Author: redict239

Writer and Teacher

The LA Opera and Memories of Fascism: Federico Garcia Lorca, Neruda, Hemingway

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Would you flee a fascist state?

Given the current state of US political affairs, I was left to ponder that question as I watched the LA Opera production of “Ainadamar” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillon downtown. In the opera, the character who plays actress Margarita Xirgu tries to convince her friend Federico García Lorca – a poet, playwright, and theater director — to flee Spain as the country hurdles towards civil war. She goes into exile, but the poet refuses to leave. Xirgu then engages with the audience to tell the tragedy surrounding García Lorca’s last days during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939.

Why Federico García Lorca?

Upon hearing about this opera, I was compelled to see it. As I state in my hybrid memoir manuscript, I first learned about Federico García Lorca at age sixteen when my AP Spanish Literature teacher introduced me to two poets who had a lasting impact on my own bilingual poetry – García Lorca and Pablo Neruda.

García Lorca is the most prominent Spanish writer of the early twentieth century. Born in 1898 in Granada, Spain and assassinated in 1936, his literary influences were futurism, symbolism, and surrealism. While doing recent research on his life, I realized authorities have given various reasons for his death. Most prominent amongst them is the fact that he was gay and a socialist in a country that was moving further and further to the right.

Was the Spanish Civil War a proxy war?

I am a fan of hybrid memoir, so literature inevitably leads me to history. Because I read the book The Red Flag by David Priestland a few years ago, I reflected on the historical context of the opera as I watched the L.A. production. From Priestland, I learned how the far right in Spain gained more popularity as Hitler consolidated power in and around Germany. Before World War II, Spain, France, and Chile had formed popular front governments to combat fascism. The Spanish left had one of the most successful popular fronts – communists, socialists, and left liberals — in the Western world, and they won the 1936 election.

Regrettably, the leftist victory of the Spanish Popular Front was short lived because General Francisco Franco staged a coup in 1936, the year García Lorca was assassinated. The country endured three torturous years of civil war fought not only by its citizens but also by volunteers from over fifty countries. The fascist governments of Germany and Italy supported Franco while Stalin sent arms to the political left.

While doing recent research, I learned new details about the quickly shifting politics of 1930’s Spain. I knew from Priestland that Picasso became a card-carrying communist during the civil war era. But I also discovered that Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda was on diplomatic duty in Spain where he met García Lorca. Like Picasso, Neruda became radicalized as a communist, but he also lost his diplomatic post due to his beliefs. The Chilean poet also met Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo and attended the 1937 Second International Writers Conference that Hemingway attended.

Despite the valiant efforts of the leftist resistance and the toil of a civil war that cut short 500,000 lives, the General gained control of the country. Franco banned García Lorca’s writing until 1953 — interestingly, the year Joseph Stalin died — and maintained his dictatorship until 1975.

A surprise for me was learning that after many years of tragic war and decades of dictatorship, García Lorca’s remains have never been found.

The LA Opera’s production of “Ainadamar” — conducted by Lina González-Granados of Colombia and choreographed by Antonio Najarro of Spain – was excellent. I appreciate how it put this history and García Lorca’s art on a Los Angeles stage for us to remember and reflect on the importance of resisting the destruction and dehumanization of far-right politics.

AWP vs LA Festival of Books

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Los Angeles hosted two large book events within two months, and I attended both. Was one better than the other? I think not. They both focused on their audience and did so quite well.

March was abuzz with AWP and the writers who visited from across the country and internationally to make the city grand!

Association of Writers and Writing Programs hosted 12,000 writers, editors, publishers, book sellers, college programs, and others at the LA Convention Center. Amazingly, I didn’t just attend. I also presented for the first time! I was on the “New Literary Forms for a New Los Angeles” panel moderated by Claire Phillips. Along with Claire, I was proud to accompany writers Steph Cha, Sesshu Foster, and Gina Frangello.

