L.A. TIMES ON LIT MAGS

No, we didn't miss the L.A. Times piece on literary magazines but it's locked up behind the Times odious registration system and unavailable. If any readers are L.A. Times subscribers and care to copy the article to me via e-mail, we'll happily run excerpts.

Comments

[Ed]

Give it a few more days and it will hit the wires. Failing that, LEXIS it, baby.

[Tod Goldberg]

Seek and ye shall find...

By Anne-Marie O'Connor, Times Staff Writer

Novelists now view the sprawling city with an insider's eye. The Los Angeles literary landscape once emerged through the eyes of Raymond Chandler's private investigator, Philip Marlowe, who moved uneasily through a gritty South-Central, or in the quiet menace of Joan Didion, who found equally lethal noir tensions in the anxieties and alienation of a rootless upper-middle-class.

Didion's Santa Ana winds still sweep through contemporary Los Angeles novels, but today, South-Central is anything but a shadowy backdrop. A growing community of new writers is redefining the regional fictional landscape, writing their stories out of Crenshaw, Little Saigon, Echo Park and places like "Irangeles," which can be found anywhere from Beverly Hills to Huntington Park.

Their characters emerge more from the urban Darwinism of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" than from the pampered anomie of Bret Easton Ellis' "Less Than Zero." Hollywood still flows through the stories with the literary inevitability of Mark Twain's Mississippi River, but it is less often a setting than a symbol, of the perennial California dream of reinvention. "You could say you were anyone. Who would know?" one urban scavenger says to another in Marisa Silver's 2002 "Babe in Paradise."

As Los Angeles writer Carolyn See sorts through the new fiction for an upcoming anthology, she says: "I get very excited about it. I think we really are experiencing, not a renaissance — because we're not being reborn — but a naissance. The literature is being born every day."

Like Walter Mosley, who reinvented the classic noir mystery genre with his black investigator, Easy Rawlins, the new novelists create their fictional worlds from insider perspectives, See said. Chandler "never graced South-Central with actual human beings," See said — and even John Steinbeck's most respectful portrayals of Latinos were written as an outsider. But many of today's new Southern California writers are African American, Latino, Asian or foreign-born. A number are women.

Their work is increasingly being read — in new literary journals and anthologies, at independent bookstores, galleries, book clubs and literary salons that are proliferating in private homes. Author readings, even poetry readings, are muscling their way into the city's cinema-centric popular culture, and helping to absorb literary newcomers into the milieu.

"There are all these different threads weaving together," said Chris Abani, a Nigerian novelist who moved to Los Angeles in 2000. "You're reading each other's work. You go to their readings. You have conversations. That filters into how you think about your own work, and how you position yourself."

Yet "it's a much looser network than you would have in New York," Abani said, repeating a mantra of local writers. "You don't have that cutthroat competitiveness. You don't have the overbearing sense of the school or the kind of artistic fascism. You're much more free."

The vast urban spread of Southern California offers entire worlds of unexplored terrain, new novelist Nina Revoyr said. Revoyr is the author of "Southland," the story of a young Japanese American law student who, like Mosley's Easy Rawlins, is forced into the role of an investigator by circumstance, in her case the sudden death of her father. The story is set in the Crenshaw district. When Revoyr began her research, she was fascinated by the area's history of racial coexistence: of African American neighbors who watched over the houses of Japanese Americans sent off to internment camps.

"What you hear about in ethnic neighborhoods in Los Angeles is always strife," Revoyr said. "You don't hear about cooperation and community. It's a great place to be a writer because it's all happening here. If you're interested in race, the environment, social class, we're in the center of all of those burning issues."

Novelist Samantha Dunn thinks Los Angeles' more open-ended society makes it a good place for writers to take stylistic risks. Dunn, author of "Failing Paris," is editing "Women on the Edge," an anthology of female writers who she believes benefit from L.A.'s nonpuritanical culture. "These are women who have a daring view," she said of the writers she has selected. "Inside, something really wild is going on. It manifests itself in language."

Dunn is including Mary Rakow, author of the award-winning "Memory Room," Anita Santiago and Lisa Teasley. There is Julianne Ortale's surrealist tale of a 60-year-old woman who begins to lactate and the edgy sexuality of Rachel Resnick in a story set in Marrakech.

To Glenn David Gold, one advantage of Southern California for writers is the diffuse urban geography, which means that people form communities by choice, not serendipity, granting space to the growing number of writers — both new and established — who have made the region their home.

