AMANDA FLETCHER, JEFF GOERTZEN, JEFF GRITCHEN, HANS GUTKNECHT, NANCEE LEWIS, CAROL MITHERS, LIZ OHANESIAN, LEONARD ORTIZ, WATCHARA PHOMICINDA, MINDY SCHAUER, SUSAN STRAIGHT, TANYA WARD GOODMAN
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
LAILA DERAKHSHANIAN
cover ILLUSTRATION
JEFF GOERTZEN
Spend some time and take a deep dive
DEAR SUBSCRIBERS,
It’s no secret that these days, we’re all multitaskers. And with so many demands on our time, it can be difficult to concentrate on any one thing for long. The dings and rings from our cell phones. Programs on our televisions. Streaming services on our computers. The radio in the car.
It’s impossible to pay attention to everything.
So … I say, don’t. Instead, let’s focus on what deserves our attention — those items and experiences that will enrich our lives: Our relationships with others, our community, our work, and everything that provides a sense of purpose and belonging.
Another form of enrichment, of course, is intellectual, and comes from engaging with quality content that offers thoughtful information, different perspectives to consider, and interesting takes that let us see common problems from new angles. That’s what you’ll find in this newest issue of PREMIUM. We’ve assembled in-depth articles on a variety of unexpected topics and viewpoints.
One is an essay from our own Samantha Dunn, editor of PREMIUM, who takes us on a very personal journey to examine why, if mobile
homes are among the most affordable types of housing available, are they never part of the conversation about solutions to the housing crisis. Could that ever change?
Another piece is an excerpt from the book “Rethinking Rescue: Dog Lady and the Story of America’s Forgotten People and Pets” by Los Angeles journalist Carol Mithers. Her work confronts two of the biggest challenges of our time — poverty and homelessness — in asking this question: Who deserves the love of a pet?
Other fascinating topics you’ll find in these pages include explorations of what’s being done to improve healthcare access in Southern California’s rural communities, why singer Melissa Etheridge created a foundation to change the approach to treatment for opioid addiction, and how a small nonprofit is tackling the big problem of microplastics in the environment. We even have celebrated
novelist Susan Straight making a pitch for the practicality — yes, practicality — of a college degree in the humanities.
We imagine you on a Sunday morning picking up your paper, grabbing a cup of coffee, and settling in to enjoy a good read worthy of your attention.
That’s always our goal. We strive to deliver the best in local journalism along with smart, informed feature writing like the stories you’ll find here. Thank you for being a subscriber and thank you for your support of local news.
Now, we invite you to make yourself comfortable and immerse yourself in the possibilities that await you within the pages of this PREMIUM magazine.
RON HASSE PRESIDENT
PHOTO BY WILL LESTER, SCNG
PHOTO BY HANS GUTKNECHT, SCNG
ILLUSTRATION BY JEFF GOERTZEN, SCNG
Serving up community
A
San Diego-based author believes in bringing people together – one meal at a time
BY SAMANTHA DUNN
If there’s one thing Madhushree Ghosh has faith in, it’s the power of a great meal to unite people across whatever might divide them. Anyone who’s met her will tell you the first thing out of her mouth after “hello” is usually, “When can I feed you?”
By day, Ghosh works in global oncology diagnostics and strategy, a career she calls her “paycheck” job. Her passion, though, is as an author and culinary and immigrant advocate. Ghosh’s 2022 memoir, “Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory and Family,” led to speaking engagements around the country, including a popular TEDxSan Diego talk, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Food.”
The San Diego resident also launched KhabaarCo, a supper club exploring literary and social justice conversations around food, featuring guest speakers. We talked to her about what’s behind her fervent belief in food’s uniting power.
Your writing is often not only about great recipes, but is a meditation on the greater meaning behind the meals you prepare. When did you know this was important to you?
If you come from older cultures, you’re used to the kitchen being the source of great excitement and wonder. My childhood
memories of visiting Kolkata (from New Delhi, where I grew up), where my parents settled post-partition of India, were of going to my father’s and my mother’s family homes.
Each summer, we headed to Kolkata, and every morning I woke up to the scents and smells of a coal
tandoor/oven heating up the water for tea, women of the family cutting vegetables, fish, chicken, even goat; others grinding turmeric and cumin mixes on a shil nora (a flat mortar and pestle, a very Indian kitchen implement); the men bringing the day’s catch from the fish market, or haggling
with the vegetable seller on the price of beans and eggplant — a fine division of labor, interspersed with daily gossip, calling out to the children to sit down to eat, telling the staff to clean the dishes, set the table, fill the glasses with water from earthen pots…
What I mean is I grew
up with the joy of cooking, watching my mother cook to feed, my father picking the best fish, chicken or cauliflower for the day’s meals, and my extended family showering us with love through what they fed us.
To sit across from each other, and share a meal
is the ultimate act of love within family that we did every day. Not once a year. Not on Mother’s or Father’s or Thanksgiving Day. Every day.
When I started writing about what I knew, it came from exploring what homesickness meant to me. It meant a deep missing of
Madhushree Ghosh prepares naroo (with strawberry and blueberry, in a westernized version of this sweet treat) in her Mission Hills kitchen.
PHOTO BY NANCEE LEWIS, CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
what used to be love without words, of recipes that generations passed down word of mouth, of spirited conversations — on politics, patriarchy and Bollywood — around meals.
All this to say, I knew recipes, meals, food; they’ve always meant a deep connection to my ancestors from childhood. All I am doing now is giving words to it.
Tell us about KhabaarCo, and what you hope to accomplish with it.
KhabaarCo literally translates to khabaar or food in Bengali, and “co” meaning community. It solidified while I was
writing “Khabaar,” my food narrative memoir, and the pandemic actively told us to focus on what was important.
To me, what was important was to build community through food, to listen, to grow and to make the neighborhood a happier place to be by acknowledging who grows our food, who cooks the ingredients and how immigrants, migrants and refugees continue to influence our San Diego neighborhood.
What started as a dinner for friends, where I used greens grown by East African refugee women in San Diego to cook
Bengali meals, and what started as conversations with community leaders, thinkers, chefs, authors and changemakers on what we could do to make our community tighter, more effective and, frankly, kinder, is now a monthly event where KhabaarCo has a lively interactive conversation with a changemaker and their work — be it in community, activism, food, culinary arts or literary exploration — and as a group, engage in community and world citizens.
KhabaarCo has global events where I cook, showcase immigrant restaurants and chefs, and continue to champion
human rights. We have been fortunate to host events and conversations in San Diego, New York, the Bay Area and forthcoming in London. We have interviewed and highlighted the works of urban planner and author Megan Groth (author of “Places We Love”), screenwriter and memoirist Priyanka Mattoo (author of “Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones”), poet Ivy Raff and San Diego culinary superstar and “MasterChef” Season 6 winner Chef Claudia Sandoval. We have exciting events planned with amazing chefs, authors, community leaders and change makers in the next few months.
PHOTOS BY NANCEE LEWIS, CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
Madhushree Ghosh launched a supper club, KhabaarCo, to have conversations over food.
Now we’re excited to announce our next phase — three-day and 10-day global culinary explorations of colonization, immigrant food and how they’ve traveled throughout the world from India to London, as well as Mexico and Portugal. More details will be announced at @writemadhushree and @khabaarco as well as the website: www. writemadhushree.com
Is the secret to community and happiness as simple as having people over for a meal? I’m warning you now, I’m a mediocre cook!
The secret isn’t a secret at all! Have you met a cook/ chef? All they want to do
is feed you. The joy we get watching something that we created give a consumer that sensory pleasure is out of this world. The thing about food is, we have to eat to survive. But if you want to thrive, you want to cook with love. And then the diner will feel love in each bite.
You can be a mediocre cook, but your taste buds aren’t. You will know food through the emotions it brings you — comfort, joy, memories. One can be a mediocre cook, but if one is curious, and open, one can learn — to be a cook and a more mindful diner.
You’re also an avid gardener. What does it mean to you to grow
your own food?
Oh, you should see the disasters I have in my backyard garden! I am a messy gardener — which means, I plant whatever I want, whenever I want and however I want to. Which is okay in San Diego, because the weather is so forgiving. Sometimes the plants thrive, and sometimes they survive despite my black thumb.
To me, my garden — which I started during the pandemic in all earnestness — represents the chaos that is life. Right now I am arguing with the rabbits that are hell-bent on consuming my beet greens, so it’s a negotiation process, since I refuse to destroy their lives
in order to consume the beets myself. It’s this wonderful place of conflict management, negotiations and coexistence that represents how we live, and my garden is proof.
But yes, when I am able to harvest my mustard greens, or radishes for a salad, or the green chilies in a vinegar-based fresh pickle, or my papayas in a sticky sweet chutney, it just brings me back to my native land, India, the food my Ma fed me, and it helps me connect with my roots even as I grow my roots in my adopted city, San Diego.
What’s one thing you want people to change in the way they approach eating?
It’s very simple really: find out who your grocer, farmer, butcher is. Know where your food came from; just ask your local supermarket person behind the counter, which farm they got the chicken from. It’s really that simple. Once you know where your food comes from, teach your children. Try to grow vegetables and you’ll discover this huge respect for farmers. Invite your neighbors for a meal, and cook for them — don’t potluck, feed them. Live, learn, laugh. Life is too short to not share a meal with a neighbor, or a stranger. It’s that simple.
For more information about upcoming KhabaarCo events, follow @khabaarco on Instagram and Threads, as well as @writemadhushree on TikTok. Email writemadhushree@ gmail.com.
Madhushree Ghosh is the author of "Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory and Family."
Small but mighty
Plastics pollution is everywhere, but this 30-year-old nonprofit says the fight against it moves forward
BY LIZ OHANESIAN
In a Long Beach shopping center near where the San Gabriel River empties into Alamitos Bay, researchers, educators and activists are stepping up the fight against plastics pollution.
The headquarters for the Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research is small, but it brings together a refill store, BYO Long Beach, with offices tucked behind it, a classroom and a state-of-the-art lab.
Inside the lab, researchers engage in a multistep process that involves sieves, chemicals, a large scanner and open source software developed in-house to identify microplastics in anything from water to air. As of Sept. 1, the lab was among the world’s first to be certified to analyze microplastics in drinking water.
“We want everybody to be able to understand their risk of microplastics and be able to determine whether or not we’re improving the situation,” says Win Cowger, research director for Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research.
But, in order to do that, lab technician Andrea Amend adds, “we need to know
Win Cowger, research director at Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research, displays a vial of microplastics in Long Beach.
PHOTO BY LEONARD ORTIZ, SCNG
where it is and in what quantities.”
The conversation about plastics pollution has changed a lot in the past 30 years. Back in the 1990s and ’00s, even into the early 2010s, the emphasis was on the plastic we could see — grocery bags, plastic straws, etc. — and the harm it caused wildlife in and around the ocean. Over the course of the past decade, though, the focus has shifted to microplastics — particles that can be small enough to go unnoticed as they disperse across land, sea and air.
Scientists have found microplastics in our food and our bodies. Recently, a study from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque found evidence of microplastics in the human brain. Scientists are only beginning to study the impact of microplastics on human health, but, to get a better idea of the scale of the issue, you need to know where the microplastics are. That’s where Moore Institute of Plastic Pollution Research, an offshoot of
30-year-old environmental organization Algalita, comes into the picture.
Founded in 1994 by Captain Charles Moore, Algalita was initially designed to study and restore kelp forests. (In fact, the name is derived from “alga,” the Spanish word for seaweed.) A few years later, though, the mission changed when Moore spotted plastic litter in the ocean while sailing from Hawaii to California.
Heading into the new century, Algalita became one of the major voices raising awareness on what would be popularly known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Algalita dived into researching plastics pollution in the ocean and, as word of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch spread, young people wanted to learn more and get involved. Katie Allen, Algalita’s executive director, recalls near-daily phone calls from students, teachers and parents back when she started with the organization in 2010. She started sending out “simple teaching kits” to classrooms.
“Today, we have a flourishing international program with students from more than half the world’s countries participating in
Andrea Amend, a lab
at
them,” says Allen.
In some respects, it’s been easier to engage people in plastics pollution issues than other environmental issues because so much of the problem is visible. You don’t have to be a scientist to see trash clogging gutters or strewn across beaches and recognize that it shouldn’t be there.
“I prefer to work in plastics because you can actually see it,” says Allen. “There are so many people who are climate deniers in part because you can’t really see it the way that you can see plastics.”
Still, there has been misinformation that Algalita’s educators needed to address, such as what exactly is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
“What happened was that, in using that terminology
uses a pipette to take an aliquot from a sample that was concentrated into a fluid so the microplastics will float to the top. It’s done in preparation to place the sample into a vacuum filtration flask that will move the microplastics onto a 10-micron filter so a Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) analysis can be done on the sample.
