Origin story: Trina Robbins (1938-2024)

Yesterday, Trina Robbins, the legendary comic artist, graphic novelist and historian — who was also one of my mentors and role models — died. You can read more about her incredible life in this New York Times obituary; the gift link will expire May 11, 2024. 

I first learned about Trina in my early teens, when Eclipse Comics moved into the house across the street from ours in Forestville, California. I think there must’ve been an article in the local paper, saying that Trina was launching a new comic, California Girls, with Eclipse, and was seeking fashion designs from readers, especially young readers. 

At the time, I was drawing a comic of my own (inspired by my classmate, Mark; you can see some of his characters here). It was about a rock band called Zoo, where all of the members were different animals. I sent Trina some sketches featuring two Zoo members modeling different outfits. Much to my surprise and excitement, she included one of my designs in issue 5, and also featured me as “designer of the month.” 

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It was my first time being published, and I still remember the thrill of it clearly. Although I was already writing constantly at the time, this was a milestone that gave me the confidence to keep going. In future years, I joined my high school’s newspaper staff, co-founded a newsletter with our environmental club, and published the school’s literary magazine my senior year. I’ve been a writer and journalist ever since. 

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Pages from California Girls #5, featuring the prairie dress I designed.

Also, I love that the design Trina chose was my “prairie dress.” If you’ve been following my work in recent years, you know I’ve never stopped dreaming of the perfect prairie dress. (See my video here.)

A lot changes in a year or two in a teenager’s life. Just before I turned 16, I discovered Jim Morrison and became obsessed. I bought a copy of “No One Here Gets Out Alive,” the biography of Jim’s life by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, and inhaled it. Among its pages I found a familiar name: Trina Robbins. She and Jim apparently had a brief friendship and sexual relationship. I wrote to her, asking if she was the Trina Robbins in the book. She wrote back and said yes. 

At the time they met, Trina was a fashion designer whose creations caught the eye of musicians like Mama Cass, David Crosby and Donovan. She also opened a clothing boutique, called Broccoli, in New York. According to the biography, Jim started hanging around the shop and he and Trina got to know each other. I was incredibly jealous, but did my best to be respectful. I asked Trina whether she had ever thought about writing about her experiences with him. She said she had, but she didn’t want to feel like she was monetizing the relationship like others were doing. I remember having so much respect for that stance, even though here was someone who had all these juicy details I wanted to know about. 

In early college, I turned the tables by profiling Trina in the Santa Rosa Junior College newspaper, The Oak Leaf, giving her a two-page spread with many of her drawings. She’d just released her book A Century of Women Cartoonists. It was then that I began to learn more about her life as a pioneering woman artist in the male-dominated comics world of the 1960s and 1970s, and the fact that, in 1985, she became the first woman ever to draw Wonder Woman. 

Once social media rolled around, I reconnected with Trina, especially on Facebook and Instagram. I realized we both lived in San Francisco, and we met up one time for lunch at Crepevine on Church Street; it turned out she lived about a block away, in a house she’d bought for next to nothing in the 1970s. It was incredible to finally meet and talk with this woman who’d been such a huge part of my teen life. Now, I imagine all the other people she inspired and mentored, and I’m in awe. 

I’ve only just discovered that, in 2017, Trina did release a memoir of her life, which includes at least some of her stories about Jim Morrison. I’ve just ordered it, and I can’t wait for it to arrive. 

Rest in power, Trina. You gave us all so much. 

Corrections and connections from "San Francisco's Forgotten Cemeteries"

Odd Fellows Cemetery, 1900s. (wnp15.208; Courtesy of a Private Collector).

Writing a book is always an imperfect process. Most authors do our best to get all our facts straight before a book goes to press, but frequently find out later that we got something wrong, or didn’t have all of the information we needed. 

I’ve learned a few such tidbits since “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History” came out almost 6 months ago, and thought it would be fun to share them here.

In the chapter on City Cemetery (where the Lincoln Park Golf Course and the Legion of Honor Museum operate today), I wrote about Thomas Wood, a military man who served in the Mexican-American War before taking his own life in San Francisco in early 1882. I — and other local cemetery historians — assumed Wood’s grave remained at City Cemetery to this day. 

Clipping: The Arizona Sentinel, Yuma, Arizona, 04 Mar 1882.

However, another researcher, Alex Ryder, recently discovered that after the San Francisco Call wrote about Wood and the sad state of affairs at City Cemetery in February 1882, Wood’s body was exhumed and reburied in the Odd Fellows Cemetery, on the western slope of Lone Mountain. At the time, this would have been seen as a more respectable spot for a veteran than the Potter’s Field at the desolate edge of the city. But it probably wasn’t Wood’s last move. The Odd Fellows Cemetery was largely dug up and relocated to a plot in Colma’s Greenlawn Cemetery in 1932. 

