup, to simulation participants. The gruesome results are made even more heart-wrenching when they are applied to children, but that’s often the reality in the field.

In a world of active shooters, devastating fires, frightening evacuations, abusive situations, traumatized children need a way to process what is happening to them. A community can help by training children in how to make creative and resilient responses. 

To that end, Merica has developed a coloring book with a cartoon character called “Aoifa” (pronounced EE-FA), “A distinctive warrior with holden hue, of Irish lore./ She’s strong and soft, thoughtful and brave,/ keeping watch with a courageous roar.” The book is “a safe place to discuss hard things.”

“If I Have To Grow, It’s Good To Know—Because Every Story Matters” ($16.95 in paperback, independently published, available through Aoifa.org) features illustrations by Daniel J. Seward. The first pages introduce the cast of characters, Ottava the octopus, Aria the fox, DaCoda the wolf puppy, and of course Aoifa, whose calming presence graces each page.

Aoifa leads children through difficult landscapes, but there’s always hope, as in this prompt for readers to consider: “When paths become rocky, fight we must,/ our way back through,/ the road may be rough, and alone we may feel,/ but rarely ever is this actually true.”

There are pages where children can fill in their responses to the prompts, such as this one: “Some pain for a future gain, is required growth, when we need it most…/ But some hurts, must be addressed, to ensure our health, and our long-term best.” Then there’s ROAR (“react accordingly; outreach—notify others!; activate emergency notification system; reevaluate and respond”). 

Sensitive, courageous and hopeful, Aoifa helps create that “safe place.”

“Seamus O’Leary’s Taqueria”

Chicoan and retired Butte College and Chico State anthropologist Mike Findlay wanted to “provide young readers with a cross-cultural lens, so they can foster a better, wider sense of the world’s complexities.” And so was born “Seamus O’Leary’s Taqueria” ($2.99 in Amazon Kindle format from Tlaxiaco Press). 

The novel is a kind of cultural travelog centering around Seamus O’Leary, 22, who “grew up in Northern Ireland, in a fishing town northwest of Belfast, named Ballycastle.” As the Sixties wane and violence of “The Troubles” comes ever closer to his home, Seamus is restless. 

His father, his “Da,” doesn’t understand his leaving—what is wrong with Sea? (“They call me Sea,” he tells his new southwest Irish friend Garret, whom he meets in Seattle. “It’s spelled like the ocean … but we pronounce it … like ‘hey’ with a ‘sh’ in front.”)

The story is full of fortuitous encounters, like with Elizabeth, a “food critic specializing in Mexican food,” whom he meets in a Tijuana restaurant.

Here Sea is introduced to “the little folded things.” Tacos. “This is so good,” he tells Elizabeth, “I don’t want to put it down.” Much later he tells her: “I have a theory that if people can taste the food of other people, the world will be a much better place. The first time I had tacos in Tijuana, it opened my eyes to Mexico.”

Elizabeth responds that things are more complex than that. “There are Americans who eat Mexican food, but have no idea who Mexicans really are…. If someone thinks food or any other single thing is going to make the world a more peaceful, informed place—I think that is naïve.”

But food does play a big part in the narrative as Sea grows in cultural understanding. Marrying and settling in La Paz, in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur, still feeling unmoored, Sea and his family, and many others, are hit by a devastating storm, a “Chubasco.” It will change his life forever.

As Findlay notes at the end, “For me, food, place, and people are a nexus linked to an ever expanding diverse human universe, a kind of cosmic taco if you please.”

“Land Yacht Seaward: Building A Cozy Wooden Camper For A Small Truck”

“For years,” writes Chicoan David Bruhn, “I told my older son, who had a Nissan Frontier, ‘Someday I’m going to build a “yacht in a truck” for you.’ … a wooden camper with as many amenities as possible…. Finally, this past summer, I decided to carry out this goal.”