Captain Charles Moore of Long Beach started the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in 1994, and four years ago established the nonprofit Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research.
technician
Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research,
and the media really grasping hold of this, it almost created this tangible vision in people’s minds that there was a huge island out there, which isn’t true,” says Allen.
“If there was any pushback, it was more along the lines of re-educating people that this isn’t some huge plastic island,” she continues. “This is something that’s much harder to imagine, but it’s more like a plastic soup. When it comes to the severity, people can see it.”
And, at Algalita, there are samples on hand to view. I look at a jar filled with contents collected in the North Pacific Gyre 10 years ago. It does look like a soup, albeit one filled with rope and shards of plastic instead of noodles and vegetables.
Inside BYO Long Beach, where customers cut down on plastics by refilling jars with products like laundry powder and Castile soap, there are display cases filled with items found on beach cleanups. A Fritos corn chips bag from 1970 turned up during a 2018 cleanup. There also was a lid labeled “certified compostable,” but, as the label points out, that can only happen in an industrial compost facility. (The EPA states that plastics labeled as compostable need to be able to break down at a composting facility, adding: “There are currently no ASTM standard test methods in place for evaluating the ability of a plastic to compost in a home environment.”)
An aliquot goes into a vacuum filtration flask.
PHOTOS BY LEONARD ORTIZ, SCNG
Beyond consumer-level plastics found along waterways, there are nurdles, tiny plastic pellets used in production processes. Back in the lab, Cowger shows me a vial filled with the small, round nurdles in varying colors found during a Southern California beach cleanup. This kind of trash can only come from industrial dumping, he says. Nurdles, which are considered microplastics, aren’t consumer products. They’re also one of the most common types of pollutants found along our beaches.
“This data can drive a solution,” Cowger says. “If I can tell you I’m confident that 50 percent of the plastic on the beaches is coming from industrial dumping, we have a target.”
About seven years ago, Cowger began researching microplastics and encountered a problem. The analysis software available was very expensive and not very good. So, he made his own, called Open Specy, and made it open source. Now, other researchers are using Open Specy as well. “Other academic papers are citing it, about 100 every year,” he says.
On top of that, the Moore Institute has a specialized scanner-like machine used for particle analysis that microplastic researchers need, but many labs lack. With that in mind, they’ve opened up the lab to students. On the day I visited, a PhD student from UC Riverside was using the machine for her research. “Really, without this instrument, they wouldn’t be able to do their research,” says Cowger.
It’s one of the most advanced machines available, which is necessary as the lab tries to ramp up the process of analyzing samples for microplastics. Where once it took about a week to process one sample, now the lab is able to do it in about three days.
“We think that we may even be able to bring it down within the next couple years to a single day,” he says. That’s crucial in light of California’s efforts to test drinking water for microplastics.
As Algalita continues to educate the public on plastics pollution, Moore Institute’s lab will be there to help provide a fuller picture.
“That’s one of the major contributions of our current research right now, using this device to do high throughput work,” says Cowger. “It allows research labs to scale really quickly. They can collect lots of samples, analyze lots of data and that increases our confidence in our results. The main application of that is that municipalities will be able to respond faster and more confidently.”
A sediment sample is examined to identify microplastics within the sample, analyze them for polymer type, measure and then identify what kind of particle they are in.
uses a stereoscope to examine a sediment sample to identify microplastics within the sample.
Shelly Moore, executive director of the Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research,
The Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research in Long Beach.
PHOTOS BY LEONARD ORTIZ, SCNG
The kids aren’t alright
Is the solution to teen despair teachable? Ambassadors of Compassion reaches into schools to try
BY LIZ OHANESIAN
“The world’s coming to an end, and I haven’t even graduated high school yet.”
That’s a line from a teen character in “Euphoria,” a much-talked-about drama that aired on HBO about a group of high schoolers whose young lives are mired in depression, addiction and issues around sex. If only it were just fiction.
In 2023, the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey reported that 40% of high school students had “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.” The numbers were a
slight improvement from the CDC’s 2021 survey, but it still means that four in 10 have experienced sadness or hopelessness to the extent that it has interfered with their normal activities on a near-daily basis for at least two weeks.
And the numbers still show that more young people are struggling with mental health than they were a decade ago.
But, it’s not all doom and gloom. That same CDC survey from last year indicated that 55% felt “school connectedness,” i.e. close to others at their schools; one takeaway of the survey is that access to programs that build on those relationships can help
schools and students meet today’s challenges.
That’s where Orange County-based Ambassadors of Compassion comes into the picture. Founded in 2010 by Eric and his wife, Jodi Hannah, and father, Dave Hannah, the nonprofit runs a nine-week school program that encourages teens to work together as they meet their personal challenges.
“The data on what’s going on with this generation is discouraging,” says Eric Hannah on a recent call. Their aim is to teach emotional resiliency. “When we started in 2010, we had to call it leadership,” says Eric. “Now, people really understand what’s going on, collectively.”
Ambassador of Compassion co-founder Eric Hannah speaks at SoFi Stadium.
COURTESY OF DAVE HANNAH, AMBASSADORS OF COMPASSION
Since its founding, Ambassadors of Compassion has attracted celebrity partners, including former 49er Spencer Tillman and “Access Hollywood” host Mario Lopez. Their nine-week program has been instituted in middle and high schools, as well as universities, across the United States.
Locally, Segerstrom High School and Lathrop Intermediate School, both in Santa Ana, participate in Ambassadors of Compassion. In January, the nonprofit will hold a kickoff event at SoFi Stadium to launch the program for several thousand students across Santa Ana Unified School District.
And there’s more: Santa Ana College waives tuition and fees for all high school graduates who complete the Ambassadors program. That means a free undergraduate education.
“We were having difficulty getting our students to stay, persist and complete,” college President Dr. Annebelle Nery announced
in an Instagram post. “So the partnership with Ambassadors of Compassion is critical because they have demonstrated student outcomes.”
²
The seeds of Ambassadors of Compassion were planted after Eric and Jodi made a rom-com feature film called “Meet Me in Miami.”
When the movie opened, they used the opportunity to raise funds to provide hearing aids and glasses for kids, then hosted an event where the kids were able to walk the red carpet and sign autographs.
During the course of those events, Eric noticed how, no matter where they were in the world, young people seemed to be struggling. Ambassadors of Compassion was born to give youth the tools to better handle their struggles.
That celebratory aspect is part of Ambassadors of Compassion’s approach.
The kickoff events at the start of every program
brings students to stadiums or other large venues because it provides positive reinforcement. “As they come down the red carpet, they’re cheered for by mayors and city leaders and celebrities and business leaders, thanking them for coming and making a difference in their life and community,” says Eric. Here, they break up into groups with a designated student leader. They’ll listen to talks from the event’s special guests, then return to their groups and discuss. “Participation is very high,” says Eric. “They don’t sit there and listen to information. They are participating.”
And from the get-go, the emphasis is on the students connecting with each other. “We’re not going in and speaking to them for an hour and a half at the kickoff,” says Eric. “We only speak enough to give them permission for them to open their hearts and for them to share with each other. It’s what they share.”
Over the course of two-
and-a-half months, the students will embark on personal journeys like LIFE (Labor, Influence, Forgiveness, Experiences) and RISE (Responsibility, Initiative, Service, Expectations) with their groups. They’ll keep each other accountable as they grow. Some will make important decisions about their future, like where to go to college, with their peers at their side. Others will rely on the support as they face past traumas and learn to forgive.
“We teach them how to face it, release it, replace it because the science of forgiveness is very powerful,” says Eric.
Ambassadors of Compassion builds on recent research in psychology that points to the mental health benefits of forgiveness. “If you don’t learn to forgive, you’ll tend to be triggered when people don’t agree with you and, when you’re triggered, you tend to name, blame and shame others,” Eric says. “When that happens, it divides families, it divides businesses.
Long Island student-athletes learn life skills from Ambassadors of Compassion programs.
COURTESY OF DAVE HANNAH, AMBASSADORS OF COMPASSION
Ambassadors of Compassion has hosted students at SoFi Stadium.
COURTESY OF DAVE HANNAH, AMBASSADORS OF COMPASSION
Eventually, it can divide a nation.”
²In the 14 years since Ambassadors of Compassion’s founding, the nature of connection has changed as folks of all ages struggle with maintaining a healthy balance between the world with which we physically interact and the one that exists behind our screens.
For youth, the impact of social media has become a particularly concerning issue. Earlier this year, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for a warning label on social media platforms, due to the damaging effects they can have on young people’s mental health, including increased symptoms of depression and anxiety. Meanwhile, in an interview with ABC News earlier this year on the loneliness epidemic in the U.S., Murthy noted that while one in two adults are experiencing loneliness, those numbers
increase amongst youth.
“We are the most connected world ever and yet loneliness is at an alltime high,” says Eric. “How can you be so connected and so lonely? Well, because we are wired to be connected in ways that are not just through social media. That’s information. That’s a form of connection, but that’s not the kind of connection that we’re wired to have as humans.”
Part of Ambassadors of Compassion’s approach is bringing together students of varied backgrounds. “When you get kids that are maybe your tough kids and you get your successful ones and you get them together, they see that this is something for all of us and they learn from each other,” says Dave Hannah. “That’s when it really started changing a lot.”
Now, the nonprofit plans to build on its successes. “It was always evidencebased from the beginning,” says Eric of Ambassadors of Compassion’s work. “We focused on what we were seeing. What we were seeing
“We are the most connected world ever and yet loneliness is at an all-time high.”
— Eric Hannah
in athletics, what we were seeing when distraction goes away and focus comes in.”
And the results they’re seeing have been positive.
A report from Lathrop Intermediate School from the 2016-2017 school year indicates that students who went through the program had an increase in A and B grades and a decrease in Fs. Plus, the unexcused absences, tardies and other disciplinary issues dropped amongst these students.
A 2015 report from Meritcore’s Resiliency Initiatives, which was based on a survey of program participants, indicated that Ambassadors of Compassion did help students develop stronger relationships with peers, family members,
school staff and community members. The same report also found that students were gaining confidence, problem-solving skills and other attributes that will benefit them as they transition into adulthood.
Next, they will look into how they check in on the progress of Ambassadors of Compassion participants years after they’ve completed the program. Ultimately, the goal is to scale the program to reach a million students a year across the country. “That becomes a tipping point where we can really impact a lot of students,” says Eric.
That’s the ray of hope that shines through even the most discouraging of statistics.
Two-year Santa Ana College will waive tuition and fees for all high school graduates who complete the Ambassador of Compassion program, officials announced earlier this year.
PHOTO BY JEFF GRITCHEN, SCNG
INTO THE GREAT WIDE OPEN
Across our nation, medical providers are aging out of the profession or leaving due to stress or burnout. Recently published projections, by the Association of American Medical Colleges, predict the United States will face a shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036.
Rural areas experience the brunt of healthcare system deficiencies. Are there solutions?
BY TANYA WARD GOODMAN
On a recent flight across the country, I found myself staring out the window at a vast desert landscape that, as the crow flies, is a relatively short distance from the crowded streets of sprawling Los Angeles.
From the air, it was possible to see towns and small cities in their entirety — squat buildings hanging out around a single intersection or rows of identical houses marching in tight grids alongside patches of sprinkler-fed green. Human-scale homes, post offices, local markets and cafes were dwarfed by the influx of massive, white rectangular warehouses parked along the highways like cruise ships along a canal. It was easy to eyeball the distance from one cluster of structures
to the next, to trace the tenuous arterial connections of lonely roads leading from one beating heart to another.
My vantage point gave me a “big picture” sense that felt akin to the broad statements being made about the state of our country. For instance, I knew from reading a recent study by The Commonwealth Fund that the U.S. “continues to be in a class by itself in the underperformance of its healthcare sector,” but I didn’t have a great idea of how or why the health system in one of the wealthiest countries in the world could rank dead last among 10 comparably wealthy countries and 69th internationally.
Our rural areas, places many of us often see from a great height or at great speeds as we are on our
way elsewhere, feel the brunt of this deficiency. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, rural mortality rates in 2019 were 20% higher than in urban areas. Rates of leading causes of death — such as heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, and chronic respiratory disease — are also much higher in rural areas.
There are plenty of reasons to live far from the city: lower housing costs, employment opportunities, family connections, a need for privacy, the desire to look up at night and see a sky full of stars. Whether they are there by choice or by chance, all residents are owed basic rights to the pursuit of happiness in a place with clean water, clean air, affordable housing, employment, and health care.
A resident holds a sign opposing a warehouse project during a Riverside council meeting. Health experts cite poor air quality and increasing pollution as some of the urgent issues affecting residents in Riverside County.
PHOTO BY WATCHARA PHOMICINDA, SCNG
²I grew up in the mountains outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico — an experience that has given me, among other things, respect for the scarcity of water, the danger of fire, and the amount of time and fuel required when the nearest services are about 40 minutes away. I’ve got family and friends all over this country of ours, and recently, I’ve been talking with them about their experiences with health care.