We know that at least a handful of Odd Fellows graves were left behind, but most of its 26,000 occupants now rest in Colma. Unfortunately, their plot has, in the past 100 years, been separated from the rest of Greenlawn by a large Best Buy retail store and parking lot. Before that, a United Artists 6 movie theater sat on the same site. 

Today, the Odd Fellows reburial site is a weedy, fenced-off lot with a single, broken monument commemorating about as many dead as the population of El Cerrito or Eureka. In my book, I wrote that they were all in a single mass grave. I’ve since learned that the Odd Fellows remains were reburied carefully, each one with a small marker with some identifying information on it. Unfortunately, those markers have since been broken or moved, making it difficult to determine who is buried where. 

Thomas Wood might have had an easier rest if he’d been left in City Cemetery.

Jewish Cemeteries, on the land that’s Dolores Park today.

I also reported in the book, based on faulty source material, that the Jewish cemeteries in today’s Dolores Park contained about 600 graves, but that wasn’t correct. It turns out they held somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000 graves. All those graves are now in Colma, as far as anyone knows. Thanks to Judi Leff for the correction. 

Lastly, this isn’t so much a correction as a nifty connection. In the section on Sailor’s Burying Ground, one of San Francisco’s earliest settler cemeteries, I write about British seaman James Anderson, who died aboard the USS Congress in July 1847 and was buried in Sailor’s the next time the Congress docked in San Francisco. 

This wasn’t the Congress’ first time in San Francisco; it wasn’t even the first Congress. This second iteration, built in Maine in 1842, was the flagship of the Mexican-American war from 1846 to 1848, a conflict that ties Thomas Wood, James Anderson, and many other newcomers to San Francisco together. Back to my point: Nine months earlier, the Congress docked in San Francisco, in October 1846, to bring California’s new Governor, Robert F. Stockton, to visit the tiny village of Yerba Buena on the shores of San Francisco Bay. Stockton was also the Commodore of the Congress from July 1846 until his retirement from the U.S. Navy in 1850, making it possible that he and James Anderson crossed paths, or even that they were on board together when Anderson died. 

The Congress, for her part, served as a flagship in Brazil before joining the Union Army during the Civil War. She met her end in March 1862; while anchored off the coast of Virginia, she was attacked by the Confederate USS Virginia. She slipped her moorings, ran aground, and was destroyed by the ensuing fire and explosions. Governor Stockton died in Princeton, New Jersey, in October 1866, and is buried in Princeton Cemetery. 

Folk art of my Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors

Detail from Twenty-Four Original Barn Stars, Surveys of Berks, Lehigh, Schuylkill, and Montgomery Counties. Photo: of Patrick J. Donmoyer.

One of my favorite things about learning about my ancestors is discovering ones with whom I share similar traits. For example, my 10th great-grandfather, Dirck Goris Storm, was a skilled writer who penned a history of the Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Last year, I discovered a creative streak on another branch of my family tree. 

It started with a little zine from Leodrune Press that mentioned Pennsylvania Dutch folk art, particularly barn stars (often called “hex signs” by outsiders). I knew that a number of my ancestors immigrated from Germany to Pennsylvania; although some of them were Mennonites who probably wouldn’t have engaged in barn decoration, not all of them were. So, I thought it would be interesting to see if there were any barn star motifs particular to my ancestors or the places they lived. 

I quickly learned that barn-star styles are determined much more by the artist than by the family that hires someone to paint their barns. There’s a popular misconception that these stars were painted on barns to keep witches away (hence “hex signs”) and protect the livestock inside. Instead, they’re more likely inspired by celestial themes that were common among the Pennsylvania Dutch, both before and after they came to the United States. Other patterns of shapes, such as flowers and hearts, are also common. 

(That being said, farmers did hire folk magicians — practitioners of Brauche/Braucherei or “Powwow” — to bless and protect their barns and livestock, and to perform healing spells for sick cattle and other animals. Petitions written on small slips of paper were occasionally found tucked into barn walls and other places, reflecting this practice.)

John Bieber. Chest over Drawers, 1789. 01.13.18.

I didn’t find any barn stars specifically associated with my ancestors, but did find something else: An intricately carved and detailed dower chest made by one of my ancestors’ brothers and nephews. 

My 6th great-grandfather, Conrad Bieber, was born in 1725, probably in Germany. He immigrated to Pennsylvania sometime before 1743. Conrad’s father, Johannes, was also born in Germany and arrived in Pennsylvania in 1739. Conrad had a brother, Jacob, born in 1731 before the family immigrated. 

