I MOVED TO CALIFORNIA from New York about two years ago. I spent a year driving around the state in small trips and went to some pretty cool places: Yahoo!, the Castro, Chez Panisse, a Fresno cattle ranch, a Silicon Valley startup, the big wave spot Maverick's. I went to parks like Joshua Tree, Sequoia, and Yosemite. I met people like Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, the rapper Funk Doobiest, the Eureka fire chief, a Tahoe snowboarder. These are the types of things I wrote about in the book.

California is a beautiful place to sketch (just think of the Big Sur coastline). It's also a wild, diverse state and I tried to get that across. There are more stories in the book, more writing. I wanted to get inside the lives of the people I met—I spent most of my time at home in Berkeley working the phone and trying to convince people to let me inside their ranch or boat or prison. My most recent book is always my favorite book, but this one is really close to my heart.

Read an excerpt from California: A Sketchbook

Published by:
Chronicle Books 2000
ISBN 0-8118-2697-X $17.95