I could write a book about the uncle who, after inadvertently shooting himself in the leg with a nail gun while climbing down a
rickety ladder, had to take a ferry off Washington Island, Wisconsin, and drive two hours to Green Bay before finding someone to remove the nail. “All the local place can do is stitch you up or offer some antibiotics,” he said.
Out in Newell, South Dakota, my aunt, Jennifer Orwick, her husband and their boys, run a cattle ranch. Fourteen years ago, when her husband was diagnosed with cancer, they began making at least twice yearly trips to Rochester, Minnesota, for treatment.
“It’s not a problem for us,” she said. “But I could see it as a problem for others. It’s 646 miles from here.”
For Ruth Nolan, an
educator and writer in the Inland Empire, the rapid development and vacation rental explosion in the Coachella Valley has been coupled with a long, slow slide toward greater dysfunction.
“The amount of patients has quadrupled, wait times in the ER are 8 to 12 hours, you have to book a standard appointment months in advance,” she said.
She explained that the major influx of part-time residents adds pressure to those who “aren’t here
for adventure, they’re here because they can’t afford anyplace else.”
There was an edge of anger in Nolan’s voice, but also of vulnerability, and I heard it again when I spoke to my friend, Windra Trujillo, MSN, R.N., a clinical educator in Albuquerque. She’d recently finished a de-escalation and self-defense training module for care providers.
“Why do I have to teach a doctor or nurse or EMT how to defend themselves at work?” She answered her
UC Riverside pre-med student Pedro Lezama-Garcia, left, interprets Spanish for a client while another student, Sadaf Sadighian, does intake during a Vineyard Free Clinic event in Riverside.
PHOTO BY MINDY SCHAUER,SCNG
“Money and egos,” was his answer to my question about the biggest problems with health care in the United States.
own question by describing the barrage of personal attacks she’d sustained during her time as a bedside nurse. “Patients are coming in angry because they don’t have access and they’re in the emergency room and they are waiting too long and there’s not enough workers and that anger and frustration gets showered down.”
In Kentucky, my postcollege roommate, Jennie Jean Davidson, is the director of Neighborhood House, a community center in West Louisville, an area hard hit by our nation’s twin forces of destruction: the opioid epidemic and the gun-violence crisis.
“Try to find a therapist of any kind — physical therapy, speech therapy, talk therapy, you name it,” she said. “There’s nothing.” She took a deep breath and sighed it out. “But I don’t like to spend a ton of time on the problem, my mind is always headed toward what’s the answer.”
In every conversation, the issues were the same: provider shortages, lack of access to health care, lack of preventative care, and vast inequities that can be traced to race, gender, income and ability. The problem is so large in scope, it is difficult to hold. But, like my friend Jennie Jean says, the secret is to try not to get overwhelmed by the enormity, but instead, look for ways to make a change. Who else is thinking this way? Who and what is being left out of the big picture?
²
These are central questions for the community-based UC Riverside Medical School. With a stated mission to break down barriers of equity and inclusion, and train a diverse workforce to deliver clinical care and research to the Inland Empire, it’s the first public
BY LEONARD ORTIZ,
MD degree granting medical school to open in California in over four decades.
One of the fastest-growing regions in the state, the Inland Empire hosts a population of over 4 million (roughly as many as live in the state of Kentucky). Scattered over 27,000 miles of Riverside and San Bernardino counties and nearly 50% Latino/Hispanic, it is the fifth-largest Latino community in the United States. There are just 40 primary care physicians per 100,000 people, roughly half
of what’s needed to provide optimal care. Specialty care is minimal.
The area’s problems mirror those found across the country in one rural area after another, but what sets the Inland Empire apart is its proximity to the enormous metropolis that is Los Angeles.
“As a region, we have some of the poorest outcomes in the wealthiest state,” says Anne vanGarsse, M.D., associate dean of Clinical Medical Education at UCR’s School of Medicine.
Medical student Marina Zakhary Gad el Sayed moved with her family from Egypt to Rancho Cucamonga, and had a positive experience with the UCR healthcare system that led directly to her interest in becoming a physician.
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BY LEONARD ORTIZ,
She cites rising diabetes, respiratory illness, and lack of preventative care, along with poor air quality and increasing pollution as some of the urgent issues the school is working to address through research, education and services.
For vanGarsse, each student is a potential “agent of change,” and the school is focused on all aspects of their development. “We teach them that they are leaders even if they aren’t doing that formally. We try to build that servant/leader, servant/advocate thread into
Rates of leading causes of death — such as heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, and chronic respiratory disease — are also much higher in rural areas.
July landed the school in the seventh spot for diversity in U.S. News & World Report’s annual Best Medical Schools rankings.
“One of our main missions,” van Garsse said, “is to solve a workforce problem.”
²them as they are weaving the fabric of who they are as physicians.”
Starting in 2013 with just 50 students, UCR’s School of Medicine received more than 6,000 applicants in 2023. Just 86 were accepted, 73% of whom have ties to the Inland Empire and 44% percent of whom are from underrepresented groups. Many current students are the first in their family to receive an undergraduate degree and, for many, English is a second language. It’s all part of the mission that in
Across our nation, medical providers are aging out of the profession or leaving due to stress or burnout. Recently published projections, by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), predict the United States will face a shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036. In the accompanying report, AAMC President and CEO David J. Skorton, MD stresses that “sustained and increased investments in training new physicians are critical to mitigating projected shortfalls of doctors needed to meet the healthcare needs of our country.”
Skorton argues in favor of bi-partisan support for the funding of medical training programs. “Medical schools have done their part by increasing enrollment by nearly 40% since 2002. We must now expand graduate medical education so we are training more doctors to meet the nation’s healthcare needs.”
Though our nation’s communities share many of the same needs, it’s important to recognize the affect of local variables. In Newell, South Dakota, for instance, my aunt Jennifer stresses the possibility of rattlesnake bites and tractor
Jason Sacdalan, MD, a family practice physician at Kaiser Permanente in Riverside, has been working with the LACE program for nearly 10 years.
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accidents. “What we do out here is all high risk,” she said. “Because we’re working with machinery and animals … a lot can happen.” Icy Dakota winters may necessitate meeting the local volunteer ambulance at the end of a long dirt road.
While rattlesnake bites may be a threat in some parts of San Bernardino County, the larger issue is air quality. Given the grade of “F” by the American Lung Association’s 2024 State of the Air report, the county has the worst ozone pollution in the nation. All those enormous warehouses
mean fleets of delivery trucks, and the burning of gallons and gallons of diesel fuel. Ozone gas causes inflammation and damage in the lungs and, ultimately, it can impact all body systems. Drought and the re-routing of the Colorado River are some of the causes contributing to the rapidly disappearing Salton Sea. The increasing presence of air-borne particulates released by the drying seabed have also contributed to an increase in respiratory ailments, including childhood asthma.
At the UCR BREATHE Center, a multidisciplinary
collaborative for studies Bridging Regional Ecology, Aerosolized Toxins, and Health Effects, scientists, physicians and students with the UCR School of Medicine are simultaneously researching the causes of illness and finding new ways to treat the symptoms. Partnering with outside experts and faculty members in engineering, agriculture, biology and public policy, BREATHE
seeks to understand the Inland Empire through regional climate modeling, studies on air quality and environmental justice and health disparities, and the health impacts of aerosolized particles, which include not only pollutants, but also pollen from invasive plant species.
“Everything is interconnected,” said Marina Zakhary Gad el Sayed, a second-year medical student at the UCR
Medical student Chiemelie Onyekonwu, left, tests the blood pressure of a patient at the UC Riverside School of Medicine's Center for Simulated Patient Care.
PHOTO BY CARRIE ROSEMA FOR THE UCR SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
SOM. “You can’t mention the social determinants of health without eventually landing on the Salton Sea, diabetes, medications...”
Gad el Sayed, who, just before starting high school, moved with her family from Egypt to Rancho Cucamonga, has a personal understanding of correlation. Her own positive experience with the UCR healthcare system led directly to her interest in becoming a physician.
“I was a groggy teenager with uncertainty about what was going on in my body,” she said. “My doctor reassured me and my parents, who were English learners, and even entertained my young siblings because we had no one to leave them with.”
Eventually diagnosed with the autoimmune disorder Lupus, Gad el Sayed recounts how comforting it was to feel that her doctor was truly focused on her and her family.
In her first year of medical school, participation on “the wards” in the Longitudinal Ambulatory Care Experience (LACE) gave Gad el Sayed and her classmates an immediate connection with people living around her. Because the school does not have its own hospital, students are sent out into the various clinics and other hospitals in the area where, overseen by a mentor physician, they participate in all aspects of care.
“You don’t just learn the science,” she said, “you learn how it affects people in the real world.”
For students and volunteers alike, working in a wide variety of clinics and hospitals provides valuable insight not only about modes of practice, but also universally applicable lessons in humility.
“They are learning something that most
physicians didn’t learn until later in our careers,” says Anne vanGarsse. “If you’ve seen one hospital, you’ve seen one hospital. Different places do things differently and yet they all get to the same result. That’s a big learning thing: don’t get entrenched in the idea of the way.” ²
This kind of training also serves as a reminder that when individuals share resources, often the whole group will rise. In Albuquerque, Windra Trujillo, M.S.N., R.N., cast back to the earliest part of the pandemic when she was pulled out of the classroom and back into clinical practice. At first, hospitals siloed their resources, she remembered, but the educators were the first to change this behavior.
“We need to break down those walls of this is just a ‘my systems’ problem,” she said. “It’s not. How do we help each other serve our community? It’s not, who is better? It’s how do we make everyone better.”
Jason Sacdalan, MD, a family practice physician at Kaiser Riverside, has been working with the LACE program for nearly 10 years. It’s a volunteer position that runs parallel with his work at the hospital.
“I’ve been around so long some of my patients are very comfortable with students,” he said. “They feel like they are giving back to the community when they can teach students because they are literally teaching the future.”
Say “the future,” and it’s easy for me to picture a vast, unknowable landscape stretching all the way to the horizon. The enormity can feel paralyzing. “Future” is a word that can easily be shaded dark or bright depending upon the point of view of the speaker. It’s a word that those in charge
like to use to remind us just how in charge they are. But, the more people I spoke to, the more certain I was that the job of defining our future belongs to all of us. As we make choices about how to spend our money, time and energy, we are moving forward together, one day at a time.
Intention is crucial.
“If you’re not intentional, then inertia will lead to a lot of other places,” said Denise Martinez, MD, professor of family medicine and associate dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UCR’s SOM. Born and raised in the Inland Empire, she believes the school should mirror the community.
“We need more people to understand the language and the culture,” she said.
Though California is about 40% Latino, only 6% of the state’s physicians are Latino and just 2% Latina, making Martinez unique among her medical peers. Nationally, the numbers of underrepresented practicing physicians are similarly low. A 2021 study by the AAMC claims gender and racial diversity are on the rise in the U.S. physician workforce, while reporting that just 6.9% identify as being of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish descent, 5.7% Black or African American, and under 1% American Indian or Alaskan Native.
To put this disparity into perspective, according to the AAMC, out of 841,342 active physicians, just 2,583 identify as American Indian or Alaskan Native. Recent census reports show 9.7 million people in the U.S. identify as American Indian or Alaska Native. With so few direct role models, just a handful of young people might be inspired to pursue a career in medicine.
for high school and collegeaged students to see themselves as part of the healthcare system. With 10 programs in action, Pathway works to recruit a diverse cohort for the medical school, but also to create opportunities for all young residents to expand their skills and broaden their horizons.
For Jalene Rodriguez, who has been admitted to the School of Medicine for fall 2025, Pathway has been invaluable. “I was born and raised in Riverside.
I am a first-generation Latina student and I hold great pride in that title specifically,” she said.
Prior to her freshman year at UC Riverside, Rodriguez participated in Jump Start, where she was paired with upper-level mentors who helped prepare her for the rigors of college life. As an undergrad in the Medical Scholars program, she was introduced to a network of peers and professionals and received coaching on interviewing, resume writing and advocacy.
“I was scared of this path because I didn’t know anyone who looked like me that was on this path,” she said.
Pedro Lezama-Garcia’s parents immigrated to the Coachella Valley from Mexico, and he grew up helping them in their Mexican food and bakery business. As an eighth grader participating in Kaiser Permanente’s Hippocrates Circle, he learned about the UCR SOM Pathway Programs. As a high school freshman, he joined Pathway’s Medical Leaders of Tomorrow.
At UCR’s SOM, the aptly named Pathway Programs offers myriad opportunities
A single week in the program spent living and learning on the UC Riverside campus inspired him to apply to UCR. He is now a third-year undergrad, volunteering at both the Coachella Valley Free Clinic and Inland Vineyard Free Clinic.
“I always saw my parents struggle at doctors’ visits with their limited English,” he said. “The only support they had was me. Even then, I struggled to translate complicated medical terminology. However, bridging the barriers is only one part of the answer. Understanding the cultural differences and valuing everyone’s unique cultural background plays a huge role in personalized healthcare treatments.”
