Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 63

Resting in Peace

I have a complicated relationship with churches.  I haven’t been in many in San Francisco, but Grace Cathedral keeps drawing me back.  I’ve been to look at the murals a couple of times and gone to hear Handel’s Messiah there one Christmas and walked the labyrinth.  The church feels cold and aloof, but it doesn’t feel like it rejects me.

During one of his cemetery lectures in Cypress Lawn, Dr. Svanevik mentioned that Grace Cathedral has a columbarium.  Ever since I heard that, I’ve wanted to explore it, but it’s only open on Sundays around the morning service.  I didn’t want to intrude on anyone — and things are always better with a tour.  I booked one for last Thursday.

Our guide was the cathedral’s verger, who gave us a wonderful tour.  Even though he’s worked at the cathedral for the better part of 25 years, he introduced us to the artworks that jam this lovely building as if he was as enthusiastic about them as the first time he showed them off.  He led us in to locked chapels, back behind the organist, into the vestry, into the vault and the robing room, and answered every question we could come up with.

Once we reached the columbarium, it was a little disappointing.  The room is tucked into one of the bell towers.  Rather than having personalized glass-fronted niches like the San Francisco Columbarium or Chapel of the Chimes, the Cathedral’s columbarium has doors with little name plaques.  The cremains are tucked inside in nondescript boxes.

I can see the appeal of remaining for eternity in a place filled with music and artwork and the beautiful colors of glass-stained sunlight.  But I want a sense of belonging to history — and the cathedral, while lovely, was only completed in 1964.

It’s not for me and it won’t fit into my Historic Cemeteries of the Bay Area project, since the columbarium didn’t open until 1985.  Doesn’t matter, though.  I had a great tour, absorbed some beauty, gloried in the organist rehearsing, and felt grateful for the adventure away from my computer.

Now I’m considering a tour of St. Mary’s Cathedral, to see if they have a crypt or columbarium tucked away somewhere.  Svanevik had a theory that a number of San Francisco’s churches had semi-secret burial niches.  I’m on a mission to find out the truth of that.

Month of Blogging Month-Long Blog Challenge

Last month, I managed to blog six times here at Morbid Is.  That’s embarrassing.  I have been writing in my notebook a lot, even drafting out blog posts, but somehow, when it comes time to type things in, I can’t seem to do it.  I lose my nerve.

Instead, I spent last week writing blog posts for other people.  The Joan of Arc piece went up on Scoutie Girl last Tuesday and I’ve got 3 others out, waiting to go live.  I feel like the guest-blogging is useful — and it’s fun — but I need to find the fun on my own blog, too.

Luckily, Tonia Brown is hosting a month-long blog challenge on Facebook.  People need to commit to writing six posts a week for the month of June.  They can be written in advance and just posted one at a time each day — which is how I’m going to try to do it, since I’m going to be traveling this month.

I’m hoping that getting into the habit of blogging with make the sitting down to type in my posts less daunting.  And I always do better when there’s some kind of deadline, no matter how arbitrary.

Are you happy with the number of times you blogged last month?  Come join us!

Win a copy of Wish You Were Here on Pinterest

Loren Rhoads:

Today is the final day to win a copy of Wish You Were Here on Pinterest.

Originally posted on Cemetery Travel: Adventures in Graveyards Around the World:

Do you use Pinterest?  I’ve got a cemetery pinboard where I collect up images that may inspire their own Cemetery of the Week sometime.  I try to follow every cemetery board I come across, just in case something catches my eye.

I’m trying a new thing, this week.  If you pin the cover of my cemetery travel book onto one of your boards, you might win a copy of the book.  Tomorrow is the final day of the contest — and at this point, your chances of winning are good.

Here’s the link to my Cemeteries + Graveyards board: http://www.pinterest.com/lorenrho/cemeteries-%2B-graveyards/

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The Weekly Morbid

Guides of the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery tour

What with all the traveling and tour-taking, things have been developing slowly here, but I’ve got a couple of new pieces up online for your morbid perusal:

Scoutie Girl published my reflections on trying to convey my admiration for Joan of Arc to my daughter when we visited Rouen.  Tomorrow is the anniversary of Joan’s martyrdom.

The Gravecast blog reprinted my first adventure in the cadaver lab, in case you missed it earlier.

The Obscura Society tour of the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery tour was wonderful, despite the summery weather and the holiday weekend traffic.  I made that the basis of this week’s Cemetery of the Week.

