11/5/09–The Owens Valley in California on the east side of the California High Sierra where I was born and raised  happens to be a location especially revered by a friend I met when I was in my 60s.  She is a gifted high school English teacher, now retired in Bakersfield, a city in the San Joaquin Valley on the west side of the Sierra where I lived in later years, not far from the ciry in which she has lived all her life.  She constantly inquires about records I have about life in Owens Valley–my own history and farther back into my parent's history there. We have visited there together and I showed her sites I remember and what little history I know.  We exchange e-mails frequently and visit each other whenever we can.

How I met her is a writer story.  As a member of the Sierra Club in the 1970-80s, I received a newsletter published by a local chapter. It was called The Roadrunner.  In it I read in  each issue charming nature essays by a woman I did not know.  Because I  particularly admired her writing in the latest issue and then led a writer workshop in my community, 50 miles from hers, I wrote praising her writing skills and telling her of my writing and my workshop–in case she might want to bring her talents to share with us.  This is the only "fan" letter I have ever written to anybody in my long life. The upshot of my letter to her was her letter of thanks to me and resulted in our planning to meet.  We have been friends ever since, visiting as often as possible and e-sponding regularly about her poetry workshop and my prose workshops here–and her questions about one thing or another in "our" Valley. I  subsequently (largely due to her interests and questions) wrote and sold both tavel and  historical articles about that area..

Writing provides many avenues to new friends and new writing ideas.–Willma