Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2022 i Journal of Alta California

Kim Shuck’s most recent book is Exile Heart. She is the seventh poet laureate emerita of San Francisco. She has received honors including the 2019 PEN Oakland Gary Webb Anti-Censorship Award and an inaugural Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. I write every morning. These morning poems are a catchment of what is running through my thoughts, things in the news, or my frustrations. These poems came from watching my great-grandmother’s hometown in Ukraine be destroyed. Echoes Morning wispsEchoesPress noses on predawn glassBacklit by the dimming night walkers theEarly writersSlipping their cocoons and shaking their still wet wingsRitualCarrying some across their shoulders into these hoursRitual of waterPreparationClosureNews from Ukraine andDebates on the various selected hypocritical curiosDeclarations of why you should or shouldn’t be upset about the bombingDebates on…

Imagine that it’s 2035 and I’m halfway between Earth and Mars. My spacecraft, a marvel of engineering, is designed to protect me and my fellow astronauts from the thousands of different ways that we could die or that our fragile bodies could be damaged. High on the list is radiation—invisible particles of energy as small as a quadrillionth of a meter that zip and zap through space at close to the speed of light. They slice right through our bodies to strike our DNA and proteins and other very small and very critical structures in our cells, potentially causing tumors and other molecular mayhem. Zero gravity threatens to turn my muscles and bones to mush. Isolation, anxiety, and the mind-boggling distance from Earth and those I love threaten to drive…

Elon Musk is aiming for Mars. Jeff Bezos is building “a road to space.” Richard Branson is selling gravity-defying joyrides. Among the New Space entrepreneurs, there’s a lot of talk about the future. But what about the past? We think we know about the history of space. (Heck, if you’re reading this, you’ve probably lived through a lot of it!) Popularizations like Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 have made the space race story common knowledge. It goes like this: The Soviets kick things off by blasting Sputnik, and then Yuri Gagarin, into orbit. The Americans respond by dropping Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and then 10 others, on the moon, where they play golf and rip around in a buggy. The Soviets up the stakes…

It all started with a blog. Remember those? Seth Marko’s love for reading inspired the Book Catapult, a blog he founded in 2006 where he reviewed the titles he was reading each week, an online diary of sorts. He gained a large following after San Diego’s local radio station KPBS interviewed him about his 117-day reading of a James Patterson novel, an attempt to solve the mystery of why “JPatt” was so popular. Marko concluded that you can “read a chapter in one of [JPatt’s] books during a commercial break on American Idol…. [His readers] kind of read by convenience, you know, rather than looking for real literature.” After 10 years of blogging about literature, Marko wrote a final post to announce that the Book Catapult would become a store.…

VROMAN’S BOOKSTORE Pasadena, vromansbookstore.com Founded in 1894 by Adam Clark Vroman, a relocated midwesterner, this well-appointed shop is Southern California’s oldest bookseller. Vroman’s is beloved throughout the San Gabriel Valley for its robust English-language children’s section, an abundance of discounted jewels in its clearance section, and plenty of free parking out back. It has a second location in nearby Hastings Ranch. (Tip for writers: Vroman’s offers a discount to authors needing copies of their own book.) BOOK SOUP West Hollywood, booksoup.com On the Sunset Strip’s western edge, a stone’s throw from the Viper Room and the Whisky a Go Go, this shop boasts of being a bookseller to the great and infamous. True to its word, it is probably the only place in the world where you can see Harvey…

BOOKLEGGER Eureka, facebook.com/booklegger-112573335426992 Booklegger, in Eureka’s Old Town, is a maze of shelves where one can happily get lost. With over 50,000 used and new books, the store offers a diverse mix for every interest. Want to read about aviation? Railroads? Shakespeare? A foreign language? Booklegger has a section for that. NORTHTOWN BOOKS Arcata, northtownbooks.com Since 1965, Northtown Books has offered new releases, works by local authors, and thought-provoking political titles. In addition to a selection on Humboldt County’s redwood forests, there’s a large magazine section—a rare sight these days. Each purchase comes with a free bookmark designed by owner Dante DiGenova. GALLERY BOOKSHOP Mendocino, gallerybookshop.com Thanks to the carefully chosen selection at Gallery Bookshop, intriguing books face out from every shelf. While kids enjoy the Bookwinkle’s Children’s Books room…

