Selected Works of Nonfiction
Pat Malo in a drainer.
USA Bodysurfing Contest Ignites Olympic Dreams at Steamer Lane
Good Times Weekly, April 4, 2023
“The salty old-timer remembers when all surfers were bodysurfers. Before leashes transformed surfboards into flotation devices. Before the crowds and the bad vibes and the meth-addled surf tribes. Before the creation of the surf industry and the contests designed to move surf-industry products. Before, even, the bodysurfer’s curse faded from memory.”
Casey Sonnabend.
The Life and Art of Santa Cruz Iconoclast Casey Sonnabend
Good Times Weekly, April 12, 2022
“Casey Sonnabend’s name might sound familiar. You’ve seen his work. He might even be a genuinely important American artist. Yet, outside of certain lofty circles, he’s totally unknown. And that’s by design. Like a prankster bullfighter, the longtime Santa Cruz resident has dramatically sidestepped success for 65 years. And in a world where metrics are tied to everything, the 88-year-old still refuses to be counted or labeled.”
Photo: SLV Steve/Steve Kuehl
Anxiety, Courage and Adrenaline Inside Firefighter Academy
Good Times Weekly, Jan. 18, 2022
In the wake of the 2020 CZU August Lightning Complex Fire, which destroyed 1,490 structures, consumed 86,509 acres and killed one civilian, Lompico resident Ryan Masters volunteered to be a firefighter for the Zayante Fire Protection District. Expecting to “maybe help clear brush or something,” the 48-year-old writer was instead enrolled in a five-month paramilitary boot camp—the 2021 Santa Cruz County Fire Fighter Academy.
TSJ 26-5
Skin of the Ocean: Notes from tHe 2017 Pipeline Bodysurfing Contest
The Surfers Journal, Vol. 26-5
“Roughly 700 voluntary muscles are attached to the bones of the human skeletal system, like the rigging of some wildly complex sailboat. Consequently, bodysurfers don’t ride waves so much as captain flesh and bone. After he won the 2017 Pipeline Bodysurfing Contest in perfect head-to-overhead conditions, Mike Stewart was asked why he devoted so much time to such a practice. He thought for a moment then replied, “Because you are the planing surface. It’s up to you to create the shape.”
What Lies Beneath: Bodysurfing in the key of Heavy
The Surfers Journal, Vol. 25-5
“I have seven freshly broken ribs, a broken scapula, a punctured lung and a small fracture in my neck. I am deep beneath the surface, wallowing in The Cauldron, a chunk of dark, pitted reef associated with the wave called Maverick’s. I am in shock. My brain wheezes in my skull like a deformed bubble of air—one last, tenuous grasp of consciousness to get me back to the surface.”
At 84, poet William Minor reveals truths about life and aging in a new collection
The Monterey County Weekly, March 6, 2020
The narrator in Another Morning, the sixth collection of poetry from longtime Monterey County artist, musician, and writer William Minor, 84, speaks with authority from what Shakespeare calls that “time of year thou mayst in me behold.” The poems are celebrations of a long, vibrant life at its denouement, quietly powerful statements of love for his wife of 63 years, his music, and the joy with which he greets each new day.
Photo: Nic Coury
Three days and nights inside Marina’s card rooms stacks character and revelations as high as the chips.
The Monterey County Weekly, July 10, 2014
Accented by the taut slaps of the cards and the murmur of the dealers, the chips create a percussive soundtrack to the drama of Mortimer’s card room in Marina. Yet more often than not it’s a song of unrequited love. They may own those chips now, but chances are they will be someone else’s soon.
D.S. PoormaN: What Becomes a Legend Most?
Boog City, Sept. 13, 2021
I first met the poet and writer D.S. Poorman through the eyes of Kent Fielding during the dark years Fielding and I spent embedded in the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ M.F.A. program together.
Sean and Ashtyn Davis.
As Ashtyn Davis Makes the NFL, His Father Also Has a Santa Cruz Legacy
Good Times Santa Cruz, June 2, 2020
“I understand the angle. The kid who overcomes a background of addiction is a story that’s familiar to people, but here’s the truth: Ashtyn would be in the NFL whether I went off the rails or not. I guarantee you that. He was driven by a force far greater than his dad,” Sean Davis says.
