One of the things I’ve been working on for the last year, ever since Helen MacDonald took the top of my head off with H is for Hawk, is trying to figure out why there’s been this vibrant resurgence of nature writing in the UK, but not here. I came out of the US nature writing wave of the 1980s-1990s — I was the grad school factotum for the first two years of the Art of the Wild writer’s workshop at Squaw Valley, and that group of writers — Gary Snyder, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Gretel Erhlich, Ted Hoagland, Louis…

Lighting out for the territories. It’s one of the core stories of our national identity, and especially among those of us who did leave the places where we grew up, who ran off to be ski bums and raft guides and lead groups of kids on wilderness trips. It wasn’t just an adventure we were after — we were going to completely reinvent how to live. We’d show them! All those people we left behind in those suburbs with the office jobs. We were going to be authentic. Real. We were Huck and Jim, deciding not to go home, but…

A new little series of mostly-unedited thoughts, the publication of which is inspired by my old friend and mentor Louis B. Jones’ Diaries that he’s been publishing, intermittently, for ages. A couple of new sets just dropped, and I thought, maybe I’d be brave enough to throw out these unfinished ideas I’m working on as I walk Hank every morning, along this mile or so of creek just that feeds into the Yellowstone. Because my day job has gotten busy again, I’ve taken to dictating into the Notes app on my iPhone using the little microphone icon. The voice-to-text is surprisingly…

A few days after my last post I had one of those moments where you slap yourself on the forehead with a big old Homer Simpson “Doh!” — I’d forgotten to take into account the gender and class issues inherent to my anti-ambition/anti-career screed. Staying home is a totally different issue if you haven’t had, or haven’t felt you’ve had, the opportunity to go out into the world, to become what you want to become, and to throw yourself whole-heartedly into the thrill of building a career. At the Montana Book Festival this summer, Kate Bolick and Sarah Hepola gave a terrific…

I was in the car doing errands yesterday when an interview came on the radio.  David Holbrooke was talking about Diplomat the movie he’s just done about his father, Richard Holbrooke. The interviewer was giving a capsule account of Richard Holbrooke’s life and when he got to his untimely death, he said Holbrooke’s death “cut off an astonishing career.” Not cut off his life, but his career. When did “career” become synonymous with “life”? I’ve worked since I was 14, often more than one job at a time, but I never felt that any of those jobs, not even teaching, represented who I was (well, maybe raft guide, that one…

We are having the most astonishing fall — and I am back to talk about Making Things. I finally seem to be in a creative space again, and have established a routine that I think is going to get me over the hump with the Book That Refuses To Be Written. I’ve been entirely stuck on a couple of topics, and with a 4 days at work/3 days to write schedule, I find that it’s late Sunday before I’m making any headway again. It’s been a problem. One of my recent discoveries is the absolutely delightful Felicity Ford at the…

One of the reasons I stopped blogging on a regular basis was that I felt that the original premise of this blog, which was to make a radical experiment out of my life, had somehow gotten completely lost amidst the recipes and photos and dog stories. All those things are lovely, but what I set out to do when I moved here  was to take a stand against the soul-less mall-and-freeway culture of larger America, to escape the housing developments eating up the hillsides of the Bay Area, and to find a place where I could live as self-sufficiently as possible,…

Great-great grandparents sounds so remote, but it’s really not. My grandmother’s grandparents, Charles Ambrose and Mary Mackin Plamondon were killed when the Lusitania was torpedoed 100 years ago this week. It was their wedding anniversary that week, one that by all accounts they celebrated with great tenderness. My mother was enormously close to her grandmother, Charlotte Plamondon Ripley, and these were her parents. Lolo, as we called her, was 32 when her parents died, a young mother. Her sister Marie was 34, Blanche was 29, Charles was 25 and Harold was only 23. Here’s a photo of Mary. She looks…

This is Hank, with the deer leg he’s been carrying and hiding on our morning dog walk for the past couple of weeks. I posted it to Twitter, and was slightly shocked by a couple of people who were grossed out. It’s one of the things about living out here where people hunt (and illegally dump hides and bones) and where there are non-human predators who hunt as well. The woods are littered with bones. Bones of deer and elk and sometimes cattle who just died out there, or who were killed by something — a bear, a mountain lion,…

I’ve been trying to figure out why I’ve been so much more compelled this past year by sewing clothes and knitting than I have been by writing. While I made real progress last year on my memoir manuscript, and sent it out to readers and agents, it’s clear that it just doesn’t work yet. It’s not bad, it’s just not right. And more important, it’s not the book I want to write. There’s a lot of good content there, and while I was pleased finally to get the voice I was after, the book itself just wasn’t working. There are things I don’t love about memoir,…