It’s fascinating to read Luis J. Rodriguez’s memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. nearly three decades after it was published. In the first place, there are all the ways Los Angeles has changed since 1993, and all the ways it hasn’t, particularly around questions of identity and race. In the second, there’s the figure of Rodriguez himself, who at the time Always Running appeared was 38 and living in Chicago, where he had moved in 1985. To return to the book in 2022, then, is like gazing backward through a looking glass, at a personal history that has now become a social history, in a future that now exists for us in present tense. Rodriguez, of course, is a touchstone writer in Los Angeles, the city’s…

In November, Scribner will publish the 50th-anniversary edition of my novel Mumbo Jumbo. My book features a force, which I dub Jes Grew, the phrase borrowed from author James Weldon Johnson. He describes some Black musical forms as having sprung up and gone viral. Jazz and rock and roll are easy examples of forms that took off and became infectious. Yet there is also something so attractive about Black musical forms that outsiders jeopardize their safety to be in proximity to their life-affirming substance and freedom. Louis Armstrong noted the travelers who risked their lives by coming from behind the then–Iron Curtain to attend his concerts in West Berlin. Nam June Paik, the late video artist, said that rock and roll was one of our country’s most important exports. More…

In my freshman or sophomore year of high school, I decided to become a painter. I devoured art history books of all kinds, but one title quickly became the focus of my early obsession: The Essential Willem de Kooning, by Catherine Morris. It was a pocket-size introductory book that had beautiful samples of work from various chapters of the artist’s life and career. As I recall, one prominent painting in it was Montauk Highway. I don’t remember the first time I saw Montauk Highway in person; however, I make a point of spending time with it on each visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (it’s a work that we Angelenos are lucky to have in the museum’s permanent collection). At 59 by 48 inches, Montauk Highway isn’t…

We’re living in a moment when fortune favors the bold, when entrepreneurs, private citizens, and billionaires are changing what’s possible for life beyond Earth. You no longer have to be a NASA astronaut to visit space. There are new services that deliver packages into orbit or to space stations. One day, you may float past a power plant and recharge your spacecraft on the way to Mars. As the stories in this special section reveal, our new obsession with “up there” has its roots down here, in the West. Prepare for liftoff!…

Look up. Just 62 miles above us lies the border of space. About an hour’s drive if you were to make the journey by car. Or three minutes if you take the trip in a rocket ship. “Space travel, in three words, is ‘you go fast,’ ” says William Shatner in a documentary about the space flight he took last October. The Star Trek actor flew 347,539 feet aboveground in a four-person spacecraft built by Jeff Bezos’s rocket company, Blue Origin. “I’m overwhelmed,” Shatner exclaimed upon returning to Earth. “Everybody in the world needs to do this.” Yet until about 60 years ago, such a high-speed journey was the stuff of science fiction. Then came the launch of Sputnik, the Apollo missions, space shuttles, and Dennis Tito, who, in 2001,…

Ishmael Reed is the recipient of a 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent book of poetry, Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues, was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2020. I first used astronomical terms in my book of poetry Conjure, published in 1972. I continue to be interested in astronomy and have a work in progress about the musings of an old satellite replaced by a newer one. “Lady Stardust” was influenced by my conversations with retired physicist Myron Salamon and a session with theoretical physicist Arthur S. Theodore. Salamon believes that the universe had a beginning, a big bang. Margaret Burbidge thought that the universe had no start and has no end. Since the…

Space suits have never been the pinnacle of chic. The microwavable-popcorn-bag silhouettes are anything but flattering, and don’t get me started on the helmets and footwear. But if Elon Musk and a couple of other male billionaires reaching for the stars succeed in making over conventional space wear, the future of celestial fashion will be more James Bond than Buzz Lightyear. One day, we may even hear someone on Mars screech, “Who are you wearing?” Musk, who, as the founder of SpaceX, dreams of putting a white picket fence on Mars by 2029, wants his space suits to look “badass.” The eccentric entrepreneur turned to special effects maestro and Hollywood costume designer Jose Fernandez, who created wardrobes for Avengers: Age of Ultron and multiple X-Men films, to finesse the look…

