A short story by Daniel A. Olivas

Origonally publish in The Coachella Review, reposted on La Bloga

We sit on the bench waiting for the Orange Line.  Rosario reads a Bolaño novel that I gave her last week for her twenty-fourth birthday.  In truth, I’d bought it for myself but I couldn’t get past the first thirty pages so I wrapped it in some nice gold wrapping paper, bought a card with a smiling monkey on it (you can’t go wrong with a monkey card), and gave it to Rosario.  She loved it, wondered how I knew she wanted to read it.  I shrugged.  Brilliant, I guess.

I should have brought a book with me.  Rosario is buried in Bolaño and I just look around.  No one is here, just us.  And a long-haired throwback to the seventies who sits on the next bench over to my right.  Rosario sits to my left.  Where is everyone?  It’s Tuesday morning.  Yes it’s early, but don’t people work anymore?  Funny question since I don’t work, not right now.  Between jobs, as they say.  And Rosario is getting her masters in English literature at CSUN, so she’s not really working, either.

Continue reading “Orange Line”

Amy Stewart on “Girl Waits with Gun”

From the New York Times best-selling author of “The Drunken Botanist”  comes an enthralling novel based on the forgotten true story of one of the nation’s first female deputy sheriffs.  Constance Kopp doesn’t quite fit the mold. She towers over most men, has no interest in marriage or domestic affairs, and has been isolated from the world since a family secret sent her and her sisters into hiding fifteen years ago. One day a belligerent and powerful silk factory owner runs down their buggy, and a dispute over damages turns into a war of bricks, bullets, and threats as he unleashes his gang on their family farm. When the sheriff enlists her help in convicting the men, Constance is forced to confront her past and defend her family and she does it in a way that few women of 1914 would have dared.

Where: Vroman’s Bookstore

Date: Monday, the 28th

Time: 7 pm

Address: 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, California 91101

Website: https://www.vromansbookstore.com/amy-stewart-sept-2015

Continue reading “Los Angeles Literary Events 9/28/15 – 10/4/15”

With David L. Ulin

To mark the publication of his new book, Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, Narrative has a few burning questions for David Ulin.

1. Who is your favorite character in fiction; your fave character in life?
Oh, what a question. Favorite character? It’s like choosing a favorite child. My favorite characters, probably, are those who hew closest to their authors: the quietly desperate men and boys of Raymond Carver; the wide-eyes alter egos of Jack Kerouac. I love the unnamed narrator in Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson; also, Meursault and the corrupted “judge-penitent” of The Fall, Clamence. I love the detective heroes: Philip Marlowe, Easy Rawlins. I adore Mildred Pierce. And St. Augustine, always Augustine, wrestling with the curse of his humanity, so contemporary and relevant over nearly two millennia. I respond to characters who are not creations so much as expressions, impressions, self-portraits, in a sense. As for life, well . . . that’s a harder question, or maybe it’s that life has never offered me such clarity.
Continue reading “Narrative 10”

By Eve Hill

The literary life of Los Angeles is thriving, and a free celebration is afoot! On October 21st, 2015, LitCrawl L.A. returns to North Hollywood with a walkable menu of literary offerings. Feed both your literary and literal appetite as over 200 Los Angeles writers descend upon NoHo’s assorted coffee shops and restaurants to read from their latest works. Start your personal literary lovefest now by curling up with a sampling of the authors described below.

Continue reading “LitCrawl L.A.: Los Angeles’ Literary Lovefest Returns To North Hollywood”

By Cynthia Guardado

In March, I began attending a women’s writing circle called Las Lunas Locas in El Sereno, Ca. The women’s circle was started by Karineh Mahdessian and Sophia Rivera, with the intention of creating a safe space for women to write in communion. Each Monday night we meet at 7:30pm and begin our journey for that evening. We sit in a circle inside Here & Now a beautiful space that provides reiki, herbal workshops & community events.

As a poet, a mujer, I noticed that the manuscript I have been developing for 5 years is extremely feminine. This was somewhat of a surprise to me, but I’m not sure why it wasn’t obvious since I am a woman who writes about herself and other woman. Perhaps it was because no one has ever taken the time to acknowledge me and say you are a women, you write from your own perspective, and then follow that with encouraging words that made me feel comfortable writing from my femininity.

