“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.

“The Jefferson State Rebellion: A Story Of Northern California’s Past, Present, And Future”

The time is just a few years into our future. A California mega-drought has returned. Two friends, meeting at the Lopez family ranch west of Gridley, are plotting. “After years of bitching and occasional bouts of heavy drinking, Dan and Eddie developed a bold plan they called the Jefferson State Rebellion. Dan was the big picture guy. Eddie’s role was tactical. Twelve hours earlier, the rollout of the initial phase of the rebellion had begun in the halls of the state capitol.”

The rollout, on Valentine’s Day, is when Democratic State Senator and Glenn County rancher AJ Donelson, relaxing with his wife Rachel at home, hears from chief of staff Andrei Volkov. There is trouble brewing at the upcoming water hearing AJ is set to chair. Andrei has been visited by “six men dressed in black and grey camouflage wearing combat boots and berets,” and they want no water compromise with the South State. 

At the same time, a Republican kingmaker from the South State pressures AJ to cut a deal to transfer more water, turn Republican, and in return get backing for a Congressional run. To top it off, the head of the DWR is about to sell out the North State.

AJ will be severely tested, in both body and soul, as he becomes enmeshed in the murderous violence of “The Jefferson State Rebellion: A Story Of Northern California’s Past, Present, And Future” ($15.95 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) by Robert M. Jackson, professor emeritus of political science and past dean of the School of Graduate, International, and Sponsored Programs at Chico State. 

Politically complex and deeply human, the book is just stunning. The North State becomes a character in the story, from a heist of explosives in Chico, to meetings with a reporter at Action News Now, to a bloody encounter at an abandoned barn in Colusa County. In Jackson’s telling, the push for a 51st state of Jefferson becomes deadly serious. 

Dan tells the reporter, “Jefferson will be able to defend our water resources…. We have a right to chart our own destiny.”

But at what cost?

“El Salvador: Blood On All Our Hands”

With the approval of Ken Leake, publisher of the Woodland Daily Democrat, George Thurlow would take vacation time to report from one of the world’s hotspots—El Salvador. He arrived there on April 26, 1981.

Thurlow, editor of the Chico News & Review from 1981-1991, now living in Santa Barbara, spent only a few days in El Salvador during its civil war. Looking for the “bang bang,” the only way to get attention from news outlets back home, Thurlow and his translator, Gilberto Moran, were ambushed by the ruthless Treasury Police. Thurlow was wounded but Moran was killed. The Salvadoran police, Thurlow writes, “shoot first and don’t ask questions later.”

“El Salvador was in the throes of a civil war between the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, which fought to end government repression and for land reform, and an authoritarian government.” Weeks after Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980, four U.S. religious figures, including three nuns, were raped and killed by Salvadoran Soldiers. Meanwhile, Thurlow notes, the U.S. increased support for the government in its proxy war against the Soviets.

The story is told in Thurlow’s riveting first-person account, “El Salvador: Blood On All Our Hands” ($19.99 in paperback from Stansbury Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle). 

“Blood was streaming from numerous shrapnel wounds in my arm, and they turned the cameras toward me. I was becoming the news. I was the bang bang. That night, my image would flash across the U.S. on network TV, and I would be heralded, pitied, and pilloried.”

Much of the book recounts Thurlow’s agonizing but fruitless search for Moran’s grave and his family. “Like so many other Americans,” he writes, “I had come to El Salvador to make a point, and I was leaving behind a trail of misery. I had stories to tell … and a clear understanding of how the U.S. was behind so much of the terror. But it would take me 20 years to figure out my responsibility. My country never has.”

Nancy Wiegman interviews Thurlow for Nancy’s Bookshelf on mynspr.org, North State Public Radio, Wednesday, May 1 at 10:00 a.m., rebroadcast Sunday evening, May 5, at 8:00 p.m.

