July 3, 2015
This is Sadie enjoying the lawn about which I feel such guilt in this Los Angeles Times Opinion piece: Deprogramming the Southern California Lawn. While she looks particularly good lounging on this gorgeous green, the browner it gets, the better she likes it for backscratching. That’s just one of the positives to our current water shortage.
An early story I did at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner was on extreme approaches to landscaping during the Southland’s mid-1980s drought. On one end of the spectrum was the young fellow installing waterfalls in San Fernando Valley backyards, on the other end was Bob Cornell doing drought tolerant “xeriscaping” in Pasadena and the east side, most notably a water wise demonstration garden at the Los Angeles Arboretum. Years afterward, he installed the enchanted drought tolerant garden in our Glendale backyard mentioned in the Times’ piece. I don’t know what the kid doing the waterfalls is up to these days, but Bob’s still at it, and we’re lucky to have him as California faces its worst drought in recorded history.
And here’s a recent interview for the Los Angeles Review of Books with author Karen Bender regarding her acclaimed short story collection Refund. I highly recommend it, along with her novels A Town of Empty Rooms and Like Normal People. She’s a combination of John Cheever, Raymond Carver and her own intelligent, darkly humorous sense of contemporary culture. It’s vital literary fiction and transformative reading.
This summer I’ll be teaching The Essential Beginnings of Fiction Writing: An Introductory Workshop at UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program on the Westwood campus. Come join us for six weeks, starting August 6, in pursuit of your own transformative writing experiences.
Okay, gotta get back to that novel project. It’s set in Los Angeles during the 1930s, when fun was illegal, graft ruled and delusions were grand. Ahh, those were the days!
Hi Nancy! We are Abi and Eden, a creative team from Lincoln, UK. We are writing a recipe book, however unlike most recipe books on the market we want to create a collective recipe book filled with bakery recipes from missed mothers. We’re sure all mothers had a signature cake or desert, perhaps it has been passed down through generations. Our goal is to collect as many recipes from mothers who have passed away, and have their memory live on through baking.
We are hoping to dedicate pages to mothers to showcase their most loved recipe and for their children to be able to write a dedication message to them. Potentially having photos and handwritten messages also. We want the memory of all mothers to live on and inspire future parents and generations. We came across your lovely book and thought you may be interested!
All profits from the book will be donated to Breast Cancer Awareness, a charity which has personal meaning to us.
Look forward to hearing from you,
Thanks,
Abi and Eden
Dear Abi and Eden, thank you for being in contact. I appreciate your kind words regarding my book and ask that you send me more information regarding your project, such as contributors and publisher, so that I can give it more thorough consideration. Please be in touch via my direct e-mail, nancy@nancyspiller.org.
Sincerely,
Nancy
Hi Nancy, I’m hoping to interview you for a TV documentary I’m working on about Brian Wilson and Dr. Landy. Can you email me? Thanks!
I read your piece in today’s LATimes and noticed you are involved with the UCLA Writer’s Extension program. So I seek your thoughts.
I am writing a book – biographical – mainly about the last year of my marriage. The manuscript is entertaining and humorous and sad and probably could be helpful to other women going through the end of a long and happy marriage.
It is a joy to write and I suspect it has commercial possibilities. I seek someone who could advise me.
You and I have some similarities in our lives. I was a Times reporter for almost 20 years. And was born decades and decades ago in Berkeley.
I have been rewriting the chapters for several months. If you think you could be helpful what material would you need from me and how do we make arrangements for such advice?
And my West Los Angeles garden has never been planted with grass.
Sincerely, Pat Anderson