Challenge number one was to calm my nerves! This was my first time presenting at AWP. The closest I’d ever gotten to presenting at AWP was participating in an off-site event alongside my publisher, Another Chicago Magazine, at AWP Seattle in 2023. But practice paves the way for perfection. And practice I did, even though my goal wasn’t to be perfect. I just wanted to be prepared enough so that if I made a mistake, I’d be able to regain composure and keep it moving.

As an attendee, I made my way to the panel “Do the Hustle: How to Publicize Your Book.” Luckily, I am reaching that yearned-for point in the writing process in which I get to focus now on submission, marketing, and publicity. So, it was great hearing how authors are clearing their own pathways to sales in an era in which publishers do less book promotion.

The panel “Literary Production During Authoritarian Governments” hit the right notes of concern and caution given our current administration in D.C. I share in the presenters’ belief that it’s imperative we continue writing and resisting during this era of book bans and limited funding.

“We Beautifully Outside: Informal Writing Collectives, Community and Kinship” was a wonderful reminder of the power of writing groups and how they have nurtured Black women writers in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Seattle.

In April, LA Festival of Books had about 160,000 people in attendance and was more about casual engagement. Let’s face it, at AWP writers are speaking to their peers — the toughest audience sometimes.

Because AWP and LA Festival of Books were back-to-back in the same city, I picked up on the different tone right away. At the book festival, authors speak to their readers. So, the presenters delve into the content of the text more so than the writing process that led to its creation. Their presentation is more relaxed because they want to meet their audience halfway, and their audience is simply out and about enjoying their weekend.

For me, panel number one was “Existential Memoirs.” As a writer of hybrid memoir, I search out this genre. The panel was moderated by Gina Frangello, my co-panelist at AWP, and included authors Meghan Daum, Lyz Lenz, and Glynnis MacNicol. The women covered a wide range of topics including relationships, motherhood, the humor of daily life, and the horror of contemporary politics.

And finally, the “Speak Out” panel on writing and activism was moderated by journalist Jonathan Capehart and included authors Ibram X. Kendi, Aida Mariam Davis, and Rita Omokha. I loved that this panel had a Pan African scope, with presenters of US, Ethiopian, and Nigerian heritage. Their call to activism was rooted in US reality but stretched across the African/Black diaspora and highlighted the need to act locally and analyze globally as we draw on Black activism from the past to traverse the winding roads of an uncertain future.

My Interview at Write or Die Mag

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Last month I was featured in the Write or Die Magazine Newsletter. Write or Die Mag is on Substack, and they have a huge following of more than 11,000 subscribers. They publish short stories, essays, and interviews.

Check out the interview here.

Write or Die Editor and prolific writer Brittany Ackerman kindly invited me to participate in the GRWM (Get Ready With Me) feature. In the interview, I discussed my favorites — a favorite bookstore, recent book, winter purchase, and brunch order. I also recalled my best and worst writing advice.

Why Samuel Beckett: A Black Writer’s Perspective

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Studying Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett during junior year at UCLA was the final straw that pushed me towards mental and emotional exhaustion. I had overextended myself academically by taking too many classes during spring and summer quarters; and, studying Beckett in the fall led to questioning my Catholic faith and having to take a quarter off from my studies.

When I heard that OR books was publishing a hybrid memoir titled Beckett’s Children by Michael Coffey, I rushed to pre-order it. Coffey’s memoir, published in July this year, offered a sense of relief because I had worried that the allusions to a modernist writer in my memoir manuscript might seem a bit dated. But here was a memoir published in 2024 proving me wrong.

Unlike Coffey’s book, there are no continuous references to Beckett in my manuscript. Studying Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is pivotal to the inciting incident in chapter one because it causes me to doubt my faith. In Beckett’s Children, on the other hand, the author’s inciting incident centers around the idea that the Irish author may have fathered the American poet, Susan Howe.

Threads running through Coffey’s hybrid memoir include the stated curiosity about a familial bond between Beckett and Howe, Coffey’s literary research on the two writers, his own history as an adoptee, and his relationship with his son who is a three-time felon and addict.  In my manuscript, I weave in the history of Black Los Angeles beginning with the founding of the city by the Spanish.