“How To Know A Person: The Art Of Seeing Others Deeply And Being Deeply Seen”

“In every crowd there are Diminishers and Illuminators,” writes New York Times columnist David Brooks. “Diminishers make people feel small and unseen…. Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people. They have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others…. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, deeper, respected, lit up.”

The Illuminator makes healthy connections with others, bringing some measure of mending to a fractured society where partisan voices talk past each other and loneliness has become epidemic. Becoming an Illuminator, Brooks maintains, is not only a skill that can be learned but it is expressed in something as simple as having a conversation—and making eye contact.

“How To Know A Person: The Art Of Seeing Others Deeply And Being Deeply Seen” ($30 in hardcover from Random House; also for Amazon Kindle and as an author-read audiobook) is a real-world guide to developing the character of an Illuminator. 

Which, writes Brooks, “is not something you can do alone. Morality is a social practice. It is trying to be generous and considerate toward a specific other person, who is enmeshed in a specific context. A person of character … is trying to just be present and faithful to the person suffering from depression….”

The first part starts with “I See You.” The goal is to see the other as they are, not through a stereotype. “The Koreans call it nunchi, the ability to be sensitive to other people’s moods and thoughts.”

 “I See You In Your Struggles” deals with hard conversations, what empathy really means and how a person is shaped by their suffering. Finally, in “I See You With Your Strengths,” Brooks moves into the importance of hearing another’s life story. 

He is a compassionate and vulnerable guide.

Chico psychologist Len Matheson will be facilitating three one-hour Zoom discussions about the book, Wednesdays from 7:00-8:00 p.m. on May 1, 8, and 15. There’s no need to have read the book in advance. Registration is free and the community is invited; go to https://tinyurl.com/5f7byt89 for details.

“Fire & Silk: Poems & Artwork”

Chico author and artist Meghan Irene Turner, survivor of the Camp Fire, recipient of a Ph.D. from the Institute of Metaphysical Humanistic Science, and ardent observer of the natural world, finds in poetry “a way to communicate with the soul.”

That communication is highlighted by her drawings and paintings in “Fire & Silk: Poems & Artwork” ($19.99 in paperback from Chico-based Quoir, facebook.com/quoirpublishing, or from the author at poetmirene@gmail.com).

Turner notes in the Preface that the meaning intended by the author, either of poetry or the black-and-white illustrations, may be very different from what the reader discovers. So the book is presented “not so that any person can decipher the absolute meaning of each poem, but so that each can explore the many worlds that creativity establishes.”

The book is designed to be taken in slowly, each poem a contemplation that invites heightened awareness of everyday experience: “Wearing sandals and shorts/,” the poet writes, “in the abyss of the ordinary// I make my bed, then pour a cup of coffee.” 

Elsewhere, in “a crack in the divine,” the entire poem reads: “My head, a shell,/ filled with the yolk/ of yesterday// My bones, branches,/ a resilient nest/ for tomorrow// My spirit, albumen,/ awkward ethereal globule,/ of intuition.”

In “ptsd,” remembering the fire: “small globules of sweat form on my neck// I can feel the sensation of panic/ as the planes fly like eager hummingbirds over head … my hands come up to cover my head,/ and protect me not from the massive tanker filled with water,/ but from my mind and the memories encased there…” 

Yet when the awful vision ends, and the poet returns to the present: “Even if just momentarily. Even if just for a brief second./ I am reminded of liberation,/ the absolute freedom of witnessing beauty before that fiery autumn.”

One’s connection with nature is a humbling, sometimes heartbreaking reality: “I am no greater than the dust, and not less./ I am infinite with the ground.” In another poem: “I see eternity/ in a speck of dust.” Yet later, contemplating the stars: “The place from which we came/ The place to which we go// Dust and luminescence….”

“Harmony: Legend Of Forest Ranch”

Wilma Rae Forester, LA-born in 1933, came to Chico with her family in 1940. Later on, marriage and children brought a move to Forest Ranch in 1964. A dedicated artist as well as writer, she has a tale to tell of many years ago. 

