Content Tagged ‘LA’

This installment of On Location comes from Ecotone contributor Josh Emmons, whose story, “Nu,” appears in issue 15, and was a special mention in The Puschart Prize XXXIX.

Hell-A Revisited

Growing up in Northern California, I considered Los Angeles to be the worst city in America, synonymous with smog, sprawl and superficiality, Alvie Singer’s cultural wasteland and “the big parking lot where you buy a hamburger for the trip to San Francisco,” as John Lennon put it. My friends and I called it Hell-A and avoided it as much as possible, although, like the common cold, it sometimes struck: I’d visit relatives or go to Disneyland or pass through en route to friendlier, less toxic Mexico. After college at an anything-goes moment, I followed a girlfriend there and lived for six months in the Los Feliz neighborhood, where its sun and asphalt and artificiality so depressed me that Elliott Smith’s suicide in nearby Echo Park a few years later made sense.

Following two decades living in San Francisco and New Orleans and Philadelphia, I moved back to LA in 2014 for work, hoping I’d be better able to accept the city’s endless ugliness as a blunted forty-year-old than I had been as an idealistic twenty-something. What I found, however, is that it is no longer a vast, unrelenting space devoted to cars and bad movies, but has made great strides in public transportation, density, art, green space, tacos and sustainability: the whole New Urbanism fantasy. When people now say, apropos of what’s happening here versus the Bay Area tech takeover, that “San Francisco is a utopia gone wrong and LA is a dystopia gone right,” they aren’t wrong.

I don’t want to get too boosterish, because Los Angeles still has the worst air quality in the country and attracts a lot of demi-creative narcissists and is too hot, but I live in a stately Art Deco building downtown, a few blocks away from the excellent Last Bookstore and Broad Museum and historic theaters on Broadway. I walk everywhere and meet people uninvolved with Hollywood and find corners of the city where nature is reasserting itself. All this might sound like a low bar to cross, but I’m encouraged that a city of four million people, like so many other cities in America and abroad, is trading in a bankrupt dream of single-family homes and eight-lane freeways for an expanded train system and high-rise residential buildings and public art.

I’ll probably never stop fantasizing about living in a more instantly appealing place—a New York or New Orleans or Paris—but for now I’m happy to be in one that’s come so far in so short period of time.

This week we’re rounding up the Ecotone and Lookout haps (that’s California-style talk for “events”) at next week’s AWP conference in L.A. We, like, totally hope you’ll come see us at tables 919 and 921 in the bookfair!

Stay tuned to the blog this week for details about promotions we’ll be running, including a caption contest related to Honey from the Lion (the winner will receive the ENTIRE Lookout catalog!) and how using #overheardatawp in honor of Ecotone‘s sound issue can score you some schwag.

Speaking of Honey from the Lion, you’ll find author Matthew Neill Null signing books twice in the bookfair: on Thursday at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center table (1254) from 10 to 11, and at our table (919) on Friday from 11 to 12. Come get a book signed!

And if you’re up for a party, please come have a drink and a chat with us on Thursday from 5:30-7:30 as we mingle with our friends at the Common, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Young Literati of The Library Foundation of Los Angeles, and Santa Monica Review. 

Here’s what some of our other friends are up to:

This panel features a nice taste of the two “great Jamies” of our Anniversary issue :
The New South: A Reading in Three Genres. (Devin Latham,  Dr. David Jamie Poissant,  Adam Vines,  Carrie Jerrell,  Jamie Quatro) With Faulkner’s South paved into history, what defines Southern literature today? Do contemporary Southern writers still make use of old tropes like familial loyalty, racial tension, and heavy religion set in a humid landscape of live oaks and wisteria? Does the urban and suburban South require new settings and themes? This reading features five Southern writers reading fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that illuminates and redefines Southern literature today. Thurs at 9 am: Room 406 AB, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level

Here’s a place-based and co-starring issue 20 contributor Toni Jensen:
Rewriting the Iconic West: Native and Latino Writers on Crafting Change. (Toni Jensen,  Stephen Graham Jones,  Tim Hernandez,  Erika Wurth,  Ito Romo) From the cowboy on horseback to the detective on the dark city streets, the fictional icons of the West loom both familiar and large. Their stories have the ease of familiarity, but what if the stories you want to tell shift the vantage point? What if your hero is the one shot by the cowboy, the man turning the corner to avoid the detective? A diverse set of writers discusses strategies for telling the West’s iconic stories through a wide range of viewpoints and in diverse cultural contexts. Thurs. at 10:30: Room 402 AB, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level

Another place-based panel, this one featuring Ecotone all-star Alison Deming and one-time contributor, the legendary Mark Doty:
The Tattooed Desert: A Tribute to and Reading from Richard Shelton, Hosted by the University of Arizona Poetry Center. (Alison Deming,  Mark Doty,  Ken Lamberton,  Naomi Shihab Nye,  Richard Shelton) This panel/reading celebrates the life of poet, writer, teacher, and literary citizen Richard Shelton. Shelton’s 12 collections of poetry include The Tattooed Desert, Selected Poems: 1969–1981, and The Last Person to Hear Your Voice. A critical influence in the 20th-century American literary landscape and a quintessential voice of the American Southwest, Shelton’s work as an educator perseveres, particularly in the Arizona prison-writing program he launched in 1974 that continues today. Thurs. at 10:30: Room 502 B, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level