Coffey’s description of airports and prisons as structures distinguished by their “architecture of waiting” stood out to me. This description was impactful because I’m familiar with Professor David Harvey’s description of the revolutionary potential of airport workers who are a class in themselves with the potential of becoming a class for themselves. In contrast, prisoners are the most captive humans on US soil; and prison is where the US Government has sent revolutionaries, such as members of the Black Power Movement and the Black Panther Party. So, I found the analogy of prisons and airports interesting because the two structures can also be considered exact opposites.

I recommend Beckett’s Children because one or more of the four narrative lines the author weaves into his hybrid memoir will grab your interest and pull you through the author’s skillful storytelling until the last page.

“The House on Mango Street” and a Garden in Watts

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The House on Mango Street in a roundabout way helped me buy the garden in Watts. The garden wasn’t just the purple fountain grass and Mexican feather grass protected by weed fabric and surrounded by wood chips at the side of the house. But also, the papyrus grass that grew six or seven feet in front of the house. I bought the house in 2004 and watered the decorative grasses and the green St. Augustine grass every Sunday until the house went underwater, financially, in 2008. Then I sold it in 2009; and not because of the garden and not because of the house, but because of a family emergency that was more important than the house.

When Sandra Cisneros first published her novella The House on Mango Street in 1984, I had been living my period of attempted literary exile that inspired me to fly from Los Angeles to Paris in search of a city Anaïs Nin portrayed as inherently artistic. Nin told me this when I ditched eleventh grade and read her autobiography inside the newly constructed big blue Pacific Design Center on Melrose Avenue. While I was ditching at Pacific Design, the Diaz sisters also had a house on Melrose that they owned before the building was completed in 1975. Ironically, their 900-foot house sat at the front steps of the blue building until 1997 when they finally sold. Another irony is that as an adult I would hear Cisneros read from her book inside the auditorium of Pacific Design. I can’t remember now if the Diaz house was still at the entrance or not.

During my literary exile that mimicked A. Nin, J. Baldwin, and J. Baker, I sat one day on a bench in the cold of winter listening as the streets of Paris told me I needed a vocation. On the metro running beneath the streets, the Black skin – akin to my own — of Francophone Africans hinted I needed a home. I returned to Los Angeles determined to teach despite my mother rightly warning that secondary education was too much work for too little income. Cisneros’ House on Mango Street gave me something to teach. And lasting in the trenches of teaching, so you can have a livelihood, pay your rent, and maybe one day buy a house, is all about having something (you are passionate about) to teach.

Cisneros is back in the States from her current home in Mexico. Speaking at City of Asylum on October 20 for the fortieth anniversary of the publication of her book, she described her time teaching high school in Chicago and how she realized the students needed more than literature; she suggested that what they needed were social services and social change. Indeed. I agree. At the same time, I am thankful she gave me poetically crafted chapters to teach, such as “My Name,” “Marin,” and “Papa Who Wakes Up Tired in the Dark.”

As I taught, I wrote poetry. Lots of it. My first published poems were bilingual, and Arte Público Press accepted them for publication in their journal The Americas Review. At City of Asylum, Cisneros stated that House on Mango Street was first published by Arte Público – a press, she said required its writers to be better than good. They had to be excellent. I knew, without a doubt, that my poems – “La Chanteuse de Jazz,” La Pachanga,” and “Boca Oficial” were excellent. Cisneros also whispered to us during her talk that a lot of Latinx writing today is pop literature.

Mango Street not only inspired me to continue teaching; it was a catalyst for me to write my own YA novella while I lived in the house in Watts where on Sundays I tended to purple fountain grass, Mexican feather grass, and papyrus grass. Thinking back now, I can’t fathom how I wrote a novella as my marriage slowly dissolved and I stepped into the role of single motherhood responsible for two kids while tending to three dogs and a garden behind wrought iron gates.

It dawned on Cisneros as she studied creative writing at University of Iowa in her early twenties that everyone in her class had a house except her. That difference was another inspiration for her writing the novella. Did I ever think of my house in Watts as “A House of My Own” that was “a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem”? Considering that idea now, I don’t think so. I wrote a novella inside its four walls, but that writing occurred in a whirlwind I barely remember. The Watts house didn’t nourish my ability to write for publication; it nourished my ability to write in order to live. It, like teaching, erased the line between writing, teaching, and living until one and the other became the same.