I’ve been collecting things to hang on the wall at Buck’s for 30 years, and in the mid-’90s, I decided that I wanted to get a space suit. But when I looked into it, I was told that after NASA is done with them, the suits all go to the Smithsonian. There were three companies that made reproductions for the movies, but even the reproductions were hard to get. I didn’t know what to do until one day Bill Perry, the secretary of defense under Clinton, came into Buck’s to have pancakes with one of the heads of the Russian army, General Leonid Ivashov, and three other Russian generals. They invite me to sit with them, and I end up asking Ivashov about what he actually does on a day-to-day…

LIBÉLULA San Diego, facebook.com/libelulabooksco Like the dragonfly the bookshop is named after, Libélula inspires dreams in the artistic neighborhood of Barrio Logan. Customers may be greeted by music being played by anyone who cares to sit at the spinet. And in addition to selling used and new books, staff help customers with job applications (a computer is available for online forms), literary explorations, and homework. MAXWELL’S HOUSE OF BOOKS La Mesa, maxwellshouseofbooks.com Stepping inside Maxwell’s House of Books, it’s easy to imagine (or remember) what life was like before the internet. Browsing the aisles of secondhand books yields thrilling discoveries in almost any genre. This vintage outpost even has a resident cat, Rorschach, who relishes a scratch behind the ears. MYSTERIOUS GALAXY San Diego, mystgalaxy.com The genre-specific Mysterious Galaxy carries…

On a block of North Vermont Avenue, between the Dresden Room lounge and the Los Feliz Theater, you will find Skylight Books, a shop with some of the country’s most intriguing window displays. They aren’t especially flashy or artfully composed, but they’re reliable evidence of Skylight’s wide-ranging, inclusive, curatorial spirit. On a recent visit, among the few dozen showcased books were H. Melt’s poetry collection, There Are Trans People Here; Akwaeke Emezi’s cerebral, surreal novel Freshwater; and Memorias de un Abedul, the Spanish-language version of Memories of a Birch Tree, Daniel Cañas’s children’s book about persisting in the face of adversity. To encounter the inviting, collective effect and not be beckoned inside is to perhaps lack curiosity about humanity. Mary Williams, Skylight’s general manager, says, “We really do try to…

WONDERLAND BOOKS Wonder Valley, instagram.com/wonderland.bookshop A real High Desert experience awaits the book browser at Laura Sibley Bone’s Wonderland Books. Open when the flag’s up outside, Wonderland is located in a classic homestead cabin across the road from the Palms, a restaurant also owned by the Sibley family. The bar, on quiet afternoons, is a fine place to read whatever you may have picked up at Wonderland. RED ROCK BOOKS Ridgecrest, redrockbooks.net The only bookshop in Ridgecrest is an expansive 7,000 square feet of new, used, and specialty books (and other gifts) in a welcoming environment—Oliver the cat may greet you—that makes a fine midday stop for eastern California travelers. The local/regional section alone is worth the visit. CACTUS WREN BOOK EXCHANGE Yucca Valley, 760-365-6652 (no website) Since the closure…

BART’S BOOKS Ojai, bartsbooksojai.com The open-air shelves of Bart’s Books carry an impressive selection, rain or shine, and put one in mind of Paris booksellers’ stalls that line the Seine. Books along the street still sell on the honor system, just as they did when Richard “Bart” Bartinsdale first set a few shelves outside his house—still the core of the operation—in 1964. PILGRIM’S WAY BOOKS AND THE SECRET GARDEN Carmel, pilgrimsway.com Browse candles and incense beneath a geodesic dome surrounded by Buddhas and fountains in this little shop’s Zen garden. Inside, inspirational literature and contemporary and regional titles join crystals, tarot decks, and polished stones. Owners Paul Fridlund and Cynthia Fernandes met and married here over 20 years ago and still maintain its spiritual oasis with care. CHAUCER’S BOOKS Santa…

