 We each have about 10 minutes to talk and Mark and Melanie and then myself and Elise will talk and we're going to do a little time traveling starting back in the 19th century and going up into Lord. It's hard to think that the 60s are now historical. I'm going to talk about two California authors or California related authors who lived one generation apart from each other. The first one is Robert Louis Stevenson. He lived from 1850 to 1894 and then a generation later Jack London. Born in 1876 died in 1916. The two of them have some parallels. They both died young. They both were worldwide bestsellers by the time they were young men and they both were in California and they both had somewhat scandalous love lives which are great things to write about if you're a novelist. This Stevenson's treasure is the first book that I published and I was going to talk about that a little bit now and I wanted to talk about the changing California landscape as these two authors made the scene and left it. So this is Robert Louis Stevenson at about the time he published Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He was in his 30s at the time. He was wearing his signature blue velvet coat and he was the bestselling author not just in England or the United States but in the Western world at that time. Robert Louis Stevenson was born and raised in Scotland but he was writing polite essays and he didn't write a big fiction hit until after he had come to California in this area for a year pursuing the love of his life who was Fanny Osborn from an old slide. That's the love of his life. A woman he had fallen deeply in love with when she was an art student in France. She was unfortunately already married unhappily and had two children was 11 years older than he but he was smitten. She went back to San Francisco where she her husband was a prominent San Franciscan at the time and wanted to figure out a way out of this marriage. After a year apart Louis he always knew himself as Louis threw caution to the winds and went from Edinburgh all the way to Monterey California where she was there with her children studying art. This is the cover of the book and this is what Louis left. His family were wealthy. They were absolutely aghast when he fell in love with this American. It was very scandalous but he was not deterred. This is where he ended up from Posh Edinburgh to downtown Monterey in the 1870s and that's the way it looked like. It was basically the wild west similar looking to Dodge City Tombstone or other Western towns but with some California touches and that's what I tried to capture in this very short reading. If you can imagine this man in his 20s who had come 6,000 miles by various means he showed up the last stage of his journey. He was very sick and but he was desperate to get to his true love. He took a narrow gauge railroad. It dropped him off on the bluffs. He couldn't even see the town and basically it just stopped in the middle of nowhere near Monterey. He had just gotten off the train. Where are you headed? A driver in an open-necked shirt and brown suspenders frowned down from a one-horse buggy. I seek a woman in Monterey, a Mrs. Fanny Osborn. The driver held out his palm. Two bits. Louis was not sure he had heard, sir. I'll get you there for a quarter. When Louis produced the coin from his pocket the driver helped heave the chest and the buggy. What intarnation you got in there, lead? Bencroft's history of the United States. All ten volumes. My pleasure reading. I'll admit a bit heavy in the carrying as well as the reading. The driver spit tobacco at his horse's flanks and snapped the reins. Within a half mile they reached rickety docks jutting over the bay to their right and just before it an intersection of sorts with a road turning inland. They took the turn, passed a tiny church, and stopped at a plain square building that stood alone in a weedy field. The driver motioned Louis with a jerk of his head to follow him down from the buggy and through the double doors of the Bohemia Saloon. The smoky room was crowded with merchants and bowlers, fishermen and cotton jerseys and Mexican cowboys and sombreros jabbering in several languages as they drank at a long redwood bar or played cards at small tables. The driver banged a spoon against a glass. Anyone know the whereabouts of a Mrs. Fanny Osborne? He hollered. This set off side discussions among the men as if they were playing a party game to see who could answer first. Short woman with a couple of children, one of the merchants eventually yelled back, has a tall husband who works in San Francisco? The driver forwarded the questions to Louis with a nod. He felt his face flush. That would be Mrs. Osborne, yes. The men now stared over their beer glasses with raised eyebrows. Were they friends of Sam? Perhaps they were staring at the red sores on his face from the rash he had caught on the rail car near Cleveland when someone had thrown a filthy blanket over him during his chills and delirium or maybe they were just curious about his Scottish Brogue and the foreign looking cut of his blue velvet coat. The big