The house made of candy Hansel and Gretel tore at in their hunger.

The cabin in the woods shared by seven dwarves, or the house of the three bears, each invaded by a little girl lost.

Attics with deadly spindles. Ashy hearths for sweeping and sleeping.

A castle, a tower, a cave. A prison, a home, an illusion.

The settings of fairy tales — their environments, their cities, their architecture — are as critical as their characters, and I am so pleased to be able to share “House on Chicken Feet,” the creative work of Kate Bernhemier, Andrew Bernheimer of Bernheimer Architecture, Leven Betts and Guy Nordenson and Associates.

The series is named for the first of its three installments — an interpretation by Bernheimer Architecture of Baba Yaga’s home: “One can hardly think of Baba Yaga without envisioning her spectacular hut. In folklore, it is often adorned with bones and little skulls. Standing on chicken legs, it spins when she is angry.”

Now, I’ll admit — and this is more testament to my sci-fi-geekiness than any design flaw — when I first saw this picture, right, which is the lead image of the series and the image I have seen most in news coverage of same, my brain screamed, “AT-AT!” I hope I’m not the only one who can see why one might associate that image with a Star Wars “All Terrain Armored Transport” Walker, as seen from behind. (If I am the only one, I’m clearly never allowed to play Battlefront ever again.)

That said [admitted, confessed], the design itself is clever and intricate — as complex as the Baba Yaga myth itself, and I would encourage you to investigate both for yourself.  This second image shows the three dimensional “hut,” which rotates, aligns to the witch’s flight path, and even includes her wooden stove.

The second installment in the series interprets Jack’s beanstalk. While the designer interview portion of the narrative here is less developed, the explanation of the fairy tale itself is as rich is in the first installment, for which I assume we can credit and thank Kate Bernheimer. The design concept reminded me of Antonio Sant’Elia, if he had lived a century later and, perhaps, been interested in hallucinogens — and I mean that as a compliment. I admire Sant’Elia’s fascination with centralizing infrastructure, even if his designs were impossible in scale, and that same beautiful flaw is at work here.

Last, but certainly not least, is Rapunzel’s tower. From the narrative essay:

As with many fairy tales, the story ends happily — after all of the grief — with a reunion of Rapunzel and the prince. Yet some authors continue the story beyond that peaceful conclusion to show the baby-thieving witch trapped in the tower forever. So while fairy tales are often associated with “happy endings,” in fact many tales mete out, to some terrible creature, an equally terrible fate. They do so in spare and glittering language…

This “spare and glittering language” is showcased often in the works Bernheimer edits — in Fairy Tale Review and her recent award winning collection, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (Penguin). But we also can see the “glitter” of fairy tales as the detail that goes into this third design by Nordenson. The flowers, braid, and even the individual hairs are designed — materials in the whole, characters in the ensemble.

The designers received the Un-Built Work Honor Award at the 2012 AIANY Design Awards for this exhibit. I hope will encourage other artists to look at fairy tales through their lenses as well.

My parents and I moved to Mesa, Arizona when I was only three, when orange groves surrounded much of the subdivision that was our neighborhood and the nearby airfield and complex that was — at the time — Hughes Helicopters. Over the years, it became McDonnell Douglas and then Boeing, and the orange groves shrank to make way for more businesses and residences and schools, so that eventually the junior high and elementary were only a quarter mile from our house in the Buckhorn Neighborhood and the nearest grocery store was no longer the Safeway across from the Buckhorn Baths.

Yet those Baths were a fixture in my childhood. I’ve never stayed at the roadside motel, known for its taxidermy and for bringing New York Giants spring training to Mesa in the 1940s, but my mother and I used to eat across the street in the Village Inn almost once a week when I was little. My father worked nights, and my mom would go out to treat herself to dinner made by someone else. The waitresses made me a special PB&J and marveled that my mother sat and had adult conversations with a little kid as if I weren’t a little kid. While she talked to them, I looked out the window quietly at the strange sight of the Buckhorn Baths.