"If you're a writer, there is always an urge to not belong, to be a fish out of water," said Gold, who is married to Alice Sebold, author of the best-selling "The Lucky Bones." "And L.A. gives you an opportunity to not belong and still belong, which is the best possible opportunity."

In modern Los Angeles, many communities are strangers to one another, or they have been transformed by waves of migration, giving the metropolis an infinite quality, like Mexico City.

The Janet Fitch's mid-Wilshire childhood home, once a white middle-class neighborhood, is now part of Koreatown — a manifestation of the perennially shifting geography that made many of the city's literary archetypes increasingly unrecognizable to Fitch. In her novel "White Oleander," the city's transience itself becomes a force, as a rootless society buffets a young girl through a brutally indifferent foster care system.

"It made me really angry to be reading writing about Los Angeles that wasn't the real place," she said. "It was about the film industry and Malibu Colony, the Judith Krantz school of literature."

Many Los Angeles writers are thankful for the 3,000 miles of separation from the literary world of Manhattan — and an East Coast establishment viewed as more likely to show mavericks the door.

"In the East, it's much harder. You're limited there, as in England, by your accent, and your milieu," said Lisa See, Carolyn's daughter and the author "On Gold Mountain," a memoir of her Chinese American heritage.

"Let's put it this way: I think it's easier for anyone with a different perspective to flourish in California," said Sandra Dijkstra, the West Coast über-agent known for finding a publisher for Amy Tan's 1989 "Joy Luck Club," a book whose success touched off a fresh wave of receptivity for nonwhite authors. "It's more of a frontier place. That's why people come here to realize their dreams. There's an acceptance."

But today's new pilgrims come more often from south of the border than across the Great Divide, adding a new hybrid quality to universal aspirations and dreams.

"It's colored. It's people of color. That's one of the factors," said Yxta Maya Murray, author of "Locas," about young Latinas in Echo Park.

"It's growing up a Valley girl and being a Mexican. Literature is the great adventure. It's going to help smooth out these rough edges."

A number of Los Angeles-based writers devote much of their writing not to Southern California, but to their countries of origin — Cristina Garcia's Cuba, Gioconda Belli's Nicaragua. Chris Abani's latest novel, "Graceland" — a coming of age story about a Nigerian Elvis impersonator — is set in Nigeria.

Gina Nahai, whose novels "Cry of the Peacock" and "Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith" are anchored in Iran, says such literary cosmopolitanism defies such simple labels as "ethnic" literature.

"What you're really talking about is international fiction," she said.

The new plethora of Southern California writers includes a wave of mystery writers, some of them inspired by Mosley, who set his bestselling "Devil in a Blue Dress" in the 1940s belle époque of black Los Angeles, when munitions factories lent a new prosperity to black American emigres from the Jim Crow South, and Central Avenue was a bustling boulevard hosting crowded jazz clubs.

Mystery writer Paula Woods drew from her childhood readings of Chester Himes, an African American writer who lived in Los Angeles for a time, for her mysteries about Charlotte Justice, a black detective who in "Stormy Weather" must solve the murder of an early black Hollywood director whose work was all but forgotten except for a bit part in "Tarzan."

"I've had people say, 'You're a female Walter Mosley,' and that's a nice compliment, but I'm offering a different take on the territory," she said. "I suspect we have more black mystery writers in L.A. than anywhere else in the country."

Perhaps that shouldn't be a surprise. Much of the city of Los Angeles is itself a mystery, even to its residents — a disjointed landscape of multiple heartbeats, carved and recarved by freeways and an endless stream of traffic.

Even the Los Angeles literary new wave is uncharted territory. When Carolyn See wrote her dissertation on the Hollywood novel in 1963, she could find only three Los Angeles writers who were not writing about the movie business. When she published her first novel in 1970, her editor told her Joan Didion was her main competition.

Today, as she sorts through candidates for the anthology, she's coming across scores of new writers: Michael Jaime Becerra, whose new book, "Every Night Is Ladies' Night," is set among Latino immigrants in El Monte, "a beautiful dream world that's never been written about." Or Frank Mundo, a security guard who works the graveyard shift and has self-published his tales of overnight security.

See guesses there may be several hundred serious writers in the region, and she's giving UCLA an endowment for the study of Southern California literature. "This is all happening under the radar of academia," she said. "If there's money for dissertations, they'll break down and notice what's right under their noses.

