The final destination of The Grapes of Wrath is California, land of (dis)illusion. Much like all the would-be starlets who end up waiting tables in Los Angeles and the “actors” who wind up on their knees, the Oklahoma farmers didn’t find the salvation they had longed for.
Nearly 100 years earlier, people were coming for the […]

After visiting with The Outsiders in 1960s Tulsa, I went back in time to rural Oklahoma in the 1930s. It seemed to me that Ponyboy and Johnny could have been direct descendents of some of the farmers who lost their land in The Grapes of Wrath.
Instead of traveling across the country on Route 66, these […]

How come everybody I know from Oklahoma is shrouded in a cloud of drama? Is there something about Oklahoma? Maybe it’s the ghosts of spurned Cherokees, haunting the land. Or maybe all the lost souls in the world get reincarnated into Oklahoma babies. Who knows?
Or maybe it’s just that everybody I know from Oklahoma was […]

Sometimes I live vicariously through my friends’ travels. I look at their vacation pictures, listen to their stories, imagine myself there. One of my dearest friends is a huge fan of Stephen King. In fact I think she’s read everything except his memoir, On Writing (because she doesn’t really do memoirs).
So when the long-awaited final […]

There’s this spooky ghost hotel resort called the Overlook, high in the Rocky Mountains near Estes Park, Colorado. So maybe it doesn’t physically exist, but it does exist in the minds of many. Like unicorns and Santa Claus and the boogey man, the Overlook Hotel is eternal.
There are two versions of the hotel. One has […]