Offering these students a chance to act as a bridge between people and healthcare providers improves communication, can assist patients in learning to self-advocate, and builds another layer of attentiveness into what should always be a caring system.
“It’s not a bunch of big
medical machines, it’s not an expensive drug trial,” said Jennie Jean Davidson, director of Neighborhood House. “It’s people talking to people. It’s showing those young people a path to a medical career, but it’s also showing them the true path to goodness, which is social work.”
²On my recent flight across the country, it turned out that the man next to me was a cardiologist from Sherman Oaks who spent a fair amount of time volunteering at various clinics in rural Los Angeles County.
“Money and egos,” was his answer to my question about the biggest problems with health care in the United States. It was a good
BY MINDY SCHAUER,
answer, but it’s not the only answer. Sometimes, in the dead of night, my brain reels with additions to the list: environmental degradation, racial and economic disparity, crumbling infrastructure, food deserts…
The list is long.
Just as lengthy, though, is the roster of those working to find solutions: those unpaid ambulance drivers my Aunt Jennifer refers to as “saints and angels,” the 1,000-plus physicians and professional volunteers who mentor and teach students in the UCR Pathway programs, and also the professors and
administrators at the UCR School of Medicine who have made it their mission to hold the door open for a new generation of doctors.
I think about the way everyone I spoke with for this story acknowledged the big issues and still found a way to look beyond them; to draw from their own skills and talents and life experience to try to make a difference.
From the air, it’s possible to see the edges of the big cities and the dividing lines of fences and walls and interstate highways, but down here, on the ground, we are all part of the big picture.
UC Riverside pre-med student Pedro Lezama-Garcia, who volunteers at Vineyard Free Clinic, stands in front of a Riverside homeless shelter. After helping people there, he heads to volunteer at another clinic.
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Trailer park
confidential
Why does one viable solution to affordable housing still carry such a stigma?
BY SAMANTHA DUNN
There should be a word for the particular joy of finding an open parking meter a half-block from your destination.
I had been worried there only might be valet, because this was Beverly Hills and some valet guy is always just waiting to pop out and park your car in places like Beverly Hills. You might think the valet is meant to be a form of catering in this epicenter of flash and gilt, but what I know is the valet is the first checkpoint, assessing who is wealthy enough to belong here and who is feeding, lamprey-like, around the edges.
And me, with my dusty jalopy, the valet always instantly knew my deal.
The year was 2002. Back then, I wrote books and worked for glossy women’s magazines. I had a Malibu address, which really meant I rented a converted garage on a canyon estate that belonged to a movie guy. But on paper, I looked fancy, and it was true that I could pass among the rarified denizens of Westside L.A. — at least most of the time. That night in Beverly Hills, I was meeting a marketing rep for dinner. She wanted me to write a piece for a big New York magazine about a new restaurant she was handling called Airstream — as in trailer, as in an honest-to-goodness trailer in the middle of Beverly Hills, at the corner of Little Santa
ILLUSTRATION BY JEFF GOERTZEN
Although initially conceived for short-term travel to “trail” along behind automobiles for the rich, these “galloping bungalows” turned out to be a ready solution to the middle-class housing shortage created when the GIs returned from World War II.
Monica and Camden.
Chef Fred Eric was the enfant terrible of cuisine at that moment, and his new concept was to create a restaurant-asperformance-art.
The entrance was fashioned to look like an oversized replica of an Airstream door — curved top, steel latch handle. The windows had horizontal glass plates gliding outward, as if they opened by crank. Inside, the counter seats rested on the heads of lawn gnomes. Glowing dioramas on the walls created a view of Beverly Hills as a stylized trailer park: Devo mowing Astroturf, Barbara Streisand doing laundry, Dolly Parton fixing her beehive in the bathroom mirror. Pink flamingos sculpted from porcelain sat in the corner. The counters were made to look like Formica, but weren’t. Faux-Formica.
“Somebody had to go to college to think that one up,” my mother said in my head. Some people have a conscience that speaks to them; I have my mother’s Scotch-and-mentholcigarette one-liners on mental auto-play.
At Airstream, it was possible to order a magnum of Veuve Cliquot ($128) with your peanut butter and jelly sandwich ($2.75). The “Mac Daddy and Cheese” — what my family called “chili mack,” canned chili over
spaghetti noodles topped with cheddar cheese — ran $7.50. (Today, all this would be three times as much.)
The waitress suggested a nice domestic pinot noir with that. Sonoma is producing such fine grapes, don’t you know?
“Yes. Of course. Mais oui,” I said, throwing in some French.
But suddenly, I wanted to hit things. Slap the chef and his mocking, condescending menu. Slap those millionaires at the counter laughing at the gnomes under them.
My face reddened. I felt ashamed by how much I knew about this world that was being joked about.
But I widened my smile; my nonchalance, impeccable.
“You know what? I’ll just have a coffee. Black. Do you have Folgers?”
²I grew up in a mobile home — the type of domicile that has evolved into today’s manufactured housing.
But let’s be honest, everybody still calls them trailers.
That mobile home of ours provided stability I might otherwise have never known. It gave us privacy, and four walls to call our own. My single mom didn’t have to scramble every month to make rent. And
maybe, just maybe, it helped make me the person I am today.
Yet my mother and grandmother would roll over in their graves that I’m telling you this. Why? Because they were always afraid we’d be judged as “those” kind of people: “Trailer trash.”
²But let’s back up.
The wood-framed, metalclad boxes on wheels to be called trailers were a 1920s American invention. Although initially conceived for short-term travel to “trail” along behind automobiles for the rich, these “galloping bungalows” turned out to be a ready solution to the middle-class housing shortage created when the GIs returned from World War II.
One of those GIs was Scott Camp Jr., my father-in-law’s father, who returned from the front lines in Germany to a wife and two young children. Scott had war medals but no significant money, so the family lived in a travel trailer until he could establish himself as a civilian. Although that was a brief period for the family, my father-in-law still jokes uneasily about being “the original trailer trash” — as if his college degree and subsequent career as a minister can never erase the
gluey smell of pressboard walls from his memory.
Some historians point to a 1936 court case in Orchard Lake, Michigan, as setting the frame through which people who live in trailers would be viewed. In “Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes,” Allan D. Wallis wrote about the case of automobile factory worker Hildred Gumarsol, who pulled his trailer to camp at the shore of the lake one summer.
That was common enough at the time, but rather than pull the trailer away after a few days, Gumarsol put it up on cement blocks and added a small wooden porch. Since he returned so often to the same spot, he thought he’d save himself the hassle of moving the cumbersome trailer.
But the neighbors threw a fit, afraid the lake area would soon become a shantytown and lower property values. They sued to have Gumarsol’s trailer moved and to prevent others from moving in.
The Gumarsol matter articulated all the arguments against trailers and the biases against their dwellers that have all become stereotypes in American culture, and codified through zoning laws: “Trailer people” do not pay their share of taxes but get to use public services; that trailers are ugly and threaten real estate values; and, perhaps most importantly, the kind of people who would choose to live in a trailer “tend
1940s (160 sq. ft.)
to behave immorally,” to borrow language from the Gumarsol case. ²
Some 18 million Americans live in manufactured housing today. A mere 20 years ago, that number was roughly 7 million greater. You’d think it would be more today, given the acute homelessness and housing crises — not to mention the advances in mobile home quality, safety and functionality.
The 1980 Housing Act established “manufactured housing” as the legal term of reference for industrialized construction built on a chassis that is neither trailer nor conventional stick-built housing. Real estate agents had coined the term “mobile home.”
Whatever you call it, the units themselves have become more substantial with each evolution, being now the only type of housing built by private companies that must conform to federal standards. More than half a century has gone since the days when an unscrupulous manufacturer could wad old newspapers into wall frames and call it insulation.
As SCNG business
columnist Jon Lansner has reported, manufactured housing presents one of the best options for putting up highly livable homes in the shortest amount of time, and more cheaply than any other type of housing. And yet, mobile home manufacturers and park owners contend that California regulations make it impossible to build new mobile home parks and
almost impossible to keep the ones we have open. Why is our dismissal of mobile home parks and those who live there so intractable? Why is it so persistent that we can’t see this as a potential solution to the current housing crisis? Why dismiss people who live in mobile home parks as undesirables and assume those who own the parks are mostly just slumlords? Deeply entrenched prejudice and assumptions fly in both directions, and are exactly what’s keeping us from solving one of the worst social problems of our time.
Facts: There is an urgent need for affordable housing. Home values and rents in California are among the most expensive in the nation, and the state has one of the highest rates of homelessness, according to
most any source you want to cite; let’s pick the Public Policy Institute of California for one.
Mobile homes are a viable form of low-income housing. Period.
So, why isn’t it being factored in?
The irony is mobile homes aren’t really mobile. They’re built to be set on a permanent foundation, and even among the ones that can move, most don’t. It requires permits and a lot of effort to move a mobile home. Plus, in this market starved for affordable homes, it’s often profitable for owners to sell the home at a relative premium and get the key money from the buyers for the lease on the lot where it sits.
Yet the whiff of transience
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still attaches to them. For instance, a report for the Fannie Mae Foundation, done as late as 2001, noted that the general population considered mobile home residents to be “transient people with unconventional lifestyles.”
I know firsthand that people who live in mobile homes want community. They seek consistency and connectedness, as my single mother did for my family. They turn to mobile homes precisely because they offer a home to call their own, affordable stability, and it offers them the space and lifestyle they want. You can live well in manufactured housing.
California-based Three Pillar Communities owns some 40 communities in seven states, including many parks here in California. Co-founder Daniel Weisfield has a vision of next-generation mobile home parks. As the website explains, “Daniel’s professional mission is to turn the ‘trailer park’ stereotype on its head. He believes manufactured housing is the best way to close our country’s housing gap and to create affordable home-ownership opportunities.”
Mobile home park owners and operators could be seen as the potential allies of the government in the fight for affordable housing. And yet, politicians seem to prefer
stereotypes to solutions.
Builders also see the paradox. On his website Construction Physics, Brian Potter writes about the “failure of prefabrication (building homes in factories instead of on-site) to revolutionize the housing industry. … No one has yet managed to do for housing what Ford did for cars, or what Corning did for lightbulbs. ...
“However, one form of prefabrication is able to reliably produce housing substantially cheaper than site-built methods — the manufactured home (formerly the mobile home, also called trailer homes or HUD homes). Manufactured homes
are a particular type of factory-built housing that isn’t required to meet local building codes — instead, manufactured homes are built to the Manufactured Home Construction and Safety Standards, a federal standard administered by HUD. Manufactured homes have an average per-squarefoot cost that’s less than half the cost of the average sitebuilt home.”
²
It was 1981. We could have qualified for government housing, if any had been available in our rural New Mexico town. Mom was a single mother, sole supporter of both her daughter and
Yet, while ecologically speaking they might be more suitable than most of the McMansions tearing up Southern California hillsides, they will never be considered anything but blights on the landscape.
her own mother on a nurse’s wage.
Instead of Section 8, we landed in a mobile home park where $185 a month covered rent and utilities, about half the price of any place we had ever rented. “Can’t beat that,” Mom said. I remember nothing about packing up to move. One day we were just there. Mom drove up in the Ford Country Squire station wagon to the last row of the park, swinging the steering wheel left onto the gravel parking pad on the side.
Gram’s white shirt collar was ironed. Her brown eyes surveyed the long rectangle of a house, lingering at the bay window above a towing hitch.
“We can pretend it’s a land yacht. There, in the front there, is the bow,” Gram said. I stared at the bay window and saw the license plate displayed in the corner. “Why is there a license there, like it’s a car or something?”
I thought the license plate must be some person’s idea of a joke about home décor, like the beer can windchimes a few carports over. I was unaware that the law required a license
1950s (400 sq. ft.)
for any home with wheels underneath it, even if those wheels were hidden by a corrugated skirt. I didn’t know it then but that was the reason a mobile home’s value depreciates over time, unlike a site-built home: Even if the home goes nowhere, laws still label it “mobile.”
Inside, the paneling did create the feeling of a ship’s cabin or a submarine, or what I imagined those things to feel like. The trailer sat high, and because it was stationed in the end row of the park, the living room windows faced out onto an empty pasture, onto the road, with a vista as far as the drive-in theater, so if you looked straight it was possible to ignore the neighbors on either side and around in the back, lined as cars are in a busy store parking lot. It was possible to think you did have a home in the country.
The interior — from the fake wrought-iron room divider to the forest-colored appliances in the corner kitchen area to the bay window at the end of the living area — wasn’t nearly as noxious as some of the
terrible apartments we’d rented.
In many ways, the trailer showed genius in engineering. Every inch of space was accounted for, employed for some purpose. My room was the first door down the hallway next to the one bathroom; the hallway no wider than a hefty man’s shoulders. Mom and Gram would share the bigger room located at the butt end of the trailer, past the back door and the laundry area.