Actually, it comes from an old man she and her children encountered one day while walking in Forest Ranch soon after establishing residence there. They passed an old tree with a sign that read “World’s Largest Cherry Tree.” 

“The roots of it twisted beneath a rectangular shaped cement watering trough,” she writes, “with the words ‘Diamond Match Co.,’ imprinted into the side.” Then they saw the man, in red suspenders and with a long white beard, and though the tree couldn’t talk, he certainly did.

It's all recounted in “Harmony: Legend Of Forest Ranch” ($7.76 in paperback from ReadersMagnet LLC; also for Amazon Kindle), with more than two dozen of Forester’s whimsical illustrations depicting a young gold miner named Harlan, a Native American woman named Melody, and a creature called a Harmony.

A Harmony, Forester writes, “is a tiny playful horse-like creature that looks like it’s made of glass. It has a white fuzzy mane and tail, two sparkling bright eyes and wings like a dragonfly. Since they are only about four inches tall, they may easily sit in the palm of your hand…. Listen, did you hear a soft haunting melody or is it just the water bubbling over the rocks?”

When Harlan and Melody, riding in what is now Bidwell Park, and admiring Big Chico Creek, fall in love, Melody’s brother puts a curse on Harlan, who promises to return to marry Melody but, mysteriously, stays away for years. 

“You see,” writes Forester, “Harmonies were originally created to send out feeling of happiness and good will to everyone … but it wasn’t working. Because of the terrible battles and bad feeling between the White man and the Indians, all Harmonies were ordered to leave the West. Only two were left and they were grieving and sad.”

Would Harlan ever return? Only the Harmonies Dusty and Silky can help and, fortunately, a happily-ever-after is not far behind.

“The Dutch Master: Big Joe Carson Series Book III”

My old pal, David Dirks, longtime Chicoan, now a Brentwood based novelist, is no stranger to the inner workings of the Department of Energy’s national laboratories. So the fictional Hans M. Mark National Laboratory, near Ft. Wayne, Indiana, hums with verisimilitude. It’s the Cold War 80s when a super-secret particle beam weapon being developed at the lab explodes, the victim of treason and espionage.

After lead scientist Horatio Glen Knightsen and his accomplice are apprehended, but later apparently disappear, Senior Engineer “Big Joe” Carson suspects something more is afoot, which is revealed in the third book of the Big Joe Carson series, “The Dutch Master” ($10.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle).

The first two books, “Particle Beam (For Such A Time),” written with Dennis E. Jones, and “Red Skies (Aftermath),” introduce a fellowship of close friends, including David Janzen, a key engineer on a new super-secret device, the Laser Optic Diamond Turning Machine (LODTM) for the Laser Defense Weapon program approved by Congress. 

Since the LODTM is not available at Costco, the lab has to build its own, at great cost. And now the Indiana lab is experiencing odd delays and Janzen and Carson wonder if Mildred Cornwall, administrative lead for the new program, and one among others of Dutch ancestry at the lab, might be involved with a rumored “Dutch master” of espionage.

There’s big trouble for Big Joe when Knightsen vanishes. “The FBI announced they were adding the charges of murder and conspiracy to commit murder to the … charges against Big Joe Carson, and Sunny and Bunny Valencia, the two Latino twin daughters of the infamous but dead cartel lord, Agusto Guitterez Valencia, and defrocked US Marshals. All three were already locked up on multiple serious charges, any one of which could land them behind bars for life….”

That’s on page 1 of the novel; later, an attorney, known for defending cartel members, springs the twins. His name is, ahem, Daniel Barnett, of the firm of Barnett, Bennett and Barns. I’m honored. I think.

It’s a great romp and a satisfying conclusion and, if it please the Court, you should read it. 

“Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism Of Karl Barth”

Chicoan and substitute teacher Max Feiler graduated from Duke Divinity School in 2019, where he struck up a friendship with one of his professors, Stanley Hauerwas, born in 1940. 

