‘Inside of a Dog’ encourages readers to stop and smell the roses

I used to merely go for runs with my dog. Not that that was a bad thing—my vivacious Australian Kelpie needs the three-mile jogs as much as I do. But after reading “Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know” by Alexandra Horowitz, we’ve begun to intersperse our athletic pursuits with outings of a different persuasion.

We now go for “smell walks,” where Toby’s nose is in the lead, and I follow along as he tracks the invisible history of each creature that has passed by every bush on our route. I let him urinate on fence posts, and I even indulge his yearning to roll on the ground in all but the most offensive-smelling places.

MAH-commissioned book details history of local music

When Frank Perry was just a kid, he had a music teacher by the name of Vera McKenna Clayton, who taught in Santa Cruz from the 1920s to the 1970s. Perry doesn’t remember too much about Clayton, except that “she looked like she was really old,” he says. It wasn’t until much later that Perry realized while researching a book and finding out more about his former teacher, that “she was only a few years older than I am now.”

Editor’s note: David Allen Sullivan teaches English and film at Cabrillo College. The following poems were taken from his latest book of poems about the Iraq war, entitled “Every Seed of the Pomegranate,” published this month by Tebot Bach. A publication celebration reading will be held at 6 p.m. on Sunday, July 15 at the Cabrillo College Horticulture Center, Room 5005.  
Photo of the author by Amina Barivan.

Local writer JD Arnold pits humans against ravenous animals in new doomsday comic

The phrase “zombie apocalypse” has recently skyrocketed up to the No. 2 spot on Google’s list of trending search terms, thanks to a string of grisly murders and cannibalism. But if you were to ask Santa Cruz comic book writer JD Arnold who controls the fate of the human race, you might be surprised by his answer: animals infected by a mutated rabies virus.

A young woman loses everything, then finds herself on the Pacific Crest Trail

She was only 22 when she lost her mother to cancer, fell out of touch with her remaining family members, and began to drift from her husband. A few years later—after a rampage of extramarital sexual escapades with men whom she had no feelings for, her subsequent divorce, and a fling with heroin—she made a spontaneous and unlikely decision: Cheryl Strayed set out to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. Alone. With no cell phone or GPS, (this was 1995, before the days of smartphones), and with only her ill-fitting boots and a backpack that weighed nearly as much as she did.