This one has Ecotone‘s editor Anna Lena and contributor Annie Finch:
From Tetrameter to Terza Rima: Prosody as a Catalyst for Discovery in the Workshop. (Anna Lena Phillips,  Kim Addonizio,  Annie Finch,  Timothy Steele) Formal poetics can enliven workshops and offer students access to a rich set of traditions, replete with potential for new work. As teachers and authors of guides to poetic craft, the panelists have introduced students to formal prosody in college courses and in community settings. How can craft guides be used to encourage experimentation with meter, fixed forms, and procedural work? Their titles offer a wide range of strategies; they will discuss these as well as other possibilities. Thurs at 1:30: Room 409 AB, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level

This one has Ecotone contributor Camille Dungy:
Genre-Crossing and Poetic Truth: Lyric Nonfictions, Reported Poems. (Tess Taylor ,  Camille Dungy ,  Robert Polito,  Tom Sleigh,  Brian Turner ) This panel examines the places where genres collide and inform one another. What happens when the poet takes up the memoirist’s work, the reporter’s notebook, the essayist’s pen? What do poets learn about poetry by pushing its boundaries? By what means does documentary poetry emerge, and what can poets teach documentarians? Five skilled practitioners of both poetry and nonfiction explore the productive sites where genres overlap. Thurs. at 3: Room 518, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level

So, no contributors here, but this one’s right up our alley!:
The New Nature Writing. (Sarah Gilman,  Meera Subramanian,  Christine Woodside,  Elizabeth Rush,  Laura Pritchett) What is the impact of climate change on contemporary literature and creative nonfiction in particular? How do you write creatively about climate change? And how can we engage new audiences about a deeply polemic issue? Through a sustained discussion of craft, best practices, and theory, this panel explores the ways in which climate change has destabilized and redefined our literary interaction with nature. Thurs. at 3: Gold Salon 4, JW Marriott LA, 1st Floor

We’ve got a hat trick in this one! Ansel, Rebecca, and David are all Ecotone contributors:
The Music Issue: Poetry’s Root Influence (Hosted by the Oxford American). (Ansel Elkins ,  Ada Limon,  Don Share,  Rebecca Gayle Howell,  David Kirby) Roots music represents a diversity of styles ranging from Tejano to gospel to blues and beyond—sound work from the crossroads of place, family, and culture. Poetry, too, has an Americana tradition, a divergent verse that sings the multitudes of our fly-over selves. The Oxford American presents a conversation about musical influence that moves through the global into the local and returns us to the origins of poetry: the beat, the breath. Friday at 9: Room 502 B, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level

This panel features folks from UNCW’s graduate program–Jamie Mortara, former Lookout intern, and Corinne Manning, former Pub Lab staff:
Reimagining Literary Spaces. Maisha Z. Johnson (Black Girl Dangerous, Silk Road,various), Jayy Dodd (The Offing), Zinzi Clemmons (Apogee Journal), Jamie J. Mortara (Voicemail Poems), Nancy Jooyoun Kim (various, The James Franco Review)Literary journals must go beyond stating a commitment to inclusivity and diversity. To change the literary landscape and make public more work by POC, LGBTQ, women,working class and differently abled communities, journals must reimagine the traditional structure of submissions or even the role of literary spaces. Editors will share their experience of how they re-visioned journals or differently approached the editing process Friday at 1:30, Gold Salon 2 in the Marriott on the 1st Floor

Two Ecotone contributors in this remembrance:
Remembering Claudia Emerson. (Emilia Phillips,  Jill McCorkle,  Alan Shapiro,  Kathleen Graber) Claudia Emerson’s death in late 2014 grieved her friends and her readers. This event features panelists remembering her spirit and her work and inviting audience members to participate by also reading her poems so that her single voice resonates through a chorus of witnesses. The panelists focus on her posthumous books, The Opposite House and The Impossible Bottle. Friday at 1:30: Room 403 B, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level

This one place-based AND stars two Ecotone contributors:
The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide. (Christopher Cokinos,  Eric Magrane) More than 50 writers respond to the stunning biodiversity of one of the world’s most important deserts. From serious to comic, postmodern to narrative, this community produced an anthology as varied as the desert itself. Editors and contributors will do brief readings, followed by a discussion of the processes behind creating a unique book that combines, for the first time, anthologizing creative work with (playful) natural history descriptions and illustrations found in traditional field guide. Saturday at noon: Robert Muroff Bookfair Stage, LA Convention Center, Exhibit Hall Level One

We hope to see you at one of these events or at the bookfair table or totally soaking in some sun waiting in line outside of a taco truck. Travel safe to L.A.!