The buildings are low structures with creamy stuccoed walls, dark wood vegas and beams, and terracotta tiled awnings that screamed and defined my very early ideas of what it meant to be Southwestern architecture. The neighboring shopping complexes, new and 1970s or 1980s or 1990s as they might be still often echoed the color scheme of the Baths in their efforts to be “Southwestern” and to appeal to tourists and “snowbirds” (winter visitors) who frequented the antiques and crafts shops of this stretch of road.

I left the Southwest in 2000 not because I didn’t love it — I did and I do. I left because there was nowhere here to study preservation. Because if you said to people, I want to learn how to preserve old architecture that matters, they told you you had to go east of the Mississippi where there was old architecture that mattered worth studying.

Now, I knew this wasn’t true. I did papers on the historic churches of Tucson. I read articles on the preservation efforts underway in Phoenix at the territorial school, and I have been to missions in Arizona and California, to ruins in New Mexico and Colorado and Utah… I knew there was plenty worth both preservation and study right here. Yet if you wanted to study, to learn, to get a masters degree in preservation, well, that part of what they said was true. So I moved to Georgia.

Now, twelve years later I’m back in Tucson and I’m following the story of the Baths and the Diving Lady in the media, watching the preservation efforts and the iMesa campaign. The Baths are less than two miles from my childhood home where my mother still lives — a house I’ll sleep in again just next week — and here is yet another reminder that character, heritage, and a sense of place exist so close to us, right under our noses. Too often in ways we can forget until they are threatened, or lost.

Terrain.org is pleased to announce its 3rd Annual Contests in Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction:

• Poetry, judged by Suzanne Frischkorn, author of Girl On A Bridge and Lit Windowpane and five chapbooks
• Fiction, judged by Skip Horack, author of The Southern Cross and The Eden Hunter, and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University
• Nonfiction, judged by Christopher Cokinos, author of Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds and The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, and associate professor at the University of Arizona

$10 entry fee, $250 prize for winner in each genre, plus publication in our Fall 2012 “Ruin and Renewal” issue for winners. All submissions considered for publication.

View full contest submission guidelines.

A colleague of mine — Simmons Buntin — is one of the talented teaching artists contributing to this exciting workshop coming up next month.  This is an amazing opportunity; read more below! Read more

This spring I taught two classes that related to and relied heavily on place-based writing.  One thing I found ironic about this was that my own writing hasn’t been particularly place-based lately.  I’ve been reading and thinking about place constantly, yet writing not at all.  And then, just this last week, a friend who doesn’t even know about this mile-wide city idea that bubbles always on a back-burner in my brain, marveled that his Canadian hometown, which is barely a mile wide, would fit entirely within just one of many similar suburban blocks in the part of the Phoenix-metro area where I grew up.

And suddenly the mile-wide idea was in the (fore)front of my brain.

We gave each other Google maps tours of where we were born, where we grew up, and (because we’re academics), where we went to college and grad school, including our favored walks and bike paths from home to campus.  We’ve both had life experiences in small towns and mid-size cities, flirtations with Real Cities, and cross-continent moves to Tucson, Arizona (which is currently leading Outside Magazine’s Best Town Ever contest and is #1 on Forbes reporter Morgan Brennan’s list of the best cities for renters).

The alien desert, Tucson Botanical Gardens

Thinking about the literal and metaphorical paths we took got me thinking about the cultural differences we have in processing our environments.  My Canadian friend initially saw Tucson as desiccated — not just environmentally dry, which it is, but also culturally and socially lacking.  In contrast, having grown up in the suburbs of sprawling Phoenix, I find Tucson’s culture to be charming but niched; it is narrower in its appeal than the one-size-fits-most veneer of Phoenix and less diverse than the cultural mosaic of a capital-C City, like New York City (or how I imagine Toronto or Vancouver, neither of which I’ve actually visited).  It is without a doubt easier to find big concerts in Phoenix or a wider variety of food offerings in Manhattan.  Tucson’s culture is more like scavenger hunt items that have to be actively sought out.  It was only when my friend began taking twilight walks downtown that he began to see both the charm and the potential of the neighborhood, which like so much of the world has suffered in this last recession.  ”There’s beauty everywhere,” he admitted, even as our temps hit 100°F (38°C) and drove him indoors during the day. Tucson’s beauty, like the desert, is harsh and alien to those not raised in the American Southwest, and again like the desert, it is unforgiving; if you don’t “get” Tucson, Tucson probably doesn’t care.

