Mitch’s Blog
Trouble on the Border
Wednesday, June 29, 2022
I was blessing my good luck when I saw the sign that there was less than a five minute wait at the Peace Arch crossing into British Columbia. Gonna sail right through and be sure to catch my ferry back to Vancouver Island. It was the return from a quick trip down to Palm Springs for a neighbor son’s wedding, then back to finish my month in our quiet hideout in Parksville, population 10,000.
It was even better than the minimal wait. I rolled right up to the border guard and presented my passport.
Where are you going? To Parksville,…GUEST POST: Traveling Light II
Wednesday, June 22, 2022
This is a guest post by XYZ, a series written about prison life by a long-term friend now incarcerated. It traces his journey from a series of county jails for 3 years while awaiting plea bargaining and sentencing. In this episode, he is travels from a prison waystation at Wasco to the infamous San Quentin Prison, where he is to serve his sentence. Friends of mine might know who XYZ is. Please repost, but retain his anonymity for his safety.
by XYZ
At 2:30 am I am wakened to the sound of tapping at the edge of our metal bunk, whispers…
Guest Post: Traveling Light I
Friday, June 17, 2022
This is the third guest post by XYZ, a series written about prison life by a long-term friend now incarcerated. It traces his journey from a series of county jails for 3 years while awaiting plea bargaining and sentencing. In this episode, he is sent to Wasco, the waystation for prisoners before their final destination. Some friends of mine might know who XYZ is. Please repost, but retain his anonymity for his safety.
by XYZ
One thing you can count on in a jail is possibly being uprooted and moved to an unknown location at any moment. Your control over your…
GUEST POST: A Dream State
Monday, April 11, 2022
This is the second guest post by XYZ, a series written about prison life by a long-term friend now incarcerated. It was written while he was still in a California county jail, where he sat for 3 years while his case was prepared, plea bargained, and sentencing arranged. He has since been moved to a prison following sentencing. In this one, he looks to the value of dreaming to survive inside. Other friends of mine might know who this is. Please repost, but retain his anonymity for his safety.
by XYZ
Being locked up in a box about the size…
GUEST POST: Life Inside the System: Introduction
Monday, April 04, 2022
XYZ is a friend of mine incarcerated in an American prison. Many of my FB friends know him. Without a six figure payment for a high powered lawyer, he ended up plea bargaining guilty to his crime and is in the US prison system for a substantial while. He is a writer, artist, musician; intelligent and creative. He has been sending regular messages to a select group of us on the outside but jumped at the chance when I offered a more public audience for his observations on his daily prison life through this blog. This is the first installment. He has…
Old News
Thursday, March 03, 2022
The scruffy cover with only the hint of a binding was on the top shelf at Fireside Books, a stretch for me and out of reach of anyone a bit shorter. But it showed promise. Flecks of black leather rained off the cover as I pulled it down. But I chose well.
Opening it carefully to avoid a blizzard of pages fluttering to the floor, I found myself looking at the first page of The Strand Magazine from February 1900. The bound volume included the monthly’s issues through June of that year.
The Strand was a well known…
Deep in the Weeds
Monday, January 24, 2022
Richard Charkin is one of the superstars of publishing. Former head of Macmillan, Holtzbrinck, and Blooomsbury, President of the International Publishers Association, a fellow at Oxford, etc. Upon his retirement in 2020, he decided to start his own small press, Mensch Publishing. Here’s someone who went from the Bloomsbury boardroom-- a company with close to $200 million in annual sales, offices on four continents, publishing 2000 books a year with a staff of 500-- to a one man operation where he had to do everything from sorting the mail to fixing a cranky laptop. He has produced
Those Aha! Moments
Saturday, January 15, 2022
I’ve had two big authorial moments in the past few weeks. The day before Thanksgiving I sent off the final book manuscript of Archaeology of Southwest Afghanistan to the publisher, Edinburgh University Press. Then last week (ironically, on a Christian holiday called Epiphany), I did the same for the chapter I was invited to write for the 6th edition of the Handbook of Qualitative Research on publishing qualitative research. Each was a major step for me as a scholarly writer. Each gave me enormous joy, though maybe the feeling of relief at having each of them finally finished might be…
Panning for Gold in the Filing Cabinets
Saturday, May 15, 2021
The latest pandemic task was simple: go through those five filing cabinets in the garage, jammed with papers from a 40 year publishing career and cull them down to what was important to save. A simple task, eh? I had already done this with my sister’s collection of papers and figured I had it down.
For someone who has dealt in history all his life, deciding what is “important” is both random and unclear. What makes something historical? In the archaeological work I do, little broken bits can make all the difference. A small fragment of a goblet…
Saving Her Life
Monday, April 05, 2021
Well, it’s not exactly what you think, my sister Robin did depart five years ago at far too young an age. A phone call one late afternoon. A sudden heart attack, found hours later by a friend who had brought fast food dinner for the two of them. I wish I could have found a way to save her then.
No, this is a different question, one for the long term. Will we be remembered? By whom? How will we be remembered? These questions were central all weekend as I went through boxes of Robin’s papers pulled from her apartment…
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