Happy Camp News

Honey Receives A Copy Of Dear Mad’m
June 1, 2014 · Posted in Notes from Above Ground

NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND

By Honey van Blossom

(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)

A package arrived in the mail with my cousin Little Barbara’s address in the top left hand corner. I found a note inside the book in the package. Little Barbara wrote she and her sister Daina thought I would enjoy reading a book about an eighty-year old woman who begins a new chapter in her life in the mountains of Trinity County (sic: actually Siskiyou County), near where our Aunt Big Barbara taught in Blanchard Flat School in Hoosimbim Mountain during the Great Depression.

I’m approaching seventy, and my cousins approach eighty. This book seemed like it would be just the ticket to a new way to look at growing old.

What reading the book — and then following up with some research — turned out to be was the revelation of a life that vividly soared without a safety net over a ranch in Stockton, literary San Francisco and a remote cabin near Happy Camp in Trinity County. (sic) The author was not an eighty-year old; she was close to ninety when she finished writing it.]
Although Honey was incorrect about Trinity County, Dear Mad’m moved to her cabin near Clear Creek just down river from Happy Camp, CA and was in Siskiyou Mountains of Siskiyou County, California. She seems to have enjoyed the story. Stella moved to the mining claim when she was 80, after a leg injury, and wrote the story, but it went to various publishers and had final editing from the eventual publisher by 1955.
The printing was postponed to 1956 after McCall’s Magazine wanted to include it in serialization that spring.

To see more of Honey’s account of the story: http://boryanabooks.com/?p=4514