A plastic knob opened the door to my room, the door itself was air-light because it was hollow — more a suggestion of a door, but still something I could shut for privacy. Behind the door, I found a space that was either a goodsized walk-in closet or the smallest bedroom ever to be designed. A built-in dresser pressed next to a recessed area for hanging clothes. A built-in headboard for a twin bed. A large rectangle window looking out onto the neighbor’s carport.
Gram followed my gaze. “We’ll get those butterfly curtains you liked at Kmart,” she offered. I thought that sounded great, happy that
when Congress enacted the Mobile Home Construction and Safety Standards Act, HUD has regulated the industry’s safety standards.
The units themselves have become infinitely more substantial with every passing decade. They’re architecturally designed, they’re energy efficient, they’re spatially enhanced. They can be pretty much whatever you want them to be.
I finally had a space to call my own.
Then, Gram’s eyes took in the brown linoleum we stood on. “This is what throw rugs are for.”
After we settled in, Mom and Gram made the place pretty plush. We had a floral davenport, a stereo set with velvet covers on the speakers. Gold curtains hung from the bay window and on the longest wall were two pictures, one of a matador and another of horses rearing, exactly like the one on the set of the television show “I Dream of Jeannie,” a little detail I always appreciated because it provided evidence we were part of a permanent world, waiting somewhere out there.
²Granted, the mobile home solution to the dearth of affordable housing isn’t perfect.
A hundred years have passed since the galloping bungalow days, and today the homes bear little resemblance to that Depression-era take on the covered wagon. Since 1974,
In fact, considering the efficient design of today’s mobile homes and how light they live on the land, leaving no permanent scar, they’re perhaps also the most environmentally sound choice available for housing in this delicate ecosystem. Yet, while ecologically speaking they might be more suitable than most of the McMansions tearing up Southern California hillsides, they will never be considered anything but blights on the landscape. They’re still considered personal property, like a car, not real property like a condo. Financing for personal property loans, sometimes called “chattel loans,” comes with higher interest rates and shorter terms than mortgage loans. And if you’re in a park, you may own your home but you still have to pay rent for the land underneath it. That rent can go up, or you could even be evicted, although it’s more difficult to evict someone from a mobile home park than an apartment.
That’s because, in California at least, residents aren’t totally powerless.
When mobile home parks were expanding in the 1970s and 1980s, the give-andtake between prospective residents and park owners
ILLUSTRATION BY JEFF GOERTZEN
was not what you might expect it to have been. The effort to try to fill spaces gave prospective residents leverage.
And, get this: In some locations in California, mobile home park owners were so eager to attract residents they offered free piloting lessons so prospective tenants could learn to fly airplanes and helicopters if they would agree to move into a mobile home park. Essentially, tenants back then were calling the shots.
That imbalance of power became part of the law that governs such tenancies, and particularly the Mobilehome Residency Law, which is part of the Civil Code. Because mobile home park tenancies differ from standard single-family detached or apartment tenancies, the legislature felt that special circumstances entitled mobile home park tenants to superior protections. And to this day, it’s the tenants who actually have superior
bargaining power. This complicates the stereotype of the all-powerful landlord.
California Civil Code, §798.55 (a) says: “a) The Legislature finds and declares that, because of the high cost of moving mobilehomes, the potential for damage resulting therefrom, the requirements relating to the installation of mobilehomes, and the cost of landscaping or lot preparation, it is necessary that the owners of mobilehomes occupied within mobilehome parks be provided with the unique protection from actual or constructive eviction afforded by the provisions of this chapter.”
The Mobilehome Parks Act in California also carried a legislative declaration of policy and intent that flies in the face of the stigma of transience associated with people who live in manufactured housing.
Health & Safety Code §18250 says: “...Because
of the high cost of moving manufactured homes and mobilehomes, most owners of manufactured homes and mobilehomes reside within mobilehome parks for substantial periods of time. Because of the relatively permanent nature of residence in such parks and the substantial investment which a manufactured home
or mobilehome represents, residents of mobilehome parks are entitled to live in conditions which assure their health, safety, general welfare, and a decent living environment, and which protect the investment of their manufactured homes and mobile homes.”
All that is to say, I think if voters demanded that the existing drawbacks to mobile home living be improved, politicians, banking and businesses would be motivated to institute solutions.
But nothing will change, no solutions can be imagined, if we don’t drop the old ways of thinking.
²My grandmother had come out of the hills of rural western Pennsylvania and became a fashion buyer in Manhattan, then a “risqué divorcée” for her time; she died still wearing her fake pearls in a single-wide mobile home in the New Mexico desert. My mother joined the Air Force, became a nurse thanks to the GI Bill, traveled the world, married my stepdad — an Army vet — and then
ILLUSTRATIONS BY
JEFF GOERTZEN
she became a widow in a double-wide.
Hard work and books got me out of the park through a scholarship to study in Australia my last year of high school. (“Only a girl from a trailer park would think a ticket to a penal colony was a step up,” a friend teased.)
That scholarship combined with some luck and financial aid programs for working-class kids landed me at a state university. My subsequent career has since taken me to the center of Hollywood glamor and the tense circles of the New York literati.
“You don’t look like you grew up in a trailer park.”
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that in my life. It’s infuriating. And I hate that I know what they’re implying.
You might know comedian Vicki Barbolak from “America’s Got Talent,” where she cracked up Simon Cowell and the rest of the judges with her brand of what she calls “Trailer Nasty” humor.
Don’t get me wrong.
Barbolak, who hails from Oceanside where she owns a mobile home with a milliondollar ocean view, is funny. Really funny. She seizes the stereotype and wields her jokes if not like a sword then like a big rubber club.
I love the way Barbolak plays with how the trailer park lifestyle is both reviled and embraced as an alluring form of kitsch. Christian Dior once included a “Trailer Park” purse in a spring collection — which was considered daring. At one point at the height of my own Hollywood cool days, I rented the “Cowgirl Palace,” a tricked-out 1967 Fleetwood trailer in Topanga Canyon owned by a stunt woman (famous for her driving in “Thelma and Louise”), and it was considered “edgy.”
But start to really look at how trailers are used in popular literature, film and TV: Want a shorthand for conveying that a character is poor, hopeless and ignorant? Put them in a trailer. A buffoon? Put them in a trailer. An outlaw on the run? Put them in a … well, you know.
The most positive depiction will be the
charming rascals, like Jim Rockford and his trailer on the beach in that old show “The Rockford Files.” Still marginal, though. Still outside conventional society. As amusing and convenient as these references are, they conceal the true intricacy of politics, economics, sociology and psychology that weave together to create a cultural phenomenon. The labels around trailer life have been traded for so long that it’s almost impossible to see behind those labels — even if you live in one.
²
I sometimes think of our neighbors in the park I grew up in and the parks in which my mom and grandmother later lived: a music professor; a retired high school teacher from a well-off family in Iowa; a widowed cop with three troubled boys; a sheriff’s deputy; a construction worker; a beauty salon owner who hailed from Juarez. I knew them all. These people were not “trash,” nor were we. We all deserve a home to call our own. Which is becoming
more elusive every day. Let this be a clarion call for cooperation between government and the private sector in California. Now is the time, Golden State. If you could take another look, it might just get people into homes.
As for me, my life’s work has made me rich in knowledge and experience — and not much else. Today, I hope I can bring the story full circle and one day retire to a mobile home. I imagine a cute two-bedroom on a plot of land in the mountains outside of Julian. A home in the country. Like where I grew up, only better.
Samantha Dunn’s books include the novel “Failing Paris” (finalist honors for the PEN West Fiction Award) and the memoirs “Not By Accident: Reconstructing a Careless Life” (Henry Holt & Co.) and “Faith in Carlos Gomez: A Memoir of Salsa, Sex and Salvation” (Owl Books). She is currently a senior editor for Southern California News Group.
CHANGING YOUR MIND
Could the cure for opioid addiction and other mental disorders be found in old ‘plant medicine’?
BY AMANDA FLETCHER
The last time singer, songwriter and activist Melissa Etheridge heard her son’s voice, he said, “I’m sick. Mom, it’s fentanyl.”
According to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, there were an estimated 70,029 overdose deaths involving opioids in 2020. On May 13, 2020, her son Beckett Cypheridge became one of the statistics: He died from causes related to opioid addiction. He was just 21 years old.
Etheridge says she remembers asking herself: What do I do with the pain?
For most of her life what she did — and continues to do — is make music. While I wait for her to continue speaking during a recent Zoom interview, I can’t help but hear the lyrics of “Precious Pain” in my head, her throaty voice wailing about clinging to the feeling of hurt as an identity, how sorrow can keep someone from moving on.
In real time, it is obvious she has done a lot of healing, not only since releasing her debut album in 1998, but since those first gut-wrenching moments without Beckett. When she finally exhales a gust of breath to go on, she says, “As I have now lived for 63 years, I have experienced all the different types of pain, physical, emotional … and the more I have worked on my own understanding of what I call spirit or the source of this life force that
I have, I have realized that pain is just a symptom, a sign to pay attention. Something needs to change.”
In her opinion, what needs to change is our approach to — and treatment for — addiction. Part of that change for her was founding the Etheridge Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for and supports scientific research into plant medicine and psychedelic treatments for opioid use disorder (OUD). Why? She
believes this kind of therapy has the potential to shift both physical and emotional responses to pain, enhancing the sufferer’s ability to confront and move past it.
“We feel like people deserve the opportunity to access these medicines in an equitable, affordable, legal and safe way” like any other treatment, says foundation executive director Anna Symonds.
Pharmakon
In his latest book, “This is Your Mind on Plants,” Michael Pollan writes that the ancient Greeks understood the two-faced nature of drugs, reflected in their term for them: pharmakon. A pharmakon is a medicine, poison or scapegoat — depending on the dose, intention and public opinion.
“Everything can be medicine,” agrees Valerie (Vimalasara) Mason-John, co-author and co-founder of “Eight Step Recovery: Using The Buddha’s Teaching to Overcome Addiction” and the co-creator of Mindfulness Based Addiction Recovery (MBAR). “Alcohol is medicine, food is medicine. It’s just when we get out of control with it that it becomes poison.”
An obstacle to using psychedelics as therapy is that they are still illegal in many places, including California. Although promising research was being conducted into the therapeutic uses of these substances in the 1950s and 1960s — LSD research paved the way for the development of SSRIs, a class of medications commonly prescribed to treat depression and anxiety disorders today — the counterculture movement and widespread recreational use raised concerns about public health and safety, prompting strict regulations.
Singer Melissa Etheridge is joined by Beckett Cypher, her son with former partner Julie Cypher, during a 2011 Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony. In May 2020, Beckett died from causes related to opioid addiction, at age 21.
President Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) in 1970, not only prohibiting many psychedelics in the United States, but classifying LSD, psilocybin and even cannabis as Schedule I — dangerous, addictive and harmful substances with no recognized or accepted medicinal use.
That means decades of restricted research have limited our understanding of their potential benefits.
Social stigma and fears about misuse or psychological distress continue to influence public perception and policy, while proponents of their use point to the hundreds of thousands of people who have lost their lives in the opioid crisis, which was spawned by legally prescribed narcotics first misrepresented as nonaddictive by pharmaceutical companies in the 1990s.
In a bid to move the needle on reforming the legal status of psychedelics, the Etheridge Foundation has awarded several research grants since it was founded in 2020. These include an $85,000 award to the University of British Columbia to study psilocybin-
assisted psychotherapy aimed at tapering opioid medication in chronic pain patients, and $15,000 to the Psychae Institute in Melbourne, Australia, for the study of botanical ayahuasca as a treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD). (Ayahuasca is a powerful plant medicine that has been used for centuries by indigenous communities in the Amazon as a tool for healing, growth and connection to the natural and spirit worlds.)
Personal experience
“We love our people,” Etheridge says. “But we can’t save them.”
Still, she wishes she could have shared the power of psychedelics with Beckett. “My belief,” says Etheridge, “is that if I could have taken him somewhere with psilocybinassisted therapy, I think it would have given him more of a working chance.”
The first major study in this century to explore psilocybin’s potential in addiction treatment was led by Dr. Matthew Johnson at Johns Hopkins University in 2014. The results provided
PHOTO BY CHRIS DELMAS, AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
new insights into how psychedelics can rewire the brain, promote emotional breakthroughs and foster long-term behavioral change. This allowed Johnson to secure the first federal funding for psychedelic research in more than 50 years, from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).
It was an accidentally heroic dose of cannabis (a very large quantity of a hallucinogenic substance) in a homemade cookie that catapulted Etheridge onto her path of spiritual awakening and personal transformation — an experience she details in her latest memoir, “Talking to My Angels.” She dedicated herself to understanding what had happened to her by reading books about neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, physics, religion and ancient Indigenous cultures (which would later lead her to participate in an ayahuasca ceremony).
