I’ve been writing over on Substack. I am still trying to sort out What Goes on Blog versus What Goes on Substack. So far I can only confirm that it is ungood to double post in both places.
I expect I’ll still keep posting here. However, at the moment I’m preferring Substack. I seem to be interacting with more humans over there. (Over the last few years, most of the follows and comments here have been from Bots.)
Mind you, I don’t post much in either venue. My writing energy is all too finite, so I have to save mine for my novels.
Anyhow. Come visit me over on Substack! From anywhere on Substack, you can search for “Sue Perry” or “Required Writing”. Or, simply try this link.
Once upon a time, I listened to the radio and I tuned in to my music by twisting a dial, which slipped me past sudden squawks and ghostly wisps: voices from other stations. What were those voices saying? Couldn’t tell you. Back then, I knew exactly what I wanted and had zero interest in what I didn’t.
Today, well, maybe I’m in some other part of the galaxy, catching those squawks and wisps as they slip past me, for those radio waves continue to travel, expanding out through the universe. And maybe now I’m getting hooked, trying to imagine who’s talking, and who they’re talking about, and what comes before and after the words I catch.
That would also describe how I felt during my recent stay in New York.
On the streets of Manhattan, in loud clear voices, people say astonishing things – to their phones, to one another, to the air. I transcribed the squawks and wisps as they passed my ears, then converted the transcriptions into placards, where I adjusted typefaces and layout to capture the moods of what I had overheard. I assembled the placards – every bit I overheard, in the same order that the words reached my ears – and discovered that the phrases often connected, though spoken by strangers in distinct locations on different days.
I’ve collected the placards into a movie, which you can watch on YouTube from the link below.
(I’m calling this movie a “rough” cut until my current internal debate concludes: part of me says it’s kinda long so I should cull the weakest; while the rest of me says that the Overheards need to be kept together without cutting or editorializing.) (You are welcome to join this debate.)
Much to my surprise, being a land baron is no guarantee of being financially successful or secure. At least, that was the case in the 1800s in Santa Barbara County, as I discovered while researching the setting of my new novel*.
The local history of land ownership goes something like this: without individual land ownership, the Chumash indians lived and thrived for thousands of years, until a few centuries ago when the Spanish and Mexican conquistadors arrived. These interlopers – eventually joined by the 800-pound bully of the U.S. government – stole land from the Chumash and then from each other. The scant few surviving Chumash scattered to live in hiding, deep in the mountains and back country.
The various interlopers gifted and sold huge swaths of land as ranchos, in exchange for favors, bribes, service rendered, and money. By the late 1800s, some ranchos had changed hands many times – sold, subdivided, and sold again. Farming and ranching have never been easy ways to make ends meet.
Consider the Rancho Ortega. The first documented owner was one Apolonia Zuniga, who fell on hard times and sold his rancho to a Santa Barbara doctor and rancher who sold to two Englishmen, who raised sheep on the rancho but no profits. During this time, on the rancho and nearby, various men dug for oil with disappointing results.
In 1883, the Englishmen sold the 1,049-acre Rancho Ortega to Henry Lafayette Williams (photo; Santa Barbara Historical Museum). He paid $17,000 ($16.20 per acre). Another business venture left him with less cash than he expected, so he made good on the rancho purchase by borrowing some money and giving the former owners a hefty note for the rest.
That was a lifelong pattern for Williams, who had an amazing instinct for being in the right place at never quite the right time: he would take a gamble, prosper temporarily, succumb to debt, take another gamble. But I’m jumping ahead of his story.
Williams was born the son of a financier in Ohio in 1841. He joined the Union Army just in time to fight under General Grant in the battle of Shiloh. A 19th-century biographical sketch asserts, “They were in the three day’s fight at Stone River, where one half of the regiment was lost, and were also in many small skirmishes. Mr. Williams, however, did not receive a scratch, although his clothing was many times pierced with bullets.”
After the U. S. Civil War, he married his childhood sweetheart Katie and job-hopped from government pay agent to coal salesman to special agent for the U.S. Treasury to copper mining entrepreneur; from Ohio to Pennsylvania to Arizona to Rancho Ortega.
The rancho came with cattle but he sold these and bought pigs. Heavy rains in the next winter decimated his pig population and washed out his lemon orchard. After that, he diversified crops and enlisted his whole family to help out. For example, his father dried apricots, his mother and aunt sewed bean sacks. All this wasn’t enough to make ends meet. He had to borrow from a fellow rancher to pay interest on the original note that got him the rancho.
