Dancing Around the Edges

I feel I have been neglecting my site horribly - I need to update the sidebar for several columns and I have run so many articles at Alaska Dispatch that I would like to copy here but it seems impossible to keep up with. Also my posts should be at last 3X a week and yet I continue to find myself here only once or twice which is really far too little. I'm working on it, promise.

Some interesting articles read lately I wanted to share. At Smithsonian, Tony Horowitz has a profile of Joseph McGill Jr who is staying in every former slave dwelling still standing in the US. He does this, to bring notice to the dwellings in an attempt to save them. His message is pretty powerful:



"Americans tend to focus on the 'big house', the mansion and gardens, and neglect the buildings out back," he says. "If we lose slave dwellings, it's that much easier to forget the slaves themselves."

Also a book I came across in the University of Utah catalog sounds interesting: Canyon of Dreams* by Don Lago. It includes stories of Edwin Hubble, who tested his telescope there in 1928, the Apolla astronauts preparing for lunar exploration, singer Roger Miller who lived there in a trailer one summer, "pushin' a broom" which later went into his song "King of the Road" (love that song!) and William Randolph Hearts fighting the NPS over his property on the canyon. I have been to the Canyon twice and it really is as spectacular as you hope it to be; I think this would make a very good read on western history.

Author Kelly McMaster has a lovely piece up at the Paris Review blog on owning a small bookstore and her deep love of reading. Here's a bit:

There was a loneliness that permeated my childhood that could only be filled by books. Watching my son's love of books simmer and steep, I realize it isn't so much that I'm afraid of not being able to relate to him if he were a nonreader, or that he wouldn't be smart or able to succeed. Books prepared me for so much--not just grief, but romance, betrayal, heartbreak. Stories sometimes functioned as a kind of escape, but mostly I simply learned how to be from my books.

After reading this essay, I added Kelly's book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir From an Atomic Town, to my holiday wish list.

Little Brown has a very cool tumblr - one of the best sites for a publisher on the web (I think). Also, they are publishing Col. Chris Hadfield's memoir which sounds like the book for Christmas. (He sang Bowie in space. BOWIE IN SPACE.)

I love these vintage Barbour ads - the notion of a "Ladies Scooter Suit" just makes me happy. (I have the Tomboy Style book - it's one joyful page after another.)

I am writing reviews for four books for December, reading three for Booklist (due in Nov and Dec), finishing up a book for the Bush Pilot blog at Dispatch and working on several articles. There is a balancing act out there for me that I haven't found yet but it will allow me to write as much for myself as for others. I have been there before; just need to find it again.

No worries. I'll get there. :)

*Canyon of Dreams is due out later this month.