adobe down Alvarado Street, the businessman said, just back of the French hotel has roses growing over the door. The driver nudged Louis. It would be civil to buy that man a drink and one for me too of course. Louis stepped up to the bar. Of course. One hour and two whiskeys later the driver was jouncing Louis down the sandy mud of Alvarado Street. They passed clabored shanties, balcony adobes and rusty Spanish cannon marking the street corners. Every chuck hole the buggy hit made his head pound and his lungs ache. The fog that had settled over Monterey as thick as any fog he'd suffered in Edinburgh didn't help matters. He fought a growing sense of panic for the most important meeting of his life. He had wanted to be in a healthy, confident state of mind. Just beyond a ramshackle hotel the driver reigned in at a handsome two-story adobe with pink roses growing in profusion over the doorway. Louis climbed down from the wagon, walked up a flagstone pathway. Finally after 6,000 feverish stomach churning, bone jarring miles he found himself at her door. He leaned against it to get his breath, willed his cough to be gone. His head to clear and his heart to stop racing. Then he knocked. Fanny opened the door and gaped. So he's surprised her. And I won't wreck the story by telling you what happened, but suffice it to say the love affair continued. This is the wonderful lodgings that Louis lived in for a few months. An unheated room up there on the upper right. Now the Stevenson house has been beautifully restored by the California State Parks. You can take tours through there. They have bougainvillea growing, but at this point it was a flop house. They continued their relationship in San Francisco. This is a picture of the ferry building in about 1886. So just a few years after Louis was there. And you'll notice that it's busier than it is now. There were no bridges leading to San Francisco. Those are horse drawn omnibuses spanning out to all areas of the city. And he and Fanny met there and rendezvoused as she tried to engineer her divorce. Suffice it to say, so Louis and Fanny spent time in Calistoga. He went back then to Europe and he wrote his first big hit, Treasure Island. Before that, again, he was writing these polite essays, but his worldwide hit was really all about Fanny and his new stepson and the foliage and everything that he describes on this Caribbean island was actually the foliage and the stone outcroppings and what not that you see on Point Lobos near Monterey. So he was a Californian by this time. Okay, Jack London, say going here. I had some great pictures of Jack. Let me see if I can there he is. No, there. Okay, that's Jack when he was 21, born and raised in Oakland and San Francisco. This was about the time that he tested into the UC Berkeley after one year of high school. So he was just phenomenally intelligent but from the other side of the tracks. He's nice and cleaned up there. He went to the Klondike. I had a great picture I was going to show you of the ships jammed with people and Jack in his characteristically urgent way, he couldn't afford to stay at Berkeley, dropped out after a semester, was on one of the first ships going up north to the Klondike to find gold. He found no gold. He got $4 worth, almost killed himself in the process. And this picture is his first photo shoot. And this is a blow up from the Overland Monthly of 1900. They published some of his Klondike stories. That was his real gold that he brought back. And I like this photo because it shows him in this silly kind of suit with the Arctic night was supposed to be behind him in the way of a blue blanket but you can see the folds on it. So it's kind of, this is like early promo and Jack at age 24. I already detect a little cynicism in his look there. So I just really like this old photo. This is a much slicker picture of him at about 1903. Three years later he was the best selling author of the world, the United States and then soon the world with call of the wild. Now he's much more posed. He's a hunky guy. He's outdoors in Glen Ellen writing on a rock. But this is kind of stagey. And then I was going to show, let's see if I have it. I don't. There's a great picture of Jack in a Stutz Bearcat Roadster in 1915, which is a year before he died. And by that time he was down in Hollywood. His books were being adapted into motion pictures. And so within one generation from Stevenson's time to London's time, we see the beginning of pop culture, the movie industry, the frontiers are gone but people really like the idea of those good old days. The frontier is now up north in the Arctic Circle. So Jack brought that back. He retired to a ranch. His second wife was trying desperately, I think, to save his life by getting him out of the fast life. And I had a neat picture to end this on, showing him riding his horse on the Jack London ranch. If you haven't been there, be sure to go and spend a day there. You get a real good sense of Jack. So I'm out of time. But I just wanted to look and see if, I think that was my conclusion, is that just within that very short time, there was an