Finally, if you’re on Pinterest, I’m giving away a copy of Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel this week.  The details are here.

Tour Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery this weekend

Loren Rhoads:

I’m finally getting to tour one of my favorite local cemeteries. You know what would make it perfect? If you could come tour it, too.

Originally posted on Cemetery Travel: Adventures in Graveyards Around the World:

Obelisk in Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery

Founded in 1854, the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery is the final home of whalers, brewers, cattlemen, a survivor of the Centralia Missouri Massacre, and the brother-in-law of General Mariano Vallejo. Veterans from the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, and World War I rest here.

Although the cemetery doesn’t boast any big names, it does contain some interesting stories – and the docents promise more, tailored to Obscura sensibilities:

John Richards, a very popular black barber, helped resettle slaves freed prior to the Civil War.
A monument remembers the 75 Santa Rosa victims of the 1906 earthquake.
“Doctor Dear,” Santa Rosa’s first female physician, was buried here in 1914.

Docents from the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery Association will be joining us as guides on this special walk organized for the Society by our resident Bay Area tombstone historian, Loren Rhoads…

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Back from WHC and Done Partying for a while

Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues on the shelf at Powell’s

The World Horror Convention in Portland went pretty well for me.  I didn’t come home with any new offers of work, but I didn’t go in expecting them either.  Mostly, this con was about seeing and being seen.  I had a list of people with which I wanted to hang out (because I’m just that maladjusted) and I managed to check most of them off.

Maybe the absolute highlight of the weekend happened entirely by accident.  Since I couldn’t do my planned excursion on Thursday afternoon because of the weather, I switched gears and took the train downtown to Powell’s City of Books.  I’d been to Powell’s once before, years ago, and all I remembered was that the bookstore was as big as a city block.  Somehow I hadn’t realized it was also three stories tall.

I drifted from info desk to info desk, stalking cemetery books.  After the initial disappointment that they didn’t have a cemetery shelf (or, better yet, a cemetery bookcase), I was still able to track down two lovely graveyard books that I didn’t already have and a book about funerals.  The final information clerk directed me to their Extremities shelf — and what should I find there but Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues!  They invited me to sign the copies they had.  My day was entirely and completely made.

Back at the convention, I caught two readings over the weekend, both by Haunted Mansion survivors.  Yvonne Navarro read a heart-rending story about enduring a Russian-engineered famine.  I’m not going to guess at the title because I’ll get it wrong.  Rain Graves read a bunch of poems from the soon-to-be Stoker Award-winning Four Elements.  My favorite was about Medusa, with whom I closely identify.  It’s the hair.

I read Friday afternoon, opposite Brian Keene receiving the Grand Master award.  I dreaded that no one would show up, but I was really pleased with the turnout.  It was great to see so many familiar faces — and so many unfamiliar ones.  I read the first menage a trois from As Above, So Below, one of my favorite scenes with Tuan Nguyen (my favorite mortal in the book), and a couple of brief scenes from The Dangerous Type.  It might have been a lot of jumping around for one reading, but it felt good to speak those words aloud.

Friday night I treated myself to the Beyond Bizarre ghost-hunting tour of Portland’s Old Town.  We got to play with EMF meters, slink around some of the underground Shanghai tunnels, and walk into a spectacular early-20th century hotel.  No ghosts were sighted, but we did stop for Voodoo Doughnuts, so there was magic.

The Smut, Gore, and More panel on Sunday morning went really well, too.  I expected that there wouldn’t be many people there on Sunday, but the room was nicely full.  It was a treat to share the panel with Lucas Mangum, Robert Devereaux, Tiffany Scandal (the first Suicide Girl I’ve been lucky enough to meet), and Dave Fitzgerald.  It seemed like the audience divided neatly between the smut-peddlers and smut-consumers.  They asked some great questions.

The hotel bar had a special drink menu for us.

In amongst it all, I got to hang out with authors Dana Fredsti, S. G. Browne, E. S. Magill, John Palisano, Rain, Lucas, Kate Jonez, Jaime Johnesee, Lisa Mannetti, editors Paula Guran, Angel Leigh McCoy, and Ellen Datlow, photographer Beth Gwinn, artist Alan Clark, and a bunch of other people I’ve obviously forgetting.