THE COLLECTIVE OAKLAND Oakland, thecollectiveoakland.com Anchoring a collective of Black businesses, this one-room bookshop offers a well-curated reading room with armchairs, Black art, and vintage vinyl. The tiny team that runs the Collective Oakland is taking Black literature to the people by launching book giveaways; creating partnerships with schools, hospitals, and farmers markets; and hosting Read Drink Chill events with its in-house chef and mixologist. BOOKS INC. Palo Alto, booksinc.net In 1851, Bavarian immigrant Anton Roman used his gold rush riches to fund a bookselling-and-publishing venture. Despite losing one location to the 1906 earthquake, and no longer in the publishing game, Books Inc. remains the West’s oldest independent bookseller. In addition to its popular Palo Alto location, Books Inc. has nine other Bay Area stores and offers community services like…

As its name suggests, Mother Foucault’s is not a typical bookshop. Or rather, it might’ve been a typical bookshop in, say, early-20th-century Paris. Thousands of used books weigh down teeming shelves, while hundreds more are stacked waist-high on tables, desks, upholstered chairs, the floor—everywhere. An upright piano stands in one corner, also burdened with heaps of books. The news program Democracy Now! plays quietly from a small vintage radio as Walt Curtis, the “unofficial poet laureate of Portland,” rhapsodizes nonstop about poetry while sharing a bottle of red wine with the shop owner, Craig Florence, who will likely offer you a glass as well. Mother Foucault’s, in other words, is a bibliophile’s paradise. Florence, who grew up in Portland, worked at Shakespeare and Company for a spell in the 1990s,…

BOOK LARDER Seattle, booklarder.com A mecca for cooks and readers alike, Book Larder has, for over 10 years, offered not just cookbooks but also classes and author events encompassing every kind of food and cuisine. Housed in a sunny storefront in the eternally funky Fremont neighborhood, the shop has a cheerful vibe that belies the extreme seriousness of the cooks who gather here. ELLIOTT BAY BOOK COMPANY Seattle, elliottbaybook.com The grande dame of Seattle booksellers, Elliott Bay anchors Capitol Hill’s Pike-Pine corridor with a cathedral-like, wood-lined, two-story space in an old warehouse. For decades, led by book-industry darling Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay has been the place where writers dream of reading from their work and readers gather to support and sometimes revere them. EAGLE HARBOR BOOK CO. Bainbridge Island, eagleharborbooks.com…

Rabih Alameddine’s The Wrong End of the Telescope is one of those books. You know the kind I mean: a book that creates its own terms, its own universe, that astonishes us by being unlike any other we have read. Narrated by a trans woman named Mina, it is an expanding universe of a novel, in which little is as it appears. Mina is Lebanese, a doctor; she has come to the Greek island of Lesbos—itself a sort of symbol—as a volunteer to assist Syrian refugees. Alameddine has done such work; he visited Lesbos and wrote about it in 2017. “I had been looking for a story for a long time,” he told Alta Journal in an interview last September, “and when I went to Lesbos, it became clear to…

Julie Otsuka’s third novel, The Swimmers, is a book of voices. A chorus, yes—but also a collective. Otsuka makes this explicit from the opening paragraph, which introduces first person plural as the novel’s earliest, and perhaps most distinctive, register. This blurring (between the individual and the communal, the particular and the universal) is a hallmark of Otsuka’s fiction: Her 2002 debut, When the Emperor Was Divine, brings a similar approach to the experience of interned Japanese Americans during World War II, while The Buddha in the Attic, her PEN/Faulkner Award–winning 2011 follow-up, addresses Japanese picture brides. In all three books, perspective is slippery. We are never quite certain of where we stand. For Otsuka, this quality of indistinction is the whole idea. As she writes late in The Swimmers, “There…

Some artists want their works to appear behind the velvet ropes of a museum where guards keep an eye on visitors’ every move. Mildred Howard wants her work to be in places where everybody can see it. Her largest public art piece, Frame (2015), a 22-by-20-foot rococo bronze structure, is situated in San Francisco’s Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. The empty rectangle draws the eye to Refrain (2015), a cluster of vertical steel rods created by Walter Hood that stand as if in conversation with Howard’s work. Breathtaking views of Hunters Point, other parts of the city, Treasure Island, the East Bay, and even the South Bay lie both within and beyond Frame, depending on one’s vantage point. The piece highlights the shipyard’s central role in “migrations from the southern part…

