The quests of many fantasy novels lead to a specific destination. If you’re under four feet tall and travel barefoot, say, chances are you’re going to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Mordor to unload some troublesome jewelry. 

Readers of the genre of all sizes (but preferably with shoes) will be happy to know that a new destination awaits: Word Horde Emporium of the Weird & Fantastic, just past Rivendell in the shire known as Petaluma. Proprietor Ross Lockhart, a veteran bookseller and publisher, specializes in weird, horrific, fantastic and speculative fiction for all ages (including a “spooky kids zone”). 

The store quickly became a favorite of my 12.5-year-old son, an avid fantasy reader, who recently interviewed Lockhart for a school project. And since I’m not above cribbing notes from my own kid, I’ve poached from his interview for this annual Spring Lit edition.

“I have worked in a lot of bookstores over the years… I had in the back of my mind that I wanted to have my own bookstore,” says Lockhart, who had previously worked for a small press that met its untimely demise in San Francisco, which spurred him into his own publishing venture, under the Word Horde imprint, in 2013. “I was out of a job, so I said, ‘I’m going to publish books.’ And then this past year, just because with the pandemic going on and everything, we decided we were going to take that step and open up a bookstore.” 

Suffice it to say, it takes a particular kind of stoutheartedness to open a new business during a pandemic and with specialty products like horror and fantasy books and role-playing games. But the roll of the 20-sided die is paying off as fans, friends and families have embraced the store. Moreover, Lockhart relishes that he gets to “talk about books with people all day.”

On the horizon is a quest for a new space.

“Ideally, I want to find a bigger place,” says Lockhart, who’s on the hunt for more permanent digs (the sands of local real estate tend to shift under the feet of scrappier ventures). His ambition is to create “a good community hub.”

“They call it the third place,” says Lockhart citing the work of urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg. “It’s not your home, it’s not where you go to work, but it’s a place where you can gather and talk and create community.”

Word Horde is presently located at 301 2nd St, Petaluma. Visit wordhorde.com and weirdandfantastic.com for more information.

I remember the days when almost every woman I knew in northern California poured over Alice Walker’s new age novel about women who love other women, and wore something purple.

Some were even inspired to come out as lesbians.

Walker has continued to write and publish ever since The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1982. Stephen Speilberg turned it into a movie and gave Walker international star power. 

When I was teaching American literature in Europe in the mid-1980s, students wanted to know all about her. They would have benefited greatly by the journals she kept from 1965 to 2000 that have just been published under the title Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965–2000 (Simon & Schuster; $32.50). They have been edited, though nothing significant seems to have been omitted. 

Walker writes about her Jewish, civil rights lawyer husband Mel, her Black lovers, including the historian Robert Allen, and the singer/songwriter Tracy Chapman, plus her fractious relationship with her daughter, Rebecca Walker, an author in her own right. 

In Gathering, readers have the opportunity to see Alice up close and personal, though they won’t know everything about her, up to the last minute. The book stops in 2000. 

I’ve never met Walker, but I heard her deliver an inspiring speech to seniors at Mendocino High School, where she said, “Walk alone, be an outcast.” I also interviewed her by phone soon after U.S. troops went into Afghanistan. “We have all been called to awaken right now,” she told me, and helped to fuel the current woke phenomenon. 

These days, Black women writers are all over best seller lists. Walker was one of the first to break out of the literary ghetto and appeal to both white and Black people. To do that, she worked exceedingly hard promoting herself. Not surprisingly, she writes in Gathering, “I want a year of not being Alice Walker.” In another journal entry from around the same time, she asks, “Why do I keep on trying to figure out what’s wrong with me?” 

What seems to have made her relatively happy and even content with her lot in life, has been her time among back-to-the-landers. As she explained during the interview I conducted with her: “It’s so peaceful and rural, and I like my neighbors who are regular people. Mendocino County is a wonderful place to grow a garden and an idyllic place to write. In Boonville, I wrote The Color Purple.”

She added, “The Mendocino County I know and love is similar to the countryside in Georgia where I grew up.” 

Still, it’s curious that a woman from a poor Black sharecropping family found herself in northern California, far from any big city literary marketplace. Predictably, Walker has never been entirely happy in Mendo. In Gathering, she writes about her weary, world-wide travels, the many expensive properties she buys in California and New York, and her “house complex.” I applaud her candor and her willingness to reveal her flaws, contradictions and frustrations with friends and lovers. “The nomadic life has got to stop,” she writes. Read Blossoms to find out if she has slowed down. Become a voyeur or pretend you’re reading a long gossip column in which the columnist strips herself naked—almost.

Jonah Raskin is the author of ‘Beat Blues: San Francisco, 1955.’

The new book from Greg Sarris, Becoming Story: A Journey Among Seasons, Places, Trees, and Ancestors, is a personal memoir of 13 essays in four sections, exploring connection to place, past, present and future.

I first encountered Sarris’ work in 1994, when I read his book of short stories, Grand Avenue. Sarris, an author, activist, producer and playwright, is also Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. Like Sherman Alexie and Oakland author Tommy Orange, Sarris has portrayed Native American life in a non-romantic, realistic way in his past work. Becoming Story maintains this, but also takes on a more dreamlike quality, as Sarris evokes memories from his past and incorporates landscape, weaving them into a whole narrative.

“What’s important is how the stories evoke certain ethics and esthetics that predicate a culture and of people’s relationship to the land,” he says.

While Grand Avenue is fiction focused on intertwined Native American families and their dynamics and challenges in Santa Rosa, Becoming Story’s personal memoirs, evoked by moments with others in place, are all part of Sarris’ past and present story. The collection of essays begins with the seasons, entitled Frost, Iris, Osprey and Scar, and ends with The Last Woman From Petaluma. In between are essays about trees, ancestors and local places, including one about the charms (pun intended) of Tolay Park and another discussing the devastation of Sudden Oak Death in Sonoma and Marin’s Oak trees.

“My whole experience consists of what I experienced and know from the past, what I know and experience in the present, and how I might be imagining my experience in the future,” he explains, “The parameters of what constitutes our ethnicity, our identity, even the stories we read, is ultimately dialogical, consciously or not.”

The book began with work he had already published in newspapers and journals, which Sarris expanded into a narrative about places and people, the moments where they intersect and how they inform each other.

“Colonizing cultures too often bring their own story to the landscape that they encounter, rather than stories evolving as a result of a long relationship with the landscape itself,” he says.

Living a long time in one location, and generational memory can activate how a story is told as well as what is told.

“Our experience will always shape how we see things and read things around us,” he says, “If we are open, and if we are flexible, we will be able to hear the landscape and other stories for what they might suggest to us and the ways in which they may get us to rethink our own stories and our own experience in a place.”

Ultimately, story reflects who we are and who we want to become. Do we anticipate our place in a landscape that sustains life or in a place that destroys life?

“All that we know and all that we are about are stories,” Sarris says. He then asks, “Will those stories suggest and reinforce a sustainable respectful relationship with the landscape, or will they suggest and shape a harmful disconnected relationship with the landscape and world in which we live? That is the question.”