Some cities, some neighborhoods, wear culture on their sleeves for all to see and read, while others are coy.  This idea came back to me again today when I was reading about a recently passed protection of Melbourne’s historic buildings (“Precious facades recognised in sweeping heritage order“).  Along with the article was a lovely photo gallery of some of the gems of Melbourne’s CBD (my favorite is 160-162 Bourke Street), but there were also wise words from Rohan Storey from Melbourne Heritage Action, making the point that protecting heritage doesn’t make it invincible or unchangeable; it only expresses that preference for constancy.

Patio at the Tucson Botanical Gardens

I am a preservationist, which means that my value system favors conservation of the environment, traditional design values, local materials and building traditions, and, above all, protection of the character of a place that makes it unique.  And yet, I’m polyamorous in my love of place — I love different places for different reasons, and moreover, I love the idea of how a place can change over time.  I became a preservationist in Tucson years ago, when I lived here the first time and before I knew what the word meant.  I have a mile-wide city in my head of how I live in Tucson, but I know for certain that my mental map is very different from other Tucsonans’ perceptions of our city.  I know this not just because I make my students draw their mental maps but because my own map changes every year.  The same would be true of people from Melbourne or Toronto, big cities or small towns the world over.  The challenge in the design professions now would seem to be how to honor both change and tradition, how to leave room for a variety of perceptions, and how to capitalize on the potential for beauty in everything.

A true local, at the Tucson Botanical Gardens

In which Terrain.org, an anthology I reviewed, poetry I taught, photography I admired, and students I taught conspire together to inspire something new. Read more

I am excited to announce that I will be teaching an online course for UMass Amherst’s International Heritage Online Studies program this summer. The course will run from June 7 – July 12, and the registration deadline is May 22. Below is additional information about the course, with more details coming in the next few weeks.

LLPER 40: Communicating with the Public about Heritage

Every heritage project includes, by necessity, both advocacy and interpretation. In the public arena, the heritage flag-bearer must be capable of both promoting and defending his or her cause or project, especially in the dreaded event of a prolonged battle for public opinion. What strategies can be used to persuade the public to support a heritage project on a rhetorical level? What skills must be deployed to rebut an opponent’s claims? Even in the absence of controversy, how do heritage professionals campaign for the public’s interest and investment in a heritage project? Moreover, many heritage professionals face the challenge of interpreting the heritage value of a project, or the work itself, for the public. The same skills come into play: How does one identify the target audiences of an interpretive program during the heritage management process? How can one effectively present different levels of interpretation and presentation to multiple audiences? How can an interpretation optimize the use of multi-media without becoming “all glitter and no substance”?

This course will give participants hands on experience analyzing and composing public communications regarding heritage. They will analyze the rhetorical and practical effectiveness of heritage campaigns, including those in their own communities or areas of interest. Participants will be able to focus on the structure of arguments and on the visual design of campaign materials, depending on the case studies they select. In the latter half of the course, participants will become familiar with the ICOMOS Charter for the Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites, will compare a variety of interpretation and presentation case studies, including some of their own choosing, and will be given the option to engage in a detailed critique or an interpretive design of their own.

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For more information, contact the Center for Heritage and Society.  All updates will be here: http://www.umass.edu/chs/courses/online.html

I’m no expert on feng shui by a long shot, but one of the basic ideas I do understand — and in my own way subscribe to — is the idea of leaving space (or creating space) for good things to come into your life.  If you have negative energy crowding a space or your mind, there’s no room for the good stuff to come in, whereas empty space with some good energy in it functions like a magnet for more positivity.

On the spreadsheet I use to keep track on my writing projects, for instance, I leave plenty of extra rows on the “acceptances” table but none on the “rejections” table.  When I get a new rejection I add a row for it, but with acceptances and published pieces, I always leave room for more.  (I’ve tried to figure out how to reverse this principle for dirty dishes and laundry.  No luck yet.)  I did a bit of this type of clearing out on my own closet over the holidays and was rewarded by finding a shirt on clearance in the exact shade of purple I’d been craving.