Lava Thomas has finally come to understand and accept her role. “I never thought of myself as an active seeker,” she says. “But for my family, ancestors, descendants, my role has been a seeker.” A multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans drawing, painting, sculpture, and site-specific installations, Thomas is known for addressing issues of race, gender, representation, and memorialization. Her work centers Black experience, mining personal and national histories to recover and amplify erased voices and facilitate healing. The elegant balance of research and the experiential requires her to act as historian, writer, storyteller, archivist, and—whether she likes it or not—activist. “I look at history as being cyclical, especially in this country,” she says. “The bulk of my practice is really about uncovering, unearthing these hidden histories of Black women.” While…

With the publication of this excerpt from Properties of Thirst, Alta Journal is pleased to begin a five-part serialization of the opening section of the new novel by National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Marianne Wiggins. The book is a multigenerational saga of California in which rancher Rocky Rhodes battles the Los Angeles Water corporation against the backdrop of World War II, the internment of Japanese Americans, and the death of his wife. Each week, starting July 11, we’ll publish online the next portion from this first section, titled “The First Property of Thirst Is an Element of Surprise.” Visit altaonline.com/serials to keep reading and to sign up for email notifications when each new installment is available. YOU CAN’T SAVE WHAT YOU DON’T LOVE. —he knew that. Christ, he’d…

From a young age, Amika Mota was immersed in the advocacy for women’s wellness that was central to her mother’s San Francisco sex shop, Good Vibrations. At 19, Mota started her career as an apprentice midwife, then became the assistant director at the Andaluz Waterbirth Center in Oregon. There, she advocated for teen mothers like herself. When the center was faced with bullying by a nearby hospital, Mota weathered a “David and Goliath–style fight,” she says. Andaluz prevailed. The experience would prepare Mota for a life of battling Goliaths, one that would lead to her role today as policy director at the Young Women’s Freedom Center. Mota ended up in policy work after experiencing the prison system firsthand. After moving in with a violent partner, she slipped back into the…

The 1992 film American Me opens with a riot and a rape, and gets darker from there. Directed by and starring Edward James Olmos, the movie tries to present a fictionalized account of the origins of the Mexican Mafia in California—from Los Angeles’s Zoot Suit Riots in 1943 to the city’s gang wars of the 1990s—as a cautionary dirge. But overwrought acting and directing coupled with corny dialogue (tell any group of Gen X Chicanos to “open your eyes, vato” and expect loud laughs) made the well-meaning American Me a box office disappointment. Its title is now shorthand among Mexican Americans for ham-fisted moralizing, and the film lives in the shadow of the other cinematic 1990s Mexican Mafia origin story, the campy cult classic Blood In, Blood Out. But at…

In June 2021, one of the most important works of public art ever created in the Bay Area was rescued from semi-oblivion. Diego Rivera’s enormous 1940 fresco Pan American Unity, which had languished inside a poorly lit theater building at City College of San Francisco, was unveiled in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s free Roberts Family Gallery. It had taken four years of preparation and seven trips to move the colossal panels by truck. SFMOMA will display the mural until summer 2023, when it will be returned to a new performing arts center on the City College campus. The museum is also mounting the exhibition Diego Rivera’s America—more than 160 artworks and objects that reflect his visits to the United States and life in Mexico—which will run from…

On a Sunday night in March, a multicultural mix of Echo Park creative types, Leimert Park poets, and a few old-school jazzheads from all over sat transfixed at the Lodge Room in Northeast Los Angeles listening to three generations of musicians jamming a chorus of horns, bass, piano, and drums. The scents of sage and incense filled the air as the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra played a 100-minute set dedicated to the recently deceased percussionist Derf Reklaw, whose djembe drum stood empty at the end of the stage, flanked by flowers. The Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra is at the center of Los Angeles’s spiritual-jazz scene, a constellation of performers like saxophonist Kamasi Washington, the all-women choir Voices of Creation (founded by Arkestra member Jimetta Rose), and the Miguel Atwood-Ferguson Ensemble.…