Creative Writing Meets Fashion Design

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Last weekend, I had the pleasure of attending the 15th Annual Ankara Festival in Hollywood, CA for my third or fourth time. I enjoyed taking in the African fashion created by designers from Ethiopia, South Sudan, USA, Nigeria, Congo DR, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon.

While attending, I deliberately made the following connections between fashion design and creative writing:

Embodying your narrative. (Just like fashion designers when they create a collection; just as models do when they approach the runway.) It’s important, as you write, to show your characters (including you, if memoir) feeling the chill of the air, the rough sand particles at the beach. For writing, we find these ideas in the book Body Work by Melissa Febos and in the instructional resources at Corporeal Writing.

Use descriptive imagery. (Fashion designers are masters at this because fashion is all about image.) But also appeal to your readers’ sense of smell, taste, sound, and touch.

A beat is a major turning point in narrative. It’s also the make your point moment. (Just as models stop at just the right moment to capture an audience’s attention, take advantage of your beats.)

Publishing

Research your comparable/competitive titles when publishing a book. Check your local bookstores, bookstore websites, and Publishers Weekly.

Know your audience. Who are you writing for? How can you connect with them and stay connected? (Fashion designers know who they are designing for.)

Work with your team – editors, agent, publishers. (Like writing, fashion is teamwork.)

Can I Really Pitch This Book? — Black Writers Weekend, Atlanta

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I recently returned from Black Writers Weekend (Aug. 1-4, 2024) in Atlanta where I participated in their Pitch Fest.

My biggest takeaway was that I needed to embody my logline – that one-sentence synopsis of my hybrid memoir that reveals the central conflict in the manuscript. Embody how, you might ask? I have to walk in a room and incorporate the three selves of my memoir – the writer, the character in the scenes, and the reflective narrator (Kate Bannon) and convince my listeners that my book is worth their time.

What is Black Writers Weekend?

Black Writers Weekend is a four-day event that brings together authors, screenwriters, and media professionals for a bookfair and a series of panels, discussions, and movie viewings. Founded by writer Tamika Newhouse in 2008, the festival has been held annually in Atlanta since 2014.

My Logline

I started writing the logline for my hybrid memoir in 2022 during a UCLA Extension class titled Conquering Your Story and Its Superstructure with Steven Wolfson. The challenge I’ve faced in writing my logline has been incorporating the history of Black Los Angeles with my personal narrative about being a writer. My memoir structure is hybrid/researched, and my manuscript isn’t just about me. It’s about the experience of writing bilingual poetry in a city with a distinct history.

Since the 2022 course, I’ve continued to refine my logline. And I don’t think my current version will be the last. Each class I take, along with each event I attend, encourages me to revisit my logline and perfect it.

The logline is not only essential for querying and pitching, it also has helped me stay focused while writing.

The Foundation

Some other courses I have taken that have helped me refine my query and pitch include Query Your Memoir with Allison K. Williams, Writing and Pitching Hybrid Memoir with Courtney Maum, and The Query Workshop with Mary Alice Stewart of the Shipman Agency.

The Challenge

Black Writers Weekend required book writers to write and send in a description of their project if we were going to participate in Pitch Fest. My goal in participating was to challenge myself to pitch in person and then receive the bonus of immediate feedback. To write my description, I referred to the notes from the courses I had taken and the workshops I’d attended. And to pitch in person, I read three articles on the Jane Friedman website – “How to Pitch Agents at a Writers Conference,” “How to Pitch Like a Hollywood Pro,” and “The Power of Silence in a Pitch Situation.”

When push comes to shove, I’m almost certain I will query and pitch via email submission; but I realize that in-person pitch skills are invaluable. The Jane Friedman articles helped me pinpoint why my book is relevant, who it’s going to help, and why I have the authority to write this book.