When I ask her about sharing this knowledge with Beckett, she says, “I was just at the beginning of my psychedelic experiences,” and still learning about their scientific and spiritual benefits “when Beckett was starting his own hard decline into addiction.”
She adds that her acrimonious relationship with her ex-partner and co-parent Julie Cypher was another restriction. “We shared custody, and I didn’t want to give his other mother a reason to take him away, like, ‘she’s giving him drugs.’”
The best she could do, Etheridge says, was be an example, something she speaks about in the present tense, because she is a mother of four.
“It can only be learned, right? I can only show them how happy I am, how delighted and surprised I am with reality every day. And hopefully, they’ll move
toward that light.” Still, she says, smiling ruefully, “What is that saying? ‘A prophet is not welcome in his own town?’ My kids were like, here she comes with that woo woo stuff.”
Etheridge says Beckett was only 17 when he took his first prescribed painkiller. He was training to be a professional snowboarder when he had an epic fall and broke his ankle in two places. The ER doctor sent him home in a stabilizing boot with a prescription for Vicodin — a drug that’s a combination analgesic, containing acetaminophen and hydrocodone with a high risk for addiction and dependence. When Etheridge saw him again, he’d lost weight, his face was ashen and there was a faraway look in his eyes.
It was clear to her that her son was hooked on painkillers.
Years of therapy and treatment followed, but Beckett couldn’t manage to stay clean. He didn’t resonate with the 12step programming and complete abstinence from all substances that most residential treatment programs still require.
“He would say, ‘Why can’t I just get off the [opioids] and then have cannabis so I can get up and go from there?’,” she recalls, “but there was nothing like that.”
She notes that the cannabis plant has been cultivated to treat pain, nausea and inflammation for thousands of years, but yet it wasn’t considered as a legitimate option.
Which is why another one of the Etheridge Foundation’s awards was for $25,000 to Dr. Staci Gruber’s Marijuana Investigations for Neuroscientific Discovery (MIND) Program at McLean Hospital in Boston, to research the impact a proprietary CBD product has on pain,
related symptoms and the conventional use of pain medication — particularly opioids.
So, what exactly is OUD?
A 2022 report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) defined opioid use disorder (OUD) as a chronic disease. It affects 6.1 million people in America, like Beckett. Contrary to what may have been believed in the past, opioid addiction is now understood not a moral failing or a simple lack of willpower. While we can’t say definitively why some people are more susceptible to OUD than others, what we do know is that addiction results when the brain’s reward system goes haywire, flooding our systems with dopamine, a primary “feel good” neurotransmitter that, from an evolutionary perspective, keeps us engaging in food and sex so that our species stays alive.
Opioids increase dopamine by binding to opioid receptors, which leads to reduced inhibition of dopamine release in the brain’s reward areas. The longer someone uses opioids, the more the brain’s structure and chemistry change, leading to increased tolerance, craving and compulsive drug-seeking behavior.
A critical component of this disease is that while it can be managed, it cannot be cured. This means that no matter how well someone becomes, the potential for relapse will follow that person forever.
Full disclosure: I have been in recovery from my own substance misuse disorder for more than a decade, and I work in recovery facilities, teaching movement and breathwork
meditation (facilitating a practice similar to the one developed by psychedelic research pioneer Stanislav Grof). As a result, I’ve sat in thousands of 12-step meetings, residential rehabs, outpatient programs, hospitals, coffee shops and living rooms with many opioid addicts.
Time and again, I’ve seen how shut down this disease and its prognosis can make people, especially in early recovery. What I know is that clinging to the belief that nothing will work closes a door at a time when what people most need is to stay open to what is possible.
Stuck in a cycle
While cannabis is still considered a Schedule I narcotic, the FDA has
PHOTO BY GETTY IMAGES
approved three medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD), which are standard protocols for treatment: Methadone is a synthetic opioid that reduces cravings and withdrawal symptoms by activating opioid receptors in the brain; buprenorphine is a partial opioid that has similar actions; and naltrexone is an opioid blocker that is used to prevent relapse.
People in recovery can remain on MOUD for months, years, or even a lifetime, stuck treating the physical symptoms of the disorder, but potentially avoiding the real work of living a recovered life.
Joe Schock, who owned and operated Casa Vista Sober Living in Venice Beach for 17 years, knows this firsthand. “The idea is
This means facing social stigma, debt, legal problems, chronic health issues, employment gaps, parenting, isolation, emotional upset, boredom and stress. Internalized shame, doubt and a lack of self-esteem can challenge a person’s ability to decide who they are, what they want and how they show up. Life can lack meaning and color. Many people realize they have co-occurring mental health conditions like depression or anxiety, and it’s not unusual for repressed trauma to resurface.
senior researcher for the Center of Excellence for Psilocybin Research and Treatment at Sheppard Pratt’s Institute for Advanced Diagnostics and Therapeutics, said that in the psilocybin-assisted therapy he conducted, there were “high rates of mystical experiences (reported), amazement at life, and experiences of unity that provided a reframing of personal narrative.”
About one of her experiences, Etheridge wrote in “Talking to My Angels”:
to wean people off (MOUD) once they build sober support. Many times, that doesn’t happen.”
Josh Lazie, co-founder of the Bend Recovery Collective in Bend, Oregon, agrees. “Suboxone maintenance has become the gold standard for treatment,” he says (this is a combination of buprenorphine and naloxone). “There may be the best intentions behind it,” he adds, “but can you really heal?”
Plant medicine and healing from OUD
True healing is hard work. Staying off of opioids is only the first step. There is a lot of potential pain in recovery that can lead to relapse. People with OUD have to learn how to “human” again.
“Everything was a trigger when I got sober,” says Schock, who was diagnosed with OUD and depression. Psychedelic therapy shows promise in treating addiction by addressing both the psychological and neurological aspects of OUD. Classic psychedelics — LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and DMT — promote neuroplasticity, helping the brain form new connections that can disrupt rigid patterns of addictive behavior.
These substances also reduce the activity of the Default Mode Network (DMN), which is responsible for our perceived identity. This can lead to a state where individuals experience a loss of their usual sense of self, which can shift perspectives and foster a sense of profound interconnectedness. This change can help people confront the underlying emotional or psychological issues driving their addiction, such as trauma or anxiety. What’s more, psychedelics can promote emotional insights and personal breakthroughs, creating an opportunity to reframe negative thoughts and build healthier habits.
In an interview for the 2023 Global Mental Health Summit, Johnson, now a
“I became suffused with love, giving in to the space around my body and merging into an infinite horizon. By whom was I loved? And who was generating this love? Was it possible to imagine being loved? And in that imagining, make it real?
As these questions arose in a burst of spontaneous and tangible insight, I began to realize that it was me doing the loving. That for the first time ever, I felt a profound self-love. … The universe was trying to tell me that I did not have to be afraid. That I did not have to worry. That I did not have to fight so hard for what I wanted. That the love moving through me, the love that runs through all of us and connects us to one another, to the sky and trees, the animals and plants — the all of it — that the love is within us and all around us.”
While transformative results like this are possible with psychedelic therapy, this is not an easy fix. These therapies aren’t about avoiding pain, they’re about opening a doorway to walk through it in a potentially profound way, allowing people to see new possibilities for themselves and their lives.
Research and anecdotal evidence suggest that
productive treatment includes many factors. Like any kind of therapy, integrity, trust and ethics play a vital role in making it effective. Set and setting are also key. Set refers to the individual’s mindset and includes expectation, mood and mental state, while setting pertains to the physical and social environment of the situation. And integrative activities — meditation, talk, trauma and art therapy, journaling and discussion groups — are essential for helping individuals make sense of their experiences in a lasting and meaningful way. Imagine we could offer more than survival to millions of sufferers. What if we could help them flourish?
A long and winding road
Schock himself tried everything to manage his depression, from daily meditation to talk therapy and medication. “I did it all,” he says. “And still it seemed like the better my life got, the more suicidal I got. The only thing that kept me going was my kids.”
To see if a change of scenery might help, Schock sold his sober living house and moved to Tennessee. “I built a chicken coop,” he admits, “so I would have a place to hang myself.”
Relapsing wasn’t an option for him, he says, “I just wanted to die.”
After a lot of contemplation, he turned to psychedelic therapy. A process with precarious results, considering the lack of resources available to him: Schock had a few horrible experiences, partly because he couldn’t share any of this work with his sober men’s group.
“I was terrified of losing my support system,” he says, which he believes contributed to his distress during treatment. Finally, he found a therapist he could trust and she introduced him to micro-dosing psilocybin — a process of taking subperceptual doses for short periods of time — combined with therapy. It’s the same treatment Etheridge believes would have helped her son.
Doing this work with a therapist allowed Schock, he says, to peel back the layers of the onion and “get” his depression. He discovered that he was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.
“I know you hear stories like this and you think people are making it up,” he says. “But I remember having one of those aha moments, like, yeah, that really happened to me.”
He goes on to credit his therapist for walking him through those difficult memories and the emotions they brought to the surface. “I’ve done a lot of healing,” he adds.
Not only does he still go to his AA meetings and continue to count his sober days, Schock now offers micro-dosing as part of his coaching and mentoring service. “It’s all about integrity,” he says. “I’m not trying to hide how this therapy has helped me. We need to be able to have these conversations.”
Right in front of us
Turns out, we could have been having conversations about plant medicine and psychedelics the entire time. Rarely discussed is that the spiritual aspect of a Higher Power in AA was ignited by founder Bill Wilson’s treatment with a hallucinogen in the 1930s.
According to “Pass It On: The Story of Bill Wilson and How the AA Message Reached the World,” when Wilson worried about alcoholics not being able to stay sober because they lacked the ability to have a true spiritual experience, he made the decision to try LSD in the 1950s after researching the work of Dr. Humphry Osmond and his mindmanifesting medicines.
“Anything that helps the alcoholic is good and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand,” says a passage in “Pass It On.” Wilson went on to receive several treatments to great success, but stepped away when it became clear that most members of AA were “violently opposed to his experimenting with a mindaltering substance.”
So, what makes one medicine good and another bad? How do we determine treatment and healing?
Symonds says that should be up to the individual to decide.
“For some people, maybe the pharmaceutical opioids (MOUD) will be enough. But for many people, they’re unsatisfied with where that’s brought them. Where plant medicines and psychedelic therapies are so helpful,” she adds, “is that they also work on the mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of addiction.”
For Schock, it’s all about integrity and intention. When we’re dealing with people who have substance misuse disorders, everything has the potential for abuse.
“A good friend of mine is out there doing journeys (with plant medicine) every week. That’s not what this is about. Psychedelics aren’t for everybody,” he says. “But when it works, it’s like a slow cracking open of your heart. It makes you feel … something. A deep appreciation, not only for mother nature but for humanity and for people.”
As he talks, a smile takes over his face. “The level of compassion I have for myself now,” he shakes his head as if he can hardly believe it, “is uncanny. I dig my life. Is it always hunky-dory? No. There are issues with money and my health, my relationship,” he laughs. “But I love every day. Does my depression show up? Yeah, but I’m not powerless over it anymore. I have some say in it.”
He asks me how I feel about the possibility of relapsing in my own sobriety. When I tell him the idea makes me feel sick to my stomach, he says, “that’s how I feel about suicidality now. Thinking about how close I came so many times, it makes my stomach hurt. I would have missed out on this conversation and my morning meditation with the guys this morning. I would not have run into my friend Steve at the gym and given him a hug. I would have missed all of these beautiful things that we’re talking about. I call it God’s grace, and it’s not lost on me anymore.”
Rethinking rescue
When poverty and pet ownership intersect, what’s the most humane thing to do?
BY CAROL MITHERS
Downtown Los Angeles, 1998
One morning, not long after Lori Weise began working at the Modernica furniture factory in downtown LA, her co-worker Richard Tuttelmondo came back from an errand all revved up. “Lori, want to meet the coolest dog?” He led her behind the factory to an unpaved, graffiti-scarred alley. It stank of garbage and shit. Twenty feet away, a huge cardboard refrigerator box lay on its side, like a coffin. Lori hesitated — was this a safe place to be? Suddenly, a big-headed, barrel-chested black dog came
at her. She froze, then realized that the dog’s tail was wagging, and its lips were pulled back in a grin. A man rose up out of the box, a slender African American of indeterminate middle age, with close-cropped hair and tattoo-covered arms. He called the dog, which bounded to his side.
Lori was 31, a child of the Southern California suburbs. With the new job, she’d grown accustomed to seeing unhoused people around her, but Benny Joseph, who lived in the alley, was the first she’d actually met. His dog, Iron Head, was her first pit bull.
“I call him that because when we met, he had a burn there,
like someone hit him on the head with a frying pan!” Benny told her. An echo of New Orleans softened his speech, and missing teeth blurred the words.
Lori smiled. “He’s beautiful!” she said, and stroked the animal’s big head as Benny beamed.