"Australians have an expression: singing the world into existence," See said. "If you do make a song about it, it's there, and it takes on its own momentum, it's Paris in the '20s."

[TEV]

Thanks Tod, but I'm looking for the other piece - the one on the lit mags. (They ran two pieces.)

[TEV]

Ah, and here it is, sent in to me by another reader - so now we're up to date!
***
BOOKS
A local boom in lit mags
Three journals are giving voice to writers from the area and to the
city, sans clichés.

By Lynell George, Times Staff Writer

For decades, the challenge for Southern California writers hasn't been
trying to fix the region on the page; the real test has been to
circulate more representative ideas and images — beyond L.A.'s borders
and its easy clichés.

But in the last few months, three handsome, homegrown literary journals,
Black Clock, Swink and the Los Angeles Review, have made their debuts
with high hopes of raising and sharpening the profile. To longtime
participants and observers of L.A.'s literary life, they are all welcome
additions, fleshing out the area's already vivid scene.

The coincidence of timing suggests to veterans nothing more than the
fact that the table has been amply set. "I sort of see this as not the
advent but the continuation of something," memoirist and native Bernard
Cooper says. "To register surprise is to risk sounding provincial."

"What I like is what all of this says inherently," says David L. Ulin,
an L.A.-based writer and editor of "Writing Los Angeles" (Library of
America, 2002) and a contributor to The Times. "It's time to stop
talking about the culture and start making the culture. In the past,
journals have been just an expression of a smaller community....
Philosophically, these three journals speak from and for their community
— but reach out to artists beyond them as well."

Unique, unpredictable and stripped of the usual-suspect clichés, these
journals reflect the region not through its topography or its icons but
through its pace and sensibilities. Just as strong a filter is the
editorial point of view.

Black Clock, edited by local novelist and critic Steve Erickson, is
published under the auspices of the California Institute of Arts in
Valencia in conjunction with its master of fine arts writing program.
The premiere issue convenes well-known writers from both coasts and in
between — Aimee Bender, Heidi Julavits, Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody and
David Foster Wallace. Erickson raises the question-and-answer bar with a
deliciously twisty conversation with speculative fiction guru Samuel R.
Delany — mulling over all manner of topics, including male emotional
detachment, theater and urban landscapes.

For anyone familiar with the murky dreamscapes of his novels, Black
Clock is decidedly Erickson — an expansive, elliptical, speculative
journey in which "place" is illustrated not through surface symbols but
by attempting to convey a location's mood or essence. It's a sensibility
that reflects the creative spirit of the institute, CalArts President
Steven D. Lavine says. "I don't entirely share his dystopian views, but
I like the fact that he is someone who spans the distance between high
literary culture and popular culture."

For Erickson, 54, who just completed his latest novel, "Our Ecstatic
Days," the process of creating a literary magazine was a departure from
the isolation of writing, a kind of laboratory for the process of
collaboration. "There was a certain sense of serendipity to it,"
Erickson says, one person leading to a germ of an idea, leading to a
larger theme. Erickson, who has been teaching fiction and popular
criticism workshops in the school's master's writing program since 2000,
liked the idea of what a journal on this coast might mean.

"Great literary writers aren't being published as much anymore, but in
fairness people aren't buying a lot of literary fiction now. Some kind
of independent movement has to come around to invigorate it." Published
semiannually with submissions on an invitation-only basis (a
subscription is $20 a year; the newsstand price is $12 per issue),
Erickson's plan is to organize each issue around a theme. "Not a theme
that will announce itself on the cover, but one that will emerge" — in
nonfiction, poetry, "lost music of the imagination," and subtly, of
course, L.A.

"We're straddling this line. We want to be a magazine with a national
presence, but I don't want to obscure the West Coast identity and
sensibility that I think is there," he says. "As the publishing business
gets more like Hollywood, I want more good writers to have a place to go."

Playful, yet serious

Of the three new literary havens, Swink most patently bills itself as
bicoastal. In many ways, Swink is like joining a boisterous conversation
already in progress between two worlds no longer as distant as they once
were — or think they are.

Swink's editor, Leelila Strogov, who has lived on both coasts and now
makes her home in Silver Lake, is trying to inject the energy and play
of both regions on her pages: "I like L.A. although I will say I love
New York. New York is the unhealthy, obsessive love. L.A. is the healthy
relationship."

