After the Louisville Conference, with COVID numbers in decline, Carla and I headed west for a week on the coast. The trip was not simply restorative but repurposing, reconnecting with friends and family in real time, face to face. And so we saw them, in each instance redefining both time and events that have come between. These friends and family, of long standing and more recent acquaintance, are prime numbers, so to speak, in a series that has many twists and turns. Life histories and practices of art coincide with them, for which they are primes. As we know, a coastline is a fractal, as in the thumbnail sketches below:
Monday, February 28
Delta DTW > SFO
> San Francisco/Stinson Beach
Megan Adams/Camille Roy
Our first stop after arrival at SFO was with New Narrative author Megan Adams/Camille Roy, celebrating her just published collection of stories Honey Mine. We admired the art, light, rooms, and overgrown garden of her working-class mansion across from the thronged Daniel Webster School playground, where I first taught Poetry in the Schools. We then walked the streets of Potrero Hill, with its monuments to the history of Language writing still preserved at 235 Missouri Street, 326 Connecticut Street, and the public gym and soccer field at the top of the hill, where the competitive drives of young poets were at play. Just so, New Narrative and Language writing conjoin.
> Stinson Beach