Authors are constantly pitching their books, whether in manuscript form, at conferences, or at bookfairs. During the bookfair at Black Writers Weekend, I noticed how powerful the pitch is if we want readers to buy our books. My first day at the bookfair, I was determined to walk around and get a sense of which books were available. The second day, I planned to do the same, but an author invited me to her table. She began to pitch her book, and I bought a copy. Other authors noticed her success and followed suit by pitching me their books as well. Before I knew it, I had walked away with seven or eight titles by different authors.

Black Writers Weekend encouraged me to focus on the editorial challenges I have ahead of me. It also allowed me to get a clearer idea of who my readers will be and how I will need to improve my pitch to get my book into their hands.

Kendrick Lamar, LA Street Culture, and Memoir Writing

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During the week of the Kendrick Lamar Pop Out Concert scheduled for Juneteenth in Inglewood, I was busy reviewing my research on the history of Watts. Watts figures in the penultimate chapter of the hybrid memoir I am writing because I owned a home (or a few mortgages) for five years – 2004 until 2009 — in that unincorporated area of Los Angeles. Since I am mixing the history of Los Angeles with my own personal experience as a writer in this city, I knew that in writing about Watts I needed to include some history on the Watts Uprising of 1965. Both the research in my manuscript and my statements here draw heavily on the article by Alex Alonso titled “Out of the Void: Street Gangs in Black Los Angeles.”

The Watts riots of 1965 that were sparked by police officers using excessive force on a Black family during a traffic stop were pivotal in the history of street gangs in Los Angeles. After six days of riots that left thirty-four people dead, L.A.’s rival gangs focused on unity and the ability to work together. And they were successful during a three-year period.

 At the Pop Out concert, Kendrick and others reflected on his concert’s ability to draw rival gangs and various other participants together to celebrate the Juneteenth holiday commemorating the end of Black enslavement. But why gangs? And how do gangs figure into the history of the City of Compton and greater Los Angeles?

As Alonso clearly delineates, Black gangs in Los Angeles developed as a reaction to the white racism that was fundamental in founding this country. As Black migrants left the segregated South and their numbers grew in the rapidly industrializing Los Angeles of the 1940’s, Black residents sought homes beyond the Central Avenue corridor to which they were limited by racially restrictive covenants. The KKK and white teenage hate groups like the Spook Hunters organized to keep Black residents from moving into predominantly white parts of South LA and adjacent cities such as Downey, Compton, Lynwood, and South Gate. Black teens formed their own clubs in order to protect their neighborhoods and combat the white violence being perpetuated against them and their families.

Over the years leading up to the Watts Uprising, South L.A. and cities like Compton became increasingly Black resulting in little need for these groups of Black youths. Yet the formations remained within the deteriorating political and socioeconomic environment of the era, and many of the Black gangs began to engage in Black-on-Black violence. L.A.’s Crips and Bloods gangs filled the void left by former street clubs that had engaged in the positive street behavior which initially resisted white racism and then advocated for Black power. And street violence began to mirror Black socioeconomics as gangs on the Eastside battled with the more upwardly mobile Westside gangs.

Black gangs in L.A. have always been connected to politics – initially, the politics of racism, and later the politics of the Black Panther Party and the revolutionary uprisings in Central America. Regarding the BPP, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter who was president of the LA-based Black Panther Party was also a member of the Slausons gang. Carter and BPP member John Huggins were targets of the FBI’s counterintelligence agency COINTELPRO, and they were both killed at UCLA’s Campbell Hall in 1969. After COINTELPRO decimated L.A.’s Black Power Movement, the behavior of street gangs became “self-genocidal” in nature.

These “self-genocidal” tendencies broadened in scope during the time of revolutionary upheaval in Central America. Alonso states that between 1979 and 1988, there were more than 2,994 gang-related murders in L.A., and these occurred when the US Government was allegedly involved in facilitating the distribution of crack cocaine amongst Black gangs in order to fund the CONTRA counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua – further proof of just how intertwined Black gangs are in the politics of not only L.A., but the nation.

