Sometimes a story comes along that breaks your heart before you start interviewing. And then when you get to know the subjects it becomes even more wrenching yet at the same time uplifting. The story of aspiring musician Bernie Dalton, who refused to let the loss of...
There’s nothing better than an editor asking you to go to a city you love and find the best places for food, wine, beer and chocolate. I traveled there last year, stopped briefly (for 2 hours, which is fast) at Powell’s City of Books, then got to work...
Last fall I had the pleasure of spending 90 minutes with SingleThread chef and owner Kyle Connaughton at the outstanding Healdsburg restaurant he and his wife Katina Connaughton opened just over a year ago. Three weeks after the interview, I took my wife there for...
The opportunity to write for the oldest magazine in the USA about a topic I’m passionate about came together in the following story about the state of our oceans. Appallingly we treat as oceans mostly as sources of food, transport and recreation, and we use it...
I first interviewed Frances Mayes at her home in Tuscany in 2003 for my book of interviews with travel writers, A Sense of Place. It was a pleasure to speak with Mayes again in autumn 2016 for a story about the cuisine of this region of Italy, where food appreciation...
It’s been about 16 years since Patrick Amiot began transforming his street, and eventually much of Sebastopol, into an outdoor art gallery. About a decade ago we became neighbors and we’d hang out on his porch talking about life, art and turning dreams...