I’ve been thinking about this idea in regards to both dating and planning lately.  (The other blog’s for topics like dating, so maybe I’ll get to that next week.)  It seems like a dangerous principle to apply to an urban area in some regards — who gets to decide what’s negative, what’s the “clutter” that needs to be cleared?  How swiftly could we devolve to the Urban Renewal approach of the mid 20th century?  On the other hand, much of planning is akin to agriculture — you have to weed and plant seeds in the hope of growing the environment the people want.  To continue that analogy, most American planners now recognize the problems of “monoculture,” of single use districts.  Maybe it isn’t so much about getting rid of “negative” energy in those cases as it is about opening our minds and spaces to other uses.  Then again, some folks get pretty attached to certain weeds and their clutter, and Aldo Leopold reminded us in A Sand County Almanac that some “weeds” are vital parts of a bigger system.

Lately, Tucson’s plans for the streetcar, a light rail system, have been poking up in conversations about traffic along the University Boulevard and 4th Avenue thoroughfares.   Again and again I’ve heard friends — not trained in urban planning but well-educated and interested — suggest that perhaps once the rail is running the city will or should close those areas to private car traffic.  The idea is the same, I think, as the idea of space clearing: get rid of the “clutter” of the automobile lifestyle — move it to the edges of this area — and in so doing make room for a more vibrant pedestrian district.  It has been highly successful in some parts of the world — an interesting list of them — but isn’t a universally loved solution in the US.  Only time will tell in Tucson — including whether or not it becomes the future capital of Baja Arizona.

Half of my class was missing on Tuesday, and those of us remaining punctuated each of our points with the sounds of the season: sniffles, coughs, and throat-clearing frog sounds.  I wanted to make a joking comment that, if I had know this would happen, I would have put a flu day on the syllabus this week so we could all have stayed home.

Worse though is my literary analysis class in which we’re studying the literature of wilderness and escape while I’ve been confined indoors by my second flu of the year.  I want to scream:

Dear Universe,

I am already craving more time outdoors simply by virtue of being too busy for hikes.  I’m now too sick for even long dog walks.  Putting “Into the Wild” in the mix was salting the wound.

(Cabin) Feverishly — Jennie

But the truth is, it wasn’t the Universe that put all this great environmental writing on my plate right now — it was me.  Before Krakauer was Ed Abbey and Aldo Leopold, and I’ve been working my way through the lovely Wildbranch anthology for a while.  (Review coming soon in Terrain.org, and a local launch this weekend.)

If you subscribe to Murphy’s Law, I might as well have put the flu on the syllabus by choosing and planting such lovely seeds of outdoor craving.  That said, one thing I’ve got to be grateful for — once I get over this flu-cold-thing, at least I have this to look forward to:

Beautiful Tucson weather at Himmel Park with the kids.

I noticed the jugglers first. Himmel Park in central Tucson was particularly well-used when my dogs and I joined in last Sunday afternoon. The air was unseasonably warm for any four o’clock in January, even for Tucson, and the sun was high enough still for recreation but low enough to gild us all.

The dogs and I walk here often, about a mile and a half from our apartment. The path we take is much like Tucson as a whole; there are strip malls and small business parks, a natural foods store and an international market, coffee shops and bike shops and used car lots, including my favorite, which is patrolled by the owner’s dog. He’s a tawny fellow somewhere between my two dogs in size, and my puppy, Penny, comes alert when he’s in sight almost as much as the elder, Luke, ignores him.

She does the same when we come to the park on days like this, when we come in the afternoon instead of the morning, when the park itself is like Tucson. I smile as I watch the jugglers — one pair throwing six pins between them, a girl showing another that she’s getting the hang of a three-ball behind-the-back maneuver, and a third man tossing five balls of his own — and when I look past them to take in the rest of the park now that we’ve come fully around the library that sits at its corner, I see that here too is the mile-wide city.

