Journal of Alta California Spring 2022

CAROLYN FONG “She Who Remembers” photos, page 6 Your portraits of Ayodele Nzinga prominently feature blue sky and bright colors. Why? Dr. Nzinga arrived at the portrait location with beautiful bright red glasses. That accent was such a signifier of her personality and sense of style, and I knew that the red would pop beautifully against the blue of the sky while also showcasing the gorgeous weather. Upon meeting Dr. Nzinga and chatting with her, I knew I wanted to create portraits that showcased her personality, which is clear and defined, joyful and extroverted. TERESA FLORES “Ars Poetica,” page 98 What inspired you to write about your art and the influence of Fresno’s poets on your work? My first Alta contribution was in the Art Issue, where I was invited…

This issue of Alta Journal is a celebration of Joan Didion, the premier chronicler of California and beyond. She passed away in December, and we’ve spent the past few months mourning her death and assessing her legacy. We asked ourselves, How might we make sense of her career? How might we hold up a mirror to her life and work? For that is what she often did in her own writing. She held a mirror to life even when doing so risked making us, her readers, uncomfortable. This skill of hers reminded me of an incident a few years ago when my son’s sixth-grade English teacher assigned Didion’s “The White Album.” The teacher, Bryan Newell, introduced the essay in class and assigned a portion of it for homework reading. “The…

To understand us, you must know that the North American African is a postapocalyptic being: we are, each of us, born in a certain year, be it 1619 or 1916, or this new year, and in a certain place, but the origin story of our dispossession precedes us all, and it is because of this other birth that we must reconstruct ourselves in the time we have here in the stories that we tell about who we are and wish to be. Ayodele Nzinga, the 70-year-old spoken-word poet we call WordSlanger, the activist, playwright, PhD, preserver of stories, She Who Remembers; she, the first and current poet laureate of Oakland, California, has a story that begins in mystery: she has two birth certificates, Nzinga reveals, one from State Line, Mississippi,…

In 2020, an elected panel in San Anselmo, a 12,000-person town in Marin County, voted to remove Sir Francis Drake’s name on a high school because of his involvement in the slave trade. The following year, in May, the school board replaced the famed English explorer’s name with that of Archie Williams, a Black runner who won Olympic gold in Berlin alongside Jesse Owens, served with the Tuskegee Airmen, and taught at the school for more than 20 years. A letter from the superintendent informed parents that the board was trying to make the school “more anti-racist,” and that the current name did not “align with this goal and our values.” Nearby, local officials also took down a 30-year-old statue depicting Drake at the Larkspur Ferry Terminal. Quite a comeuppance…

In Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle, a scientist invents ice-nine, which is capable of freezing all the water on Earth. Of course it gets released, and apocalypse ensues. The ocean turns into a blue-white pearl under a darkening sun. Tornadoes fill the sky like worms. “The earth was locked up tight,” Vonnegut writes. “It was winter, now and forever.” It’s a stark warning against monkeying with nature and, it turns out, Vonnegut was inspired by real life. In the 1940s, he worked as a publicist for General Electric alongside his brother, Bernie, a scientist. As part of a research team headed by Nobel Prize winner Irving Langmuir, Bernie Vonnegut helped invent cloud seeding, a process of using chemicals to stimulate rain. An aerosol—usually silver iodide—is released into a would-be…

A long line of people extends outside the Canvas at L.A. Live, an event space in Downtown Los Angeles, on a sunny Friday in January. An equal mix of teenagers, millennials, parents, and grandparents, the predominately African American crowd rocks with excitement and anticipation. Many people wear Tupac Shakur T-shirts and other apparel, as though they’re about to attend a concert by the famous rapper. But Shakur, of course, has been dead for more than 25 years. Today is the opening of the exhibit Tupac Shakur. Wake Me When I’m Free. It’s billed as a “fully immersive, thought-provoking experience” celebrating the late rapper and actor’s brief life and even briefer career. People have come here from all over the country, many of them traveling with their families in tow. Melody…