There wasn’t much else to say. The moment passed and she and Richard went back to work. It was almost a year later that they heard Benny had found a new place to stay, and that he was caring for a litter of puppies. On impulse, they dropped by one afternoon, to see if they could help. The decision would change
Carol Mithers, author of “Rethinking Rescue: Dog Lady and the Story of America’s Forgotten People and Pets,” at her home in Los Angeles.
PHOTO BY HANS GUTKNECHT, SCNG
Lori’s life.
Benny had moved up in the world. The new alley was far cleaner, and the owner of an adjacent sewing company had set him up with a “house,” a metal Home Depot tool shed that was bolted to the company’s loading dock. An extension cord and garden hose brought him electricity and water. Most importantly, the shed was surrounded by a chain-link fence with a lock. In exchange for sweeping the alley, Benny had a home that was both private and secure — for the street, million-dollar real estate.
Two more dogs had joined him: Lizzy, a brown-and-tan cattle dog mix; and Pookie, a three-legged shepherd mix. Pookie was the puppies’ mother, Iron Head their father.
“The dogs just find me!” Benny told Lori and Richard in delight when they arrived. He limped to greet them.
“They just come by me! I’m the dog man!”
Lori looked around. The compound was surprisingly tidy and smelled of Pine-Sol. A five-gallon plastic jug, its top cut off, held fresh water for the dogs. But when Benny proudly displayed Pookie’s puppies, they lay in a filthy jumble in a cardboard box, slick with their own waste. She and Richard were so disgusted they left. Then, they worried.
“The puppies will freeze in that shed,” Lori said. So, back they went, with a clean, towel-lined box for the pups and a Coke for Benny. He took both gladly, but the next time they returned, the new box was as fouled as the old. They also learned that Benny planned to sell the puppies as soon as they were old enough — and that there were more on the way, thanks to another (unfixed) female that had shown up in the alley to be impregnated by the (still-
unfixed) Iron Head.
“He’s a damn puppy mill,” Richard said.
They might have just walked away, ending the story there. But earlier that spring, Lori had bought a house. It was a major fixer, and Lori had emptied yearsold savings accounts to buy it, leaving nothing for furniture. But it had a yard, which meant that for the first time since childhood she could have a dog. Benny had sold a few of Pookie’s puppies, but four were left, and when she next visited Benny, she said she wanted one. She pointed to a squirming lump of black fur.
Benny shook his head. “If you want that one, you’ve gotta take the white one, too.”
“Oh no.”
“You gotta. I’m keeping the other two.”
“Benny, you already have too many dogs! You can’t!’
“I’m keeping these two for Pookie, so she can raise
David Clarke, 43, is unhoused and lives in a van with his six dogs. In the 10 years since he moved from Virginia to Los Angeles, he says that while he has struggled with substance abuse and been the target of gang violence, caring for his dogs is his priority.
PHOTOS BY HANS GUTKNECHT, SCNG
her own children,” he said firmly. “Nope, Miss Lori, if you don’t take this dog, I’m never going to speak to you again. In fact, if you don’t take the white one, you can’t have the black one.” He grabbed an empty beer carton and dropped the pups in it. “Here — one and two. You don’t have a choice. Good luck!”
It was a nightmare. The puppies had mange, cried all night, tore up the couch, and pooped everywhere. But the next time Lori went to Benny’s shed, she found him weeping. He had wakened to find Pookie and the puppies he’d kept dead in a pile — poisoned, he said, by “someone mean and jealous.”
“They killed my dogs, Miss Lori!” he cried.
The raw force of Benny’s grief touched her. She returned to the alley that Sunday with Polaroids of her puppies playing in the yard, so Benny could see how happy they were. With the dogs as a connection, something between them changed. She began coming to see Benny more often, and without Richard.
Benny had turned the tool shed into a real home. A bookcase he’d found somewhere was filled with old National Geographics and paperback books; a kitchen area held a tiny refrigerator, a skillet and hot plate. Pieces of carpet served as dog beds; his own was a single mattress, put on risers, out of the reach of rats. A small TV was always on, “Judge Judy” a favorite. Outside, metal shelves held his slippers on the top shelf, boots below. The left boot contained the lift that helped him walk.
When Benny was young, thieves held up a parking garage that he managed. He turned over the money, but the robbers shot him anyway and a bullet ricocheted off his shoulder and hit his spine. He could walk, painfully, but well enough to make his way around downtown collecting recyclables for cash — bottles and cans that he’d load into the shopping cart he called his “buggy” and, when possible, more profitable wooden pallets.
He spoke without
bitterness. He mentioned sisters who seemed to live more conventional lives, an ex-wife, a child, but not where they were. And while it was clear that Benny drank too much, he never revealed what chain of events had landed him on the street. It was a way of life he’d learned to navigate brilliantly. He knew which dumpsters held the freshest vegetables and when the charitable groups that handed out food were scheduled to arrive. He was always working.
With a dog at his side, he recycled, washed cars and trucks, pumped propane, cleaned and painted sweatshops, swept loft owners’ garages, and, during an era of underground parties, sold directions to wannabe hipsters.
He didn’t snitch. When another homeless man cracked him over the head with a pickaxe handle, he refused to file charges, choosing “the Biblical way,” forgiveness. He sometimes used the services of the local “night ladies,” but he treated the women kindly and
Downtown Dog Rescue volunteers Alyssa Bosch, left, and Sydney Ross take care of a dog during the Downtown Dog Rescue drive-thru vaccination clinic in L.A.
PHOTO BY MINDY SCHAUER, SCNG
sometimes welcomed them to his locked space to just sit and relax safely.
He’d done a stint in county jail, he confessed, laughing, for being a “pallet bandido,” but shunned serious crime and hard drugs. Honest, industrious, neither angry nor visibly mentally ill, he made no enemies and many friends both on and off the street.
Benny always appreciated Lori’s company and the gifts she brought — El Pollo Loco chicken dinners and German chocolate cake, a sack of dog food — but she got nowhere urging him to sterilize his animals.
“I’m doing people a service!” he said indignantly. “All my puppies get adopted! ‘Fix’ what? Miss, that is not in my blood!”
It was a source of endless frustration. Yet there was no question that Benny loved his dogs. Lori had never met anyone who spoke of his animals in such human terms, who dressed them in T-shirts when it got cold, and left the TV on when he went out so they wouldn’t get lonely. Who saw them so completely as family.
“Sometimes to me the dogs is better than people,” he told her. “People do things dogs ain’t never gonna do.” Word got out about the helpful white girl coming to the alley. Soon, other unhoused people with animal companions showed up when Lori was around. For several years, she and Richard had made it their mission to do what they could for the many strays they saw downtown — they fed some, found homes for others, and used their own money to sterilize as many as they could.
But there was something they’d misunderstood: many
of these dogs weren’t strays at all; they were unhoused people’s pets. She’d be at Benny’s talking, hear the rattle of his gate opening, see a stranger accompanied by a scruffy canine. She’d tense, then look to Benny’s dogs for cues. If the very protective Lizzy didn’t growl, the new arrivals were friends. They brought a dog that had been hit by a car and so badly hurt all Lori could do was pay to have it euthanized.
Another arrived with a gash on its side; she covered the cost of stitches.
At first, the visitors, almost all men, didn’t know what to make of her. “Are you a social worker?” one asked.
The rules and rhythms of downtown life had been mysterious to Lori, but with Benny as her guide — what anthropologists would have called “a native informant” — they took on a new coherence. The prowling dogs weren’t as aimless as they appeared, Benny explained. They had territories, alliances and turf, whose boundaries they would fight to defend. For instance, Iron Head “owned” the alley where he and Benny lived, plus one side of nearby Santa Fe Avenue. The opposite sidewalk belonged to the German shepherd guarding a truck repair yard.
“See, Iron Head always stay on his side,” Benny said in his soft drawl. “He knows if he crosses, the other dog has the right to jump him.”
People were the same. Older and “independent” homeless, like Benny, avoided the nearby Skid Row shelters and missions except to get a meal or some other service. They lived alone or with a single partner or friend, guarding their privacy and autonomy.
On the Row itself, each block was controlled
PHOTO BY MINDY SCHAUER, SCNG
by its own crew, while encampments under the bridges that spanned the LA River operated more like fiefdoms. One woman ran the Sixth Street camp like a queen. She even had a “servant,” a man who never spoke, and who made her tea. Just as in the rest of America, segregation was the rule: Black people didn’t hang with Latinos and vice versa; alcoholics looked down on “crackheads” who wouldn’t go near heroin addicts.
But everyone liked Benny. Strays always found their way to him. So did people who’d found dogs or had news of dogs. No matter when or where it happened, if someone wasn’t doing right by an animal, Benny heard about it and then he told Lori.
“The man is hitting her. I feel bad about that dog.”
The next day, she and Richard would go out looking for it.
The people Lori met through and because of Benny were impoverished, addicted, criminal, mentally ill — the kind of people anyone might cross the street to avoid. Sometimes they frightened, angered or repelled her. Some were broken, like the young prostitute born and raised on Skid Row by a prostitute mother, who had sold her for the first time when she was just 12. Some were always angry; if she dared to offer a polite “How are you?” they hissed “How do you think I am? I’m here. How would you be?”
Some who kept animals were predators, drug dealers, thieves and addicts who bred them for money or to trade for a hit of whatever they smoked or shot. Lori paid one man a staggering $750 out of pocket for a litter, because
it was the fastest way to get the puppies to safety. She soon realized the futility of that — the man had kept the mother and surely would breed her again.
But other street dwellers loved and needed their pets as she herself had depended on the German shepherd of her painful childhood. A drug dealer and sometimes pimp who lived in an Airstream trailer parked near the river cared for his two dogs, and even the strays he found. A serial burglar and crack addict doted on a small mixedbreed who was so smart he knew not to cross the street until the light turned green. The alcoholic couple who’d spent a decade on Broadway, living on the pavement in front of a liquor store that gave them credit, were surrounded by several generations of dogs, their “children.” Whatever these people’s failings, Lori could feel a connection.
Across America, many such human-animal pairs lived on the street, though no one really knew how many. The homeless hid their pets for fear they’d be taken away; the pets themselves usually ran loose, and custody of them could be fluid, with dogs and cats left behind, given away, or passed to someone else if an owner went to a shelter, rehab or jail.
According to some later estimates, maybe 10 percent of homeless people were pet owners, maybe as many
as 25 percent. The few academics who studied this group between 1994 and 2000 did agree on one thing: unhoused men and women were deeply bound to the animals they called my “best friend,” the “only thing I love” and the “only thing that loves me.”
Having a pet made being homeless less lonely, reported sociologist Leslie Irvine in her 2013 book “My Dog Always Eats First: Homeless People and Their Animals.” They brought structure, constancy, permanence and a reason to get up in the morning. Against the daily rejection of upstanding citizens, who skirted past, mouths pursed in distaste, pets said you are wanted. A dog missed you when you left, joyously welcomed you home, and brought solace when no other source of comfort existed in a cold, solitary tent.
²
Far from the downtown streets, the national movement to end euthanasia in animal shelters, popularly known as “no kill,” was bringing big changes to what America did with its “surplus” dogs and cats. To remove the “reject” stigma frequently attached to shelter animals and encourage the public to adopt more of them, some shelters adapted business strategies — “marketing” pets with appealing photos,
Wendy Williams holds Mr. Nibbles as she and her daughter Kylee Gatewood get their dogs and cats vaccinated during the Downtown Dog Rescue drive-thru vaccination clinic in L.A. Williams has adopted unwanted dogs and cats in her neighborhood.
improving the public’s access to them with longer hours. Some city governments and shelter boards in Texas, Michigan and New York adopted no kill resolutions. An ardent convert to the cause produced the nation’s first “No Kill Directory” and, in 1995, its first “no kill” conference. (While only 75 people attended, the number almost doubled the second year and, by 1999, had shot up to 600.)
In California, Gov. Pete Wilson signed legislation prohibiting the use of carbon monoxide in shelter killing, while the Hayden Act, sponsored by Tom Hayden, the 1960s activist and then state senator, extended the time a stray animal was held before it was put down. It also required public shelters to provide a place for posting lost and found notices. The no-kill effort also produced the movement that would be called “rescue.” There had always
been individual animal lovers whose passion was helping strays, though most stuck to their own neighborhoods and were seen by the public as tenderhearted eccentrics: one feeder of feral cats cheerfully told an LA Times reporter in 1987 that “we’re known as fanatics and crazy people.”
There also were loose confederations of breed enthusiasts, who sometimes stepped in to find new homes for Labrador or golden retrievers that had fallen on hard times. This new iteration was far more extensive and complex. Because would-be adopters often avoided public shelters as depressing and overwhelming, rescuers would serve as middlemen, brokers, curators. They’d find placeable pets at the shelter, take them out (“pull” them in rescue lingo) and clean them up to offer an easier, more manageable adoption experience.