amazing difference in the cultural, California political, economic landscape that bridged us from Stevenson to Jack London. Thanks. I'm Melanie Spiller and I'm writing a collection of stories of 1906 post-earthquake San Francisco with a star character being a female Sherlock Holmes named Sheila Coombs. My stories are kind of because I'm in love with San Francisco. And so I live in Petro Hill, which was a tent city after the earthquake. And I find it fascinating, there were still a couple of shacks that were there that were there in 1906 that the government built to save people. And so I just really enjoy the idea of somebody who would have to walk through the city to see the city on foot because after the earthquake there was no infrastructure, there were hardly streets, there were hardly buildings. And I like the idea of Sheila Coombs because she has sort of personality disorder. And I'm charmed by that. Sorry. So this is the dog patch, which is the flat part of Petro Hill right by the water. It was what the tent city looked like at Texas in 18th. You can see people were living really right on top of one another. And this is my part of the hill, which is really quite hilly. And the shacks, there are three shacks that remain from this time. And I've put Sheila and John Watkins, who in the first, she's John Cole Elliott, and then she meets Dr. Watson and marries him. And they go live on Baker Street, which was unaffected by the earthquake. So the way I've organized my stories is I start with really shortly after the earthquake. And I don't know if you know the story of Enrique Caruso, who was a big deal opera star. And after the earthquake, he went down and waited in the street while his two valets collected his belongings and brought them down. And in truth, someone came and tried to steal one of his valises. And Enrique didn't want any part of that. And so he fought him off and then went off and had breakfast for 25 cents down the street. In my story, the thief is successful. And one of the valets is left behind when Enrique goes back to New York to find what is in the valise. Now, Enrique Caruso was like most show people at that time, and certainly an Italian, very superstitious. And so in the valise are his little icons. He has five little icons. And also he had been granted a knighthood, an Italian knighthood, which is almost meaningless, but it was important to him. And he waved the papers around a lot. So in my story, that's what was in the Vulli since they get to wander all around the city looking for it. And the last slide I'll show you is really a lot of fun imagining people wandering into these strange places looking for stolen belongings. This is six weeks after the earthquake. This is 20th and 3rd Street, which the building on the left with the pointy roof is still there. There's Dogpatch Cafe that just closed, actually, that's inside it. And so you can see it was really quite busy. This is right near the ironworks. So there were people were really working. They really went right back to work. And life went on. In the next one, you see that this is a whole family living in one of these shacks, which is about 10 foot by 10 foot. Yeah. All the same family? Yeah. So I mean, the government was generous, but yeah. So they just piled in on top of each other. And the people who were undamaged in the earthquake were very generous. And so clothing and medical supplies and food and things were being donated by the less disrupted San Franciscans. And so as you can see, they all look like they're wearing nice clothes because that's because there really was no shortage. Not well, there was a shortage, but there were things you could find things, especially for children. Part of the story because they end up on Baker Street is over kind of in the neighborhood of Market and Dolores. And this is right at the edge of the fire. So you can see in the foreground, buildings that survived. And there are people wandering around because there were tent cities there as well. And then you can see that it's just destroyed. So everywhere you went, it must have smelled of smoke and burned things, kind of a familiar experience, I guess, for some of us from a couple of weeks ago. It smells like smoke and you can't get away from it. And I found a description. Somebody took a ferry over to the other side and described it as like a gaping maw of broken teeth. That kind of dirty mouth thing. This is the tent city at Dolores Park, which is at the edge. And you can see there are big buildings that did survive. And the Baker Street, which does have the correct address on it, but not a livable building and didn't at this time, was undamaged. So Mrs. Hudson and some of the irregulars are down in that part of the world. This is what I mentioned before. So a million years ago, I had this idea for a character named Wrong Way Nishinaka, who was always going the wrong way. Yeah. So he's half Chinese and half Japanese. And in my story, he's one of Sheila Coombs' special friends and he has this shop and all kinds of strange things are in it. There are herbs and there are antiques and he knows