The one thing I was really looking forward to — exploring Lone Fir Cemetery — almost didn’t happen.  It was pouring rain on Thursday when I planned to go, so my ride begged off.  Friday I was busy most of the day and the rain only let up in fits.  It wouldn’t have been the first cemetery I’ve poked around in the rain. Saturday morning there was a tour scheduled, but I had to be back by noon for a panel I was on.  I didn’t want to walk the two miles to get to the graveyard, then have to rush back. Finally, Sunday afternoon, the weather was glorious.  I caught a cab with Kim Richards, publisher of the Haunted Mansion Project books, and we had a lovely afternoon.  More about that adventure will be forthcoming on Cemetery Travel‘s Cemetery of the Week.  Let’s just say the trip was the perfect ending to the weekend.

The War Memorial at Lone Fir Cemetery

World Horror in Portland

Photo by R. Samuel Klatchko

Just a few more days until the World Horror Convention opens in Portland! I cannot wait to go. I’ve never spent the night in Portland, so I’m looking forward to getting to know it better.

Here is my schedule for WHC2014. It’s pretty loose, which means there is plenty of time to check out Hale Pele.

THURSDAY:

I’m checking in to the hotel around noon, then heading straight out to Lone Fir Cemetery with whoever wants to come along. Mad as the Mist and Snow: Exploring Oregon through its Cemeteries says, “If you choose only one cemetery to visit in Oregon, this should be it.”  I have a mission!

FRIDAY:

1-2 PM

I’m tag-teaming with the formidable Paula Guran to critique a story for the Writers Workshop.

4-4:30 PM

I’ll be reading from As Above, So Below – and maybe a taste of The Dangerous Type, which should be out from Night Shade this time next year.

5 PM

Drinks with the Ladies of Horror

This one is tentative, but I hope it happens.  If you’re a horror-writer of the female persuasion, you should meet us in the hotel bar.

7-9 PM

Beyond Bizarre Walking Tour

I’m ditching the Mass Autograph Signing this year to go hear ghost stories and poke around Portland’s underbelly.  It should be a blast.

SATURDAY

12-1 PM

Starving in Style: Surviving as a Small Press panel – Me (moderating), Cameron Pierce, Chris Morey, Steven Booth, Ross Lockhart, and Kate Jonez

We’ll explore the how you can run a press without running it into the ground.

I’m debating the Stoker Banquet, but I will be at the after-party to celebrate all my friends who won.

SUNDAY

11-12 PM

Smut, Gore, and More: Romance and Erotica in Horror

David Fitzgerald, Lucas Mangum, Tiffany Scandal, Robert Devereaux, and me.

Writing about violence and sex can be challenging. What’s truly gratuitous vs. integrated sex and violence, and how to depict it with eloquence, humor, and a unique voice rather than parts mashing or blowing up mechanically on the page.

I’m around the rest of the afternoon.  Either there will be a pilgrimage to Powell’s or another cemetery adventure, depending on the weather and the company I can scare up.

Books I’ll have to sign:

1. AS ABOVE, SO BELOW (Black Bed Sheets – New release!)

2. WISH YOU WERE HERE: ADVENTURES IN CEMETERY TRAVEL (Western Legends Press)

3. The CEMETERY TRAVELS NOTEBOOK (Automatism Press)

THE HAUNTED MANSION PROJECT, both YEAR ONE and YEAR TWO, will be for sale in the Dealers Room at the Damnation Books table. I’ll be glad to sign those, too.

Dreaming in black & white

My heart goes out to the people suffering from this week’s tornadoes.  I grew up in tornado country and have vivid memories of tornado drills.  Watching the Weather Channel terrifies me.

I used to have this recurring dream when I was a kid.  I’d be at my grandmother’s house, just down the road from the farm where I grew up.  In her living room hulked a big rounded armchair that was heavy enough to be a weapon.  I would hear the sound of the train blasting down the tracks that ran alongside her property.  Coming closer.  Closer.  I would look out the window.  Instead of the train, I would see a giant tornado racing toward me, sweeping up tractors and horses and trees, huge and hungry and unavoidable.

The only thing more terrifying than a tornado was the Michigan basement at my grandmother’s house.  That’s where my dad and his sisters had lived as children one winter, after their house burned down in the middle of the night and before a new house was completed above them.  My grandmother had barely survived starvation during the Depression, so she saved everything:  bags of pinecones, broken dolls, bits of machinery, plastic bags.  The basement was a maze of precarious junk.

So rather than run to the basement to shelter from the tornado, I would crouch behind the old armchair.  They’d taught us, during drills at school, to curl up as small as possible and shield our necks with our hands to prevent our throats from being slashed by flying glass.

