Publisher's Synopsis
Lost Angels is the life story of Sarah living in Northern California over many decades. She reveals, through the angels who watch over her, and through the mirroring of movies she watched as a child in St. Helena, seeing her life in a montage of miscellany film loops. In looking back at those scenes, especially when growing up in Oakland during the black and white fifties into the Wizard of Oz technicolor sixties, she tells the story of her life. She vividly recounts the social ecology of the counterculture and the back-to-land movement as she lived them during those times.
During the present decade, Sarah returns to the Lost Coast, where her son, Noah, and his partner, Heidi, are grieving over the loss of their young daughter who died unexpectedly. Sarah meets Michael there and while uncovering who they may be for one another, they become unwittingly overshadowed by Shasta, a Native American. The Indian insists that the land where Michael built his home and where he is growing a cash crop, must be returned to his ancestors.
Finding beauty and meaning arising from her dissonant life experiences, Sarah lives within her imagination and the natural world around her. She carries past wounds to the men she has been involved with in her life, and in doing her own work of healing, she cannot help but feel impacted by the suffering of native people and others. She sees this connection related to the oppression coming out of the dominant culture.
Roberta married young when living in Oakland, California and had four children by the time she was twenty-four. She enjoyed in her earlier life making theatre productions with elementary and middle school aged children. Canyon Elementary school in Canyon, CA, White Thorn Elementary school in White Thorn, CA, First Day School at Berkeley Friends Meeting in Berkeley, CA and various other venues. Some of the plays performed by the children were inspired from Pomo and Maidu Indian myths. She additionally taught textile art to children and adults and created batiks as paintings.
Roberta co-produced with KPFA Radio Journalist, Vic Bedoian, the highly produced radio series of Pomo Indian Oral Histories titled: "These Things That Cannot Be Replaced." Her interview with Pomo Indian Shaman, Bernice Torres, was printed in "News From Native California," a publication by Malcolm Margolin's Heyday Press.
Her previous book "Straight to the Heart" was published in partnership with Outskirts Press.