people. He's the guy to go see when you're looking for special stuff. And I just, when I found this picture, I just thought, that's his shop. He has an office in the back that's got a big desk and everybody comes and begs his help. I just thought that'd be a lot of fun. But because he's Asian, racism was really rampant and he could get into places with nobody noticing. He could be a servant or a waiter or laundry person and stuff. And so he could find out all kinds of stuff that Sheila Coombs would have a little more difficulty finding out. And the next slide is kind of off topic. So normally, I write about the origins of music. I'm a medieval musician myself. And I write about Hildegard of Bingen and Guido de Retso and the people who started music. And so this next slide is an announcement. I'm publishing a book on the history of music. It's not fiction. It's not about San Francisco. But it's coming out in January. So I don't know. Look for it. And Mark was referring to changes that happened between Stevenson's time and London's time. Well, the changes that happened between 1906 and 1959, which is when my book is set up were certainly astounding to most people. But nothing like what was going to happen in the 60s. And that was part of the reason I wrote this book was because I kept thinking, I had being a child of the 60s myself, that we know now what happened and all the things that came then. But people in the 50s, people in 1959, they had no idea what was coming. But people who lived in California especially, I mean, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, the big cities, they had a sense that things were changing. And my this book, Ember Days, starts in Mendocino. Has anybody been to Mendocino here? Oh, good. Yes. It's an incredible place. As you can see, that's a photograph I took from the top of one of the water tower renovated water towers up there. It was, you know, is, you know, probably it was a logging town for a long time. And then the logging business started to go away. And so by the 1950s, there were only about 500 people living in Mendocino Village. Fort Bragg was starting to grow a little bit. And it was a little more industrial. But it took five or six hours to get to Mendocino from here. Because especially once you got off the main highway and going through the redwoods, it took forever. I mean, those were old logging roads. And that took a long time. It was a quieter time and place, as some of you will recall, and probably seen it even in television programs. There was TV, definitely. But in small villages like Mendocino, there was not many people had a television. They had radio. And there were a lot of radio stations. So it was quieter. Long distance phone calls were very expensive. People wrote letters. It was just, it was a different quiet kind of time. And some pictures of Mendocino that show, it's rural. It really is. It's coastal. I mean, the California coast is a very special kind of place and a special kind of feeling. I've been up to Mendocino probably half a dozen or more times over the last 15 years writing this book in particular, but also just enjoying it. And one of the things I found most lovely about it was the fog. I just love the fog up there. And here's a very short excerpt from my book that describes the way I feel about Mendocino. As the bus drove up Main Street, heading for the tiny intersection that was the center of town, James took in the huddled shapes of the old buildings, black and slick with rain. The last rays of the sun glinted off the metal bands on the water towers, scattered like haystacks among the houses. The bus driver handed him a suitcase as he stepped down onto the broken sidewalk, the asphalt crumbling into the dirt. It was about a half mile to his mother's house, and each step brought back memories of people and events he hadn't let himself think about in 20 years. With the noisy bus soon gone down the road, silence poured in and he began to hear, one by one, the sounds of his home. Morning doves burying their soft coos from the eaves, the placid drip of rain from leaves onto the sodden ground, and finally the stir and rush and crash of the ocean below the headlands a half mile away. And then those five hours or so down the coast, San Francisco. 1959 we had beatniks and city lights, the folk music in the cafes. It's a little hard to show, but that sign says, don't envy the beats, be one. And they have a beatnik kit so you can get a turtleneck sweater and a pair of sandals and you can be a beatnik just like them. But, and then of course the wild dancing that went on down there, women wearing pants for heaven's sake, you know, not even skirts. But as you can see, they weren't hippies yet. These were just sort of ordinary looking people, hair a little bit longer, you know, maybe they smoked a little bit more. But then this one in particular, this was, it says, high squares, the citizens of North Beach are on tour. And they, a whole bunch of people walked down from North Beach down to Union Square to see the squares and greet them and to show them that they weren't really wild animals like they