I have never been able to take care of houseplants. I’ve always been envious of those who can nurture a baby plant, some suckling sprout or wispy, delicate little thing and coax such life. A friend told me to start with Dracaena trifasciata—or in the more common parlance: Mother in Law’s Tongue, commonly considered one of the easiest plants to care for—and yes, even that plant I failed, burning the edges a crispy brown after a month or so in my care.
Then, after a Spring weekend retreat in the redwoods, where I wandered through hundreds of various Californisa ferns: Athyrium filix-femina (the lady fern) and Polystichum munitum (the Western sword fern), I discovered in a second-hand bookstore in Santa Rosa: published in 1973 with all its hippy wisdom and hand drawn illustrations; right there, I vowed to learn the art of fern husbandry. * In the summer 2017, I began my novel as a story of friendship and intimacy between men. I wanted to craft a novel that was playful and silly and dirty because in my two previous non-fiction books and , I wrote with an intensity and a seriousness, trying to push back on toxic masculinity, to highlight the complexity of contemporary fatherhood, to counter the ever present Adam Sandler trope of bumbling grumpy men discovering they could—to their shock—be gentle and kind and caring; they could be human, and still save the day.
So with I shifted my writing focus to celebrating friendships and hook-ups and biking city streets and skinny-.
