Mrs. Siler is not so hapless ... Photo from Curly Wurly

In the spirit of "Mr. Hulot’s Holiday," the French cinematic parfait from 1954, I’ve decided to take a vacation.

Because this school year is in full swing, my holiday won’t involve jumping on a plane and heading to a seaside resort in the south of France, where director Jacques Tati’s character M. Hulot underwent a delightful series of mishaps.

Instead, I’m taking a reading holiday – a break from writing for a week or two to whittle down the mounting pile of books that is stacking up on my bedside table. Over the next few days, I hope to finish reading Sandy Tolan’s The Lemon Tree, Lou Ureneck’s Backcast, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

Wine and words: A perfect pairing Photo from Jupiter Images

Last week, I spent half an hour on the phone with a book group from Minnesota. Based on the laughter and high spirits I heard on the other end of the line, these fifteen or so women seemed to be having a rollicking good time together.

One explanation may be that they were sampling some of the wines that make appearances in The House of Mondavi – the Charles Shaw brand sold at Trader Joe’s (better known by its nickname of Two-Buck Chuck) and the Robert Mondavi Private Selection. As one of the members quipped, “Sadly, we just couldn’t afford Opus One!”

I was also fascinated to see that the group had just begun a blog called Chapter Chat. I’ve been in a book group now for eight years (it’s the impetus for my reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.) What a good idea.

Photo by Copia

Copia, the American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts, has struggled with an identify crisis even since its broke ground in 1999.

Should it be a showcase for the Robert Mondavi Winery? Should it be a museum? Or, should it be a place to experience the subtle pairings of food and wine? Or should it be a community center devoted to “the good life” – food, wine, and the arts, all in one?

Copia has tried on all of these hats. Graced with a stunning building by New York’s Polshek Partnership, the architectural firm that had overseen the renovation of Carnegie Hall and a lovely site on the banks of the Napa River, one would think it would draw in many wine tourists, as well as locals.

But membership levels and visitors have been disappointing. A group of friends and I were there this past Friday, after touring several wineries. Despite free admission, Copia was nearly empty.

As my plane landed in Boston this afternoon, I checked my email and found news of the latest twist in Copia’s troubled search for its calling. It was a note from Larry Tsai, Copia’s director of marketing, announcing that he’d be leaving “in the near future.”

His boss, Arthur Jacobus, who is Copia’s president, “will be leaving the organization – effective, tomorrow, Friday, March 14, 2008,” according to Larry’s note. Gary McGuire, former Copia chairman of the Board of Trustees, would step into Mr. Jacobus’s job on Monday.

Last week, Copia’s much admired “wine guy” Peter Marks jumped ship to join Icon Estates, owned by Constellation, as its President of Education. It was Constellation that bought the Robert Mondavi Corp. in 2004.

Peter worked at Copia for seven years, living through many of the changes, yet sent a note about grateful he was to have had the “opportunity to help build the dream of Robert Mondavi and Julia Child.”

After taking a peak into Copia’s stunning lobby on Friday afternoon, one of the friends I was with quipped “this would make a great high school.” He's a high school football coach, so perhaps that explains his take on should be done with this slightly-out-of-the-way spot.

Copia was Robert Mondavi's first big philanthropic project after his company went public in 1993. His dream, modelled on the Rothschild's museum at Chateau Mouton, was one that was shared with his friend Julia Child. One can't help but wonder what Mr. Mondavi and Mrs. Child would think of the troubles at Copia now...

I’ll confess that my reading holiday did indeed involve jumping on a plane and landing in a distant place. Not to the south of France, but to Boston, where the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism is taking place.

An offshoot of Harvard University’s prestigious Nieman Fellowships for mid-career journalists, this annual conference brings together some of the best and the brightest of the world’s storytellers over a weekend.

Photo by Boston University

I had the great fortune of attending a “master class” this morning with Lou Ureneck, chair of Boston University’s Journalism Department and author of Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-Fishing and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska. Lou also happens to be a friend of my Wall Street Journal colleague Steve Stecklow, who described Backcast as one of the best memoirs he’d ever read.

I’d agree – and not just because so many of the issues Lou explores in the book overlapped my experience as a parent of a soon-to-be-teenager and as a child of divorced parents. But what made Lou’s book stand out for me was his very distinct voice, which I would describe as human, funny, slightly laconic, and enormously likeable.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

I knew that the parents of teenagers are pitiful and hopeless in the eyes of their children. I took some solace in the thought.