Alta Q&A The Bay Area is home to sports teams, restaurants, museums, and all the other wonders you’d expect to find in a world-class urban area. But a space rocket company? That impossible thought was running through Alta Journal editor and publisher Will Hearst’s mind when he recently visited the former naval station on Alameda Island. Yet there it was: a sprawling 15-acre campus that included a 250,000-square-foot factory, engine-testing facilities, storage tanks for gases and liquids, and overseas shipping containers presumably filled with materials and parts for space travel. Near the testing area, a gleaming silver-and-white rocket stood silhouetted against the San Francisco skyline across the bay. The spacecraft had been made by a company named Astra (disclosure: Hearst was an early investor in the company). The rocket was diminutive…

One day in 2016, a scientist visiting the Caltech campus in Pasadena ran into one of the professors from his old aerospace department. After the two exchanged greetings, the instructor told the former PhD student about an audacious idea: Instead of building solar power plants on Earth, what if we built them in space? Forget the desert or rooftops. Space is the best place to catch our nearest star’s energy. The sun never sets. Clouds never obscure it. No atmosphere dampens its radiation. An orbiting power plant could suck sunlight 24-7 and beam power—whoosh!—to anywhere on the planet. If successful, it could offer a perpetual source of affordable, clean energy, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and combating climate change in a major way. Oh, and if that wasn’t enough, perhaps such…

At six years old, Bethany Ehlmann, fed by a steady diet of science-themed public television shows like Nova and Nature, decided she wanted to become an astrophysicist. “It was probably hearing Stephen Hawking talk about black holes,” she says. In middle school in Tallahassee, Florida, she marveled as the Galileo space probe beamed its first images of Jupiter and its moons back to Earth; Star Trek novelizations and biographies of explorers, not all of them space-bound, sat on her bookshelves. Over time, all the stories inspired Ehlmann to become a pathfinder herself. As a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology and a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Ehlmann has collaborated on everything from Mars rover missions to groundbreaking studies of Ceres, a geologically…

What’s your favorite bookstore?” It’s a question we lovers of reading often ask one another as a conversation starter, as a means of discovering great booksellers, and perhaps to identify a fellow member of our group. Discussion of a shop’s merits follows: Friendly and knowledgeable workers versus staff who encourage us to wander and let serendipity strike. Broad inventory instead of a focus on, say, art and photography. Clean, modern design as opposed to an entanglement of shelves punctuated by comfy wingback chairs. A series of intimate author events or wine-fueled poetry slams. The possible reasons we love our bookstores are infinite. My favorite is Bookshop West Portal, where I’ve been a loyal customer for almost a decade. Located within walking distance of my home in San Francisco, this establishment…

GREEN APPLE BOOKS San Francisco, greenapplebooks.com From quirky in-store events and downloadable Zoom backgrounds to a curated fiction delivery service and Mergatroid, the apple-and-book-toting mascot out front, this legendary store oozes whimsy. Customers who wander Green Apple’s maze of new and used books will also find CDs and LPs, and even the occasional couple getting engaged. Another location exists near Golden Gate Park. CITY LIGHTS BOOKSELLERS & PUBLISHERS San Francisco, citylights.com Seventy years ago, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti cofounded City Lights Booksellers, the nation’s first all-paperback bookstore. Its publishing arm brought Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems to readers in 1956, putting the Beats on the map. Locals and pilgrims still flock to the landmark flat-iron building to nestle in the iconic poetry room and read rebellious works, both old and…

BLOOMSBURY BOOKS Ashland, bloomsburyashland.com Bloomsbury Books takes its name from a group of early-20th-century English writers and thinkers that included, most notably for this Ashland store, Virginia Woolf, who serves as a sort of patron saint. Opened by four women in 1980, the bright and cozy shop carries a large selection of fiction, nonfiction, and literary-themed gifts. DUDLEY’S BOOKSHOP CAFE Bend, dudleysbookshopcafe.com With its well-curated new and used titles, including a collection of hiking books and trail guides, and a first-floor coffee shop, Dudley’s already stands out in downtown Bend. Add to those features the store’s pine floors, Douglas fir beams, and Dutch door, and you’ve got what longtime owner Tom Beans accurately calls an “eclectic, cozy” atmosphere. SMITH FAMILY BOOKSTORE Eugene, smithfamilybookstore.com Opened in 1974 and since relocated to…