Bruhn adds that he is “not a builder nor a master woodworker, just a retired naval officer and author who possesses a table saw, chop saw (radial arm saw), small electric and hand tools, and who has access to a friend’s drill press … designing the camper as I went along.” 

Step by step, thinking things through, sometimes getting it wrong, Bruhn worked a few days each week for almost three months, documenting each step of the way, sourcing materials from Chico and Butte County businesses where possible, finding sources farther afield as needed (especially for the key ingredient, marine-grade Philippine mahogany), finally making the successful maiden voyage to Fort Bragg with his wife, Nancy.

Details emerge chapter by chapter, with dozens of photographs and diagrams, from design considerations (the maximum “payload” for the 2015 Frontier is 1100 pounds, including the camper and people) to fitting “Seaward” on the truck and creating the interior. 

It’s all told in a literal nuts-and-bolts narrative in “Land Yacht Seaward: Building A Cozy Wooden Camper For A Small Truck” ($20 in paperback from HeritageBooks.com).

A Foreword, by Lynn Salmon, notes Bruhn kept six considerations in mind: “functionality, cost, attractiveness, strength, durability, and weight.” True to its name, of course, the “Seaward” had to have portholes on the doors. For security, Bruhn kept the locking tailgate. But when it was up and locked, the “Seaward” doors wouldn’t open. Just how Bruhn solved that challenge is part of the charm of the book, a tribute to the creative spirit.

If “glamping” is upscale, glamorous camping, Bruhn introduces readers to “glachting” (“glamour land yachting”). Interested? I can’t read the book for you; you’ll have to do-it-yourself.

David Bruhn is Nancy Wiegman’s guest on Nancy’s Bookshelf on Northstate Public Radio, mynspr.org, Wednesday, June 19 at 10:00 a.m., repeated Sunday, June 23 at 8:00 p.m.

“Wrestling with Demons: In Search of the Real Ernest Hemingway”

Retired Chico State business professor Curt DeBerg, now living in Miami and Hendaye, France, is obsessed with unraveling a mystery about Ernest Hemingway.

“Hemingway went through four wives,” he writes, “alienated his three sons, and betrayed more friends than you can count on two hands. The winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature saw the killing of bulls at the corridas in Spain; he gaffed marlin and bluefin tuna off the coasts of Havana and Key West, and he slayed big-game animals in Africa and grizzly bears in Montana. He was self-absorbed, and narcissistic. He told great yarns in the bars of Paris, Pamplona and Havana.”

Hemingway was driven to be seen as a hero’s hero whose own exploits fed his novels. The truth is more complicated. As a young man, Hemingway, working for the Red Cross, was wounded when a mortar shell exploded in a frontline trench during World War I; his fellow soldier, Fedele Temperini, died next to him. 

Hemingway made much of his own (relatively minor) wounds and concocted a story of how he tried to save Temperini, when in reality Temperini, the true hero, shielded Hemingway from the blast. 

In “Wrestling with Demons: In Search of the Real Ernest Hemingway” (publication information available on DeBerg’s website, curtdeberg.com) the author identifies five “demons” that shaped Hemingway: “his parents’ disapproval, remorse, chronic pain, anguish, and a deep-seated sense of rivalry with other writers and war combatants.” Fear of being found a fake pushed him on.

The book is unique. Each section begins with a letter to Hemingway as DeBerg explores Hemingway’s favorite haunts; that’s followed by a fictional conversation with MDH (“modern day Hemingway”), a biographical essay and finally a warts-and-all memoir in which DeBerg draws out similarities with Hemingway (DeBerg survived a debilitating light plane crash; Hemingway survived two).

This is Hemingway: “Safaris, deep-sea fishing, booze, Europe, women, sex, adultery, plane crashes, betrayals, injuries, illnesses and, finally, suicide.” For DeBerg, “This book has allowed me to address, and even exorcise, some of my own demons as I refer to a famous, larger-than-life man who is, in a very personal way, my kindred spirit.”