A theologian and author of dozens of books, Hauerwas’ vision of the Christian life is perhaps most accessible in “Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony,” co-authored with Will Willimon, a retired United Methodist bishop who, Feiler writes me, “told me recently that I reminded him of a ‘young Hauerwas’” in his constant awareness of human sinfulness and possession of a rather wicked sense of humor.

The abiding question for Hauerwas is the place of the Christian church in light of Easter’s resurrection reality, when the temptation is to succumb to narcissistic impulses or to take over the reins of secular power.

Now, in a series of lectures and occasional pieces entitled “Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism Of Karl Barth” ($29.50 in paperback from University of Virginia Press), Hauerwas reflects on key themes from a controversial career, influenced by many, but especially Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968). For Barth, as for Hauerwas, the “humanism” of liberal theology, which focuses on the human response to God, must be rejected.

In its place is the humanism revealed in Jesus Christ who in taking on our humanity revealed what it means to be fully alive, fully human. It is “apocalyptic” since Barth lived  “through an apocalyptic time but also because he saw the world as forever changed by a Galilean peasant.”

Though the book isn’t the place to start with Hauerwas, it is full of trenchant observations: The capitalist system “destroys human attachment to, and affections for, relationships and institutions by embedding them in impersonal exchanges.” More sarcastically, he writes that the American story is one called “freedom”: “That story produces people who think they have been wounded by being born.”

Hauerwas considers how the Kingdom of God made manifest in Jesus Christ ought to display a new kind of politics, showing an alternative to narcissism and power that can befriend “the least of these.” His is a provocative view, but, as he observes, “Few sins are more deadly than making God boring.”

“Mimetic Theory & Middle-Earth: Untangling Desire In Tolkien’s Legendarium”

“I’m of the mind,” writes Chico author Matthew Distefano, “that we can never not desire; and we will never be not mimetic. The question, then, becomes ‘to whom will we look to as our models?’” The word “mimetic” or “mimic” means “imitation.” So we learn what’s valuable by seeing what others desire and imitate that desire. If it’s the same thing or person, “mimetic” spells “trouble.”

And so it has been throughout history, people desiring what other people have; often it’s not so much the object itself (like money or political position) that evokes desire as the power the object delivers. Distefano draws on French theorist René Girard to look behind the scenes at human motivation and though for the most part the picture is not pretty, it’s, well, human.

And mostly unconscious. Girard deals with our propensity to scapegoat—create a “fall guy,” Distefano writes, whom we brand as evil and who takes “the blame for something they aren’t responsible for.” We learn in “The Lord of the Rings” the Hobbit Sméagol (Gollum) kills his friend to take the Ring; later, his tricks rile folks and he’s made the scapegoat for all the community’s woes and banished to lonely wandering.

Yet Distefano finds in Tolkien not just negative examples of desire but a different kind of mimesis. It is friendship (think of the Hobbits Frodo and Sam) “discovered, not through unconscious mimesis of a model, but rather through conscious imitation of the love and affection each have for the other.”

This vision of a better community is lovingly unwrapped in “Mimetic Theory & Middle-Earth: Untangling Desire In Tolkien’s Legendarium” ($19.99 in paperback from Chico-based Quoir, quoir.com; also for Amazon Kindle), crafted for a general audience. “It is no surprise,” Distefano writes, “I am enamored with the Shire.” It’s not perfect, but a model of friendship.

Toward the end, the author writes of his friendship with Michael Machuga in Paradise, where Hobbit-like they tend a garden at Michael’s house and afterward “put our (not so) furry feet up while pairing our pipe-weed with a glass of some of the ‘harder stuff.’”

Friendship, it turns out, is Hobbit forming.

“Sometimes The Soul Needs Chocolate: Pandemic Odes”

“Sometimes the soul needs chocolate,” the poet writes, “when we’re flung towards chaos, and plagues./ Bigots, wildfires, and powerful fools/ leap our way. Cacao lifts us up,/ unbinds our tongues, helps us stand/ on the speeding ground. Food of the gods,/ keep us wild!”

