Saltwater, Sweetwater: Women Write from California North Coast

We found the theme for Saltwater, Sweetwater, writing about our lives on California's North Coast, in the winter months of 1997. Author Suzanne Lipsett had recently died and environmental activist Judi Bari was gravely ill with inoperable cancer. The dozen women who had put together a first collection of writing, Cartwheels on the Faultline, retreated to the North Coast to envision another book. Losing Suzanne Lipsett and Judi Bari so young to breast cancer devastated and frightened all of us. Whether or not we knew them personally, their courageous lives and deaths touched everyone who read about them. Suzanne and Judi died at the most creative time in their lives, with major work ahead and young children who still needed them. Suzanne wrote and worked as an editor through a decade of illness. The bomb that had blown up under Judi Bari's car seat had crippled but not stopped her; she organized rallies, protested, wrote, and sang through pain. To hold Suzanne and Judi in our minds longer, to honor them, we would write about the places they loved, from what Suzanne called the Sonoma savannas, to the rugged beauty and ancient forests of the North Coast. These places gave Suzanne and Judi their inspiration and purpose. Our first collection, Cartwheels on the Faultline, had bubbled up with a fountain of ideas. Unlimited, unrestrained by a theme, the book could barely contain the voices of twenty-seven Sonoma County women writing about anything and everything we wanted to say. By contrast, Saltwater, Sweetwater has had a direction from the start and has grown like a river, deepening as it gathered in tributaries. Early on, Maureen Jennings and I recognized a curious unity running through many of the manuscripts we received. All the writers understood that we were dedicating the book to Suzanne and Judi and that every piece had to touch on or be about place. The writings were all regionally connected, but beyond that, a remarkable number of them were also about ghosts, about bridging the worlds of life and death. Many stories and memoirs and poems, even the funny ones, seemed haunted, as if resisting separation and loss. As we opened envelopes with manuscripts tucked inside, we wondered if we were calling to phantoms. Or were they calling us? Suzanne Lipsett knew that her last novel, Remember Me, was her finest, and the critics acclaimed it. She next published a memoir, Surviving a Writer's Life, that blended her evolution as an artist with an exploration of the difficulties that loving words and making a living as an editor had always presented. Suzanne's husband, Tom Rider, has given us one of the essays from a book she was completing before she died. Suzanne never stopped writing her own work or editing books for others. She connected many friends in Sonoma County who cared about literature. Judi Bari came to Mendocino County from the East in the late 1970s, fell in love with redwoods, and became the heart and the voice calling us to save the Headwaters Forest and all the old- growth groves on the North Coast. At Judi's memorial, people wore tee-shirts that said, Don't Mourn. Organize! Fionna Perkins, a long-time peace activist and environmentalist from Gualala, cautioned me, Don't make too much of Judi's death, focus on her life. She was not a martyr but a hero. We are donating part of the profits from our book to the Environmental Protection Information Center dedicated to preserving Headwaters Forests and the old-growth groves surrounding it. As we had done for Cartwheels, women in small groups met to read, encourage, question, and criticize each other's manuscripts. An editorial board considered all submissions in a blind reading, then made the selections together. Maureen and I edited the work. Marylu Downing painted the woman on the cover. She asked local artists for images of women, of forests and rivers, of sunny hillsides, and resting places like the Druids Cemetery in Occidental, where, last year, Nancy Farah, another beloved woman who died of cancer in her forties, was laid to rest. We chose our title when we saw how many of us were considering the sweet rivers of life flowing out to the sea. We hope that our readers will find and lose themselves in our stories about the places to which we are giving a writer's reality, the places we love and want to preserve, our places along California's North Coast. Barbara L. Baer 1997