“The Mouth Mechanic: A Rick Rose Novel”

If someone steals the crown jewels, it’s time to call in Chico novelist (and retired dentist) Mike Paull because, well, the crown in question is a gold crown, missing from a tooth in a well-dressed murder victim in the Bay Area. 

The crown has something to do with Middle East shenanigans and when a second victim is found, also with a missing crown, the stakes could not be higher for newly hired forensic odontologist Dr. Rick Rose, working for the San Francisco Medical Examiner, Dr. Alexandra (Alex) Keller and also, as Rose adds, “the most beautiful pathologist in the country.”

As Rose notes in Paull’s propulsive new mystery-thriller, “odontologists were dentists who helped in criminal investigations, especially in cases where nobody could identify who the dead guy was.” The novel’s title uses a more descriptive name: “The Mouth Mechanic: A Rick Rose Novel” ($15.95 in paperback from Wings ePress, in print or ebook format at most bookstores and at Amazon.com).

Rose, 35, tells the story. His drinking led to suspension of his dental license and time in “a diversion program—kind of an AA for people who wear white coats and latex gloves.” By the time his license is returned his practice had folded, he and wife Josie divorced, and he was Googling for work. Though he was “ninety-first out of a class of a hundred” at dental school, he’s hired by Keller who is rebuilding the department with millennials.

Things heat up very quickly as Rose tries to figure out the importance of the missing crowns on two ID-less murder victims. Some shadowy figures think he has them. “Yesterday,” he muses at one point, “I had received my third death threat in as many days. Two from a couple of thugs who were certainly doing someone else’s bidding, and the other from a spy for the Israeli Mossad. It was pretty obvious I was close to something worth killing for….”

Readers will be turning the pages as fast as they can as Rose uses every ounce of his sarcastic energy to manipulate the manipulators and find the truth. 

A flawed man, he may yet rise to his crowning achievement.

“Bidwell Park: Personal Reflections And Casual Conversations About Chico’s Crown Jewel”

After he and partner Kate Roark moved to Chico in 2016, environmental educator Paul Belz looked for a memorial to the Hooker Oak’s collapse on May 1, 1977. 

“I only found a small stone structure with a metal plaque describing the Hooker Oak. Cars zipped past on busy Manzanita Avenue….. I wondered how many people remembered the great tree. Is it a ghost only rooted in a few peoples’ memories? If people forget about Hooker Oak, I fear they can also forget how important Bidwell Park is.”

Chicoans must never take the park for granted. And so, undertaking a years-long writing project, including three dozen interviews with those who love the park and a deep dive into the Bidwell Park and Playground Commission minutes from 1918 to the present, Belz has produced an enticing invitation to consider forces shaping the park.

“Bidwell Park: Personal Reflections And Casual Conversations About Chico’s Crown Jewel” ($19.95 in paperback from ANCHR, the Association for Northern California Historical Research, anchr.org) is an extraordinary and nuanced guide to 3670 square acres and their management.

After detailing park history, Belz considers “many visions for the park.” “Reader, let’s imagine going for a hike that begins in wild Upper Park. We follow Big Chico Creek through the more developed Middle Park, ending near downtown Chico in Lower Park. I show you places involved in some of Chico’s most contentious debates about the park.”

The key question looms over every chapter: “Does the park exist so people can have recreation, or should it be more of a nature preserve?”

Belz explains why a freeway crosses the park, considers Horseshoe Lake and guns, golf and beer, invasive plants, park volunteers, budgets, children’s education, homeless encampments, and the importance of remembering “that this is Mechoopda Maidu land and that tribal members see it as part of their home and their cultural heritage.”

As Belz and Roark hike the Yahi Trail in mid-May 2019, “Kate and I hadn’t seen many of the butterflies this spring, and we were excited to discover how many caterpillars had survived.” 

How to ensure the park itself survives? “One does what one can.”