Robinson Jeffers’ and John Steinbeck’s legacies are reconsidered at an upcoming celebration
Monterey County Weekly, Oct. 2, 2008
Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck used the rich palette of their surroundings to create powerful literary meditations on our mortality and our eternal souls.
Brad Gerlach at Ghost Tree. (Photo: Wayne Kelly)
Local photographers among nominees for the world’s best XXL Biggest Wave photo of the year
April 10, 2008, The Monterey County Weekly
“The buoys indicated there was the potential for XXL-sized waves, but I was kind of skeptical because we hear all the time there’s a giant swell on its way,” Wayne Kelly says. “And when I got down there, sets were only in the 15 – to 20-foot range. I mean, big waves, but small for Ghost Tree.”
Images from the Monterey County Jail.
The Monterey County Jail is an overcrowded pit of violence and despair. There is no plan to fix it.
Oct. 26, 2006, Monterey County Weekly
The light is a sickening green. It washes over the stainless steel tables and toilets, the smooth concrete, the flaking paint, the steel bars and expressionless faces of the inmates. Their faces give away nothing, but their eyes are agonized. Their subtle movements—the tapping feet, the bobbing knees, the clenching and unclenching hands, say it’s too goddamn crowded in here—but their faces reveal nothing. Only the eyes betray the anger boiling up inside them.
Flea.
Waves of Recovery
Feb. 11, 2014, Good Times Santa Cruz
The Danish writer Isak Dinesen once wrote, “The cure for anything is salt water—sweat, tears, or the sea.” This belief anchors Darryl “Flea” Virostko’s unique Santa Cruz sober living environment, FleaHab, which opened its doors to residents on Saturday, Feb. 1.
Carlos Burle at Ghost Tree.
Pebble Beach’s rare-but-behemoth break rapidly went from secret to famous to, now, off-limits.
Nov. 28, 2008, Monterey County Weekly
The end of the Ghost Tree era was as inevitable as the tide. When the draft plan for the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary was generated back in 2006, the tow-surfing community knew it was only a matter of time before the repercussions finally hit shore and closed down Ghost Tree to personal water craft, or PWCs.
The Renaissance Faire
The Renaissance Faire experience parallels the best and worst of Old England.
Sept. 21, 2006, The Monterey County Weekly
To keep the specter of plague, religious persecution, and famine at bay, lower-class England focused on what carnal pleasures their meager lives could afford them—namely gin and ale, sex, blood sport and bawdy plays and song. The streets of London were a wild spectacle that held all the human drama, agony and short-lived ecstasy of a society dancing merrily along with death. It enthralled the writers and artists of the time—and inspired the greatest single body of literature in the Western canon.
Somar, Regina Quiñones and Okhuse, tracking and containing bison in South County.
The bison of South Monterey County have taken a strange journey, and it’s not over yet.
July 6, 2006, Monterey County Weekly
I’m driving through Fort Hunter Liggett in a blue pick-up with Regina Quiñones, her partner Somar (who declines to give his last name) and their 7-year-old son Okhuse. We are hunting for a herd of nine bison rumored to be in “the Jackhammer Dropzone,” a training area the military uses to practice dropping big things out of the sky.
How $107 million of West Coast rap king Suge Knight’s money got divvied up in a Monterey courtroom
April 27, 2006, Monterey County Weekly
When sheriffs brought the plaintiff into the courtroom wearing a prison jumpsuit and handcuffs to meet with his estranged wife, the door was locked behind them. Michael and Lydia Harris greeted each other pleasantly and sat down with their respective lawyers. The unusual meeting was set up so the prisoner and his wife could figure out how to split $107 million.
So began the most heavily armed divorce hearing in Monterey County history, and one of the last chapters of the remarkable tale of Death Row Records, the legendary rap label that boasted a history as violent and flawed as it was brilliant and influential.
A useless dam on the Carmel River is keeping endangered steelhead from their spawning grounds
March 9, 2006, Monterey County Weekly
The San Clemente Dam has been making life difficult for steelhead since 1921. For most of that time, the dam stored drinking water for thousands of people, and its benefits were thought to outweigh its devastating effect on the steelhead population. But over the decades the reservoir has slowly choked itself on 2.4 million cubic yards of sediment.