In 1993 I moved to the sleepy little college town of Redlands, California. Wedged between two mountain ranges, the Mojave desert, and Los Angeles, Redlands was a good base camp for the hiking, climbing, skiing and body surfing I hoped to get out of college.
Redlands was also one of a handful of colleges where you could write your own degree program, which I thought sounded like a swell idea. It turned out to be a good deal more work than I imagined, or was willing to put in, but I originally planned to write a major that was one part photography and one part "nature writing".
I still think it was a good idea, one I could never let go. Luxagraf is more or less the third draft of this idea.
But the first draft did not take off. I dropped out after two semesters. Before slinking back down the freeway to Los Angeles I did manage to write and complete a couple of classes. One was akin to Nature Writing 101, if such a thing existed[^1]. I tried to keep it simple, I had a lot of photography and climbing and hiking to do as well. So I read and wrote about authors I'd already read before. I didn't get too creative, mostly the usual American "nature writing" suspects -- Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, Abbey, Dillard, Lopez, Stegner.
Fortunately, my advisor in this project, who looked like a heavier-set John Muir, threw in a few authors I was not familiar with. I remember thinking damn, I *am* going to have to do some work. But that's how I first heard of Mary Hunter Austin.
Mary Austin remains an overlooked author of the west. Austin is best known, when she is known at all, for a book called The Land of Little Rain, her Walden, with the Mojave desert starring in the role of Thoreau's pond.
Perhaps she came to early. The west, especially the Mojave desert, wasn't fully settled when Austin went exploring and writing. She began traipsing around the desert in the 1890s, no one wanted to think about anything but silver and gold and pick axes and railroads. Austin's sensibility as a writer was colored by three things that flew in the face of her time, and to an unfortunate degree, ours as well. Mary Austin was three things that a nature writer shall not be: a woman, a mystic, and a defender of rights and lives of native people. It was the middle thing that intrigued me then, and it still does today because, I think it's what grew out of the other two things.
Recently, in searching for new books for the kids, I was re-united with Austin. Austin wrote several children's books. I stumbled across one, The Trail Book, that the girls loved. Exhibits in the Natural History Museum in New York come to live for two children and various adventure ensue. Finding this sent me off searching for more Austin, and somewhere in the early hours of the morning, bleary-eyed and half-asleep at the keyboard, I ran across a digital copy of a collection of Austin's short stories called Lost Borders. What caught my eye was the dedication, "to Marion Burke and the Friends of a Long Year."
Who were the friends of a long year? What were the friends of a long year? When were the friends of a long year? It's hard to tell from the typesetting if Austin capitalized Friends of a Long Year or not, but I like to think she did, I like to think it was some kind of club. I did a little research before I dragged myself to bed and dreamed of the friends of a long year.
As several people have noted, I've been writing for luxagraf less than previously. There are partly practical reasons for this, but also I've been suffering from the feeling of writing into a black hole.
Now I know a few thousand people a month stop by this site, and I know that several hundred of them appear to actually read things, or perhaps they go off to make coffee and forget to close the tab. Either way I guess I can say I know there are readers out there.
Unfortunately, I've recently come to realize I don't really want to have readers, I want to have conversations.
I spend most of my time on the internet interacting with communities, sometimes through forums, occasionally through the comments on websites, but what I like is having conversations.
And I've come to think that websites might not be such a good way to have a conversation. They're rather one-sided. And leaving comments here is kind of a pain because I have to moderate them, you have to come back to see if I responded and so on. Technology is getting in the way of the conversations.
But wait, Scott, this problem has been solved. You can post on Facebook or Twitter. Those are great for conversations!
Well. So. No. Those are not the conversations I want to have.
Conversations in public become strangely twisted by the knowledge of the audience watching. The same thing happens when you record a conversation. People change, slide that public persona mask on.
So, in casting about for some solution to this problem I considered building a forum. I may still do that, but then I happened to think of these really long emails my friend Mike used to send when he was traveling around Southeast Asia decades ago. He'd send them to a group of us, people would respond, threads would form, conversations would be had, things were learned, plans were made.
I don't think I've ever given my friend Mike the credit he deserves for propelling me on the trajectory that my life has been on since 2005. But he does deserve credit. And some of it goes to those emails.
So I decided to start a newsletter in the spirit of Mike's emails, about things Mary Austin would have enjoyed talking about, deserts, mountains, trees, walking, photography, and yes, mystics. If you'd like to join the Friends of a Long Year, you can do so right here:
Two things to note. Until the list gets to large for it I plan to send these by hand in such a way that you can reply directly to me, no one else will see your response. I encourage you to do so, that's the point after all. Mailing lists are for introverts, we can have a conversation without the rest of the world looking on and I think that's a good thing.
[^1]: Nowadays it does, perhaps not under that name, and not at every school, but it's out there.
[^2]: Not that I don't find it interesting