Astranded brainy tourist.” That’s Drew Cohen’s unexpected answer to a question about the archetypal customer of the Writer’s Block, the independent bookstore he co-owns in downtown Las Vegas. One might’ve anticipated a taxonomy of local book nerds, but really this makes just as much sense. Not all of the millions of annual visitors are here for a Sin City bender. Some are nongambling conventioneers or people visiting retired parents, and they’re looking for a different indulgence. “It’s something that’s probably unique to us, somewhat unique in the country,” Cohen says. He does offer a partial taxonomy of local book nerds who patronize his store: downtown hipsters, young families, students and faculty from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, kids from the nearby performing arts school, emissaries from deepest suburbia. What…

In 1956, when I was two, my family arrived in Los Angeles from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. My mother had Tarahumara Native roots from the Chihuahuan Desert. I was an Indigenous child who entered school in the Black and brown working-class community of Watts in the early 1960s. As a Spanish speaker, I felt unheard and unseen. Teachers placed me in a corner playing blocks for a whole year. When I spoke Spanish, I was punished. Once, when I was six, a teacher slapped me across the face in front of the class. Unfortunately, schools, including in the San Gabriel Valley, where we moved, didn’t teach English very well. At the age of 11, after being put down for years, I turned to gangs, crime, and drugs. I dropped out of…

When I wrote my first book, I thought I knew. I wanted to change literature, or at least change the world. I thought all the books about AIDS were nothing like what I was living through. People with AIDS were dying so pleasantly in literature. My novel was intended to blow up how we were perceived. My seething, righteous rage would infect readers, flow in every vein, and men, women, and genderqueers would rise to demand justice. The revolution would ignite. Not only would my novel knock capitalism to its knees, but the ex who had dumped me would regret his decision and spontaneously combust, and all the kids in kindergarten who hadn’t invited me to their birthday parties would realize the errors of their ways. Oh, and men would…

Up above there are wildfires, smog alerts, epic droughts, paper jams, teachers’ strikes, insurrections, revolutions, blisteringly hot days that never seem to let up (Massive “Heat Dome” Permanently Stalled over Entire West Coast), but down below, at the pool, it is always a comfortable eighty-one degrees. The humidity is sixty-five percent. The visibility is clear. The lanes are orderly and calm. The hours, though limited, are adequate for our needs. Some of us arrive shortly upon waking, fresh towels draped over our shoulders and rubber goggles in hand, ready for our eight a.m. swim. Others of us come down in the late afternoon, after work, when it is still sunny and bright, and when we reemerge it is night. The traffic has thinned. The backhoes have quieted. The birds have…

Rachel Richardson is the author of two books of poems, Hundred-Year Wave (2016) and Copperhead (2011), both from Carnegie Mellon University Press. A former National Endowment for the Arts and Wallace Stegner Fellow, she codirects Left Margin Lit, a literary arts center in Berkeley, and serves as poetry adviser for the Bay Area Book Festival. In the past few smoke-filled summers, I have wanted to write love poems to California’s wild landscapes, and they keep becoming love poems to my friends. This poem is for Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, whom I met in the Olympic Valley 20 years ago. We have been writing poems on opposite sides of the country since then (she lives in upstate New York), and recent years have found us both taking solace in trees and the…

THE FIRST TIME I READ MARIANNE WIGGINS’S NOVEL Properties of Thirst, it was unfinished. Or perhaps unfinishable is a better word. This was the spring of 2018, and the book had come to me in an enormous binder. The manuscript was 541 pages long, including an incomplete final chapter that began with an author’s note (the writer to herself, it appeared) articulating one of the problems Wiggins had been facing. “I haven’t been able to bring the language of this chapter up to my standards yet,” she wrote, “but I’ll get there.” The note was dated January 2016. Wiggins’s self-encouragement reminded me of a related message I’d once encountered, from a Los Angeles novelist named Maritta Wolff. In 1975, at the age of 56, Wolff had set aside her last…