Bruce Pascoe stood near the ancient crops he has written about for years and discussed the day’s plans with a handful of workers. Someone needed to check on the yam daisy seedlings. A few others would fix up a barn or visitor housing.
Most of them were Yuin men, from the Indigenous group that called the area home for thousands of years, and Pascoe, who describes himself as “solidly Cornish” and “solidly Aboriginal,” said inclusion was the point. The farm he owns on a remote hillside a day’s drive from Sydney and Melbourne aims to correct for colonization — to ensure that a boom in native foods, caused in part by his book, “Dark Emu,” does not become yet another example of dispossession.
Writers who find themselves mired in procrastination would do well to take a page from Marcel Proust’s most famous book. Specifically, a page from In Search of Lost Time in manuscript form. Nothing more powerfully illustrates the truth of that creative-writing-class maxim, ‘writing is rewriting’, than the liberally crossed-out, lavishly annotated, occasionally doodled-upon notebooks in which Proust composed his seminal, seven-volume text.
As the cabin’s only cook and diner and Yelp reviewer, I was acutely over-aware of the quality of every item of food that I made, relishing dishes when I pulled them off and despairing when I made mistakes. The memory of my isolation chicken lingered on the edges of the kitchen — as I cooked, I was careful to curb my impulse to make all the food at once, and instead cut down my portions to a manageable amount for one person.
And while the final meal is an occasion to cherish, it’s also just sad.
“Alta California,” Neely’s account of his improbable journey, touches on many other layers of California’s fiendishly complex history. An uncommonly sensitive writer, Neely trains his eye equally on the natural landscape, on plant and animal life, and on the variegated human worlds through which his strange itinerary takes him. With no trail to guide him, he makes his way across public and private lands, acres of concrete and tracts of near-wilderness. Above all, he is walking through multiple worlds of time: into his first-person narrative, he weaves excerpts from the diaries of the Franciscan missionary Juan Crespí, subsequent historical records, and the memories of locals he encounters along the way.
Some girls can’t help it; they are lit sparklers,
hot-blooded, half naked in the depths of winter,
tagging moving trains with the bright insignia of their
fury.