While Conrad moved to the Shenandoah Valley in the 1750s to join a Mennonite community there, along with his wife, Maria Magdalena Kneisley, Jacob remained in Pennsylvania, specifically in the Oley Hills area of Berks County, and began a woodworking business with his son, John. I knew I had ancestors from the Oley Hills area, and when I searched for the location and the name Bieber, these beautiful wooden chests popped up. 

An article in Reading Eagle about one of the chests reads, “Thinking that John or Jacob Bieber made a mistake with his compass drawing of a perpendicular hex sign, we noticed that this unusual designed chest had six edelweiss flowers sprouting from three white flat hearts on each corner of the dower chest with the elaborate tulip shaped escutcheon design in the middle. They were not barn stars, but an edelweiss flower theme which spread their flower like petals standing upright in each cheek of the flat hearts! A native Rhineland symbol of love used by John Bieber in the 1780s on his dower chests.”

Jacob Bieber, Johann Bieber. Chest over Drawers, 1776. 01.24.22.

A very similar chest is in the Barnes Foundation Collection in Philadelphia. Another similar one, made for Magdalena Leabelsperger, is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (I have a 6th great-grandmother named Magdalena Lionsberger, but her birth and death dates are different from the ones associated with this chest). The Barnes collection also has this Bieber chest, which has some different motifs but is clearly from the same makers. 

Although I’ve never been a woodworker, seeing this level of artistry and skill makes my heart glad. It’s an honor — and also reassuring — to know I come from people who enjoyed making beautiful things with their hands. 

11 books I'm excited to read in 2024

I love reading, and I do a lot of it. I’m the rare person who gets sleepy while reading, so I read every night to help myself get to sleep. If you’d like to see what I read in 2023, you view those books here. I read all of the books I was looking forward to in 2023 (and many more) , with the exception of “Right Hand” by Natalie Zina Walschots, only because it hasn’t come out yet.

A lot of my fellow writers are releasing new books in 2023, and these are the ones I’m excited to read, plus two more from authors I don’t know (Gabe Cole Novoa and Heather Fawcett). I hope you’ll check out everything listed below.

1. “Most Ardently: A Pride & Prejudice Remix,” Gabe Cole Novoa (Jan. 16): “A trans boy searches for a future―and a romance―in which he can live and love openly as himself in this heartrending young-adult reimagining of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, part of the Remixed Classics series.”

2. “Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands,” Heather Fawcett (Jan. 16): (I read the first book in this series in 2023, and it was one of my favorites of the year): “When mysterious faeries from other realms appear at her university, curmudgeonly professor Emily Wilde must uncover their secrets before it’s too late, in this heartwarming, enchanting second installment of the Emily Wilde series.”

3. “Breath by Breath,” Stephanie Wildman (Jan 23): “In this bedtime story, twins Flor and Roberto wonder how they can possibly go on an adventure at the same time as they go to sleep. Big brother Luis guides them in an exercise through their bodies, from the top of their heads to the tips of their toes. Following the gentle inhale and exhale of their breath, Flor and Roberto find love and calm inside and all around them as they drift off to sleep. Bonus content provides direction for mapping your own body scan.” Also, don’t miss Stephanie’s books “Ghost Writer” in September and “Miri’s Moving Day” in November.

4. “Tough Broad,” Caroline Paul (March 5): I’m so lucky that three books by authors I love and admire are releasing on my birthday! “Caroline Paul has always filled her life with adventure: From mountain biking in the Bolivian Andes to pitching a tent, mid-blizzard, on Denali, she has never been a stranger to the exhilaration the outdoors can hold. Yet through it all, she has long wondered, Why aren’t women, like men, encouraged to keep adventuring into old age? Tough Broad is her quest to understand not just how to live a dynamic life in a changing body, but why we must.”

5. “The Translator’s Daughter,” Grace Loh Prasad (March 5): “Born in Taiwan, Grace Loh Prasad was two years old when the threat of political persecution under Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship drove her family to the United States, setting her up to become an “accidental immigrant.” The family did not know when they would be able to go home again; this exile lasted long enough for Prasad to forget her native Taiwanese language and grow up American. Having multilingual parents—including a father who worked as a translator—meant she never had to develop the fluency to navigate Taiwan on visits. But when her parents moved back to Taiwan permanently when she was in college and her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she recognized the urgency of forging a stronger connection with her birthplace before it was too late. As she recounts her journey to reclaim her heritage in The Translator’s Daughter, Prasad unfurls themes of memory, dislocation, and loss in all their rich complexity. The result is a unique immigration story about the loneliness of living in a diaspora, the search for belonging, and the meaning of home.”

