This gull was obviously having fun goofing around with the little wavelets rippling over the big flat expanse of stone. Was he/she simultaneously looking for something to eat? A good bet.
*
Estuary Gull
This gull on a post in Big River’s estuary is so accustomed to humans, I had the feeling he/she would have allowed me to pet her/him. However, I wanted to make sure to get a good picture, so I stopped ten feet away and he/she graciously allowed me to make this portrait.
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New Leaves On River Trees
I take pictures of these trees on the south side of Big River’s estuary every winter when the white branches are dramatically naked of leaves. Here the trees are leafing anew.
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Historic Blossom Set
When Marcia and I bought our house twelve years ago, one of
the very first things we did was to have a sturdy deer fence installed around
half our property to keep the ravenous ungulates from eating everything except
the rhododendrons and huckleberry bushes. However, I did not extend the fence
to include the apple tree in this picture because the little tree was hidden in
a dense tangle of vines. I only discovered the apple tree after the deer fence was complete.
I have several times since then considered digging up the tree and transplanting her inside the deer fence. However, that would mean planting her in soil infested by voraciously thirsty redwood roots, and without her taproot, chances of survival would be nil.
During our twelve-year tenure here, the little tree has been
harshly pruned by browsing deer, and with each passing year more and more of her
branches and blossoms form higher than all but the biggest and most ambitious
(starving) deer can reach.
However, despite this year’s amazing blossom set, the continuing absence of pollinators, notably bees, means the valiant little tree may not produce many or any apples. The bees are absent because our misguided local, state, and national governments continue to allow the use of pesticides and herbicides containing neonicotinoids that are the proven cause of honeybee and general insect decline in America and around the world. Don’t use Roundup!
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Gull Perch Rock
This rock in Mendocino Bay is extremely attractive to my eye. I’ve looked at this stone thousands of time in the last eighteen years, photographed it hundreds of times, and there is always a gull standing on the peak of the rock. I believe the eternal presence of a gull atop this rock explains everything.
*
Fallen Icon
This mighty tree came down recently from her place on the
headlands where she grew for a very long time. Countless photographs and
paintings of Mendocino and Big River Beach dating back to the early 20th
Century feature this tree standing above all the others. A defining feature of
this stretch of the Mendocino headlands is no more.
A reader recently wrote to say she enjoyed hearing about my beginnings as a writer. This got me musing, and as I mused I remembered that most people, including people in their seventies as I am, are unaware that before television took over the world in the 1950s, there were several hundred mainstream magazines and thousands of newspapers in America publishing short stories and poetry. Thousands!
Which is to say, before televisions were installed in every home, there was an enormous demand for short stories in our culture, with high-end magazines such as Collier’s Weekly and Harper’s Magazine paying very good money for short stories, with many movies made in those days based on short stories.
For instance, Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life is based on a
story first published as a pamphlet in the 1940s by Philip Van Doren Stern and
subsequently published in Reader’s Scope
and Good Housekeeping before Capra
bought the movie rights for 50,000 dollars. Yes, Good Housekeeping published short stories!
Then television conquered American society and culture, and within a decade the golden era of short stories was over. The time people used to spend reading short stories was now given to watching the tube. By the early 1970s, when I was in my twenties, there were only a few dozen magazines left that paid well for stories, mostly Men’s and Women’s magazines, and nearly all the stories they published were by established writers.
Nevertheless, in those days before
the internet, before there were affordable ways to self-publish and distribute stories
and books, thousands of aspiring writers bought The Writer’s Market every year, a volume listing all the magazines supposedly
open to considering unsolicited (non-agented) stories and articles. This mighty
tome, updated annually, was something of a fraud since most of the magazines listed
therein would only consider stories sent to them by established literary agents,
though many of the listings said otherwise.
I sent my stories to magazines large and small, collected rejection letters galore, and then in 1972, through a series of seeming coincidences and lucky breaks, a New York literary agent asked if she might represent me. Her name was Dorothy Pittman and she was among the very last literary agents in America who would gladly submit short stories to magazines for her known and unknown clients.
Even more remarkably, she was
eager to represent what is now known as Literary Fiction, which has come to
mean non-genre fiction. Sci-fi, Mystery, Young Adult, Fantasy, and Historical
Romance are some of the most popular genres. By the 1970s non-genre fiction was
becoming less and less saleable, and today Literary Fiction is a genre most
publishers shudder to consider.
All the editors to whom Dorothy submitted my stories and books were middle-aged, extremely well read, and interested in unique writers, not copycats. None of them lasted long in the biz after the giant multi-national corporations completed their takeover of the publishing industry by the early 1980s.
In her first two years as my agent, Dorothy marketed my novella that had drawn her to represent me, two of my novels, and dozens of my short stories. She got several nibbles, but no takers.
One day Dorothy called the
commune where I was living in Santa Cruz and said in her charming Georgia
drawl, “Dahlin’, I’m getting so frustrated not selling anything of yours. I’ve
got several editors who love your writing, but you’re not famous and your
stories are a bit edgy, if you know what I mean.” She paused. “Have you sent me
everything you’ve written?”
“Except for my stories in a
folder labeled No Way,” I said
despondently. “Otherwise, yes.”
“Send me those,” she said, and I did.
Fast-forward a year. By then I’d
left Santa Cruz for Menlo Park where I worked as a janitor and teacher’s aide
in a Day Care Center before moving to Eugene, Oregon where I was living in a
converted garage with my girlfriend and desperately looking for a job. Out of
the blue, Dorothy called from New York to say Cosmopolitan Magazine wanted to buy my short story Willow for a thousand dollars. Dorothy
would take her 10% commission and I would get nine hundred dollars upon
publication. For someone who just quit his job cleaning kiddy toilets for
three-bucks-an-hour this was a mind-boggling sum.