I kept a supply of breath mints. I sucked in my stomach around him. And I never, ever, went around in my underwear. As the parent of a teenager, I had learned to keep my capacity for being disgusting to a minimum.

Lou told our class, made up of a dozen or so accomplished journalists and authors, that he had rewritten the first pages of Backcast a hundred times. Literally, a hundred times. And for him, the hardest part was getting the voice just right. Well, congratulations, Lou, because you did. What a wonderful book.

Tom French’s session on Sequencing was terrific too. He started by projecting the text of an email he’d received from his son on a screen: (nat+hockey stick+momentum+my eye+ow) explaining how that very short communication told the story of how his son Nat had gotten a black eye. He also mentioned that he’s been working on a multi-part series about zoo animals. I’m going to keep an eye out for that one.

My last session today was titled “Behind the Blue Pencil: Editors Talk about the Long Form,” featuring Jon Marcus, the former editor of Boston magazine, Larry Habegger, co-founder of Travelers’ Tales Books, and Vanessa Mobley, a senior editor at The Penguin Press in New York.

I asked Vanessa to tell us about her editing of Caroline Elkins’s Imperial Reckoning, a history of Britain’s gulag in Kenya which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. Based on her Harvard dissertation, Elkins book is a serious, dense book replete with original research. It is also very dark, in that it deals with a very shameful episode in history.

Vanessa explained that three months after buying Elkins’ book, she and the author learned of another book being published on the same subject. To try to beat their rival to publication, Vanessa came to Cambridge and spent a week with Elkins to edit her manuscript. They didn’t end up publishing before their competitor – but their close collaboration produced a book that the New Yorker described as “an extraordinary act of historical recovery.”

After that story, the conference attendees in the audience hoping to land a publishing deal couldn’t make their way up quickly enough to introduce themselves to Vanessa, which was not surprising. Who wouldn't want such an editor?

Photo by Nubar Alexanian

As a reporter, I often find that the most important conversations with sources came when I snap close my reporter’s notebook and started heading to the door. That’s what I discovered yesterday.

The second day of the Nieman conference was packed with smart, funny and inspiring speakers. Ann Hull and Dana Priest kicked the morning off by explaining how they reported their Washington Post series on the harrowing conditions at Walter Reed hospital.

One funny moment was their description of their “show-down” interview with the army brass was the image they painted of Ann in a down jacket, with its feathers sticking out, and a long row of colonels, all sitting behind them, a placement that Dana said, to much guffawing in the audience, “was all about messing with your head.”

Josh Benton, a Dallas Morning News columnist on leave from the paper for a year as a Nieman fellow at Harvard, gave a brilliant talk on blogging – ranging from the British poet/journalist James Fenton, who wrote “All the Wrong Places,” as an example of a collection of “reporting in its natural state,” to an exploration of the poet William Blake’s comment about establishment painter Joshua Reynolds, that “this man was born to depress art.”

Perhaps most moving and convincing of Josh’s point about the power of raw reporting was the teletype messages of John F. Kennedy’s assassination sent by a local wire reporter, and now displayed at the Sixth Floor museum in Dallas. I’m heading to that city this spring and plan to take a look at those dispatches.

As fascinating as those talks were, the most interesting conversation of the day occurred around a dinner table with that night with a far-flung group of journalists and authors who gathered to talk about the subject of history and journalism.

Sandy Tolan, who has recently joined the Annenberg School at USC, talked a bit about how he wrote The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, which was a National Book Critics Circle Finalist for nonfiction. In 1998, he was searching for a story to mark the 50th anniversary of the Israel’s declaration of independence, an event that Palestinians refer to as “the catastrophe.”

Sandy said he felt like a “casting agent” as he searched for the right people to tell the story. He found them in a Jewish family and a Palestinian family who had occupied the same house, weaving together their two stories into overlapping tragedies. With the goal of relating the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in human terms, he faced the challenge of how to stitch together these family stories against an enormously complex conflict, a process he described as being “like making a quilt.”

Sandy’s agent, David Black, warned him his book couldn’t just be a glorified transcript of his 43-minute radio documentary that aired in 1998 on NPR’s Fresh Air. That same year, Sandy attended the Nieman conference, where he came to the conclusion that he should aim to write a “history book in disguise” – and that the emotional heart of his story was the journey and intersection of these two families.