When Kendrick Lamar beams onstage about members of rival gangs coming together to join him at his concert, there are layers of culture, history and politics that deserve to be reckoned with. Black South L.A. formed in resistance to white racism, and California dreamin has rarely been our state of mind no matter how many sunny afternoons fill a calendar year. So many dreams have passed on, packed up and left, been either locked up or tragically shot down. And like Kendrick said, Black L.A. hasn’t been the same since…

Unlike other cities, greater Los Angeles, like its Eastside, has demanded that its rappers stay true to the streets or connected to their working-class roots in ways that other cities have not.  That is part of LA street culture and culture, as evidenced by Kendrick’s stage, is something we live in the moment without rationalizing about history and politics. Until we must. And then we analyze to discern if the social connections are real, partial, or just make believe.

How much of the history and politics of street gangs in L.A. is conscious to Kendrick Lamar and those who celebrated both on and offstage with him on Juneteenth? That is a question I can’t answer. But I can reflect on the history and politics of this topic in my memoir which I must hastily get back to writing.

Lost in Los Angeles

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I center the beginning of my memoir on my feelings of alienation from Los Angeles during my youth. Given the reflective impulse of memoir, I now realize that one reason I felt alienated from my city of birth was because I didn’t know its hidden history. Yet, history, whether in written or oral form, can be boundless, especially when the focus is a major city. I wanted to know the history of the land because one of my goals as I write my memoir, is to invite the land to speak. With that goal in mind, I decided to research the relationship Native Americans have with the land. I found some clues in a couple of articles.

I’ve passed La Ballona Wetlands in West Los Angeles countless times. Almost always, it’s during a drive to the South Bay when I take Jefferson Boulevard west. La Ballona is 577 square acres of grassy wetlands you encounter before the turn left on Vista del Mar results in expansive views of the sandy beaches and rolling waves of the Pacific Ocean. A sign indicates the wetlands are an ecological reserve. Yet, I had no idea that this area was also a former community and sacred burial ground of the Tongva Natives — commonly referred to as the Gabrieliños. The research of Seetha N. Reddy and John G. Douglass – “Native Californian Persistence and Transformation in the Colonial Los Angeles Basin, Southern California” –wasn’t replete with information on the Tongva’s relationship to nature, but the writers did state that the Tongva polished, painted, and adorned pine trees as part of a burial ritual at the Ballona site. The Natives made offerings of plant foods that they burned in baskets during burial ceremonies as well. The scant information I found demonstrated the intimate relationship between nature and this Indigenous group who were historically second only to the Chumash in regard to wealth, population, and power. With its distance from El Pueblo in what is now downtown Los Angeles, La Ballona was a living space that allowed the Tongva to escape the governance of the Spanish. Distance was preferable because after the arrival of the Spanish – who viewed them either as laborers or souls to be saved – the Indigenous lifestyles of the Tongva were disrupted in just one generation.

Before you even view the beach, the sense of vastness that hangs over the Pacific Ocean is something you sense at La Ballona. I wasn’t totally surprised to learn that the area was sacred Indigenous land. It has a distinct aura that marks it as special, as do other locations in Southern California such as the Hollywood Hills, Chino Hills, and Palos Verdes.

I gained additional insights about the Tongva people from Jon Mcvey Erlandson’s article titled “The Making of Chumash Tradition: Replies to Haley and Wilcoxon.” His writing focuses primarily on the Chumash Natives, but I learned the Tongva prophet Chinigchinich was born on the territory that is now Cal State Long Beach. In other words, the university campus is also sacred Native territory. The most sacred. The original name of the site is Puvungna which means “where all things come together.” And as recently as 1972, archeologists discovered a Native American burial site on university grounds.

Land considered holy for the Chumash includes Point Conception in Santa Barbara. Yes, the famous Point Conception that is a major geographical site for meteorologists charged with delivering our daily and weekly weather forecasts. The Chumash refer to this area as the Western Gate and they believe the dead pass to the afterworld here. They hold sacred the idea that there was “a land of the dead across the sea to the west.”