The poet is Chicoan Paul Belz. Remembering 2020-2021, his poems acknowledge pandemic and political chaos but also the importance of simple pleasures and especially connection with the natural world.

“Sometimes The Soul Needs Chocolate: Pandemic Odes” ($7.99 in paperback from Vanguard Press; also for Amazon Kindle and available locally at Made In Chico) presents two dozen free verse poems beginning with “Ode To A Pencil”:

“Do you tremble when these sparks/ gather at your paper-scratching tip,/ tingle as we fill notebooks with song,/ wear yourself out with this frenzied work,/ then shout through my arm to my heart and skull,/ beg for more images, off-rhymes, beats/ you can place in a new-born poem?”

Belz is the author of “Bidwell Park,” also available locally, and it’s clear the author-poet is transfixed by nature’s expansiveness. In “Ode To Big Chico Creek” the poet imagines where the water rushing past has been:

“Other molecules streamed skyward through oaks’ roots,/ then waited for the sun to yank them up/ to chilled air, where they gathered as clouds./ They tumbled onto roses, mallards, pines./ Rain landed on people. Did some drench Darwin,/ who strolled on the Beagle’s deck and watched spiders/ cling to bits of webs and ride the wind/ over the sea, onto his nose?”

At the poem’s end, almost as an implied rebuke to the enclosed isolation wrought by Covid, the poet exclaims: “I watch you slide by,/ while heat takes water from my skin./ I’m parched. If I drink from you,/ I’ll take in multitudes.”

While “Hospitals turn the dying away,” the poet finds some measure of relief in camping. As so many suffer, there comes an almost guilty question: “Can I briefly claim the right to be sane?” 

In that regard, the “Election 2020 Ode” expresses a wish perhaps even more relevant today: “Maybe we’ll learn to think again,/ wrangle and argue without curses,/ semi-automatics or flames….”

"Love Bath"

“It was 1986,” writes Oroville resident “Caroling Atomz” (Carolyn Adams), “and I’d been in a sick relationship since ’83. I was addicted to the man and the drug. The man was the drug. I pretended everything was wonderful. The intense orgasms and nanoseconds of love conspired to make me believe I was happy.”

Later, in 1988, she found herself on staff at Wilbur Hot Springs in Williams where she discovered a love of writing. What happened in between is told in a quirky and mostly upbeat memoir, “Love Bath” ($27 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle), which also features photographs and Adams’ artwork.

In her teenage years she had turned to drugs and booze, was sent to a boarding school at thirteen after her mother remarried, and realized her dad, abused by his father, had taken up gambling “and the ‘easy’ life” to make up for a harsh upbringing.

Things began to change in 1987 when Adams and her mom attended a new age conference at Asilomar called “The Emerging Goddess.” “I loved being in silence and in communion with one particular tree. In taking time to ‘be’ with the tree, to touch it, and to give part of myself to it, I felt rooted in deep connection with the Earth….” Adams searches for more of this rootedness in creative expression that didn’t require a man to guide her.

But more lessons first. When her new boyfriend, “Albert,” came into her life, the math professor shared the drug Ecstasy with her. “I loved feeling the essence of God in any way, shape or form. Psychedelic drugs helped me see the true Oneness of all things: how we are all One with God.”

Things didn’t turn out as expected; during a healing stay in Bali, she learned Al had fallen for another. “I was beginning to grasp … that I could move more slowly and freely, at my own pace—and that I did not need this man, or any man, to feel safe and complete.” In a therapy session at Wilbur, she finds her “heart is broken open and there is more love than ever, rivers flowing out into the sands of time.”

“Healthy Young Children, Sixth Edition”

Though it’s a textbook for early learning professionals, “Healthy Young Children, Sixth Edition” ($62 in paperback from The National Association for the Education of Young Children, naeyc.org; also for Amazon Kindle) is a comprehensive guide of interest to parents as well.