were being depicted in the press. Malvina's Cafe, some of you may remember that one. And then, you know, the good old folk scene music that was happening on there. And even when I came in 1976, there were the cafes in North Beach were still going. There were the comedy clubs were still there, the stand-up comedies with the purple onion. And there was another one, the hungry eye. Yeah. So they were still there at that point, which was lots of fun. Lawrenceford and Getty. And one thing that was particularly interesting, and I saw this when I came to San Francisco, practically the first time was the procession, a funeral procession in Chinatown. And my characters got a chance to look at this as they came, the woman and her daughter came down from Mendocino to San Francisco. I'll just read you a little bit. As they left the garage, they were stopped on the sidewalk by a crowd of people all watching something in the street, a Chinese funeral forming outside the Green Street mortuary. A small but dignified marching band dressed in gaudy red uniforms with plumes on their helmets were slowly leading a large black hearse up the street. The sonorous dirge played on trumpets, trombones and one French horn had an ironic comic edge to its sound. Pedestrians and cars alike stopped to wait respectfully as the funeral procession passed by. A large group of somberly dressed mourners shuffled behind the hearse. Ellen and Alice watched in awe until the whole scene disappeared into the fog. And I have a little selection of what that sounded like more recently. There we go. So in Mendocino in the early 1970s, there was a movement to stop development in that town. And by then there were probably more like eight or 900 people. And during the 60s, Ken Keezy and a lot of other artists, musicians, creative people disappeared. They left San Francisco. They went up there to the back of the land movement to start new crafts, to start a theater organization up there. So they revivified Mendocino absolutely. And then by 72, legislation was passed to stop development in the actual precincts of Mendocino. So it now looks pretty much what it looked like in 1972. Things are a little spiffier and the shops are a little different. But all the buildings are there. And in 72, it looked pretty much like what it looked like in 1952. And before that, just a little more cleaned up. But there are wide stretches of property that aren't built on, and they're not going to be built on out there. But if you haven't been up there, you're really out of go. It's an absolutely wonderful place. And certainly, typifies throughout its history everything that the coastal villages and towns of California typified. So thank you. So I'm Elise Francis Miller. And my books are about the late 60s. So come forward just 10 years from what Mary was talking about. But in those 10 years, as she mentioned, things changed a lot. How did California inspire my stories? Where was the dream of the West and the last frontier and the flowering of innovation? In stories about UC Berkeley and the rebellious boomers. Yes, we had sunshine. We had beautiful beaches and mountains. And these found their way into my books in the Berkeley girl in Paris, 1968. The male protagonist, Aaron Becker, who is a science nerd kind of guy. And he lets us know that even in the glorious, beautiful natural beauty of California, at that time, you couldn't escape the danger, the sense of danger that college students felt in their lives. So I'm going to read a little bit from what he, in his voice. The first weekend in May, the zoology department at Cal took a trip to the high country of Yosemite. And I went along. We hiked through pine forests to still frozen glacier carved lakes, made notes on freshwater fish, dipterians, and other indigenous species, melted snow for drinking water, poked our dinner onto sticks and into open flame, shoved pine needle mattresses under our sleeping bags, tray nice, peaceful, and totally unreal. But at nightfall, staring into the campfire, even in that place, agonized whales of the city from far below filled our imaginations and our talk turned to current events. So why do I write about California? Because I'm a Californian. My family first came to California between 1910 and 1920. Ten members of my family came. And it was all about making a living. And they did manage, even with meager educations, to start businesses, to take risks, to innovate. And they succeeded largely. And so California's promise was holding. But in my parents' generation, I remember talks around the dinner table, and it was all about the money. It was all about cash flow and customers and advertising and pricing. And so I found ways to turn California's positives into negative, into every California positive into a negative. What I'd been encouraged to value was materialism and conformity and gratitude for my blessings. I was so disillusioned that I wanted to strike out on my own and do something entirely different. But I wanted to do it in such a way that my parents would not suspect my intentions. Because after all, I was still financially and even