6. “Island Rule,” Katie M. Flynn (March 5): “An angry mother turns into a literal monster. A company in San Francisco can scrub your entire reputation and create a new one…for a price. A failed actor on a reality show turns into an unlikely world savior. And much more. Through each of these twelve interconnected stories, Katie Flynn masterfully blends people, places, and even realities. From a powerful and “radiant” (Kassandra Montag, author of After the Flood) new literary voice to be reckoned with, this collection will stay with you after turn the final page.”

7. “Relative Strangers,” A.H. Kim (April 2): “From the acclaimed author of A Good Family comes a timely spin on Sense and Sensibility, a twenty-first-century family drama featuring two half-Korean sisters, their ex-hippie mother, multiple messy love affairs and one explosive secret that could ruin everything.”

8. “Sing, I” Ethel Rohan (April 15): “Inside Half Moon Bay, a sparkling California coastal town, Ester Prynn is dulled and diminished by struggles with work, money, marriage, her senile father, a troubled teenage son, and old guilt she can’t assuage. When a masked gunman robs the convenience store where Ester works, he upends her fraught life and propels her toward passions buried, like singing; desires discovered, like a same-sex infatuation; and wrongs righted, like bringing the violent assailant to justice. But as the armed robber commits new crimes and continues to evade capture, the trauma from the holdup climbs, threatening Ester’s newfound delights and longings and forcing her to contend with her burning regrets and what-ifs. In the reckoning between Ester and these growing, molten upsets, she’s faced with enormous choices and must determine what and who can bring her to her best life.”

9. “Portrait of a Woman,” Bridget Quinn (April 16): “Discover the story of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard—a long-ignored artist and feminist of eighteenth-century France—in this imaginative and illuminating biography from an award-winning writer.”

10. “Your Presence is Mandatory,” Sasha Vasilyuk (April 23): “A riveting debut novel, based on real events, about a Ukrainian World War II veteran with a secret that could land him in the Gulag, and his family who are forced to live in the shadow of all he has not told them.”

11. “Karaoke Queen,” Dominic Lim (Sept. 17): “Rising star Dominic Lim presents a joyous queer second-chance romance about a man who must work with his ex to save their beloved karaoke bar, perfect for fans of Casey McQuiston and Alexis Hall.”

If you’d like to see everything on my “want to read” list, you can find that here.

Doing book events as a disabled and neurodivergent person

When my book “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History” came out at the end of August, I was lucky to be able to do lots of events around the city to promote it. Over the course of two months, I had six “in conversation”-style events and three readings, plus a couple of podcast recordings, and most of them were in person. 

Most authors will tell you that the book-publicity cycle is exhausting and grueling, even when it’s also a lot of fun — after all, you’re getting to talk in depth about a topic you’re really passionate about. But I also have chronic pain/illnesses and sensory sensitivities (and I’m an introvert), so I knew this process would probably be very hard on me. 

Before planning my schedule, I paid a lot of attention to what other chronically ill and/or neurodivergent authors have advised, and I did my best to create a schedule that would work for me. I’d like to share a little of what I learned ahead of time, what I did, and how it went. 

Johanna Hedva is an artist and musician, and the author of several books, as well as an outspoken advocate for accessibility and disability justice. Their disability access rider, which creates an accessible space for themself as well as for their audience, can be found here. 

A couple of items in Hedva’s rider stood out to be as potentially very useful in my circumstance. They write, “I require at least 48 hours after arriving to acclimate before I can participate in any public events. I’ll need to fly home the day after the event.” I wasn’t flying anywhere, but this tipped me off to the idea that I should try to book a day of recovery/rest after each event, where possible. In practice, it turned out that I really needed to rest the day before (and day of) the event, plus two days after. 

Ultimately, I tried to schedule my events about a week apart. On top of my personal health needs, I’m a partner and a mom (of a kid who started high school two weeks before my book launched!), and I needed to stay on top of those responsibilities as well. 

For the most part, that schedule allowed me enough time between events to recover and feel ready for the next one. It also allowed me, in one case, to take on an additional event that was very worthwhile, in terms of getting word out about the book. On the downside, I wound up with three events that week — and it was the same week my cat had to be hospitalized after eating something toxic. It was rough!

Hedva also writes, “I require all of the below to be confirmed and agreed upon by contract at least three weeks before the event takes place. Trust me, the more time there is to work out all the logistics, the better.” Inspired by this, I set up my event schedule fairly far in advance, so that once I was in the thick of things, I would know where to show up and when, and not have to worry about logistics anymore. One event was still in flux up until about a week beforehand, and another popped up just a couple of weeks before it happened. That was an extra cognitive burden, but having my schedule mostly set far in advance really helped. 

For one event, I had been to the venue before and knew that the overhead LED lighting might give me a migraine. I asked the event coordinator if they could work with me to lower the lighting, and they did. 

