She was ninety-five when this book was first published in 1925. The years between were spent in “a pioneer’s search for an ideal home” and in living there, when it was finally found at the head of the Nooksack River, almost on the Canadian border. Phoebe Judson's account of the journey west is based on daily diary entries detailing her fear, excitement, and exhaustion. At the end of the trail, the Judsons encountered hardships aplenty, causing them to abandon a farm and business in Olympia before their arrival in the Nooksack Valley. During the Indian Wars they holed up in a fort at Claquato. In time, Phoebe overcame her fear of the Indians, learned the Chinook language, and won their friendship. All this is told in vivid detail by a woman of great dignity and charm whom readers will long remember. In a foreword, Susan Armitage, professor of history at Washington State University, calls A Pioneer's Search for an Ideal Home a "classic pioneering account," important for its woman's point of view.

    Her early diaries, first published in 1940, are the touching, often humorous record of her youth and her struggles to develop her talent.

    Written, in a sense, for her husband—acclaimed novelist, poet, and mathematician Jacques Roubaud—Alix’s Journal straddles the gap between French and English, poetry and prose, the tragic and the comic, the profound and the quotidian. Alix’s idiosyncratic and revealing work gives us access to a singular consciousness, one that was profoundly influential on her husband’s subsequent works, in style as well as content. The notebooks center on themes of love, marriage, photography, addiction, and death, and include examples of Alix’s photographic work, whose strangeness and poignancy is enhanced by its juxtaposition with her plans for and interpretations of it.From Alix’s Journal:You left yesterday morning, and last night I got drunk by nine. I didn’t walk straight on the rue des Francs-Bourgeois, where I went to post my first letter. At ten o’clock I collapsed dead drunk. I woke at three and read what Nigel Nicholson wrote his parents, and read Jacques Roubaud in Change (a poem about water similar to Hockney’s distortions). I asked myself why I abuse myself in this manner when I am loved and really must keep alive; why do I get drunk on an empty stomach? why do I drug myself with sleeping pills? why do I smoke?     looking after oneself.I had things to do today.To fall asleep like everyone else, etc., to lead a simple regular life. To fall asleep likeeveryone else, that is what I want.