Erlandson’s article tells us the idea of individual ownership of land was a foreign concept to Native Americans. Quite an irony in a state like California which has some of the most expensive land parcels in the country, especially when the real estate is on the coast. I didn’t glean a ton of information about nature from this second article, but I was able to infer that the Natives, who have inhabited Southern California for at least 11,000 years, didn’t have the materialistic relationship to the land that characterizes current economic practices.

So, what was my major takeaway? I learned to differentiate the city constructed by humans – with its miles of pavement, glass skyscrapers, freeways, streetlights, and endless rows of homes — from the land. I came to realize that the two are distinct entities. And it’s the city – whether under Spanish, Mexican, or US governance – that has imposed its rules and regulations regarding the land on top of Native beliefs. Once I got a clearer idea of how the Tongva and Chumash viewed the land and how they held it sacred, a lot more made sense. Yes, I sensed when I was in the vicinity of La Ballona that there was something special about the area. Or when I viewed Chino Hills while driving south on the 71, I felt in awe of the serenity and sense of balance on the land there. Undoubtedly, I have felt alienated from the City of Los Angeles. I still am. But I’ve learned to love the land and to embrace it as it has embraced me. And that is one major contradiction about living in Los Angeles – how one can feel alienated from a city that can be downright ruthless while loving a land that is quite welcoming.

A Dizzy-Tizzy Day at LA Festival of Books

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I prepared well in advance for the Saturday book panel titled Politics and History: Roots of Black Resistance. Like last year, I purchased my tickets the night before, printed out a map of the USC campus, and felt certain I could find the appropriate halls or auditoriums. Undeterred by an infection that caused me to go to urgent care at 9 a.m. that same morning, I took my prescribed antibiotics and set off for downtown LA.

As I drove south on Vermont Boulevard near the campus, I noticed bumper-to-bumper traffic inching north towards Jefferson. Yet, I felt confident that my entry at the parking gate on Exposition would afford me swift entrance – as it did last year — so that I could make my first panel at 1:30 p.m. After I pulled up to the booth, the attendant informed me that I needed a reservation for parking to enter the campus but that I could proceed north on Vermont to access parking at the Jefferson lot. Having already seen the snarl of traffic on Vermont, I opted to go south and check for parking at the Museum of Natural History. Full. Same for the Coliseum where I saw crowds and more crowds of students, alumni, friends, and families exiting in USC gear. From that point of disillusionment, I drove for more than an hour in a series of loops around the campus that included passing the Shrine Auditorium. Full. I even checked to see if either the Automobile Club building (quinceañera in progress at the cathedral across the street) or the parking lot at LA Trade Tech might be open.

Defeated, thirsty and famished, my body now craved food and drink. I decided to let the land instead of the city decide my fate and thus, resolved to head to the beach for victuals. Since I had to pass Exposition Boulevard to proceed west, I gave the original parking gate a final try. The same attendant, appearing as tired and stressed as I was, informed me that now there were spaces. With that, my day at the LA Festival of Books began. Finally. In earnest.

Having missed my first panel, I joined the flow of the crowds and walked around browsing amongst the booths until the panel Los Angeles on the Page: Memoirs & Stories was scheduled to start at 4:30.

I enjoyed this insightful panel that included David Kipen, D.J. Waldie, Zev Yaroslavky, and Jim Newton. I must admit that my first reaction when I registered the night before was to wonder why a city as diverse as Los Angeles had a panel on memoir that was made up of three White male writers and a White male moderator.

During the memoir panel, two ideas in particular resonated with me (no, I didn’t resonate with them) during this panel. The first was from Waldie who emphasized how L.A. has a hazy, uncertain history with no clear line from the past until now which makes it a city uniquely subject to mythology. It is layered in past events and traditions that include Spanish, Mexican, and US history. I will add “Native American,” especially Tongva and Chumash, to that mix.

In addition, Zev Yaroslavsky and D.J. Waldie discussed how a lack of primary sources such as letters and diaries will make it difficult for biographers and historians to find documentation and do research in the future, given our new digital lifestyles. The point here isn’t that digital creations aren’t primary sources. They are. They are just more difficult to access.

And like that, the day was done. Thanks to the writers, the readers, the institutions that made the day possible. Thanks to the city and the land.