Journal of Alta California Summer 2020

JOHN FREEMAN “Reading and Writing California,” page 6 You propose a new California canon of books that we should all know (and be teaching in school). Do you have a bonus work for our reading list that you didn’t mention in the piece? Rabih Alameddine’s Koolaids is devastating, beautiful, and funny. The way it twines San Francisco in the AIDS crisis and Lebanon during its civil war reminds that corridors of loss can make a place home. SARA BORJAS Poetry, page 9 Is there a poet whose work you find yourself drawn to lately? I am drawn to Michael Torres, Analicia Sotelo, Cathy Park Hong, and Daniel Borzutzky for their profound humor and dreamy, casual despair and deep-rooted rage that equals a special, and for people of color, familiar, type…

Science…has been built upon many errors, but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.―JULES VERNE Surely the past few weeks have reminded us that science is not a collection of beliefs, or a catalog of knowledge. It’s more a way of thinking. Here are some things we think are true. These ideas have proved useful. This is how we think the pieces fit together—but it’s all just a guess, a plausible way to organize current knowledge. Truth depends on our ability to repeat experiments. To probe the gaps in our knowledge. Science is something that we do. It is not something codified, learned, or memorized. It’s a process. Here at Alta, we often say that we cover the past and the…

I began my life as a reader by escaping. I read to be anywhere but here—here being a suburb of Sacramento, California. Its tidy planned streets all named after Civil War battlefields. Each house a palm tree. Sprinklers set to water-conservation levels. When my parents drove off to work, I climbed atop our baking shingle roof and squinted through the pages of Charlotte Brontë, George Orwell, and Alice Walker. The further a book took me from the Central Valley, the better. Nevil Shute’s On the Beach clobbered me, simply because Australia was so far away it might as well have been Narnia. In reading this way, I wasn’t rebellious. I was actually mimicking the trajectory of all my English classes. For a public school student, I was very lucky. My…

Sara Borjas is a Xicanx pocha, a Fresno poet, and the author of Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff (Noemi Press, 2019). She teaches at UC Riverside, lives in Los Angeles, and stays rooted in Fresno. To the Woman Who Said She Could Hear My Accent We were walking down 1st St—a street I’ve only been down twice this being the second time I’ve felt seen by a woman I wanted to be seen by. You said you could hear my accent and it was the first time I believed anyone when they said that. You heard my voice and heard my father’s truck tires spinning through the neighborhood and not the one he had, the one he dreams of having before he dies. And not the father…

Happy face. Proud face. Surprised face. Sad face. I spot him practicing expressions in the rearview mirror. He’s watching himself, and I’m watching him. It’s a rare moment—usually his eyes are fixed on the passing terrain. Today, the landscape is unceasing midwestern farmland, ripe and verdant, the air thick with humidity and crackling with cicadas. Like many children with autism, Isaac doesn’t easily “read” faces, doesn’t necessarily grasp what someone might be saying through a raised eyebrow or a furrowed forehead. For the last few days, my husband, Ed, and I have been playing facial reaction games with our 11-year-old son over breakfast. Glancing now at his exaggerated smiles and big-lipped pouts, I’m gauging how much he’s caught on. Then the radio breaks out the opening line of “Whiskey River”…

Wanugee hovers over the mahjong tiles, eyes closed, chanting a mantra. He moves his hands like magic moons—waning and waxing over the little white squares—to summon his soothsaying power. My request is unusual. Instead of his customary targets—love, health, wealth—I ask him to tell a fortune for all of us, a world upended by the coronavirus, still, at this point, in its early stages. “That’s pretty macro, not really my sweet spot,” Wanugee cautions. But he’s game. “I’ll try anything, you know. How about we look towards the next six to eight months?” Perfect. With his purple and gold shawl and reassuring tone, Wanugee seems about as good an authority as any on the uncertain days ahead. After all, fortune-tellers have been called upon to predict the future in times…