The tornado would come nearer.  It spun right outside the house.  The windows exploded.  The heavy armchair was torn away.  Nearly paralyzed with fear, I woke up before I could look into the storm.

No doubt Freud would have much to say about the dream, but that doesn’t interest me.  What interests me is that the dream was always in black-and-white.  All of my other dreams were and continue to be in color.  Only the tornado dream played in chiaroscuro. I was an adult, watching The Wizard of Oz for the zillionth time, when I finally made the connection.

Dorothy was so brave in the face of that implacable funnel cloud.  I never had the sense that my tornado was going to whisk me off to a technicolor adventure.  Now, as an adult, I’d like to go back to that dream and see if I could ride the wind to Oz. Of course, it’s been a long time since I had a tornado dream.  Once I figured what inspired its imagery, it came to me less often.

I sort of miss the dream, if not the reality of tornadoes themselves.  Now that my grandmother is gone, I would love to dream of being in her house again.

Graveyard Dirt on My Shoes

In and around the ordeal with my cat last week, I managed to tour three graveyards.  That would have made for an excellent week, if not for what was going on at home.  As it was, the graveyards were my sanctuary.

Mare Island Naval Cemetery

First I got to visit the cemetery at the old Mare Island Naval Shipyard, now an historic park.  It’s a place I’ve wanted to visit since I first moved to San Francisco and found a flyer advertising it at the local tourist bureau.

Since I’m setting up cemetery tours for the Obscura Society, Mare Island Cemetery was on the top of my list. The tour was slow in starting, since the docent got caught on the opposite side of the drawbridge leading out to the island — which meant we didn’t actually reach the cemetery until the tour was meant to be over — but she showed those people left all around and told us wonderful stories.  Apparently there’s a bear (or maybe an anteater) buried in the graveyard!

John Martini by flashlight

On Tuesday night, the Obscura Society gathered again for a flashlight tour of the Lincoln Park golf course, former site of the City Cemetery.  It was beautiful to see the vestiges of the old graveyard in the twilight.  It wasn’t spooky at all, even with hundreds of unclaimed bodies still in the ground beneath our feet.

I loved to see people clustering around the old Seamen’s Union monument, their faces aglow in the flashlight beams.  The two tour guides were great storytellers. I love touring with the Obscurans, because people are always so engaged and full of great questions.

Mary Ann Jones, acquaintance of the Donner Party

Finally on Saturday my family drove around the bay to the Alamo Cemetery in Danville.  This pioneer cemetery dates back to the 1850s, when six-year-old Callie Chrisman was buried.  Docents from the Museum of the San Ramon Valley dressed up in costume and spoke as some of the pioneers, including a woman who’d walked across the country from Tennessee — and narrowly missed being trapped with the Donner Party.

It had poured heavily in Danville on Friday, so the steep cemetery paths were a little slippery.  Two days later, the treads on my shoes are still full of cemetery dirt.  I see that as the perfect antidote to the week I had.

The First Stories

Marina, the mermaid from Stingray

My mom was a firm believer in naps, mostly because she was a young mother with two small kids who also taught 9th grade English.  She hadn’t reconciled the fact that requiring students to write papers meant she had to find quiet time to read them.  The workload wore her out.

I was 5 and didn’t really need to nap, but my 3-year-old brother walked in his sleep and the doctor suggested maybe he was overtired.  So my mother brought us both into her big bed and laid down with one of us on either side of her.  She’d fling an arm across Allen and a leg over me to hold us still until naptime was over.

Unable to sleep or even to wiggle, I told myself stories to pass the hours.  My favorite book at the time was Peter Pan.  I hated wet blanket Wendy, but idolized Princess Tiger Lily, who would rather be tied to a rock and drowned rather than betray her friends.  Usually, I was Tiger Lily, standing up to Captain Hook and flying off on adventures with Peter.

I also liked a Gary Anderson marionette show called Stingray.  Among its characters was Marina, a mute mermaid who could come out of the water for brief periods of time.  I didn’t want to be her, but I imagined myself as her friend.  Together we traveled to a beautiful underwater city, had trident battles against giant squids, and raced seahorses.  I rescued her a lot.

I’ve never written anything about pirates or Indian princesses or mermaids. I was older when I began to write things down.  By then my obsessions had changed.

Still, the first stories remain, locked in my heart.  I became a storyteller before I was able to read.  I still think about the stories first, before the words begin to flow.