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There are ball-fields marked off in the park and backstops for baseball. In the nearest field is soccer — a match a touch too intense to be casual, I wager, but still informal, lacking in jerseys or referees so far as I can tell. To the east is a group of young men using the copse of trees there to practice slacklining.  I watch them, for a minute, while the dogs eat grass, because this kind of sport fascinates me most: one struggling to perform without points or goals, man against self and nature, balance versus mind and gravity.

We move on slowly as the dogs notice a girl sitting near the edge of the soccer field, sketching on a medium-size pad. I wonder if she has tried to capture a player in motion or if she’s looking beyond them to something in the trees or sky that I can’t guess.  Not wanting to snoop or interrupt, I keep the dogs moving, a peaceable distance away from her turf.  Yesterday morning we likely cut through the very spot where she’s sitting, early enough that the grass where she’s settled still crunched with frost in the shade.

The next field is quiet, and just past its corner there is a couple playing fetch with a chubby yellow lab on the bank of the dry grassy trench that curves here to trace the back side of the fields.  They look like Gen-Xers, almost yuppies.  Penny gets excited at the sight of this dog chasing a ball — my ball? retrieve, Mama? — but I do my best to reassure her that he hasn’t stolen her ball, which is sitting on my desk at home. Despite Penny’s interest in him — or more accurately in the ball — the lab doesn’t seem to care to meet us so long as Dad keeps up the game. I can hear strains of the couple’s conversation as our paths come close and then move apart again; he is talking of work, of business, until the dog comes near, at which time his pitch rises two octaves and becomes a caricature of every dog owner, the syllables so enthusiastic and pleased, so excited by the dog’s successful retrieval of the ball yet again, that I can’t even discern words except, at the end, go-git-it.

In the backstop on the southwest corner of the park is a man with four dogs working on training exercises. I say, “Lots of friends for you today, kids.”  With the exception of a pit mix, the dogs are all low-rider dachshund types that don’t match their handler’s thick-armed, tank-top-and-tattoo exterior. Again with the exception of the pit and trainer, none seem to notice us, but the owner leashes the big dog to the backstop and continues to drill the smaller dogs as we near and go by.  The pit cocks his head at Penny, recognizing a shared ancestry perhaps, but then lies down contentedly.

After the playing fields, the ground drops to a dirt path, beyond which is a flat area with picnic tables and eucalyptus trees, as well as a jungle gym and swingset. Beneath the trees — Russian olives? I think but can’t be sure — we get a brief concert of guitar practice, what I suspect might be an informal lesson between friends, mariachi music or a Latin-American polka; my ear isn’t good enough to say for sure. We pass behind the guitar players, and not fifty feet in front of them are three or four pairs of women watching their children at play. There are a few strollers and quite a few older children, two in particular I notice sitting in the grass who seem to feel they’ve outgrown visits to the park with Mom and probably have brothers or sisters on the jungle gym nearby.  I smile and say to my own teenager — Luke is thirteen years old — “You’ll never be too old for the park, huh, big guy.”

We take the dirt path, avoiding the auditory chaos of the play area, which I’ve noticed sometimes make the puppy skittish, depending on the degree of shrieking. There is quiet, though, on this section, that deepens as we pass behind the pool, closed for the season. Ahead of us are tennis courts, and most often when we are here — a coincidence of timing I’m sure — the players seem to be only children and seniors getting lessons, though occasionally I’ll see a young couple or a pair of friends playing in earnest, a quieter, more intense game that makes me miss the days when I played. Each time that happens I wonder whether it would be cheaper to re-string my racquet or buy new, but I never think of it any other time — out of sight, out of mind.  This afternoon the two courts I look into are occupied by families, moms and dads and maybe an aunt lobbing shots back and forth with tall children in white shorts.

There is a T in the path where the courts and pool buildings and ball-fields meet, and here we turn right and follow the fields a little further. In the nearest field is Ultimate Frisbee, white tees versus colored tees, as best I can tell. Penny’s eyes light with interest as a girl with a long dark ponytail makes an excellent throw to a player on the far side — but I only know it’s an excellent throw in that it flies fast and with a curve that seems intentional and her teammates congratulate her and the young man who caught the disc. It occurs to me that I have no idea what the rules of the game are or whether a point has been earned, and I don’t find myself lucky enough to overhear someone reiterate the score, so I’ll never know for sure if that’s what we witnessed. I ask the dogs — “Do you know, kiddos? Was that a point?” — but neither seems to know, answering only by watching two speed-walking women cruise by.

