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Personal
Proclivities
Judith
Broadhurst lives and works in a rustic, riverside cabin among the redwoods
of the Santa Cruz Mountains in California. This puts her within 20 minutes
of Pacific Ocean coves and beaches, Monterey Bay, redwood forests and
the rather idyllic town of Santa Cruz, which is populated by about 50,000
iconoclastic souls. She treasures her beautiful, peaceful surroundings
and the retreat and solitude when she wants it, but she's rightfully smug
about also living within 40 minutes of Silicon Valley and only about 90
minutes from one of the world's greatest cities, San Francisco.
She works
whatever hours it takes to meet deadlines. Although she loves working
from her charming home
office (see photo), flexible and adaptable being that she is, she also
enjoys getting out among people and working onsite at clients' offices.
In addition
to her local yoga classes, she occasionally attends spiritual or
self-improvement retreats in the magnificent setting of the Esalen
Institute in Big Sur. She's a local disaster relief volunteer
caseworker for the American Red Cross and certified by FEMA as a Community
Emergency Relief Team (CERT) volunteer.
She swears
she's learned only five things in life, so far:
1. Don't
talk in elevators because it embarrasses people, so that's rude.
2. Never
order the combination plate in a Mexican or seafood restaurant.
3. Shun music
with "greatest hits" in the title.
4. Avoid
traveling anywhere that you're going to stay for less time than it took
you to get there (unless you're getting paid consulting fees high enough
to justify the total time, of course).
5. Uh, surely
there was a fifth thing....
Like most
writers, Judith had a rather colorful and erratic employment history before
becoming a full-time freelance writer and editor. She was a flight attendant
for Delta Air Lines, way back when they were called stewardesses and had
to agree to resign by the time they turned 32 or got married, whichever
came first (true!). During the '80s, she got heavily involved in jazz
and blues as a talent agent, concert promoter, marketing director, fundraiser
and, toward the end of all that, a magazine columnist and a newspaper
arts and entertainment stringer. (Check here
for her favorites of the couple of hundred reviews, profiles and columns
she wrote, before realizing that it's not a good idea to turn something
that's pure joy to you into work.)
Her "road
music" travel case holds 15 CDs, so this is just a starter list of
the albums she considers absolutely essential if you're going into solitary
confinement:
- Charles
Mingus, "Mingus Ah Um"
- Abdullah
Ibrahim, "Water from an Ancient Well"
- Miles
Davis, "Kind of Blue"
- Eric Clapton,
"Unplugged"
- Bennie
Wallace, "Twilight Time"
- U2, "Joshua
Tree," but the version of "I Still Don't Know What I'm Lookin'
For" (Judith's theme song) on "Rattle and Hum"
- Nancy
King and Glen Moore, "Potato Radio" (Justice Records)
- Delibes,
"Lakmé" (Yes, it's opera, but she has eclectic tastes.)
- Paul Simon,
"Hearts and Bones" or almost any album of his
- One of
the early albums by Oregon (the band, not the state), a blues harp album
yet TBD (if only they wouldn't sing, too), and maybe selections from
Ben Webster, Joshua Redman, Marcia Ball and Michelle Shocked.
Judith feels
she would finally have reached her ever-elusive goal as a writer if she
could achieve, even occasionally, what designer and cultural historian
Edwin Schlossberg said good writing should do: "The skill of writing
is to create a context in which other people can think."
"Take
risks, make mistakes" and "nothing changes if nothing changes"
are her slogans. She also tries to
live by this wisdom from The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin:
"When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information
grows unprofitable, sleep."
But the quotation
taped to her monitor as a reminder of what's really important is this:
"Those
who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone
or weary of life." —
Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring
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