The groups’ existence was vital to the success of no kill, and they appealed to animal lovers eager to make a difference. The fight to change shelter policy was morally important, but impersonal. Rescue was about salvation — literally standing between life and death. Data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics showed that the number of “animal protection” organizations formed in the 1990s was triple what it had been in the 1980s. (By 2006, it would rise another 40 percent.) Rescue was a Wild West of a world. The groups’ grassroots nature made it impossible to say exactly how many existed and who their members were. A rescue could be two people meeting in someone’s living room or a dozen
like-minded friends or a large organization with its own kennel. It could focus on saving Chihuahuas or shepherds or bottle-feeding kittens or animals with medical needs or seniors on their last legs. It could pull animals from the local shelter or from one in an adjoining county or the streets of another country. Some rescuers even bought dogs advertised on Craigslist in the hopes of cutting the supply to backyard breeders and dog-fighting rings. Everyone had their priorities and rules, which they regularly broke when some animal tugged at their hearts in an unexpected way. A rescue group could fade in a year or last more than a decade, could survive on a shoestring or tap wealthy donors to bring in millions. With the exception of zoning
Veterinarians Frank Lavac and Trudy Golub-Sowers work on a cat during the Downtown Dog Rescue drive-thru vaccination clinic in L.A.
PHOTO BY MINDY SCHAUER, SCNG
requirements and kennel licensing, there were no laws governing how such efforts operated. Rescues had to become IRS-approved nonprofits in order to collect tax-deductible donations and adopt at reduced rates from municipal shelters, but that basically meant filing paperwork. There was no mandated training, background check or rulebook. Whoever ran a rescue was the sole arbiter of who adopted its animals and how much information was required before an adoption was approved.
Often, it was a lot: signed contracts, promises of vet care and that the pet would be allowed inside a fenced yard. Slate writer Emily Yoffe would later bemoan the barriers would-be adopters faced from these animal guardians, the “Jeopardy-like quizzes” — Where will the dog sleep? Do you plan to have children? What happens if you divorce? — and lengthy applications that were “as much fun to fill out as a Form 1040.”
The growing legions of rescuers, like many past reformers — suffragists, temperance advocates, antivivisectionists — were largely female, white and middle-class or above. This was no surprise; that was the demographic with enough time and cash for the effort. There was no money to be made in rescue, in fact it was usually the opposite: the cute little terrier saved from shelter death could turn out to have distemper and need a week at the vet; the appealing litter of puppies could all have parvovirus, an infectious, potentially fatal gastrointestinal virus whose treatment could wipe out a yearly budget in a week.
It also demanded a tremendous amount of hands-on, drawn-out, emotional and all-consuming work. A rescuer had to make alliances with shelter staff and with the volunteers who helped you, who would then call when they took in a dog that was your “type.” Over and over, you had to brave the shelter itself, the smells and immensity of need, the imploring eyes and desperate cries. You had to make a series of ugly, Sophie’s choice decisions: Did you take a healthy animal over one that was injured and needed you more but would be pricey to help? You made impractical decisions just so you could sleep at night, like pulling that arthritic, not-very-adoptable 11-yearold because he looked at you with a despair you couldn’t stand.
You always faced the arbitrary cruelty of limits: each animal saved meant one
left behind.
That was just the start. Dogs often emerged from the shelter ragged, dirty, angry and scared. They pulled on the leash and tried to escape, showed teeth, found their “freedom ride” so terrifying they shit in the car. Once home, they whined and cried all night and peed in every corner. Dozens of hours of rehab and training might follow. Sit. Come. Potty. I’m your friend.
There would be vet and grooming appointments, meet-and-greet sessions and interviews with potential adopters, home visits and applications to read. Money would have to be raised — money always had to be raised — to pay for the vaccinations and sterilizations and the expected unexpected: dental issues, blood work, tumor removal, X-rays.
Rescues without kennels had to recruit and maintain a network of responsible foster families to house pets until they were adopted (while paying for their food and medicine) or arrange commercial boarding (more money to raise). Those that owned kennels needed funding to pay staff and buy food. To raise money, you had to find and target donors, schedule events, solicit donated goods for auctions, and once social media took hold, stay eternally active. It was Sisyphean, endless. The shelter never emptied. The second one animal got a home, it was time to take in another. It simply wasn’t viable for someone juggling childcare and a long-hours, low-wage job.
As varied and valuable as rescue was, though, it left some gaps, particularly in terms of what happened to needy animals outside the shelter. Nationally, there were charities that helped homeless people and scattered attempts to help street dogs. Stray Rescue in St. Louis picked up feral animals; free vet clinics operated in San Francisco and Sacramento; and twice monthly, the 64-year-old owner of a Seattle animal hospital offered
Thor, a 12-week-old Australian shepherd, leans on the steering wheel as he waits with owner Maria Ramirez during the Downtown Dog Rescue drive-thru vaccination clinic in L.A.
PHOTO BY MINDY SCHAUER, SCNG
food, veterinary exams, and shots in the basement of the city’s Union Gospel Mission. But these efforts were intermittent — “You treat people’s animals for something, and you never see them again,” Stanley Coe, the Seattle vet, ruefully told a reporter — and focused on people or pets, not the two together.
No one was observing, as Lori was, the streets’ human/animal pairs, noting that while dogs loved their homeless owners and their humans loved them back, often they failed them in the same ways they failed themselves. They couldn’t provide many basics like cleanliness, a good diet or medical care. They couldn’t take action to prevent a crisis (like an unwanted litter) or put aside cash to cover one just in case. The easy solution to that problem might be to call animal control to confiscate the pet and find it a new home.
But no one had tried what Lori began to do, long before she was able to articulate it: care for street people and their pets in a way that helped both and allowed them to stay together.
It was about justice, yes — some of the people living on the sidewalk actually had saved their pets. Surely someone who’d pulled an abandoned puppy from a dumpster and warmed it inside his ragged shirt deserved the joy it brought. But it also made sense. If an unhoused person lost his dog or it was taken from him, what good would come of it? The man would mourn. The dog, used to running free, might never adjust to life in a silent suburban yard.
It came down to an understanding that would guide Lori’s work for the next almost three decades: Some animals suffered because their owners lacked the information and/or resources to properly care for them. What if someone just … helped?
Is it really that impractical to study storytelling, languages, art, history, music?
BY SUSAN STRAIGHT
To this day, when I drive along the coastline of California, I remember Professor Bernard Pipkin, whose courses in oceanography and earth science I took as science electives at USC when I was a freshman in 1978-79. His passionate teaching about the power of weather, the ocean, faults, and the natural world stayed with me forever. He took us on a field trip to Portuguese Bend, on the Rancho Palos Verdes Peninsula, to show us the progression of the slump in that earth, which then was already visible, and is now causing homes to slide toward the sea.
Decades later, because of his charisma and the way he transmitted serious science to this writer, I point out the toes of major slumps along the Pacific Coast Highway to non-Californians, I describe the secret canyons of the ocean, and I know all the faults in California, which helps when there have been recent earthquakes in Ontario and El Sereno, shaking me and my youngest daughter.
As a journalism/English double major back then, my science and economics courses changed my life, and gave me knowledge I still use every day. Now, I’ve been a novelist and professor at UC Riverside
since 1988, and students who take my courses as electives tell me that these hours change their lives, permanently, as well.
The Humanities are always under fire for seeming irrelevant, especially now in the age of technology, advanced engineering and medical majors. But humans need story, art, history, music, philosophy and religion to stay human. Courses in history and religion are essential to help understand the major conflicts in our own nation, and the world. Music, art history,
philosophy, ethnic studies, gender studies — all are essential to help us be human.
Many of my students are creative writing majors, but over the years, I’ve created courses that are now also populated with students from biomedical sciences, engineering, history, anthropology, psychology and liberal studies. It’s been a great joy to work with them and see deep interconnection in all our disciplines. The best way to teach humans, for me, emphasizes narrative,
and lets them share their own narratives.
Speaking to hundreds of students around the nation, I help them realize narrative is essential for everyone. Yes, writers create narratives of fiction, memoir, journalism and short story. But doctors and medical professionals need to construct a narrative for each patient, for how to assist that human in surviving, or dying, and be able to transmit that story in a way the human patient understands, believes, accepts. Researchers, scientists and engineers need to lay out their work in narrative form for grant applications, and for themselves, to keep on track. Lawyers? If they can’t construct a great narrative, to prove either guilt or innocence, they won’t last a month in the courtroom. And for all my business students creating marketing plans, or computer science students creating apps, new sites, and digital media, narrative is what will sell those.
For years, I’ve taught a seminar using four novels, in different iterations, and allowing students to bring their own experiences into the course, by writing essays that touch on the books and their own lives — memoir and history of
themselves and their families.
For example, in Road Trip Fiction, I teach “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” by Ernest J. Gaines, which follows the epic life of a woman from her emancipation, at age 9, from enslavement, to the violence of Reconstruction, which few students have learned about, and her participation in the Civil Rights Movement, when she was 110 years old.
Following that is “Fools Crow,” by James Welch, set in Montana Territory in the 1870s, in which the heroes of Miss Jane Pittman, the Union soldiers wearing blue coats, are the emissaries of death for the Blackfeet tribe of Fools Crow.
In class, we speak of history, religion, earth science, psychology, medicine, biology and botany and zoology, through these novels. My students are passionate about bringing their own family histories — migration, violence against women, learning languages, education, environment and faith — to these discussions. I have ended this course before with “The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy, which leads us to possible futures. What makes this course work for students from across disciplines is that they can write memoir, fiction and essays about the ideas in these narratives, and their own.
Last year, Gabriela Mota Orozco, a Biology major and pre-med student from Santa Ana, took my seminar Writing in Many Voices, in which the novels are polyphonic, meaning told in several narrators, and also include multiple languages. This allows students to write essays, memoir and fiction with two narrators, and also write in two languages. Stories and memoirs came in English and Japanese,
Spanish, Tagalog, Korean, and also invented futuristic languages. Our discussions of the female characters in several of the novels, as well as how illness was treated, led her to work on a deeply felt essay about the death of her mother.
Ms. Orozco wrote about being the daughter who monitored her mother’s cancer treatments, who physically cared for her mother in her dying, and in drafts, I asked her to think about the emotions, the details, the body, in her piece. The final essay was so moving that I cried — and Ms. Orozco realized how she will work on her applications for medical schools, her narratives encompassing her family history, her own journey, and her desire to help others. Recently, she told me that on the fourth anniversary of her mother’s death, she finally felt different, having written that narrative.
I’m tearing up while writing this, right now.
The beauty and endless changeability of language is vital to all our narratives, and though AI threatens to alter the way we receive and use language, think about how impossible it is to translate any language, given history, slang, and community differences! I’ve looked up so many Spanish words to see whether AI recognizes particular Southern California usages, and it doesn’t, which students tell me happens to them as well. Language is evolution — and learning languages means learning humans.
Two years ago, Isaac Jun, from Yorba Linda, also pre-med, wrote a story about a grandmother who speaks Korean and little English, shopping with a granddaughter who speaks English and little Korean. He demonstrated on the
whiteboard how we could use, in context, Korean, the English translation of those Korean phrases, and the English words for those items. We practiced on food. The class was entranced, and their narratives enriched.
In fact, over the last 20 years, I’ve had countless students write fiction and memoir about three generations of language learned and lost. I tell them about my grandparents, who spoke Swiss-German, my mother, who learned English from Dodger broadcasts, and my own obsession with language, vernacular, slang, and speaking “American.” Many students have written about being child translators for their parents and grandparents, in society; these were future engineers, scientists, marketers, and especially, future teachers, social workers, and doctors.
My middle daughter, Delphine Sims, went to USC, like me. Her plan was to be a sports agent, and she signed up for pre-law courses. Ah, the humanities courses she took! She had always loved photography, and she graduated as an Art History/African American Studies double major.
She’s now an assistant curator of photography at SFMOMA, working with photographers from around the nation. I’ll never forget 2020, when she taught an Intro Art History course for UC Berkeley, as a grad student, via Zoom here in my house. (Finally, she understood how tired I’d been all these years, grading papers!) But she was so passionate about it, choosing the images for those students, most nonmajors, that I was thrilled.
Her colleague, Marcos Cisneros, is teaching a course this fall for Georgetown University, for the Culture and Politics
Program. “Lying, Liars, Fake and Frauds,” Cisneros says, “is about how artists can help us complicate and navigate” ideas of manipulation, photography, truth and lies.
Cisneros, who studied Russian literature at Princeton as an undergraduate, has enjoyed spirited debate on how “fake” works in the world — noticing a group of tall women in class, and finding out the women’s basketball team was enrolled by their advisor to this elective. The players “come straight from practice,” Cisneros said, “but they’re always down for class discussion.”
It’s a Humanities course. It will change their lives.
Susan Straight’s most recent novel, set in Southern California, is “Mecca.” Her new novel, “Sacrament,” will be released in 2025. She is a Distinguished Professor at UC Riverside.