Another helpful guide for me is the one that author Katherine May (“Wintering,” “Enchantment”) put together, particularly to protect her needs as an autistic person. I find almost all of her accommodations for online and in-person events to be incredibly helpful for me. 

While I didn’t specifically request any of May’s suggestions from the venues where I appeared, they were important for me to keep in mind as I decided when to show up before an event, whether to mingle or rest beforehand, and so on. Unlike May, I find that showing up a bit early is helpful for me, particularly if I don’t already know a venue well, so that I can get acclimated to the space before other people begin arriving. 

Even with all these plans in place, I was still exhausted for a day or two after each event, I dealt with some brain fog and lack of executive function after events, and my throat was usually sore from reading and talking more than usual. In a couple of cases, I really should have asked for a chair at the book-selling table, so that I could sit while selling books and talking to readers. If I stand for long periods, I often get light-headed and my legs will hurt, but I sometimes got so caught up in things that I wasn’t paying attention to my body. 

And, after all that, it took about a month for me to get back to baseline energy levels, where I felt like I could do new work again. 

May writes, “Not everyone will be able to ask for accommodations like these — and also … I won’t always get them, despite asking. But I think it’s important to use my relative privilege to ask anyway. Hopefully it will begin to raise awareness amongst journalists and organisers of the kind of needs autistic people have.” 

I wish that I felt like I could have gone further and requested the kinds of accessibility that Hedva and others require, such as sign language interpreters online and in person, and live captioning for online events. But none of my events were paid, and only one was ticketed, to cover the cost of renting the venue. And currently, most venues don’t have the costs of interpreters or captioners built into their event budgets. They should, but we’re not there yet.

I’m grateful that I was mostly able to set up a schedule that was sustainable and accessible for me. I hope this is helpful for others who deal with similar differences and limitations. 

Forgotten cemeteries elsewhere

Image: Pacific Sun.

As San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries is finding its way into the world, I’m getting a number of intriguing emails from readers. (Today, I heard from a retired priest who used to work at Mission Dolores, who once helped a man find his great-grandmother’s burial spot. It turned out to be underneath the archbishop’s parking spot.)

Marin County Farm Cemetery

A week or so ago, someone emailed to ask me about a forgotten cemetery along Lucas Valley Road in Marin County. Even though I used to write about that area for the San Rafael-Terra Linda News Pointer, I didn’t know anything about the burial ground. I hunted around online a little, and came across some articles and a short documentary about this sad and fascinating spot. 

The graveyard belonged to Marin County’s “poor farm,” a workhouse for down-on-their-luck Marin County residents starting in about 1880. There was also a pest house — a hospital for quarantining people with highly contagious, epidemic diseases like smallpox and tuberculosis — on the property. 

Between then and 1955, about 600 indigent people were buried in this place, now an overgrown field with a scattering of bronze markers that bear only an ID number, according to the Pacific Sun. “In January 1881, William Dever’s body was the first to be buried in the cemetery, according to Warner. Dever, notorious for committing robberies and escaping from county jail, died in custody at San Quentin and left no money for his burial,” the newspaper reported. Only in recent years has the county added a sign acknowledging the site, along with a split-beam fence separating it from the surrounding terrain. 

You can learn more about this burial ground by watching “A Silent Legacy,” a brief and compelling film made by two locals, here: 

Hart Island

I grew up in California, so the first time I heard about the indigent cemetery on New York’s Hart Island was from the TV series Pose. In the first episode of Season 2, Pray Tell (Billy Porter) and Blanca (Mj Rodriguez) visit the island to find the grave of a friend who recently died of AIDS. In the 1980s and 1990s, Hart Island took in thousands of people who died during the epidemic. But it wasn’t always a cemetery. 

Hart Island once served as a training ground for the U.S. Colored Troops, as a prisoner-of-war camp during the U.S. Civil War, a quarantine zone for patients with tuberculosis and yellow fever, a drug-rehab center and a site for male prisoners. In 1980 it became New York City’s Potter’s Field, a burial ground for the indigent dead, and more than 75,000 people are buried there now, many of them in mass graves marked by a single number. Thousands arrived during the peak of Covid-19.

Historically, the island was closed to the public, but in recent years its management was transferred from the city’s department of corrections to its parks department, and it’s slated to open up in the coming months. I hope someday I’ll have the chance to visit. 

In the meantime, the Radio Diaries podcast is producing a series about Hart Island, telling the stories of some of the people who are buried there. It’s a moving and sensitive listen. You can check it out here. 

Below, you can get a bird’s-eye view of Hart Island, courtesy of drone footage from USA Today:

Who gets to survive and 'rewild' themselves?

