Nov/Dec 2020
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Letter from the Editor
Monan’s Rill plans to rebuild “What does it say about capitalism…that we have money and want to spend it but we can’t find anything worth buying?” So starts Eula Biss’s Having and Being Had, a brilliant essay collection given to me by this magazine’s former editor, Leilani Clark. As a professor, writer, and newly minted…
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Locavortex: Cosmic Correspondence
You may have noticed the gleaming, golden mailbox in downtown Santa Rosa’s Courthouse Square and wondered what mysteries lie within. And to be sure, this is no ordinary USPS mailbox, but rather, one installed by the US Portal Service, a transtemporal communications location where letters and queries can be sent to the past or the…
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Locavortex: Missing Live Music?
Josh Windmiller’s Got You Covered Besides being bandmates (known as the ukulele duo Sorry Not Sorry), Lorelle Saxena and I are busy, hard-working moms of young children. We often joke about the quintessentially MacGyver-ish situations we find ourselves in, wherein we have just a few seconds to dismantle a proverbial bomb, and somehow we manage…
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Locavortex: Meet a Local Artist
Malia Anderson I grew up in San Francisco in a rough part of town with what most would consider to be a rough upbringing. My Southern grandmother raised me to be strong and independent, resilient, and graceful. Growing up, I knew two things for sure: I would be a business owner like my grandmother, and…
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Kitchen Connection
The Living Room pivots from shelter to food The Living Room’s courtyard is a little oasis tucked behind what was once a single-family home right off of the busy intersection of Cleveland and College Avenues. The walkways are lined with herbs and flowers, and lead to rustically landscaped patios with umbrella-covered tables surrounding a sweet…
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Seed to Sauce
Deb Rock’s Fiery Enterprise Deb Rock likes it hot. But in October of 2017, with hundreds of pounds of freshly harvested chili peppers piled up in the back of her Volvo, a 10-gallon pot of pozole sloshing around in her passenger seat, and wildfires consuming the hills just above her farm, for once, the heat…
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Adventures in Drinking
Bean Bonanza In 1991, a coffeehouse barista and an English instructor fell in love sitting at a small, round, marble table nestled inside the Wolf Coffee shop just off Mendocino Avenue in Santa Rosa. My parents still recall fondly the yummy coffee and pastries of those early dates. Eventually my mom, the barista, joined the…
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Art as Activism
On a warm Thursday in June, I took my daughters to a sign-making gathering at Rincon Valley Park in Santa Rosa. It had been less than a month since those criminal 8 minutes, 46 seconds in Minneapolis had robbed George Floyd of his life. The gathering was a perfect socially distant kid-friendly activity. Stacks of…
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Savorbang!
Skewer Winter! Welcome to our regular recipe column from teacher and stand-up comedian Sarah Whitmore. Story, recipe and photos by Sarah Whitmore. How many times did you think about your lungs today? No, really. Twice? Twenty times? Eight million times? Because today, I thought about my lungs 37 million times. Last year, on this date,…
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The End Bit: Meet a Contributor
KERNAN COLEMAN Made Local Magazine Designer Kernan Coleman is a creative director, graphic designer, and owner of Ranch7 Creative, a full-service branding and design agency. Sadly, he is way too claustrophobic to have been an astronaut. Who do you admire and why? Globally: Jacinda Ardern for modeling a new kind of leadership. Nationally: Jimmy Carter…