For the factual backdrop to these families’ circumstances, Sandy’s friend, the poet Erica Funkhouser, suggested he imagine putting the factual material into his book with great restraint and care, like drops out of an eye-dropper. Sandy asked for help, sending all or parts of his book to 43 readers.

Perhaps the best advice he got was from a top editor at Bloomsbury. He’d already asked for two extensions and was determined not to ask for another. So he mailed off the manuscript. Not long after, he got a call from the editor, who started off the conversation saying she knew he’d be upset with what she had to say and to sit down.

Your book isn’t ready, she told him his book, and Bloomsbury needed to extend his deadline again. “She saved me from myself,” Sandy said. He used the extra months to read a few extra books, lace in details, re-read all the chapters, and work on his source notes. The result was a history in disguise that the Washington Post called “an extraordinary book.”

Photo by Spark Media

When I first listened to the book King Leopold’s Ghost on tape a few years ago, I was mesmerized by the true story of the Belgian King’s rule of the Congo. I can still remember standing in our little kitchen long after I’d finished the dishes; hands clad in yellow plastic gloves, reluctant to click off the recorder as I listened to this horrifying tale unfold.

I found myself wondering about the person who had written such a powerful story and I wished I could ask him about the enormous research he’d done in constructing a narrative of King Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo. Was the author Adam Hochschild a historian or journalist? We’d recently moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area after living in London through most of the 1990s. Now, after living and working here for a while, I now realize that Adam Hochschild is revered among many journalists and writers for his long commitment to social justice (he was a co-founder of Mother Jones magazine) as well as his generosity in helping other writers find their way.

Adam Hochschild has also long been a star of the Nieman Conference. His eloquence, modesty, and avuncular manner encourage even the greenest reporter to muster the courage to approach him. Sure enough, his talk at this year’s conference was spellbinding as he began with the proposition that “history is too important to leave to the historians.”

He admitted that although he initially worried that historians might feel resentful of him as “an unlicensed interloper,” in fact, the opposite was true. He asked six professional historians to review his most recent book about the British anti-slavery movement, Bury the Chains, to review his text before publication. Five of the six agreed. The result? “They saved me from making dozens of mistakes,” he told a crowd in one of the ballrooms of Boston Sheraton. Some of those historians even gave him literary tips.

He was drawn to writing historical narratives, after a long and distinguished career as a print journalist, because of “the thrill of time-traveling,” he explained, as well as a sense that books on history were likely to last, unlike newspaper stories.

Adam answered many sharp questions from a distinguished group. The first was from Shirley Christian, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and author of “Before Louis and Clark: The Chouteaus, the French Dynasty that Ruled America’s Frontier. She wondered if Adam would rule out writing a book about a subject if there weren’t many diaries and letters available about or from them. Adam noted that people have found interesting ways of writing about subjects when there isn’t a lot of material available, citing the many biographies written of Shakespeare.

Bloomberg’s Peter Green asked about the opposite problem: what to do if there’s too much research material available. “That’s the toughest thing of all,” said Adam, who continued that he’s working on a book about World War I – a subject on which 140,000 books have been written, though only about 85,000 in English. His approach is to choose characters to tell the story through, and then search out everything he can about their lives.

Miriam Pawel, a former L.A. Times reporter and editor who is nearing completion of her book on the United Farm Workers movement, asked a question that I struggled with in reporting and writing The House of Mondavi: how do you reconcile conflicting memories of the same event? Adam answered with the experience that most newspaper reporters have had in interviewing three or four witnesses at the scene of an accident: “memories are not reliable.” He suggests being honest about the reliability of your source, including flagging any skepticism or doubts you might have about it.

Eric Scigliano, an editor at a Seattle monthly magazine and author of Michelango’s Mountain and Love, War and Circuses, asked if Adam had ever considered abandoning a book project because the subject seemed too esoteric. Adam answered that his literary agent had sent out his proposal for King Leopold’s Ghost to ten editors. Nine rejected, citing a lack of interest in Africa. “The tenth got it,” Adam told the audience, “It’s not a book about Africa, but a book about greed, ambition, and imperialism.”

Since it was first published by Mariner Books in 1998, Bury the Chains has sold 400,000 copies worldwide. It was a National Book Critic Circle finalist, won a J. Anthony Lucas awardn and, most importantly, prompted a radical rethinking of the history of Belgium’s rule of the Congo.