emotionally dependent upon them. So they were not college grads, and they weren't college savvy. So I struck a deal with them that I would go to Berkeley. And in those days, Berkeley was known as the greatest, it probably still is, public university in America. And they were very proud of that. And they thought that was an ideal place for me to go. A year later, by the time I entered in the fall of 65, the words free speech movement were on everybody's lips. And my father's friends, his cronies, were started teasing him that you didn't have to be a communist to get into Berkeley, but you had to be one to graduate. Well, they weren't amused. And so I went off to Berkeley with a lot of stern warnings. At Cal, I did try to establish my own set of values through intellectual classes, artistic pursuits, but nothing that would shock my parents too much. I majored in art history and anthropology, even though they felt these were worthless, they accepted that. And in weekly phone calls, I tried to talk about classes and my social life and concealed effect that I was in emotional turmoil and ups and downs. For all my desire to be different at college, I was actually neither unique nor rebellious and most of the time not even very bohemian, although I was trying. But I soon discovered that neither were other people at Berkeley. So this is Berkeley, and actually I took this picture from the Cal 68 yearbook. And it was a peaceful place when you viewed it from far back. And so naturally, my parents were pretty eager to have me go there, thinking that's what it would be like. And I already told you what happened to that. So anyway, but what I wanted to show you, let's see. Okay, so this is the 1964 free speech movement. And it is a bunch of students that are marching and protesting. But the, and I don't have that in either of my books, but you can see that the kinds of people that were protesting still did not look like the dirty hippie ragged hippies that that people were talking about even in 1964. And all the more so by the time this picture was taken, these pictures were taken, which is also from the 1968 yearbook. And you can see that they just look like the boy next door, the girl next door. And this is the problem. So when I started to write this book, I had had 30 years of listening to stereotypes about Cal students in particular, and students, college students all over the country in the late 1960s. And when I saw this picture, I was reminded that we weren't like these images that you that you find on TV and in the media. And they're vilifying the students. But really, we were just the boy and girl next door who wanted to date Saturday night, who wanted to pass our classes and make good grades. And so I started out to counter the stereotypes. And I'll show you a few more. This is in Sproul Plaza, where students did protest and demonstrate. And yet, you can see the type of people. This was also in that year, I took that myself way back when this is, of course, a demonstration. But again, lots of people are wearing suit coats or sports coats. The hair is rather tame. Now this was that year also. And it is the Vietnam Day commencement, which is a scene in my book. And that is in 1969, even the year later. So you can see that my wanting to counter the stereotypes was heartfelt. So of course, given everything I've told you, I married, had kids, and got a safe salary job. And 30 years later, my husband, Jay and I, and Jay also as a Cal grad, moved back here to the Bay Area. I was still trying to find myself with that in the California paradigm. I really wanted California's bounty, which I thought was the opportunity to live a creative life, the freedom to take risks, and to be do my own thing. So then I started to write. And all of these emotions and cravings and the turning my back on what I perceive to be the constricted life of my parents are incorporated into my Berkeley Girl books. So I also wanted to explore why I had never really protested because I certainly had reason to do so. I was very much against the Vietnam War, and I felt strongly about in support of civil rights, but I never protested. Was it just my parents' stern warnings? So I began to do research on both the political and the cultural details of the era through which I'd lived. And I studied not only books, fiction and nonfiction, but my own letters, other people's letters, and articles from the Berkeley press, even flyers and posters. And when I went to write my books, I created Janet McGill, the character who condenses the transformation of a shy, timid Berkeley freshman into a protester. And I contrast her with her straight science nerd boyfriend, Erin Becker, who you have already heard from. I called it, and I'll show you this, I called it a time to cast away stones taken from the Pete Seager song. And that that you're looking at is an archival photo from Paris in the during the rebellion of May 1968. They call it the May Revolution. And yet again, these people do not look like hippies. So everyone say under 50 who looked at this cover thought it was about World War II. So my publisher, Sandhill Review