Start going to literary readings in L.A., and you’ll likely run into Rich Ferguson fairly soon. Rich is a fixture in the L.A. literary community known for three things: His wide-brimmed straw hat, his ability to perform long poems of his from memory, and his fantastic reading series, All Lit Up.
Okay, he’s known for other things too, like his lovely novel, New Jersey Me — but this post is about All Lit Up!
Originally started by Rich and Stephanie Barbé Hammer more than two years ago, All Lit Up is a monthly reading series that happens at Chevalier’s Books, in conjunction with the bookstore’s own Liz Newstat. The format of the event’s shifted a bit over the months, but these days, All Lit Up generally features a trio of readers — with occasional open mics, impromptu readings by local writers who happen to be in the audience, and a closing poetry performance by Rich himself.
Earlier this month, I got to read from Cake Time at All Lit Up, along with Guggenheim fellowship recipient Victoria Chang and Wallace Stegner Fellow Charif Shanahan! It was a fun night — with Morgan Parker (There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé) and a bunch of local poets in the house. I may have been the only non-poet in the place — but they let me read anyway.
Put the next All Lit Up on your calendar now: On Oct. 5, Novelist and filmmaker Tom Stern and poet Billy Burgos will read, along with CLS Ferguson — talented writer and also Rich’s wife — who’ll be celebrating the release of her new book, Soup Stories: A Reconstructed Memoir. The series is always free and open to the public.
All Lit Up. First Thursday of every month, 7 pm. Chevalier’s Books, 126 N Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles. Free.
*** Winner selected! Congratulations to Suzanne — Hope you enjoy the retreat! ***
Here’s your chance to spend a blissful weekend writing in the desert — getting inspired by the natural habitat around you while communing with and learning from fellow writers and artists.
That’s the goal behind The Joshua Tree Experiential Arts and Writing Retreat, happening November 17 to 19 at Mojave Stars Ranch in Wonder Valley. This weekend event includes explorations through Joshua Tree as well as creative writing exercises and ecology talks — plus a unique opportunity to publish your newly-created work.
Poet Ariel Fintushel, one of the two facilitators the event along with San Francisco poet Sean Negus, sums it up as “a 3-day retreat in the desert with experiential arts and writing workshops leading participants through the ecosystem for generation of new culturally conscious work to be curated into an annual anthology.”
As you might expect from the setting, the schedule includes some very Californian activities — a desert initiation workshop, high noon ceremony, and a talk called “Altered States and Psycho-Spiritual Legacies of the Desert” among them. But the core of the schedule is geared towards getting participants to generate writing. There’s goal-setting on the first night, lots of site-specific writing exercises, process discussions, and open times for individual writing.
Interested? Check out the full schedule on the retreat website, then enter to win a ticket to the retreat by leaving a comment on this post with a brief reason why you’d like to go. The giveaway closes September 21, 2017 at 11:59 pm PST.
Or if you can’t wait for the giveaway to run its course, get your Eventbrite ticket now at the early bird price of $50. If you wait, the ticket will go up to its regular $125 price.
Keep in mind the ticket covers just the workshops and scheduled events. For lodging, camp on the cheap at Indian Cove — or if that’s not your style, book a nearby hotel or airbnb.
I’d love to go to the retreat myself, but I’ll be out of town that weekend for the Miami Book Festival. I’m looking forward to reading the anthology though —
Every month, I interview an author I admire on her literary firsts.
I first discovered Amelia Gray’s writing through Gutshot, her collection of sharp, macabre short stories that took me through all sorts of emotions: fear, discomfort, anxiety — and almost always, surprise. So when I picked up her latest novel, Isadora, I was expecting something similar — and was surprised again.
This historical novel is much more lyric in style, dissolutely sad and languorous — Fittingly so, since it’s based on the modern dancer Isadora Duncan’s life, taking us through the years right after Isadora’s children’s untimely deaths.
Besides Gutshot and Isadora, Amelia’s the author of three additional books, THREATS, Museum of the Weird, and AM/PM. I’m now curious to read those, to see how different they are from the ones I read —
In this interview, Amelia talks about the energy in grief, the odalisque quality of sentences, and the Italian vacation she took in the name of research.
