SoHumBorn may be gone from the Humboldt Blogosphere but tonight she’s in the LA Times.   Reporter, Sam Quinones  interviewed her—taking  a look at her fiction and her life in an article sure to have growers talking all over trim scenes in the Emerald Triangle. I’m picturing being buttonholed everywhere I go tomorrow.  Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Part of what makes our community really close-knit is a sense of having to come together to protect our way of life,” said Shannon Bridges, a southern Humboldt resident and avid reader of SoHumBorn’s blog posts. “She was the first to write about it from the inside in such a public way.”

Couples argued over the stories. Chat rooms buzzed.

Then one day in February 2009, the blog vanished like the grower in SoHumBorn’s story. Readers were bereft. A rumor spread that angry growers had figured out who she was and ordered her to shut up.

Unsparing honesty

SoHumBorn’s stories gathered power from their unsparing honesty about weed life, its giddy freedom, its compromises and disaffections.

In the late 1960s and ‘70s, hippies arrived in the lumber-depleted mountains of southern Humboldt County, searching for an alternative to mainstream America that was natural and honest.

Then came marijuana. At first, the hippies grew it for their own use. As its price rose relentlessly, they became entrepreneurs and outlaws. They proved surprisingly square. Pot money allowed them to create self-reliant villages. They had Little League and quilting bees and volunteer fire departments.

Want to listen to her read one of her stories? I recorded her reading Tooth Fairy-one of her sweetest pieces, I think—and the Times put an audio link on their site.

To read the rest of her stories, go here.