Edited by Alicia Haupt, Brittany Massare, Jennifer Nizer, Manjula Paul, and Louis Valenti, the key first chapter, “Health and Safety for Children and Early Childhood Educators,” is co-written by Shaun-Adrián Choflá, Butte College Child Development instructor. 

Choflá, with expertise in empathy therapy, and co-author Julia Luckenbill, Adult Educator/Director of the Parent Nursery School in Davis, flesh out key safety standards for early learning programs.

These standards, write Choflá and Luckenbill, are more than just physical safety practices but also embody emotional safety. For instance, how should educators choose books and other items for their classrooms? “First, partner with families. Engage in relationship planning by asking about the families’ needs, values, and wishes for their children. … Ask also for a list of key words and phrases in the families’ home languages. Setting up the classroom so that the walls and shelving reflect the people walking in for the first time is a wonderful way to support feelings of belonging….”

In addition, educators should remember that “not all families have traditional structures, so your handouts should avoid assuming that families are headed by a mother and a father.”

The authors also discuss the disruption caused by COVID-19. “As early learning programs closed,” they write, “educators lost their jobs and children were left without the in-person support that early learning settings provided, creating trauma and impacting young children’s mental health.” 

The chapter is concerned not only with trauma-informed care of children, but also the well-being of educators themselves and what early learning programs can do to foster the health of their employees (such providing substitutes and regular breaks).

Real-word vignettes throughout the chapter illustrate ways trained professionals can interact with children, like washing their hands with Dee, who is two; or how to bring children out of danger without alarming them.

This is a good guide to the good work done by educators who care for some of the most vulnerable among us.

“Shadows Of Light & Shards Of Dark: Poems ReCollected 1978-2023”

Oroville teacher William (Bill) Jackson is also a professional magician, lover of theology, and now, a “reluctant poet.” 

“I never understood, nor enjoyed most poetry,” he writes. “So I never considered myself a poet … even while writing poems. However, I have always enjoyed words. I’m fascinated by how they can carry innumerable shades of meaning. … Each word is a seed containing a tree of human thought.” 

Those seeds blossom in “Shadows Of Light & Shards Of Dark: Poems ReCollected 1978-2023” ($15 in paperback, independently published). Over 45 years, beginning after high school, Jackson penned words that capture a moment but open up into larger vistas, illuminating “who we all are, where we have been, and where we may go.”

Loosely organized into four “seasons,” Spring considers words, love, and lust, Summer is for shadows of light and dark, Fall contains “Treasured Ash” in poems for Paradise, and Winter heralds a journey toward “good grief.” “Grief,” the poet claims, “is not a rest along the way./ You’re not meant to live in despair./ Grief’s never meant to be a place to stay./ Grief is about continuing to care.”

The Appendix is a children’s story, with Jackson’s own sketches, called Mark & Cathy and the Meaning of Life, a tale about misfits who fit. 

The poet knows something fitting: “Darkness falls./ Yet, the sun miraculously rises bright./ Heaviness calls./ Yet, one is not so easily made light./ A secret:/ Gratitude defies gravity.” The poet is grateful for “Table Mountain Wildflowers” which “Tuck themselves in to the tune/ Of songbirds in the evening hours/ Serenading a stoic moon.”

Some poems here evoke smiles, others reflect deep theology. “Fear is/ A certain kind of faith/ In dark uncertainty./ Love is/ The certain kind of faith/ In light risen from adversity.” And: “No matter how logical or critical/ Love is personal, not political.” 

“Only an unchanging God can truly say ‘I AM,’” Jackson writes me. We, on the other hand, continue to change: “I’m a question waiting to form./ I’m an aging man unborn./ I’m becoming but never will be./ It’s only a stepping stone/ In what you call me.”