Swink is playful but it doesn't mean that it is not serious. "Swink"
after all means toil, Strogov says, "and what is writing if not hard
work?" The premiere issue, which arrived in April, has a busy,
collage-like feel; the pages are noisy with dashed-off notes between
writers, provocative floating pull-quotes, snarky e-mails and sexy
marginalia. (A subscription is $16 a year for the semiannual
publication). Indeed it all plays out like a sophisticated mixer, with
writers — known and unknown, poets and essayists — convened from various
far corners. There's fiction by Steve Almond and Lisa Glatt; poetry by
Terrence Hayes and Rynn Williams; travel meditations by Rachel Resnick
and Geoff Dyer; and a clever feature called "Damaged Darlings" that
allows one writer to pickup a piece where another left off (or gave up).

Strogov, 33, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
whose former life was as senior vice president of Juno Online Services,
an Internet service provider, had long been looking for a way to balance
her artistic leanings with her business savvy. "I just thought: One day
I'm going to start a literary magazine." And unlike most, within a year,
she was well on the road. Raiding her savings, begging and borrowing,
she cast a wide net for writers, funding and advice.

"I cornered Ian Jack (editor of Granta) at the L.A. Times Festival of
Books [and I] told him what I wanted to do. His first piece of advice
was 'don't.' When it was clear I wasn't going to listen, he said, 'Don't
publish your friends.' "

That might get harder. Strogov realized early on that no magazine was an
island and decided that it was important to build a physical community
around the publication — even if they were distanced by thousands of
miles. To that end, Swink maintains a lively online life — poetry,
essays and fiction organized around a theme. To keep the conversation
going between issues, Strogov holds monthly parties that alternate
between New York and L.A.

"Since being here, one of the things I kept hearing was that there were
a lot of writers here doing their own thing but they didn't feel
connected to the New York scene. So Swink is a conscious effort to merge
those worlds to creative a cohesive community."

Building community

Early on, when she was just getting her sea legs in L.A., Kate Gale paid
heed to the question of space and community. "It's just hard to get
people together here. Distance. Driving. Busy lives," says Gale, who
co-founded (with Mark E. Cull) her own nonprofit literary organization,
Red Hen Press, 10 years ago.

Of all three journals, the Los Angeles Review (a subscription for the
annual publication is $14), feels the most sprung out of L.A.'s
city/desert terrain. Anyone who has been on the L.A. literary scene for
any length of time will recognize some of the stalwarts — Molly Bendall,
Greg Goldin, Suzanne Lummis, Deena Metzger, David St. John. Gale, who
had been publishing political nonfiction, fiction, poetry and memoir
under the Red Hen imprint, wanted to do something special to mark the
organization's 10th year. Publishing 20 titles in 2003, including the
anthology "The Misread City," Red Hen had built a multipronged
infrastructure — a "Poetry in Schools" program for underprivileged L.A.
school children, the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Series, which christened a
new venue for local and touring writers to present new work and an award
series.

"I kept asking myself what else does a literary community need?" she
recalls. The Review became the vehicle to press that conversation forward.

Her idea was to provide a home or a range of work — memoir, fiction,
poetry, general nonfiction, with rotating editors overseeing each
discipline. They agree on a theme: the first issue, "Language, Science
and Oppression." The next, "The Slippery Truth." She wants to take
retrospective looks at writers who made the region their home.

Gale, 41, was looking for stories from various corners of the
imagination, "I wasn't interested in collecting a bunch of big names,"
says Gale, who is assembling work that tells L.A. stories from the prism
of different economic tiers, racial or ethnic perspectives or gender. "I
like the idea of people being awake and thinking about their life.... I
see editing the journal as a way to get to the geographical margins of L.A."

She figures the journal is a way to see what kind of place L.A. is
emerging to be in the 21st century, to get at those hidden corners and
give voice to lives long marginalized. And she will make sure those L.A.
stories stand side-by-side with all the glamorized others. "Even if I
have to sell books, like oranges, on the freeway offramp."

[susu ibie]

I am about to be a published author with Publish America. Would you be interested in showcasing my book? I am Nigerian born from the Edo State region, but currently live in the United Kingdom. The book has leanings on political intruigue, religion and romantic overtones. Perhaps you might like to have a read. It was a tentative attempt to challenge certain aspects of societal practices and norms.