The SCU’s California Legacy Project, maintained by SCU English Professor Terry Beers, is a collaboration between the publishing company Heyday and Santa Clara University whose goal is “to raise public awareness and appreciation for our state’s cultural legacy and to encourage faculty and students in their creative and scholarly interest in Californian culture.”  The website dedicated to this project can be found here.

Currently Terry Beers is teaching a seminar class at SCU that has it’s main focus situated around California Landscape Literature, an offshoot of the California Legacy Project.  One of the pieces that Beers chose to discuss was Masumoto’s “Epitaph for a Peach”.  On the California Legacy website, there is a podcast interview with Masumoto about his “Epitaph..” in which he discusses how a person’s environment, pastoral vs. suburban for example, can affect the way one views the world around him or herself.  An example that Masumoto presents is that of the weather.  Masumoto laments that a person in the city isn’t going to have as close of a relationship with the weather unless it affects their life directly. However for someone like Masumoto, a farmer in Northern California, the weather takes on a whole new meaning and rhythm.

In my opinion, The CLP represents a call to preserve, sustain and even amplify a nostalgia for the California landscape and all the history and rich cultural tradition that is present in it.