We’ve taken our last turn, after which there is a stretch of path before we angle away over a pair of hills to the park’s second play area with its squishy false ground and jungle gym designed with smaller children in mind. Along the ridge of the taller hill, there is a little girl in pink tights and black boots, maybe two years old, running ahead of her mother and back again, playing a game of her own invention that involves scaring, herding, and running away from the pigeons that feed there. The dogs and I always scale these hills, rather than going around them, and skirt the play area on the other side. There we often meet eager children who scream or whisper puppies! puppies! over and over. Luke seems to love children, allowing them to pet and hug him without concern, but Penny’s reaction is still somewhat mercurial and dependent on the child’s voice and demeanor.  On one occasion, we were all caught by surprise by a four-year-old boy who ran into our midst during a vigorous grass-eating session, plopped down cross-legged, pointed at Penny and pronounced, “She looks like Dana, and you look like my aunt Ruth.” The dogs had no more idea how to respond than I did.

More common are little ones like Minerva, toddlers who slowly wander in our direction, away from Mom, Dad, and the play area, half curious to meet the doggies, half afraid. Minerva looked to be just out of diapers, and though I’d already offered to introduce her to the dogs, her dad asked if they were friendly, just to be sure. We all squatted down behind our respective babes and made the introductions, Minerva’s eyes as big and bright as coins as she imitated her father’s gesture — “Let the doggies sniff your hand” — and as she built up nerve to touch Luke’s coat.  Penny sandwiched herself between me and her brother, intent upon the grass instead.

Minerva’s parents and I talked about helping her become brave but smart about dogs and about raising Penny to be calm around children.  We talked about how maybe the next time we run into each other at the park both of our little ones will be up to actual petting.  We talked as if it was a sure thing in a city with a metro-region population of over one million that we would see each other again.

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Somewhere along the stretch between the hills and the edge of the park, I often take a knee to tussle with the dogs and give thanks that we have this time together to relax and let be. This is our time, my phone silenced in my pocket alongside the bag of their treats and my house-keys. In the same way that I am thankful to have room for them and time for these walks in my life, I am equally grateful to have that room and spend that time in Tucson.

How awesome the city of Tucson is comes up in my life, spontaneously, quite often.  On a recent afternoon, as I sat at a café looking at the mountains and the weird murals, smiling at the hipster fighting the wind to light a cigarette for an old man, listening to the first-daters behind me and the traffic hum, I realized for the first time, bright as day: I don’t want to leave.  I am one of many who have never felt at home anywhere but Tucson.

Yes, Tucson has tragedy. Yes, other cities have mountains and murals and hipsters and parks with soccer and frisbee, and even jugglers and artists. A lot has been made of Tucson’s small town feel since the shooting that killed Christina-Taylor Green, Gabe Zimmerman, Judge John Roll, Dorothy Morris, Phyllis Schneck, and Dorwan Stoddard, and injured Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others.

What makes a town of so many feel so small?

What we do, here, we do together. Working, playing, healing, teaching our children. We turn to each other, not just seeking and needing but also offering. We reach out. We extend.

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In the mornings it is so quiet in Himmel Park that I can feel the banking of pigeons over my head as they move from one field to another, from the pool fence to the hillside, the sounds of so many wings like a tumble of air. Penny is always interested in birds, whether on the ground or in flight — she is just five months old, after all.  I can’t yet tell whether her interest is dietary or merely olfactory. It is often that she startles a bird or persistently follows one that cannot be perturbed and I get to share a laugh at her antics with another Tucsonan, maybe another dog walker, maybe a jogger or a stroller-pusher or a cyclist or a guy just sitting in the grass with his laptop. Each time that she tenses on the leash — Mom! It’s a bird! or Look! Another one! — I hope that in her next life, Penny is a little girl in tights and boots, chasing birds on a hill, always within the sight of someone, no, within the sight of people who love her.