I recently read a book on human “rewilding,” the idea that modern, first-world peoples should learn ancestral survival skills, such as foraging for food, making friction fires, hunting and breaking down animals to make use of meat, bones, skin, building shelter, etc. I’m not going to name the book or the author because I don’t want to seem like I am pointing fingers at anyone in particular, but as a disabled person I came away with a lot of concerns. 

A major theme of the book is that climate change is coming, and it may very well be devastating to modern culture. We will need to have these survival skills, otherwise the human race may not carry on very well. It also argues that the kind of survivalism that’s popular now, the bushcraft in which a solo person, usually a white able-bodied man, treks out into the wilderness on their own and survives for some length of time, isn’t sustainable for human culture. 

Most people can’t do everything needed to survive: build structures, hunt and forage, cook food, make and repair clothing, etc., especially if they’re alone and become ill or injured. Humans have traditionally lived in groups or small villages, where everyone worked together to keep their community afloat. Don’t get me wrong; I have spent hours watching dudes on YouTube dig and build their own shelters in the woods, and part of me wishes I could do that, too. But it’s not a strategy for long-term success as a species. 

But let me go back to the book for a moment. The author briefly mentions that learning and using early-human survival skills might not be available or accessible to everyone, particularly the ill or disabled. They touch on it, but quickly move on. So where does that leave the many of us who rely on daily medications, treatments  and regular access to healthcare? 

Let’s say we go through a climate apocalypse. Absolutely, there are plant medicines that can treat a wide range of illnesses and chronic conditions, but even they can only go so far. What will humankind do to help people who need dialysis, insulin, respirators, cancer treatment, or other life-maintaining medical care? 

Lamar Johnson as Henry and Keivonn Woodard as Sam in HBO’s “The Last of Us.”

I know HBO’s “The Last of Us” is fiction, but I can’t help thinking about the brothers, Henry and Sam, and how Henry became an informant to the federal police in exchange for leukemia treatment for Sam. Maybe our future won’t be so dystopian, but I do wonder if my life, post-climate catastrophe, will involve hoarding meds or taking desiccated pig thyroid and berberine which, I guess, is available in a wide range of plants. And will I have to take care of that on my own, or will the larger culture be willing to provide for its disabled and ill?

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, disabled and chronically ill folks led the way in terms of masking, socializing online, and mutual aid. Even before most lockdowns started, disability activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha put together a guide called “Half Assed Disabled Prepper Tips for Preparing for a Coronavirus Quarantine,” which covered how to store two weeks’ worth of water; how to stock up on shelf-stable foods; power and fuel; sanitation and medical supplies; and much more. Piepzna-Samarasinha released their book “The Future is Disabled” in October 2022, asserting that the future is going to have disabled people in it, no matter what that future looks like. And indeed, after three and a half years of Covid-19 and Long Covid, more people are disabled now on this side of the pandemic. For most people, particularly as we age, disability is an inevitability. 

Disabled and chronically ill people have a variety of survival skills in their tool boxes that non-disabled, non-ill people largely don’t have. So it’s frustrating to see a book on rewilding and survival written with almost no consideration for those perspectives, especially a book written during a global pandemic that disabled 1 in 13 of those who contracted Covid-19.

Regular readers know that I often return to the intersection of disability and access to nature. I wrote about it after I read Robert Macfarlane’s “The Old Ways” early last year. I returned to it, internally, when reading Sharon Blackie’s “If Women Rose Rooted,” in which she describes leaving cities and the corporate world behind in favor of a series of remote homesteads that, while peaceful and restorative, required a lot of physical labor to survive in, and a lot of travel to connect with things only available in urban centers. 

It’s great to talk and write about the ways in which rural life or nature trekking is healing to the human body and mind, but you have to think about who might actually benefit most from having such opportunities — and the many barriers keeping those people, in particular, from accessing such a life. I often wonder if I’d be less chronically ill if I could live in a more remote, woodsy or “natural” environment, but it’d be a gamble finding out. 

Another YouTuber I enjoy a lot is Kalle Flodin, who lives in a cabin in a Swedish forest. He gets his water from a pond on his property (though he has to break the ice in winter), and he’s lucky to be able to grocery-shop nearby and have neighbors who help him with large-scale projects. But his is clearly a physically arduous life of building and maintaining structures, dragging heavy objects up his long driveway when delivery people won’t drive up it, etc. His videos are idyllic and calm, but a recent one asked, “What if More People Lived Like This?” 

Images courtesy Kalle Flodin.

