THE PEAVINE QUARTER – PRELUDE

Welcome to my new blog, The Peavine Quarter. These early posts will be mostly “Why I Went to the Woods” stuff.

Call me Mike Steiner, because that is my name. I am now retired, having taught mostly English and mostly in public secondary schools for 44 years. And so it is, finding myself without a venue, without an audience, and without a soapbox (which is to say, without a class, without a faculty room, and without a bargaining table), I have resolved to remedy that situation.

Education, American public schools, the teaching profession, and pedagogy will be recurring themes. Topics literary and cinematic will not be strangers here, and maybe other matters too, as they seem important at the time. Enough about myself – for now.

This is not The Peavine Quarterly. The title is no reference to format or frequency of publication. It is a literary allusion to a place that is, or was, actual, but more important, is a fictional place, a place of the mind.

” …while in north Reno, her [Mt. Rose’s] reign is strongly    contested by black Peavine Mountain, less austere, wilder, and the home of two winds. Mt. Rose is the detached goal of the spirit, requiring a lofty and difficult worship. Peavine is the great, humped child of the desert. He is barren, and often lowering, but he reaches out and brings unto him while Mt. Rose stands aloof… Rose begets reverence, but Peavine begets love. There is liveliness in this quarter that gets into everything.” (Clark, Walter VanTilburg, The City of Trembling Leaves 7,8)

It has been many years since I lived in Reno, and then it was first on Court Street and then just north of Wingfield Park, so the Peavine Quarter is, as I say, a place of the mind.