Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2022 i Journal of Alta California

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…

John Freeman is the author of two poetry collections, Maps and The Park. Wind, Trees, his latest, will be published by Copper Canyon Press this fall. He is also the founder of the literary annual Freeman’s, an executive editor at Knopf, and the host of Alta Journal’s California Book Club. His other books include How to Read a Novelist, Dictionary of the Undoing, and several anthologies, among them Tales of Two Planets, in which 36 writers address inequality and the global climate crisis. In the late summer of 2020, I was staying in London, looking after family, but a big part of my heart was in Oregon, because a dear friend of mine, Barry Lopez, was ill, and the wildfires that blazed through the state that summer were worsening, getting…

There isn’t anything like seeing a small herd of wild burros walk single file down a residential street. They stop to rest near the holiday decorations in a front yard, the heavily pregnant female burro standing watch over her two yearling females and two other relatives, who drink from the water trickling down the cement gutter. “The Reche Vista girls,” my friend Dave Rogers says as we drive past them in his beat-up truck en route to the canyons near the community of Sunnymead Ranch, where somewhere between 800 and 1,000 burros—likely more—have become naturalized if endangered citizens of this part of inland Southern California. For as long as I can remember, burros have flourished in the tangle of canyons, streams, springs, and ridges that twist between San Bernardino and…

1 DONNER PASS To honor ancestors who traveled with the Donner party, Didion kept a framed photo of the Sierra Nevada on her desk. Her forebears were not present for the most infamous chapter of the journey—they wisely split off before the group reached the Sierra. Nevertheless, their story inspired Didion’s fascination with frontier myth, and she writes about the legacy of the West’s survivalist mentality in her essay collection Where I Was From. 2 SACRAMENTO UNION HEADQUARTERS As a student at C.K. McClatchy High School, Didion worked at the society desk of the Sacramento Union. There she wrote wedding notices, which she mostly considered boring and uninspiring. In a 2011 interview, Didion said, “I didn’t cover weddings, I just wrote about them. I wouldn’t call that reporting.” Still, this…

I write because of curiosity. I like to look into things, to understand them, and then to find a way to write about them in a crime novel. It’s a curiosity that I’ve long held. Almost 50 years ago, it led me to a night in a police station that changed the course of my life and, well, brought me here. I had not committed a crime and was not suspected of committing one. I was a witness brought to a detective bureau. I was put in a chair and questioned extensively by a tough, no-nonsense detective who was trying to solve the shooting of a motorist by a man who had run off. I had found the gun used in the shooting. This all took place in Fort Lauderdale,…

There was a time in my life when I bounced from place to place around Fresno, not really feeling at home but knowing that I was welcome wherever I stayed. It was the late aughts, I was in my 20s, and I was between lives, transitioning from toiling as a stock person in the Macy’s lingerie department to working as an artist and art teacher. I couldn’t articulate what I was going through, but a couple of my colleagues sensed my struggle and suggested I take a house-sitting gig at their friend’s place. I had no idea what I was walking into. It was the home of Philip and Frances Levine. Phil was a longtime English professor at Fresno State, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and a former U.S. poet laureate.…

I. We knew what we were there to talk about. It was an autumn evening, 1998, when we settled in around my large kitchen table. The artistic director of Nevada City’s Foothill Theatre Company, Philip Sneed, had invited core members of our company—director, costume and lighting designers, key actors, and me, as playwright—to spin ideas about creating a stage adaptation of one of the great American novels. Our production of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose seemed meant to be. The theater and production offices were not five miles from Grass Valley, where the novel’s narrator, Lyman Ward, lives and writes in a cottage built for his grandparents decades before—and where those remarkable grandparents, Oliver, superintendent of the Zodiac Mine, and his wife, Susan, a writer and illustrator, live out the…

Growing up in humid Florida, Syren Nagakyrie relished the mild-weather days when they could sit in nature, dreaming up stories about the birds and the flowers. At community college, Nagakyrie took biological-science courses that brought them to the Florida marshes and the Grand Canyon. “That was [when] I learned I can’t experience the outdoors in the same way that a lot of other people do,” they say. Nagakyrie has multiple disabilities and chronic illnesses—including Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which can cause joint pain and fatigue—but that never diminished their love for the outdoors. When they moved to Washington State’s “stunning” Olympic Peninsula in 2017, they planned to explore the area’s hiking trails. However, on one early hike, despite having researched potential obstacles, Nagakyrie immediately encountered steep stairs and a sharp drop-off on…

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…

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…

My mother is a teacher of fiction. She has read every novel under the sun. She wrote her master’s thesis at San Francisco State on Mrs. Dalloway while pregnant with [my sister] Emily. To celebrate a poetry publication of mine years ago she sent me a card that read: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”—Joan Didion. At the time I was living in a closet on St. Mark’s Place, and I pinned the card to the crumbling wall to remind me of her support, her thoughtfulness. But the more I looked at the card, the more it troubled me. My poems didn’t tell stories. I became a poet in part because I didn’t want to tell stories. As far as I could tell, stories may enable us to…

Tongo Eisen-Martin is San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate. His curriculum on the extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again!, is widely used as an educational and organizing tool. Eisen-Martin’s most recent poetry collection, Blood on the Fog, was published in 2021. You all prayed so perfectly just now(in the growing San Francisco language)Tomorrow, we start again with the gold… new neighbors in the trance of spiritual infancynewspaper people describing the way the non-white-class body stretches out on bencheshow the city will sit you down next to the kindest alcoholismspare fanaticism…a stealin the shooting gallery that becomes a shooting gallery (or the next vaudeville congress) accordingly, newspaper people wanting in on underground gambling shacksmaybe even in on sensible proletariat retribution Perfectly,from your lips to courthouse tiles…the revolution that devils…

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…

“After a lifetime, I still have never been able to escape my family…. It is still a struggle to be hidden and feel strange—my favorite mood.”—PHILIP GUSTON Painting is perhaps the most malleable of all artistic mediums. It captures every bit of the artist. The physical, mental, and emotional are recorded in the paint. The movement of a sore shoulder, selfish desires, and the pain of existential dread stick to the surface of canvas. In this way, every painting is a self-portrait. Flatlands is a painting from the third act of Philip Guston’s career. Depicting a barren landscape littered with symbols, elements of the studio, objects that recall the passage of time, old shoes, canvases, body parts, and a disembodied hand aiming an accusing finger at an unknown subject, it…

The thing is, doing what you love and passing it off as work, a career, even—it’s the ultimate scam. The victim is either no one at all (it’s your life) or everyone else (no man is an island), but there’s no question that you’re getting away with something—and not just a sly little trick but a sustained and life-defining con. I write full-time (which is to say, I’m a novelist but also a screenwriter, editor, anthologist, freelancer, and occasional speaker and teacher, as “writing full-time” tends to go), and while I have several reasons to write, some of them even good, I mainly do it to keep the scam going. I know a lot of writers now, but even as a child of Los Angeles, I grew up without knowing,…

ON A HILL OVERLOOKING THE VAST OCEAN, AN OLDman sat under a crooked cypress, telling story after story. Yes, this is a mukashi mukashi story. Taro watched, through the wispy strands of the old man’s long white beard, seaweed bobbing over undulating waves. He had heard another version of this same story. In fact, he’d heard it many times before. He looked around at his family and friends, his fellow villagers. They were entranced, deep inside their personal visions of adventure. The old man’s beard tossed the other way, and Taro peered deep into the horizon, the thin line between sea and sky. According to the old man’s stories, the archipelago was rich with life, reefs and other island landings. But no one on this island ventured farther than to…