Press, decided to completely change the title and the cover to reimagine it. And it became The Berkeley Girl is the same book. If you have read one, you have read the other. And it won the Independent Press Award last year too. So that's why the award is on there. This last month, I published the, she published the Rendezvous in London, the Berkeley Girl Rendezvous in London, which is a sequel. It's a novella that's a sequel to the first book. And it also contains a collection of other stories set in various settings with different characters and different plots. And they are all in the 60s. Let's see if I can. Oh, maybe that's it. Okay. Anyway, so in one of these, I have Sharon in jazz reflections who directly seeks to fulfill the vision of an artistic life that I never managed to do. And she winds up in the Haydashbury district. And I'm going to read to you a little bit from her explanation to her boyfriend, Denny, of her awakening. She was 15. Her date a year, I can't tell whether I'm speaking into this or not. She was 15, her date a year older. The date was forgettable, but not the smell and taste of her first Italian expresso, the darkened room full of young faces and the bard on the stage. To Sharon, his long and shiny hair, thin face and crooked teeth exuded the raw, ragged sexual magnetism reflected in his voice. She leaned toward the stage, her arm hair standing up on end as if a brisk breeze had swept through the stifling room. She absorbed his guitar rhythms, melody, and not too perfectly rhymed message of new hope and opportunity to learn, to know life, to be free, to converse without limits, to make love without limits. His message was meant for me, she told Denny. And his passion for his message was authentic. She believed him. She believed the bitter coffee and the darkened room permeated with teenage sweat and she wanted to follow him. Incidentally, not her date, only the musician poet. But more than to follow him, she wanted to be him. So that's Sharon. And in another story, decades too late, I seek to empathize with my parents. And I wrote a story called The Wedding of Her Dreams from the viewpoint of a mother who cannot catch up with or understand her daughter Debbie, a bride who has embraced the social and political values of her own generation. So in this scene, Debbie's mother is speaking. What it all came down to was we allowed Debbie to go to Berkeley because we trusted her. I'm sure she did some things she didn't tell us about, but she still looks normal, dresses well, and is accomplishing things in her life. She's not a deadbeat. Cyrus and I can't stand a deadbeat. You can tell this is a little autobiographical. So that March morning, before we had gotten as far as discussing the date, Debbie announced that she and Gary had decided to get married on the beach. Maybe Half Moon Bay, Gary said, or another. We'll have to scout it out. Cyrus turned to Debbie. And you don't want the synagogue? He sounded a little hurt. I'm sure he was thinking as much about the building fun as about God. He was the one who had worked for it. Could I blame him? The synagogue is beautiful, Daddy, Debbie replied, but after all, we're Californians. We spent our summers on the beaches. You know, bare feet, a bonfire, it will be symbolic of our lives. She sounded like she was halfway through penning her memoirs. Then I couldn't help myself. I burst out. But what about grandmother Eileen? Don't you want her at your wedding? Oh, yes, of course, mom. Debbie laughed. I wouldn't feel married if grandmother Eileen weren't there. Well, she's nearly blind and she can't walk without a walk. Are you going to make an 82-year-old woman stumble down the beach in the sand in the wind? The house at that moment was as quiet as I'd ever remembered it. From the den, I could hear the blue jays complaining in the backyard. I just wanted to say that in the actual novella sequel, there's hardly any California at all. Yet throughout the whole novella, Janet McGill is planning on coming back to California. It's as if she knows that unless she returns, she's not going to be able to take action and get anywhere with her desire to fight for women's rights, to end the Vietnam War, and her other kinds of things that she likes to do. So it seemed to most Americans, I think then, and Europeans as well, that California was way ahead in the awakening and transformation of and that other parts of America followed. So in the 1960s, and as Mary showed in the starting in the 50s for a small group, I think that I see California as restaking a claim to be the Wild West, a singular place and an exciting place to be, stimulating, far from the Washington, D.C. political center and the big money of New York. So conversations were intense, whether they were in dorm rooms or in North Beach, and I have lots of these conversations in my books, and whether they're in Paris or London or even in the Midwest is in one of my stories that's called The View from Pond Hill Farm. They are open and searching and honest and even painful, and I think that those conversations first took place in California. So that's it.