Sean uses clay to replace the plaster parts that melted away.

Seven Steps to a More Beautiful Face

“Water vapor is your enemy, heat is everything, and there is always another step,” says Sean. He runs a bronze foundry in Santa Cruz. Bronze casting is a messy, multi-step process that pulls beauty from chaos. And Sean is a chemist, a material engineer, and an artisan. I followed Sean’s work this week as he…

Continue Reading
Badly-written review of Dead Space 2 annoys fans

Dead Prose 2: how Zinsser improves a video game review

The internet isn’t exactly known for providing a consistently high quality of writing. And I don’t think most people have particularly high literary expectations of video game reviews. So I was surprised to see a badly-written video game review elicit strong responses from readers, and prompt a discussion on the craft of writing that references…

Continue Reading
jiddou and tayta and me copy

moonlight meditation

By the late 1990s, my grandfather could no longer read. To be visible, photos needed to hover near his visual peripheries. Then, Jiddou –“grandfather” in Arabic – couldn’t see me unless I stood off to his side. My Jiddou had a growing blind spot smack in the middle of his visual field: he was suffering…

Continue Reading
IMAG0032

Levitating Sea Lions

The title might be a bit of a stretch, but the punch of it approximates how astonished I was to see the sea lions of the Santa Cruz Wharf this past weekend. Before a sunset dinner on Sunday, I was dazzled by a group of sea lions resting on the horizontal structural beams that lay…

Continue Reading

The Courage to Write

I took along a whole lot of books during winter break, and started with The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear by Ralph Keyes. I ended up reading it cover-to-cover during my flight, as I was completely engrossed. This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned overcoming fear in order to write. I found the…

Continue Reading
rp_vase-face.jpg

What Makes a Good Profile

I wrote my first profile as an undergraduate, of an eminent economics professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. I thought it was pretty good. It even earned an honorable mention in a school-wide writing competition. Then a real profile of the same person was published in Forbes, and I said to myself: “Wow….

Continue Reading
Election night in Selma, Alabama

Election night, interviews, and mom

Today I had a conversation with a man who I have read about in history books. I’ve also seen a few movies about him. And the night Barack Obama was elected President; I saw this man’s face on a television set in a bar in Selma, Alabama. He was talking, but I couldn’t hear. I…

Continue Reading

Snapshots

Since I was a little girl, I’ve taken what I call “mental snapshots” of moments that I want to remember. I almost always carry a camera now, but back before digital cameras became ubiquitous, I hardly ever had one handy when something significant was going down. I still take mental snapshots when I feel that…

Continue Reading
Picture of "Man and His Mountains"

Reading Cronin in Santa Cruz

I’ve been reading Cronin in Santa Cruz. It’s less exotic than Lolita in Tehran, but more personal. My grandmother, Dinah Cronin, died 15 years ago. During my childhood I visited her a few times in Arizona, but she passed before I got to know her well. So, I’ve been developing my relationship with her through…

Continue Reading
Welcome to work at the Merc

Field trip to our local temple of journalism

“I know that piece of paper is around here somewhere . . .” Getting the newspaper out is sometimes called the “daily miracle.” And while it might not be exactly comparable to walking on water, the daily cycle leaves me ever-awed. The week after classes let out one of our professors, a reporter and editor…

Continue Reading