Archive for the 'writing' Category

A new writing class

paperhaus April 21st, 2010

I’ll be teaching a new creative nonfiction class — memoir, essay — with Writing Workshops Los Angeles. It will start on June 1, and run for 8 weeks. It’s shaping up like this:

In this mixed-level course, we will read and discuss published narrative nonfiction as a means to investigate questions of truth and storytelling, and where the two intersect. There will be in-class exercises that address specific craft issues such as scene and voice, among others, and every student will have the opportunity to workshop at least one piece of nonfiction writing in a serious environment meant to challenge and inspire each member of the class.

This course will take place in the instructor’s home in Echo Park, where beer, wine and sparkling water—and the occasional delicious snack—will be served.

In class, we will explore the pleasures of reality-based narratives and the sometimes-conflicting pressures of truthtelling and storytelling. We will discuss the difference between memoir and memory, the difficulties of disclosure, and explore the edges of nonfiction. We will also practice, practice, practice: form, technique, discipline, play. Workshops and exercises are designed to ignite the desire to read and to write. Each individual voice will be fostered, encouraging students to be the best writers they can be.

Talking to Rebecca Skloot

paperhaus February 11th, 2010

I met Rebecca Skloot in New York last fall, when after a National Book Critics Circle event I had little business attending, I tagged along with a group of former board members in search of cocktails. Because we’d gone to the same graduate MFA program I knew her name — not that I learned the names of all alumni, but the nonfiction program had been passing Skloot’s book proposal to class after class of new students, saying This is the way you do it.

The book, however, had been in (and out) of the works for a long time, and when she told me it was finally on the way, I suppose I was dubious. But I was also curious. It sounded fascinating, and it was.

The book was released Tuesday, Feb 2; my piece on Skloot and her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, ran in the LA Times this Monday. Here’s some of it:

Lacks, who died of cervical cancer in 1951, is the source of the HeLa cell line, the first human cells able to reproduce on their own in the laboratory.

By the time of her death, researchers at Johns Hopkins University had been trying for years to find cells with such reproductive properties. Lacks’ cells — powered by something in her cancer — were so remarkable that Hopkins shared them with scientists around the globe. A new industry of mass-producing human cells grew up around them.

HeLa cells have been used in experiments for decades, enabling countless scientific discoveries, including the polio vaccine and the discovery of chromosomes. The were blown up with an atom bomb and sent into space.

Still in use, they have been produced at mind-blowing volumes — enough to wrap around the world three times. They’ve been called immortal. Yet as vitally important as they have been to science, few have thought about their origins.

Skloot first heard the story of the cells as a teenager, learning only that they came from Lacks, an African American woman. She found the information tantalizingly inadequate. At the time, Skloot’s father, Floyd (who is the author of several books about living with brain damage) was severely ill and enrolled in a difficult, frustrating drug trial.

“I think that’s why I latched onto the story,” she says. “My first question was, ‘Does she have any kids? What do her kids think of this?’ “

One thing I didn’t mention anywhere is that Skloot has established the Henrietta Lacks Foundation, in hopes of providing resources to subsequent Lacks generations. Henrietta was poor when she died; her children grew up poor, as many of their children have, unable to afford to health insurance even as major biomedical industries have grown up around their mother’s tissues. Maybe some of the people who make charitable decisions in those industries will consider putting some resources into the foundation.

I interviewed Skloot in January, before she embarked on a massive, 100+ day book tour. Part of that conversation was posted on Jacket Copy, the LA Times book blog. Seeing Skloot in action, and hearing her story of this book, is highly recommended — she’s a total dynamo. I feel lazy around her, and believe me, I generally only feel lazy when encumbered by a massive hangover.

Chances are, if you’re living in the continental US, she’ll be showing up somewhere near you soon.

Zombies and Fante

paperhaus April 7th, 2009

Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of John Fante’s birth, and I wrote an article for the LA Times about how his work — particularly “Ask the Dust”– has survived. I talked to Dan Fante, who, like his dad, is an author, and who is at work on a memoir, and who told me lots of good stuff that makes it into the article.

Zocalo holds a panel on Fante tonight at the Hammer Museum, moderated by tall guy David Kipen. Oh, he’s also NEA guy David Kipen. I can’t be there, but I am going to try to make it to the unofficiall Happy Birthday Drinks for John Fante at a Skid Row bar on Wednesday.

I am not a devoted fan of John Fante — some of Bandini’s struggles are just too juvenile for me — but I do love how he sees Los Angeles, and how it is where his true feelings lie. Like this:

Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.

The pretty town of Los Angeles gave me another recent article, too. Last week, I met up with Seth Grahame-Smith, author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. We shot a photo of him in a casket showroom and then he talked to me for an article that appeared in Saturday’s LA Times. The book has been #10 on Amazon — in all books, including nonfiction — since its release Wednesday.

Now: coffee.

State by State in the LA Times

paperhaus September 12th, 2008

“State by State” is an amazing anthology in which 50 contemporary writers take on our 50 states; I write about it in Friday’s LA Times.

For the article, I talked to co-editor Sean Wilsey (over breakfast) and contributors Josh Ferris (over e-mail) and Jhumpa Lahiri (via phone). Thanks to all of them. You can see the guys in the new Out of the Book film that’ll be playing at independent bookstores across the U.S. Many of the writers gathered in New York for a BBQ and reading; I bet the outtakes are pretty good.

I was inclined to like this book — I love roadtrips, I love the truly stellar writers, and heck, Lahiri writes about the Rhode Island town we grew up in together. While we were on the phone I had to ask — in that play, when we were colors of the rainbow, were you yellow? No, she was red, she said; her family has photographic evidence. I was yellow, and I believe all evidence has been destroyed.

Anyway, I did like the book, very much. I am sad, though, that I couldn’t cite more of its fantastic essays in the article in the paper. A few standouts: Anthony Doerr on Idaho; Heidi Julavitz on Maine; Louise Erdrich on North Dakota; Said Sayrafiezadeh on South Dakota; and Jonathan Franzen’s perfect anthropomorphization New York.

The anthology was inspired by a depression-era series from the Federal Writers Project, which of course now I’d love to read — all 20,000+ pages of it. But those were guidebooks, and this is not. From the article:

How do we define home? Is it the place you came from, or the place you chose? Is it the place where you felt free, like Ferris? Or where you no longer feel secure, like Lahiri? Does its absence make the sense of home more acute — does leaving help us recognize what is essential and unique about the place we came from?

If “State by State” answers these questions, it does so in a patchwork. For some, like Charles Bock on his father’s Las Vegas pawnshop and Rick Moody on the Connecticut parkway that stretched between his divorced parents’ houses, home is defined, in part, by its destruction. Its essence exists only in memory.

But for others, who return to places that are surprisingly recognizable — Susan Choi to Indiana, Ann Patchett to Tennessee, Susan Orlean to Ohio — there is an essentialness that remains deeply affecting. How, Choi wonders here, could her old “house lurk there, unchanged apart from the trees, so that it could leap forth and bludgeon my heart?”

Read the whole article. Or the book.