I frowned. “Willow? The story about the black woman
boxer who through a series of implausible flukes gets a chance to box against professional
male boxers? Cosmopolitan? Really?”
A month later, down to my last few dollars, a check for nine hundred dollars came in the mail. My monthly nut was fifty dollars. I was rich! Over the next year I completed two novels, one of which was Inside Moves, my first published novel.
However, three years would pass before that miracle occurred. In the meantime, I worked as a landscaper in Medford, Oregon and did very little writing. Then Dorothy sold a story of mine entitled The Swami and the Surfer to Seventeen for five hundred dollars, and Seventeen commissioned me to write a Christmas story for seven hundred dollars.
While I worked on the Christmas story, I continued to labor as landscaper until I saved enough money to travel to New York to meet Dorothy in-person for the first time and meet the magazine editors who had taken a chance on my edgy stories.
I spent four months on the East Coast, thought about relocating there, ran out of money, returned to Oregon, and then moved to Seattle where I fell on very hard times until Doubleday bought Inside Moves for a pittance and Dorothy sold a few more stories for me. Then right before Inside Moves was to be published, New American Library acquired the paperback rights for a large sum, the movie deal was made, and I was lifted out of poverty for several years.
At the publication party for Inside Moves in New York, the editors from Cosmopolitan, Gallery, Seventeen, and Young Miss who had bought my stories were there to celebrate with me, as were editors from Redbook, Penthouse, and Esquire who had never bought a story from me. They came to let me to know they loved my stories and would have published them had I been better known.
Virtually every successful writer in America and England for the hundred years prior to 1970 published short stories in magazines en route to publishing a novel. In those bygone days, writing short stories was the training ground for becoming a professional writer. Striving to publish short stories was the gauntlet writers had to run if they wanted to one day enter the Promised Land of being a published author.
In 1980 I was on a radio show
in Sacramento talking about the movie based on Inside Moves that was about to be released. The interviewer asked
me how I got started as a writer and I mentioned publishing my first story in Cosmopolitan.
I think I must have sounded slightly
embarrassed about my first commercial success coming via a Women’s magazine and
not Esquire or The New Yorker, because a few minutes later an elderly woman called
into the show and said, “I want you to know, Mr. Walton, you are in fine
company having your first story published in Cosmopolitan.” Then she paused for effect. “For Ernest Hemmingway
published his first short story in Cosmopolitan, too.”
I have never confirmed this,
preferring to believe the delightful caller knew what she was talking about.
I was twenty-one when I wrote my first novel. I’d written several dozen short stories by then and a few really long stories, but I was full of trepidation about attempting to write a novel. I had never published anything, though not for lack of trying. I’d garnered hundreds of rejection letters from magazines large and small, and covered two walls of a bedroom with rejection notes from The New Yorker.
The year was 1971. After two years of vagabonding I rented a little room in a former hotel in Ashland, Oregon during a very cold winter. I was nearly out of money and beginning to think I should go back to college. I was writing songs, working at odd jobs, writing stories, and feeling unpleasantly stuck.
At that time there was only one little bookstore in Ashland. I’d go there every day to read books and get warm and gawk at the young woman who worked there. I was afraid to ask her out because I had no money to spare.
One day I happened upon a little paperback edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle and read half the book standing in the bookstore. I bought the book, took it back to my room, finished reading it, and knew I was ready to write a novel. The chapters in Cat’s Cradle are only a page or so in length. There was nothing at all daunting to me about writing a book with very short chapters, so that is what I decided to do.
To make a long story short, within a few years I had turned into a compulsive novel writer. Over the next thirty years I wrote twenty novels. Some were published by big publishers, some I self-published, the others I threw away. When I wasn’t writing a novel, I felt out of sorts. Out of identity.
When I was fifty, my commercial writing career kaput, I decided to stop writing novels and find out who I was when not working on a novel. I wrote very little for the next three years, during which time I went through a massive identity crisis. I spent much more time on my music than I ever had before, patched together a minimalist living as a gardener, secretary, and editor-for-hire, and found life perfectly okay without working on a novel.
On my fifty-fourth birthday, I put pen to paper and began writing something that turned into a novel. Since then I have written many more novels and several hundred essays and stories, though I am no longer a compulsive writer.
I write when the spirit moves me, not when my intellect tells
me I should.
Our new album Ahora Entras Tu is here! We’re so glad to be able to share this suite of new piano songs and piano/cello songs with you.
The album contains nine songs and four short poems and is downloadable and streamable from Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, YouTube, Spotify, and other music web sites! We will soon be getting our shipment of the actual CDs to send to community radio stations in hope of getting some airplay, and to dispense to friends who still have CD players.
We
began the recording process last year when Peter Temple came to the house and
recorded me playing the piano tracks on my Yamaha U7, an excellent upright piano
I bought new in 1980 and have babied for forty-five years. I then went into the
studio and added vocals to three of the eight tunes and gave those eight tunes
to Marcia. She listened to them for some weeks and decided on four of the tunes
she wanted to compose cello parts for.
When she was happy with what she’d created, we went into the studio and she recorded her parts. Then we lived with those renditions for a time, she made changes and additions in subsequent studio visits, and… voila!
As
I prepare to send copies of the album to radio DJs, I’m calling the music Jazz
with a Latin feel, though the music isn’t traditional Jazz. These tunes are
melodic inventions, several of them Latinesque, as their names imply. And one
groovacious blues.