“John Brown’s Family In Red Bluff, California 1864-1870”

In 1833, John Brown married Mary Ann Day, just seventeen. In the first two decades of their marriage, writes Wilbert Phay, “she bore him thirteen children…. Of these, seven died in early childhood. Four of the children were taken by disease of some nature in one year. Two of her children, Oliver and Watson, were killed during the Harper’s Ferry episode.” 

Brown, drawn by the abolitionist movement, was increasingly absent from their North Elba home near Lake Placid. His “attempted seizure of the United States Armory at Harper’s Ferry failed.” Found guilty of “treason, murder, and conspiracy” he was hanged December 2, 1859.

The family’s story is told in a 1969 Chico State master’s thesis by Wilbert L. Phay, who passed away in 2020, but not before giving permission to Chico-based ANCHR (Association for Northern California Historical Research) to republish his work and include historical photographs and additional essays from ANCHR members.

“John Brown’s Family In Red Bluff, California 1864-1870” ($19.95 in paperback from anchr.org and local book outlets) includes contributions from Josie Reifschneider-Smith, Ron Womack and Nancy Leek. 

In late 1864 Mary Brown “and her four surviving children arrived in Red Bluff” after an earlier encounter with a “rebel” wagon train on the Oregon Trail. But why Red Bluff, with its “Copperheads,” “its nucleus of pro-Southern sympathizers, the most ardent haters of her dead husband,” Phay writes, “and by association, herself, and her family”?

The book answers that question, and more. Others in Red Bluff built a small house for the family in 1865, so family life was complicated, made more so by the attacks of the Red Bluff Sentinel and defense by the Red Bluff Independent. Phay and the contributors create a compulsively readable narrative that makes the past live again. It’s essential reading.

The story continues to unfold. Reifschneider-Smith, ANCHR Publications Manager, has unearthed details about why the “rebel” wagon train was so hateful of Brown and his kin, some of whom are buried in the Paradise Cemetery; she will present her findings to the Paradise Genealogical Society, 1499 Wagstaff Road (530-762-7105) on Thursday, February 15, at 3:00 p.m.; the presentation is open to the public.

“The Queen And The Empress”

Red Bluff novelist William Wong Foey, who earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Chico State in 1973, mixes fact and fiction in his eighth novel. “The Queen And The Empress” ($14.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) traces the parallelism in the nineteenth century between two of the most powerful women in the world, Britain’s Queen Victoria and China’s Empress Dowager Cixi (“pronounced Tz’u-hsi”).

Both are cigarette-smoking, scotch-drinking, headstrong, power-hungry rulers, one seeking to extend the reign of the Union Jack to ancient China, the other seeking to protect 400 million Chinese from British control by means of devious plots to upend the conciliatory tendencies of the governing regents and wrest power from them. The women have a grudging admiration for each other even as Cixi survives attempted assassination.

The story imagines two key meetings, the first at Buckingham Palace when Cixi is a mere teenage concubine of the emperor yet willing to tell Victoria (whom she is wont to call “Vicky”) where to stuff it. As the queen muses years later, the dowager “was only sixteen and was addressed as the concubine Yi at that time. ‘That young Chinese tart was strong-willed even then,’ mouthed Victoria softly.”

The second comes in 1897, at the celebration of the Queen’s sixty-year reign, when, in her private room, Victoria and Cixi duel with swords. Cixi accuses the queen of extorting Chinese silver and addicting the population to opium. The Queen replies that “our true ambition for the heathen countries we acquire is to fill their hearts and souls with God, and to be good Christians so the dark races can join civilized society. Think of us as the nurturing parents….”

Cixi wants nothing to do with the gwai los (“whites”) yet she has little choice as she schemes for power. The Empress Dowager works to modernize her country to push back the British threat, but as the twentieth-century dawns it becomes clear that monarchs around the world were becoming more like figureheads.

The two powerful women survived in a man’s world even as they mixed the personal and political at the cost of many lives. Foey’s fiction tells uncomfortable truths.