I commented that his lifestyle isn’t available to all of us. One commenter replied to me, “I live with numerous chronic illnesses alone in the forest.” But when I asked them how, they just said “healthy living,” adding that they didn’t need to see doctors very often. They said, “I find that worrying about health makes health worse — so I don't. It simply is what it is. I recommend that approach.” I replied, “Many of us would die if we followed that advice.” And then they said, “If you need a doctor every week, simply live close to one,” which pretty much proved my point. 

The conversation in my mind is joined by other books, including “The Hidden Life of Trees” by Peter Wohlleben. In the book, he writes about the complex ways in which trees communicate with one another, including through underground mycelial networks and chemicals released into the air. The air in forests benefits humans, too; it’s richer in oxygen and it’s cleaner, because the trees act as huge air filters. Some trees release phytoncides, which kill germs in the air and soil. 

It seems as though all humans could benefit from more time among trees, particularly forests or even small, naturally formed woodland areas (trees planted in forestry contexts often can’t communicate with or look out for each other). But I wonder whether natural, wooded environments wouldn’t be especially beneficial to people whose nervous and immune systems are off the rails, whether through trauma/oppression or illness or both. In other words, could disabled and chronically ill people benefit even more from living closer to the land? And if so, how do we open up conversations and skill-building around survivalism and rewilding to include these considerations? 

Is there a way to create rural, nature-filled communities where people can live off the land, not have to trek for miles on aching legs to secure food or water, maintain access to life-sustaining medications and treatments, and meet with a range of medical experts who can diagnose hard-to-pin-down chronic ailments? Is there a way to make the world of rewilding and climate-survivalism truly accessible — and also welcoming to people with different abilities and needs? 

I don’t know the answer. Some ancient humans sacrificed disabled community members — and others with certain medical conditions, or even simple infections, wouldn’t have survived before the advent of antibiotics and other modern treatments. I don’t think we have to go back to that. But I also hope that it won’t just be up to disabled and chronically ill people to determine how we will survive in the future. 

'Forgotten Cemeteries' events + how to support!

I’m happy that, as of this week, “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History” is out in the world. Its official birthday was Monday (though some preorders were delivered sooner), and I had a fantastic book launch Tuesday night at Green Apple Books on the Park with poet and fellow cemetery nerd Heather Bourbeau. If you missed it, you can watch the replay in the video at the bottom of this post/note.

Many people ask an author: How can I support you and your book? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Buy the book (mine is available through online booksellers and in some SF bookstores, but any bookstore can order it for you). And give one as a gift in the upcoming gift-giving season! Ebook editions are coming soon. There are, unfortunately, no plans for an audiobook.

2. Tell people about the book — in person, on social media, whatever feels most comfortable.

3. Come to events. I’m including a list of my upcoming events below. Come to more than one! They are all designed to be a bit different from each other.

4. Write a review. Especially on Amazon and Goodreads.

5. Request the book at your local library. San Francisco Public Library has some on the way, but if you live outside SF, ask your library to get a copy!

6. Signal boost. If you see me sharing events or other milestones on social media (these will mostly be on Instagram and Facebook), please share in your stories or share with your followers.

Upcoming events:

Tuesday, Sept. 5, 6 p.m. Pacific
”Grotto Nights” with the SF Public Library
”Giving voice to the dead,” in conversation with Roberto Lovato
online, register here

Saturday, Sept. 9, 2023, 5:30 p.m.
Reading at Babylon Salon

Sunday, Sept. 17, 2023, 3 p.m.
In conversation w/Courtney Minick, Here Lies a Story
Bird & Beckett bookstore

Friday, Sept. 22, 2023, 5 p.m.
Reading at the Writers Grotto

Friday, Oct. 13, 5:30 p.m.
in conversation with Julie Zigoris
+happy hour at The Ruby

Friday, Oct. 27, 6 p.m.
in conversation with Loren Rhoads
at the historic San Francisco Columbarium
RSVP/register here

You can keep up to date with any additional events on my book’s page.

A Sinéad-shaped hole in the world

Warning: This post includes mentions of abuse, suicide and abortion.

I must have been 14 or 15 the first time I heard Sinéad O’Connor’s voice, howling and crooning “Mandinka” from our television in the hours after school let out for the day. Her debut album was brave, challenging, feral. I wasn’t sure what to make of her, this bald-headed siren on the screen. But I never forgot her. 

It was through interviews with O’Connor that I learned that abortion was illegal in the Republic of Ireland. Pregnant people who wanted not to be pregnant had to travel, and I knew, even then, that wasn’t possible for many people. When I heard the bare grief in “Three Babies,” in 1990, I assumed that’s what the song was about. (I didn’t learn until much later that it was about O’Connor’s miscarriages instead.)

Even so, that’s what went through my head when I watched her shred her mother’s photograph of Pope John Paul II that night on Saturday Night Live. In that moment, my chest filled with admiration — at her courage, at her willingness to put the Catholic Church in its place. And I was confused when she was crucified for it. 

