At the end of March, 2018, my husband and I moved from Brooklyn, New York to Ashland, Oregon after 50 years living in the Northeast and three days in Southern Oregon. It was a startling decision, one our family and friends couldn’t quite believe but admired. We discovered Ashland—and the surrounding Rogue Valley—on a cross-country road trip the summer before. We were hooked in a few hours, although the air was thick with smoke and the temperature sizzled.
I have never called myself a writer, but I’ve written all my life: reports, stories, articles, and books, mostly about powerful learning with public purpose by our country’s adolescents. My partners were teenagers marginalized by race, class, and language, and the adults that cared about them, and the audience was educators and policymakers nationwide.
If what I wrote didn’t secure publication, it was like a tree falling in the forest. I wrote for others, part of a lifelong campaign to spread progressive education.
Soon after arriving in Ashland, I heard a talk by the irreverent novelist and non-fiction writer Anne Lamott. “I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be,” Lamott says. “But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.”
She reminded me of the joys of writing for yourself. “There is ecstasy in paying attention,” Lamott says. “If you start to look around, you will start to see… The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.”
These Postcards from the Rogue Valley are my way of paying attention in my new home, practicing curiosity, seeing and listening, documenting what is close to me, and being taken by surprise. I came to Ashland, I say to myself, not to retire but to be fully awake.
In Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Lamott tells a story about her older brother, then ten, struggling to write a report on birds that he’d had three months to write but had not started and was now due the the next day. Immobilized by the huge task, he was in tears. She writes: “Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”
As I ease into this personal project—gathering reflections, stories and images—from one of the most graceful yet wild places in our country, I am taking it bird by bird.
Ashland, Oregon, May 2018
A POSTCRIPT: I’ve surprised myself, keeping at this blog and its postcards for five-plus years. For those of you who haven’t received these posts bird by bird, you will find here more than 100 essays and running. Curiosity and a large appetite for research have led me to subjects I’d never imagined — from roads less travelled, medicinal potions, and working cats to a history of race in Oregon, the catastrophic losses of Rogue Valley’s Hispanic community in the devastating Almeda Fire, life in the time of COVID-19, and the accumulating impact of climate change.
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