Shiny poison oak! / I share my water with you / the bathroom is closed
— Earthday Haiku
This is as late as I’ve ever sent my Spring Museletter. It’s May Day, and if you’re unable to hit the streets and protest the tyrannic panic, here are a bunch of fun clicks that will help you not go shopping.
It’s my semi-annual roundup!
My last Museletter at the end of summer heralded a busy creative fall, from which I’ve only recently recovered!
Let’s start where we left off.
“For the Love of Mr. Miller,” my September talk at the Pardee Carriage House Salon went wonderfully. Watch the talk on Youtube, and meet some amazing historical women!
“In the Hights” Literary Arts Festival in October was a great success! I’m still editing the video, but here are a few scenes from the beautiful day…
Then I went to Europe, where among other things I followed the footsteps of Joaquin Miller in Como and wrote about it From a Milanese Couch.
In January, my words of the past two years came back to me like a muse’s command: “Someone really should write a new book about him.” Uh-oh, it dawned on me…am I that someone? In March, I read a short story wrote to the Ina Coolbrith Circle that kinda feels like a first chapter…should I write a book about Joaquin Miller? I could, you know. Would you want to read it?
I did two events for Earth Day in the Park—a Haiku writing challenge while people worked on trails, and a singalong on “Joaquin Miller (went walkin’)” for a huge group of school kids. I dressed my brother (“Mr. Tree”) up as Joaquin Miller…including the “bearskin” vest and poetry beard. (Guess which photo/s I got AI help with!)
If you can make it to Oakland at the end of May, and you’re a Miller Nerd or Miller curious, please come to the Joaquin Miller Salon, featuring a recording artist all the way from Norway who found me to say he’s putting Miller’s poems to music, how cool is that?
Also in October was the second annual Dirndl Day in the Dimond. The whole neighborhood got into the action, our celebrity judges were extra spaß (German for fun). I showed the movie at the Altenheim — and a few months later, in Bavaria! Did you catch, “That Time I Did the Wobble in a Dirndl”?
This year I’m taking steps towards getting The Dirndl Diaspora properly staged. The animated staged reading has laid a lot of groundwork but it’s a good work and deserves a real theatrical premiere. Are you connected to a local theater that does new work? Shall I submit?
I hope you enjoyed all the pictures of hungry ducks and gilded ceilings in my Paris in the Fall post. Someday I hope to write about all my pilgrimages—to Assisi, the Casa di Goethe in Rome, Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, the Goethaneum in Basel, cathedrals galore, an ancestral Bavarian peat bog, the Beautiful Blue Danube, and the Temple of Volta in Como. The last one was the most memorable…I stalked George Clooney! (He wasn’t home.) Video is on the to-do list.
Back home, it was the holidays, it was family, and getting back to the business of Uplifting families.
👂Did you catch The Whining Family podcast episode with author Tim E.J. Campbell, Discipline vs. Diversity? Here he is reading Steinbeck at In the Hights. See how everything is connected?
Good news: The Uplift Family Playbook is finally on Amazon! And it REALLY NEEDS SOME REVIEWS. Could you pop in and give it some stars? (Refresh your memory here.) That would be a huge favor to us, and other parents. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Mother’s Day is coming up soon. If you know a parent who struggles with keeping her family on the same page, consider the gift of a game-changing mini-class: Monday Meeting Magic!
“Monday Meeting Magic has completely turned things around! I can’t believe we’re talking to each other… and it takes a big weight off my shoulders.” — Hannah, single mom
Use the code MOM26 for a 50% discount on this or any of our programs, or become a $upporting $ubscriber and access MMM plus lots of other great stuff in in The Library. (And don’t worry, shopping from me does nothing for the Bad Places.)
One of my favorite things about The Winning Family is the word “Boobledink,” which Mom called us when we were being naughty. Also last Fall I somehow managed to launch my new nonprofit, Boobled Inc., to expand support for all of my educational, arts and community initiatives. Here’s an overview video; see where you fit in as a Museletter reader (and all the other possibilities if you might like to work, donate or volunteer for a nonprofit with a culture of positivity)!
Since the last Museletter, I read more books about Paris and more about Europe:
The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George is about a bookstore on a barge called “The Literary Apothecary.” The bookseller prescribes books as medicine. A wonderful concept, and a gripping adventure about how he heals himself from grief after the book boat gets unmoored and makes its way to the riviera through French canals. Read WITH MY EYES the old fashioned way!
The Paris Booksellers by Kerri Meher is the story of Sylvia Beach and how she founded the first English bookstore on the European continent AND published James Joyce’s Ulysses, a book that changed the literary world. I listened to the audiobook, then made a pilgrimage to Shakespeare & Co in Paris to buy the paperback!*
I also finally read Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, which came short on the heels of Ulysses, also groundbreaking in its grittiness. I never realized it takes place almost entirely in Paris! Sylvia Beach helped this American find his publisher, too. I read it after re-watching Henry and June.
I’ve also been mind-traveling a lot in Italy and England and their entwined histories. I read The Memoirs of Casanova about Venice in the 1700s and The Betrothed by Alex Manzoni, Italy’s required reading about Northern Italy in the 1600s—the audiobook is fabulous and highly recommended. A truly unique hardback is Do Admit! by Mimi Pond, a graphic metahistory about the amazing aristocratic British Mitford sisters, two of them who became fascists, one of whom (Nancy) became a Parisian writer, and one (Jessica) who became a California Writer. The Enchanted April audiobook by Elizabeth von Arnim about English women vacationing in Italy is absolutely delightful, treat yourself!
My girlfriends also made me read Longbourn by Jo Baker, which tells Pride and Prejudice from the POPV of its staff. It’s Jane Austen’s 250th birthday this year (happy birthday Jane!) and to celebrate I’m reading ALL of her books on Zoom with Johnnies, lmk if you need to join in!
On Librivox, I’ve created a California Writers shelf. Things I enjoyed on that list include The Cup of Gold by Steinbeck, I was really very hungry: a portrait of m.f.k. fisher, Letters from a Cat by Helen Hunt, A Woman of Genius by Mary Hunter Austin. I highly recommend and The American Diary of a Japanese Girl by Yone Noguchi, who brought haiku to America.
Not an audibook, Ina Coolbrith: The Bittersweet Song of California’s First Poet Laureate by Aleta George was a fantastic read.
*NOTE: I made this bookstore pilgrimage because a few years back we stayed in the Jules Verne room (another French guy) of the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, Oregon, where the rooms were all whimsically furnished to reflect the imagined worlds of different authors and she lit something inside me! (Sadly, the new owners seem to have taken all the fun out of it.)
Thanks for keeping up with me, and let me know what your muses have been keeping you up to!
Love everyone around you, revel in abundance, see beyond sorrow, keep creating… and VOTE! (Do your research…see if your candidates are taking fossil fuel money.)
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Jane Austen is the mother of our country? No? The big sister?
would it have killed them to leave a bloody splatter on the wall of the Ernest Hemingway suite?