Many of us didn’t know then that the Catholic Church was lousy with sexually abusive clergy, and many others knew but thought hiding and denying it would keep it from being true. That was the real force behind O’Connor’s gesture, and even after the truth came out decades later, the world failed to adequately apologize to her. 

O’Connor’s music came in and out of my life at key moments, including in 1997, when she released the “Gospel Oak” EP about a year and a half after my mom’s death. The whole album is a healing balm, in particular the opening song, “This Is To Mother You.” At the time, it felt like an umbilicus nourishing me from beyond the veil. Now, I suspect she wrote it in part for herself, to heal from the abuse she experienced at the hands of her mother when O’Connor was a child. 

That abuse launched O’Connor into her life’s trajectory in so many ways; she went to live with her father at 13, but soon fell into risky behavior, including shoplifting, which landed her in a Magdalene asylum (laundry). Run by Catholic nuns, these institutions claimed to be “reform schools” at best, but functioned as prisons and labor farms for girls and women. 

O’Connor was imprisoned in the An Grianán Training Centre, in northern Dublin, for 18 months. “We didn’t see our families, we were locked in, cut off from life, deprived of a normal childhood,” she told the Irish Times in 1993. “We were told we were there because we were bad people. … “We were girls in there, not women, just children really. And the girls in there cried every day.” 

That experience contributed to her SNL protest, she said. “It wasn’t the only reason, but it was one of them.” The last of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland didn’t close until 1996. 

I wasn’t raised Catholic, or even especially Christian. The Irish ancestors I know by name were Protestant, but I know I have others who were Catholic. They found great comfort in their faith, I can feel it in my bones. But they were also hurt by its restrictions, particularly for women and girls; I feel that, too. That’s part of why O’Connor’s protest ripped straight through me. It made me recognize a kindred spirit in her, even before I knew we both endured PTSD and mental illness, and would become mothers to suicidal children. That fury that rose up from her life and DNA? It was in mine, too. 

Sinéad O’Connor was so much more than her trauma and pain. She was a stunning singer, a gutsy and honest songwriter, a woman daring enough to go about the world without her mask. The news of her death tore right through me, and through so many of us, as though we were no more than paper. 

She said and did what so many others were afraid to. She was punished for it, and I can’t help but think she might have enjoyed a longer life if she hadn’t been. Today, the world is a little less brave, a little less honest, without her. 

Edible plants of my childhood

I know it’s been a while since I shared anything here. I’ve been busy with book promotion, freelancing, family stuff, end-of-school-year obligations and health maintenance. It’s been A Time. 

But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the roots of my foraging knowledge, how I learned about edible plants and trees and herbs. It was sparked, in part, by a conversation with Cailleach’s Herbarium over on Instagram, after they posted about a kind of honeysuckle that we used to have growing on one of our fences in Forestville. I remember sitting by the fence for hours, picking the flowers and pulling the stigma out from the back of each blossom to snack on the drops of flower nectar that would come out. The yellower the flower, the sweeter the nectar. 

On that same fence, blackberry vines grew, bursting with fruit in the late summer. They were great just to eat out of hand, but often, enough ripened at one time to make a pie or blackberry jam. I once made a blackberry galette and brought it to San Francisco, where I interviewed Primus and fed them pie. (Some of them were suitably wary, and others dove right in). 

Nearby, we had a trio of purple-leafed plum trees, which we called cherry plum trees for the size and flavor of their fruits. The cherry plums are delicious if you can catch them at the peak of ripeness; a little early and they’re pretty tart. These trees often grow as street trees in San Francisco, and I’m always surprised to see that people avoid the fruit or say it doesn’t taste very good. 

In late winter, after the rainy season, the ground would become blanketed with oxalis (also known as common yellow wood sorrel). We called it “sour grass,” because the stems and flowers have a refreshing, lemony flavor. As a kid, I chewed on it randomly when the mood struck. As an adult, I’ve made soup and sorbet with it; the soup was good, if time-consuming to harvest the individual leaves; the sorbet never set properly but it tasted delicious, like a herby lemon sorbet. 

We also had more obvious sources of food, like the Gravenstein apple trees I would climb and sit in, eating still-green apples even when my mom swore they’d give me a stomachache. We had nectarine trees and a garden with corn, green beans, zucchini and cherry tomatoes (I was guilty of stealing cherry tomatoes right off the vine). 

I still have fond memories of grazing on cherry plums, blackberries, honeysuckles and sour grass, and wish I’d realized, back then, that the wild garlic and lilacs that grew in our yard were also edible. But the whole experience gave me a kind of confidence about foraging and eating wild plants that still thrills me today.