Continue reading “Convivir: Las Lunas Locas a Way for Women to Write”

Los Angeles poet Chiwan Choi has published another section from his current poetry project “If 100, Then 150,” this time in Twelfth House. As Choi said on his blog in July about this project, “as some of you know, I’ve been working on a poem (or the poem’s been working me) in the last month or so…The poem started out as a shorter piece called ‘if 100, then 150,’ I wrote it to read at the Machine Dreams robot symposium at UCLA on June 11. While I liked the piece enough when I read it, it didn’t feel finished at all. So when I had a chance to read again 10 days later…I edited it and read it again. It felt much better…but still not done…The editing ‘solution’ I found became a bigger problem. Ok. Not problem, but definitely bigger. I realized the poem, still called “if 100, then 150,” needed to be a 100 part piece.”

Continue reading “Chiwan Choi in the Fall Issue of Twelfth House”

Erica Jong on “Fear of Dying”

Four decades ago, Erica Jong revolutionized the way we look at love, marriage and sex. Her world-wide bestseller,” Fear of Flying” opened the doors for writers from Jennifer Weiner to Lena Dunham. Now she does it again by giving us powerful, new perspective on the next phase of women’s lives. Full of the sly humor, deep wisdom and poignancy we know from her poetry, fiction and essays, she delivers the novel women everywhere have been waiting for… “Fear of Dying.”

Where: Vroman’s Bookstore

Date: Monday, the 21^st

Time: 7 pm

Address: 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, California 91101

Website: https://www.vromansbookstore.com/erica-jong-sept-2015

Continue reading “Los Angeles Literature Events 9/21/2015 – 9/27/15”

NOTE: A touching essay about the intersection of race and love, by one solid native Angeleno journalist and essayist Erin Abury Kaplan.

By Erin Aubry Kaplan

Fourteen years ago I wrote an article for Salon.com published for Valentine’s Day about how I met my husband, Alan Kaplan. I ended the article on a cautionary note: our hugely improbable, racially romantic story did not mean that we’d solved the problems of the color line. Far from it. Strip away the circumstances that I was a reporter and he was the reluctant subject of an interview for a story I was writing at the time, and we were merely a black woman and a Jewish man from different parts of L.A. who shared the same politics and bottomless outrage about the historic effects of that color line. He taught about it–for 33 years at Hamilton High School’s humanities magnet–I wrote about it. That was the most obvious thing we shared in common, but there were other things too, ordinary couple things like a complicated love of the Dodgers, eating out (neither of one us cooked), movies, sifting through stories in the latest issue of the New Yorker or the Atlantic Monthly. A few years into the marriage we discovered that we both loved dogs, and rescuing dogs; we adopted one post-Hurricane Katrina and eventually accumulated a whole houseful.

Continue reading “Love Across the Color Line: Remembering Alan Kaplan”

Evan Thomas on “Being Nixon”

Noted author Evan Thomas discusses and signs “Being Nixon: A Man Divided” in which he peels away the layers of a complex, confounding figure and examines the gaping character flaws that would drive him from office and forever taint his presidency and legacy.

Where: Vroman’s Bookstore

Date: Monday, the 14^th

Time: 7 pm

Address: 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, California 91101

Website: https://vromansbookstore.com/evan-thomas-sept-2015

Continue reading “Los Angeles Literary Events 9/14/15 – 9/20/15”

NOTE: The following is an interview conducted by one of Los Angeles’ great journalists and native Angelenos Lynell George.

On the American “stage” — within mainstream media and in public discourse — the discussion of race and racism is often defined by spectacle: an event that we can collectively point to that plays out on our screens, large and small. It might be the grievous roll call of black lives cut short by raw acts of violence; or it might take shape in next week’s headlines — a bungled arrest or denial of dignity — that eerily mirrors incidents of three generations ago.

While those high-profile, super-charged moments are indeed odious and shameful, they are indicative of a deeper malady affecting the American psyche, writer Claudia Rankine argues in her most recent book, “Citizen: An American Lyric.”

Continue reading “Writer Claudia Rankine On White Blindness, The Black Body, and the Freedom to Live”