Briefly, he enjoyed a thin financial cushion from the sale of some pigs. His accounts looked to finally move into the black when he devised a new – as always, complicated – partnership to sell most of the rancho at a big profit. Alas, that deal fell through and when he tried to sell more pigs, they went rogue and eluded capture. He bank-mortgaged the rancho and got into yet another complicated partnership, this time to convert part of his rancho into a town with its own railroad stop. In Southern California, land sales were booming, thanks to railroad expansion and more.
Williams platted the easternmost sliver of his rancho – about 100 acres – into blocks with lots measuring 25 feet by 60 feet, and began to sell the lots in this new town which he called Summerland.
The town may have started as a way to pay debts, but its development took an unexpected swivel from debt reducer to utopian community. It may be that Williams was the only one in his town-building partnership with this intention.
Summerland. The name was probably a tip-off. Although, like other key pieces of Summerland’s lore, the origin of the town’s name is today uncertain. Modern-day articles speculate but the intention isn’t confirmed in documents from the town’s early days.
Anyway. The town was likely named after the summer land, which, according to some spiritualists, is an interim world where spirits first stop after death.
The spiritualist movement was widespread during Williams’ time. It included intellectuals and academics and professionals as well as ‘plain’ folks. They all depended on mediums who claimed to contact the dead during seances. Some spiritualists sought to use scientific methods to understand what happens after death. Some wanted to improve humanity. Some simply yearned to connect with dead loved ones: interest in seances spiked after the Civil War and again after World War I.
Williams’ beloved wife Katie was a spiritualist and she got him interested in the movement, at least for a while. He was inspired to write letters to his deceased brother and father. And he began to invite settlers to his new town with newspaper advertisements like these:
– The Reconstructor, June 12, 1890
Wife Katie had been ill for several years and died shortly before the launch of Summerland’s spiritualist colony. Williams soon remarried, and his second wife was not a spiritualist. Still, the whole town attended the wedding; and, for a couple years, Williams continued to lecture and write about his uplifting ideals for the new town. In addition, he became known for his kindness and flexibility when settlers needed help with the costs of joining the colony.
He seemed remarkably comfortable with mixing spiritual and material concerns, such as in this speech to spiritualist conference attendees:
We can render a double service: assist in the development of higher, stronger mediumship, and help poor spirits out of darkened conditions. The angel-world has seleced this locality in whichto perform this beneficent service, for in no place I have ever visited or read of can be found its equal in natural advantages accessible by both railway and steamship.
Even while he was welcoming spiritualists, he attracted speculators looking to exploit Summerland’s resources. The speculators were encouraged by Williams, which set the colony members to complaining: about the gas and oil drilling in their streets; about the new, nasty smells that earned their town nicknames like Smellerland and Stinkville.
After a brief surge in popularity, Summerland’s lot sales slowed, then stopped. Now, spiritualist colonies rarely lasted more than a few years so it’s not definite that Summerland’s colony would have persisted, even without the oil and gas drilling. Certainly, the colony’s founder lost interest in attracting more spiritualists. As Williams wrote to one of his bankers in 1894:
I have had a big load of debt to carry. I started a town which invited a lot of cranks to it who have fought me in every way possible, until I have been forced to abandon the idea upon which the town was founded in order to get rid of them. The recent discovery of oil in the town is going to create some excitement and demand for lots and land, this with the early completion of the gap in the S. P Ry [Southern Pacific Railroad] making or placing my property on its main line will enable me to pull out nicely within the next 18 months.
He must have held mixed feelings about the speculators, as well. Williams loathed drinking and when he established Summerland, he forbid – upon forfeiture of your land! – the sale of alcohol and saloons, which he called criminal education schools. Such restrictions might be palatable to spiritualists. But did Williams try to make teetotallers of the oil drillers, too? I’m guessing that he did not, because there don’t seem to be news stories of civil unrest in Summerland during those years.
Summerland’s beach by about 1920. Photo: Library of Congress.
Despite years of false starts and drilling strikes that didn’t amount to much, Williams remained enthused about Summerland’s gas and oil prospects. He was the first to try to cement a claim stake into Summerland’s shifting beach sands. Meanwhile, he joined yet another complicated partnership, this one intending to run an electric train between Santa Barbara and Summerland. That project installed some power lines before it fell apart.
