Ruth Newell

Ruth Newell is a freelance writer with a serious slant towards dharma travel. She spent the last 25 years writing a variety of technical documents, marketing material, and website content for Native American tribes, government entities, and corporations. Much of her professional writing pertains to sustainable development (specializing in zero waste technologies), comprehensive and environmental planning, fundraising/financing, and community and business development. She also taught creative writing in a private school for 16 years. For the last three years, she’s been traveling, housesitting, and writing about the places she visits, the people she meets, and the food she eats (2shoestravel.blogspot.com). She has been contributing to the Reader since 2011.

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Ruth Newell's Stories

Slab City, CA

Trying to change the negative reputation that the Slabs had acquired over the years as a melting pot for drug addicts, hippies and psych ward releases, Builder Bill created the Range, just southeast of the ...

Finding It in Shoshone, California

For the record: I’m not a fancy, gotta-have-posh type of woman; I’m OK with “rough around the edges.” I’m instinctively drawn to character, whether quaint and endearing or quirky and eclectic. I like spice, color ...

Nothing Like the PCH

Undeniably one of the most picturesque roads you’ll ever traverse, California’s Route 1 north of Santa Barbara is a largely contiguous strip of undeveloped coastline with endless, arresting views. (“Undeveloped,” as in not much there ...

Ruth Newell's Blog Entries

Blocked Kiss

How effortless life’s become when with the click of a cyber button we just as easily add friends as delete them, when we block correspondence rather than communicate, when we’ve the excuse of not having ...

Slow Your Roll: A Writer’s Cacophony

Lying in bed this morning, long before the slamming of doors and the starting of engines awakened the sleepy barrio, a million thoughts were stampeding through my head. Impressions about the things I looked at ...

Amping up the Corporate Ante: Conservation Beyond Compliance

Voted several years running by Fortune Magazine as one of the country’s best companies to work for, DPR Construction aims to be more progressive than its competitors, continually pushing the envelope. For instance, it earned ...

Beyond Cult Controversy: The Mate Peddlers of the Twelve Tribes

As I wound my way up to Morning Star Ranch Farm tucked back in the hills of Valley Center located adjacent to the well visited Keys Creek Lavender Farm, I remembered a man from years ...

Rising from the Trenches Part 2: San Diego's Urban Corps Receives Two National Awards

Not sure if you’ve heard the news yet, but we had local heroes recognized in Washington, D.C. last week. During the Corps Network's 2012 National Conference held from February 12th through the 15th in the ...

Samurai Surfers: Cashing It All In to Live on The Edge

When I first landed here on the shores of the broad Pacific to winter in paradise, I fell upon an article describing the new face of homelessness. Recently, I read another article describing how more ...

Heaven's Good

I live in the lap of luxury. No kidding, I do. Started about six years ago when the first man I chose (versus who chose me) decided that he didn’t want my love. When I ...