Welcome to the newest incarnation of Zacate Canyon, a website I began a decade ago as a way of sharing stories, reflections on teaching, and interviews with fascinating people. Have a look around: the website is now cleared of some dated and irrelevant material, easier to navigate, and also  incorporates my blog, Still Amazed.

I think you will find some good company here. The interviews are the result of an oral history project I started several years ago in which my students and I had conversations with a number of remarkable people. These include ranchers and elders of our community, Chumash descendents, inspiring teachers, a physician who founded a health care clinic along the Amazon, even a world-famous musician and songwriter. Each was gracious about talking with us and sharing their stories and life wisdom.

The blog is an ongoing collection of essays, memories, and thoughts, often about life here at the Ranch, the unlikely place where I make my home. As the blog's name, Still Amazed, suggests, it is a documentation of wonder -- along with bewilderment and searching, of course, but mostly amazement, and hope.

I am a former teacher, a freelance writer,  and a fellow of the South Coast Writing Project. I believe, as the poet Naomi Shihab Nye expressed it, that “Our words and images, land to land, era to era, shed light on one another. Our words dissolve the shadows we imagine fall between.”So maybe Zacate Canyon is a place for dissolving some shadows, feeling less lonely, and pausing to be present.If any of these words touch you, please send your comments and responses.

I started the blog portion of this website in 2007. It was April, a good time for beginnings. Bees were buzzing in the orchard, the hills were tinged with yellow mustard, and the world felt new again. I had been thinking about creating a blog for quite some time. I hoped it could be a more fluid and potentially interactive version of my website, Zacate Canyon. I struggled with the title, which assumed disproportionate significance. On some days, Trying Not to Cry would have suited me best, but I settled on Still Amazed simply because, despite everything, I am.The blog, like me, is inconsistent and erratic but follows a fundamental thread. And sometimes it goes dormant, as do I, but so far it has always managed to bounce back. I see it as a place to share stories, memories, and thoughts on writing, teaching, and life, a place to discover those little sparks that somehow connect us.I’m based at a ranch in rural California, but you may find reminiscences here of growing up in Brooklyn and on Long Island, as well as fond recollections of fat-tire bike adventures, a bit of local history, and maybe the occasional rant, though mostly I seek reasons to be hopeful. I’d like to showcase people who are doing great things, share ideas and experiences from my years of teaching and learning, give poetry and writing its appropriate place of honor, and invite your questions and feedback.In other words, this weblog is a work in progress, as I suppose they all are, and I don’t know how it will evolve…but there’s a light in the window and I hope you’ll stop by.To open to the current post of Still Amazed, go here.  Older posts can be found by clicking on one of the categories listed over there on the right, searching by date, or simply scrolling and strolling through.Linger awhile...

Teaching is more than a profession. It's a way of life and a way of thinking. It's never finished. It's highs and lows. It's drudgery and epiphany. It's exhilarating and exhausting. Some days are so much fun you go home grinning. Others leave you thinking that it's time to do something else. But every day of teaching is a day filled with opportunities to have a significant impact on a kid's life, and that makes you want to be a better person than you are.Perhaps it is in the nature of teachers to reflect and verbalize, compare notes, question themselves, and encourage others. In this section, I've collected a few of my own thoughts about the profession. I was still teaching when I started doing this and have since retired, but the ideas remain current, I think, so I have decided to keep them here in the updated website. I like talking to teachers, and being a teacher has been a huge part of my life.  (You can also find several relevant blog posts under Still Amazed if you look under the category of teaching; maybe at some point I will transfer them over to here.) I've also included a couple of "how to" essays written when I was an online mentor for new teachers as part of a national program, but even after having taught for such a long time I'm not sure I like giving advice. Let's just consider this a place to touch base. I still have way more questions than answers.

Out of print, but now available in digital form! This is my first book of essays, originally published in 2008, and it's ready for you at the Kindle store.You can click here to buy itThe thirty-one essays in The Savage Faith of the Secret Heart are mostly based on memories: everyday betrayals and misplaced loyalties, small redemptive moments and confusions of the heart, long pointless journeys on Greyhound buses, a flooded Gaviota creek, and saying goodbye in so many unexpected ways to beloved people, places, and things. Encompassing the author’s Brooklyn childhood, her 1960s Long Island adolescence, and her improbable present life on a windswept ranch on the California coast, the book is an essentially American tale, complete with deep Old World roots and westward movement, pausing, like so many of our narratives, at the very edge of the Pacific. It offers readers a powerful and memorable experience, one which can compel them into examining their own lives and begin exploring experiences of their own that are over, but by no means over with.“While these essays contain fragments of a life story,” writes reviewer Robert Isaacson, “Ward offers her readers far more than mere autobiography: With agility, precision, and even downright elegance, her lucid prose offers us insight into how a mind makes meaning by directly confronting ghosts we once knew all too well but now pretend no longer to see. But those ghosts are still there, wandering our hallways, dragging their chains, making their clunking night noises, seeking resolution, consolation, peace. We all know that. We can only fool ourselves so long. The Savage Faith of the Secret Heart offers numerous clues as to how to confront those ghosts and see them for what they are, and, by embracing them, find the words to set them free.”“Cynthia Carbone Ward writes with radiant care and exquisite, heartening beauty. Her essays make us better human beings. The cluttered spaces inside feel smooth and whole again.” Naomi Shihab Nye