Life continued to be rough for Williams, financially. He had long been defensive about colony terms and prices. And now he began to sue people for harming his town’s prospects, beginning with a libel lawsuit against a publicly unhappy lot purchaser.
His own oil drilling did eventually bring him prosperity, for a time. But then his health failed him, and he died at 57, on the downslope of one his endless repeating cycles: restless optimism spurred by bold innovation undercut by debt-driven haste leading to limited success and blustery chagrin.
Endless repeating cycles. That’s my opinion and I don’t presume to understand anyone well enough to proclaim such claims as fact. I have read what little writing survives, by and about Henry Lafayette Williams, and my reading has jumped me to many conclusions…
… And has left me feeling considerable affection and respect for the man. In fact, I discovered that I could not write a novel* set in the early days of his town, without making Mr. H. L. Williams a character in it. And when I came upon this obituary, it broke a piece of my heart.
– Los Angeles Herald, 1899
*****
* My new novel is The Summer Land, an historical drama from a supernatural time. Here’s a thumbnail description:
1891. A runaway boy happens upon a mysterious young girl, all on her own with amazing powers. He brings her to Summerland, California, so that she can learn to live safely around people and he can hide from his past. Summerland is a brand new town, a spiritualist colony attracting many kinds of seekers, including psychic investigators, oil speculators, the recently deceased, and these two stray children in need of a family.
Currently, you can get The Summer Land from Chaucer’s Bookstore in Santa Barbara, from Amazon, and from your preferred ebook store on-line.
Over the next couple months, copies will be trickling into other stores and libraries.
[This post pulls from numerous historical sources, listed in the bibliography at conclusion of The Summer Land.]
They say we have different kinds of memory and we each have our specialties. I don’t recall what the kinds of memory are, but the concept fits my experience: I’ll recognize your face before your name; I only have to see a word once to spell it forever; and every time you ask me whether I live on Second Avenue or Second Street, I’ll need to look it up.
Also, I can’t quote a lyric to save anybody’s life. (Fortunately, the stakes are never that high.)
Back when I had to take required classes, history classes lifted a rock and revealed my worst squirmings of memory. History stuff. Past names and dates and factoids. (Eventually I discovered that I remember past stuff just fine when the topic interests me, say, uprisings in Ireland or famous earthquakes. But that’s another digression entirely.)
Anyway. After I made Carpinteria my new home town, I immediately sampled most of its locations and events, stores and restaurants, parks and (of course!) beaches. However, it took me more than a year to visit the Carpinteria Valley Museum of History, because. You know. History.
I was only steps inside the museum when I turned sheepish about my delay. The first exhibit informed me that there used to be natural gas just below the surface, hereabouts. Kids would pound holes in the ground and set the gas on fire to light ballgames after sunset.
Which gave me a rush and a chill. That’s the opening of a novel.
Another few steps into the museum, I learned about the oddball bedfellows who had launched the town next door. Summerland was founded as a colony for spiritualists, and may have been named for the Summer Land, which – according to some spiritualists – is the place we initially go after death. No sooner had the spiritualist colony formed, however, than gas and oil got discovered and speculators swarmed in. What a combination! Note to self, there’s the setting.
(It was a single individual who welcomed both spiritualists and oil speculators to Summerland. Henry Lafayette Williams. A man with a complex world view. More on him, soon.)
When I left the museum, I set my discoveries aside, with all the other shards of ideas that might someday build themselves into something. The image of that gaslit ground did keep poking at me, though.
Some people say that coincidences aren’t.
Not long after, as serendipity would have it, I went for a walk in a sweatshirt from the elementary school my kids had attended, some 25 years and 800 miles away. The sweatshirt caused a woman to stop and chat. She used to teach at that school and now took classes at a place called Pacifica Graduate Institute. I recognized the name because writer friends had recently recommended dream tending there.
I began attending workshops on dream tending, which led me to take a tour of Pacifica’s research archives, OPUS. Among OPUS collections are the books of Henry Barnes, a 19th century judge who became interested in the spiritualism movement after the sudden untimely death of his wife. It turns out that in the 1800s, many intellectuals and professionals were spiritualists.
The rush-and-chill returned. Same novel. Barnes collection plus gaslit ground.
And the next thing I knew, I was spending hours in the back rooms of the Carpinteria Valley Museum of History and the OPUS Archives, marvelling at 19th century life, locally, and spiritualist ponderings, globally. So many fascinating aspects to the local history and the global movement. In posts to come, I’m looking forward to sharing some of what I learned.