“Before Ishi: The Life And Death Of The Yahi”

For decades, longtime Chico Enterprise-Record reporter Steve Schoonover, aided by his wife and fellow reporter Laura Urseny, have been in search of Ishi’s heritage and the fate of his people, the Yahi. They “backpacked in 1995 from the Sacramento Valley floor near Red Bluff to Childs Meadow, in a bid to replicate the Yahi annual migration.” 

Schoonover’s dogged investigation of the historical record challenges claims made in books about Ishi, and paints a nuanced picture of gruesome violence against native populations in the mid-1800s in Butte, Tehama, and Shasta counties.

“Before Ishi: The Life And Death Of The Yahi” ($24.95 in paperback from Stansbury Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle) is available at Made in Chico, the Bookstore downtown, at the Chico History Museum, and at beforeishi.online. 

Schoonover bursts the “Ishi myth,” that he was starving, that he and the Yahi were part of the Mill Creek Indians, “the last survivor of a tribe that had terrorized Northern California for years.” Wrong.

The book focuses on the life of the Yahi and surrounding tribes, and the coming of white settlers. California, Schoonover writes, “wanted the natives out of the way and had the authority to use gunpowder….” By contrast, federal troops called in to “protect the settlers from Indian depredations” often “discovered it was the Indians who needed the protection more than the settlers.”

By 1867 “the organized carnage” in the three counties ended. Some fifteen whites died in the preceding six years;  the Indian death toll was more than a thousand “if you add in those who died of malaria in 1863 at the camp on John Bidwell’s ranch in Chico, and on the forced march from there to Nome Cult.” Most of the Yahi had been killed.

“It’s important to understand,” Schoonover concludes, “what your predecessors and ours did to those who lived where you and I now live, in order to claim the land for ourselves.” His is the most piercing book you will ever read about the ghosts that haunt us still.

Schoonover will present at the Chico History Museum, at 10:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., on Saturday, May 25. For ticket availability visit chicohistorymuseum.org/event-5737721.

“Gam Gam, Am I Mixed?”

For longtime Chicoan Mollie Openshaw, entrepreneur and Butte College vocational nursing instructor, her young granddaughter Bellahrainee sparked something deep within, an honoring of “the richness of cultural diversity.”

That led to a partnership with Chico artist Linda Phelps to publish a children’s book that “encourages children to celebrate the tapestry of their own identities and unique characteristics.” A grandmother’s love comes through mightily in “Gam Gam, Am I Mixed?: Promoting K.I.D; Kindness, Inclusion, and Diversity” ($29.99 in paperback from FMG Press in Chico, amimixed.com; also for Amazon Kindle).

That love is expressed in Phelps’ full-color artwork on each page, blending whimsical paintings of Chico places (like Caper Acres, Made In Chico, and Shubert’s) with photographs of Mollie, Bellahrainee, and many other children. Each page, in “find Waldo” fashion, contains Dot the ladybug (for Kindness), Buzzy bee (for Inclusion) and Flutter the butterfly (for Diversity).

When the book is opened, each left-hand page contains the question “Gam Gam, Am I Mixed?” with Gam Gam’s response on each right-hand page. Here are some of the answers:

“Yes you are my darling, you are mixed with anything you want to be and with lots of gumption”; “… you are mixed with imagination and wonder”; “… you are mixed with equality and acceptance.”

The foreword is by Alan Floyd, “the former head of global touring operations for Beyoncé” and “son of Eddie Floyd, one of the leading voices of the 60s and 70’s era of soul and of rhythm and blues….” “As we immerse ourselves in the pages of this book,” Floyd writes, “let us be reminded that our diversity is our collective strength. Each one of us is like a puzzle piece, and together, we create a more complete and harmonious picture of humanity.”

From the book’s webpage, ladybug Dot reminds readers to practice the Golden Rule, “being considerate and generous,” and that “Kindness makes our hearts shine!” Buzzy the bee says “no one is left out” and “everyone is included.” And Flutter the butterfly emphasizes “things that make us special and unique” and “Beautiful differences in language, abilities, skin color, religion and more!”

Though the book is for children, it's not just K.I.D. stuff.