As he told the writers gathered together this Sunday morning, summed up by Hermann Melville in Moby Dick, “to produce a mighty book you must choose a mighty theme.” So, Adam told us, write about whales, not fleas.

This weekend, I spent 48 hours in Boston’s Prudential Center without venturing outside once. Yes, the fat snowflakes that drifted down past our hotel window Saturday morning were an enticement to venture outside. But not enough of one to convince me to miss any of the conversation taking place inside, at the Nieman conference.

Making the trip to Boston for the weekend involved taking a trans-continental flight, spending three nights in a hotel (with my lovely room-mate, Sarah Mott, who had recently returned from Hong Kong,) lining up a sitter for our two boys, and plunking down $375 to attend the conference. It also meant missing such sweet moments as the opening day parade for the start of Little League, which our younger son plays and my husband coaches.

So why did I do it?

One thing I didn’t hear anyone mention at this year’s Nieman conference was the “New Journalism” – that movement pioneered in the mid-1960s by Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin. Perhaps because there seems to be a growing sense that at least some narrative nonfiction writers have gone too far in plucking techniques from novelists and applying them to journalism.

What drove this home for me was one of the books I bought from the Harvard Book Store to read on the airplane. It was The Fact Checker’s Bible: A Guide to Getting It Right, by Sarah Harrison Smith, who worked as a fact-checker at The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. Ms. Smith argues that the fabrications of Jayson Blair of The New York Times, Stephen Glass of The New Republic, and, stretching even further back, Janet Cooke, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her fictionalized story about an eight-year-old heroin addict which ran in the Washington Post.

Photo by Mark Richards

Last night, on the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, I heard Anne Lamott speak at Book Passage, one of my favorite bookstores.

Anne (often referred to as Annie) was at the tail end of a three-week tour for the paperback release of her book, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith. She was in particularly fiery form, unleashing her hilarious fury at everyone from Dick Cheney to John McCain to the media pundit who criticized Hilary Clinton for fat ankles.

A hometown favorite, Annie grew up in nearby Tiburon, spent a lot of time in Bolinas, and now lives in Fairfax. With her dreadlocks tied back in a batik scarf and wearing red clogs and a lilac-colored jumper, she spoke to a large, standing-room only crowd, including many longtime family friends.

Green labels - coming soon to a wine label near you? Images courtesy CCOF

This morning, I climbed into my VW and headed north, to Sonoma’s wine country, where tender green buds were just beginning to unfold from the trellised vines. I pulled into the driveway of Sonoma-Cutrer, where a flock of sleek geese were pecking at shoots, and sat down in a conference room facing nineteen – yes, nineteen – glass stems, each filled with a few ounces of wine.

I love wine, but I don’t like it much at ten in the morning. Still, these were “green” wines, produced through sustainable vineyard and winery practices and on offer for tasting as part of an event jointly hosted by the California Association of Winegrape Growers and the Wine Institute, which represents vintners.

It was such a lovely spring morning that the French doors of the conference room were wide open, allowing birdsong to float through. Past the lawns and into the distance, I could see the Kunde family’s bluebird boxes – the homes they’d erected to encourage birds to nest near the vineyards -- and feed on pests.

And the nominees are ...

In researching The House of Mondavi, I built up a modest wine library of fifty or so volumes. Some of my treasures came from the annual sale of the St. Helena Library, which has a wonderful collection of wine books. Others came from local, independent book stores or Amazon, or were given to me by people who knew I was working on a book about the first family of Napa Valley wine.

One of my favorites is George Taber’s Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine, which was published by Scribner in 2005 and justifiably earned wonderful reviews.

After a quiet lunch in Rutherford yesterday, I drove back home along the Silverado Trail. As rain droplets began hitting my windshield, I passed the modest sign for the winery whose founder, to me, is an almost perfect example of the idealism of many of the early vintners who came to Napa Valley, searching for an Arcadian life.

Warren Winiarski gave up his job as a lecturer at the University of Chicago, packed up his family in their station wagon, and moved to Napa Valley to begin again as a winemaker. After a short stint at Souverain Cellars, he joined the new Robert Mondavi Winery, working through the first two crushes in 1966 and 1967 before starting a winery of his own on Howell Mountain.