As serendipity or impatience would have it, I didn’t do on-site reading of the archive materials, I took phone photos to read later. The pandemic gave me plenty of time to catch up on that reading, and to write most of the rough draft of the novel that first snagged my attention at the museum.
I’ve written ten other novels, and the writing experience has been different each time. “Writing” this novel, I wasn’t quite taking dictation, but the characters kept making all the big decisions, even when I initially disagreed.
I’m proud and excited about the result, The Summer Land, an historical drama from a supernatural time. I hope you’ll give it a try! I’ll be trickling copies out, on line and in stores, over the next couple months. Right now you can check it out on Amazon.
Whoosh. Cripes: it has been more than a year since I last wrote about my life with the snail trails. In fact it has been about a year since I worked on this project. I have some other snail trail stuff I want to try, but not just now.
Thus and hence, this update marks the conclusion of … whatever this was. Let’s call it phase 1.
To refresh our memories:
+ I photographed a complicated snail trail on a low tide beach, then tried/failed to figure out what path the snail had taken to make this trail.
+ I took the photo into Adobe software, figuring I could color and manipulate the image to detect the path.
+ I never detected the path but coloring it led to many interesting images, some of which I shared in Snail Trail posts 1-12.
+ My next ‘failure’ arose when I tried to organize the images into a single poster.
+ Some of the images, including this one, told me they wanted to be displayed alone.
… OK, that concludes our stroll down memory lane.
I printed and framed 3 of the solo snail trails. Each snail trail wanted an entirely different frame and it took a long time to understand what they wanted. They are more fussy than I am.
Here they are, decked out in their frames. Two of them got to join an exhibit at the local Arts Center!
(And even juxtaposing these 3 reminds me why it was so squirrelly, trying to put 30-40 colored trails on a poster…)
Unplanned, unexpected, rarely understood, this snail trail project has been so important to me! It remarkably shifted my creative process. I’ve learned and discovered so much. And perhaps the coolest discovery of all came a few months after I set the trails aside.
I happened upon a web page that discussed sandroing, an indigenous performance art in Vanuatu. Sandroing artists tell a story with words and song while their finger creates a design in sand; they wipe away the design to conclude the performance. Times being what they are, some of these ephemeral performances persist on You Tube. And in the first one I watched, the design looked staggeringly similar to the original of the snail trail I spent so many months trying to color and understand! (Frustrated to report that I can no longer find that particular video … so… still ephemeral, just not so immediately so…)
My takeaway from this: I am on the right path. I have no clue what that path is, or where it leads, but I intend to keep following it, as best I can!
Meanwhile, back at the tidepool, I fell in love with bean clam shells like these:
which launched a new project, still very much evolving. More on that to come.
As I’ve been detailing in recent posts, I’ve become preoccupied with altering a photo of a complicated snail trail.
For the last several weeks, I’ve been attempting to present all the trails in a single poster. I’ve tried so many combinations. I knew going into this effort that – given the great variety of styles, colors, feelings – to combine the trails would defy the basic rules of good design. Rules, shmools. Good, shmood.
I figured – I still figure – it must be possible to combine the trails in a way that is pleasing and interesting. So far, however, my posters have induced headaches. At best.
Again, I started over. This time, instead of analyzing combinations, I started with a favorite trail and asked which other trail it wanted to stand beside. I tried again with a second trail. Not getting answers the way I sought them, I tried a third time.
What I learned is that the trails vant to be alone. However, duplications and mirror images of themselves are okay.
All of which led to this image, a prayer rug of a snail trail that has got me hearing Garvey’s Ghost (Burning Spear’s dub version Marcus Garvey), which I haven’t thought about in years.
As I’ve been detailing in recent posts, I’ve become preoccupied with altering a photo of a complicated snail trail.
However, my snail trail colorings have begun to slip from curiosity and exploration into planning and process.
I take dream advice seriously. Thus, I doubt that it was coincidence when an irritable dream voice recently told me (in a C’mon, get with it tone), “You’ve got a snail trail. Learn how to wander.”
I’ve set aside ideas for more snail trail embellishments. For the moment, at least, I’m not pursuing them.
I confess that I’m not sure how this snail trail can teach me about wandering when I can’t even follow its frigging path. Which brings me back to the impatience/patience thing. Doesn’t feel like I’m getting anywhere, I’d better turn versus Oh is it time for a turn? Alrighty then!
Required Writing 