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Siel: This is your fifth book — but your first work of historical fiction, I believe! In a previous interview, I read you took a couple classes at Duncan Dancing in San Francisco as part of your research for Isadora. What other fun things did you do in the name of research? Did you eat blackberries in Paris? Sunbathe in Corfu?
Amelia: I made it to Viareggio, on the Italian coast, for a week of off-season wave-watching. I’m glad I did, too; that sense of a shuttered beach community off-season was exactly the feeling I was going for with the book, and getting to spend a few days walking cold sand was important to the whole. I was writing this book while working a full-time job, so I didn’t get to take as many trips as I might have liked.
I think most people know you for your dark, tight, jewel-like short stories in Gutshot. How did your writing process change for Isadora?
I wanted lines that suited the character, and in reading about Isadora and looking at pictures of her, I came to understand her as a languid woman of great and enduring passion. The sentences naturally needed to have this odalisque quality, a confidence, a patience about them. The sentences would go on for pages and pages in the first draft. The word count probably stayed about the same from first to last draft but the number of sentences quadrupled.
The novel’s told from four perspectives — Isadora herself, her lover Paris, her sister, and her sister’s lover. All are relatable, with their little selfishnesses and self-loathing — and hateable too, for the same reasons. Is there one character you most related to personally?
I couldn’t sustain a novel’s worth of work if I didn’t related to the characters personally. In Isadora I see vanity and self-interest, in Elizabeth my fear and practical sense, in Paris my mysticism and idea of country. Max is a bit of a scapegoat as he represents a few different things, I’d answer your question by flipping it and saying I least related to Max, though of course there’s plenty of me in there.
The overarching mood in Isadora is that of grief. What was the experience like, day in and day out, writing a book-length work on such a heavy topic? I ask mainly because the mood of whatever I’m writing does tend to affect me, even if what’s happening in my own life has nothing to do with what’s happening on the page.
It’s a grief-driven book but I wonder if it might not be quite right to say that the overarching feeling of it is sadness. I found myself energized by writing it, but there’s a lot of energy in grief, power in passion that maybe lives under cover of ordinary life. Writing about grief is an opportunity to live in one of the more dynamic emotions we get. I’ve had a much harder time writing from the perspective of someone losing their own life.
Though your writing’s often described as dark, I think of you as a pretty cheery and funny person, having seen you ham it up as a Literary Death Match judge! You were hilarious in the LDM Book Report too (below). I mention this because I’ve been thinking a lot about what a writer’s writing actually says — if anything — about the writer herself. Do you think the former offers any sort of window to the latter?
Oh, thank you. My hammy stage nature is perpetually mortifying to me, but I can’t help myself. There’s something way over my pay grade about the relationship between humor and the abject. I can only speak to the feeling of this constant search for balance. I don’t think I’d last too long writing death novels and no jokes.
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Enter to win a copy of Amelia Gray’s Isadora by signing up for my newsletter. Already joined up? Then you’re already entered — but you can get a second entry into the drawing by leaving a comment on the giveaway post with the title of the last historical novel you’ve read. Good luck!
What is the difference between a Cafe Gratitude restaurant and the new Beverly Hills spot called just plain Gratitude? Both offer delicious, organic, vegan food with a dose of self-empowering messages — but only the latter boasts a full bar.
So though I rarely drink, when I stopped by the newish Beverly Hills spot for happy hour with Esther of e*star LA fame, I had to try the cocktails.
And in regular Gratitude-style, these cocktails are the most healthy-sounding cocktails ever. Case in point: the Black Magic gets its black from activated charcoal! The cocktail might not be all that detoxifying though, since it also contains a good amount of rhum agricole, along with fernet, chaga sarsaparilla, and lime, and comes topped with a cluster of mushrooms — yes, real mushrooms — growing out of a big ice cube.
That cocktail wins the prize for creativity. For fruitier fare, there’s Escape — a refreshing summer drink made with fresh pineapple, coconut water, and Diplomatica Reserva Rum — and One In A Melon — a tequila drink mixed with watermelon puree, lime, Himalayan salt. Basically, the cocktail ingredients sound like raw juicery concoctions — just with alcohol added in.
My favorite drink though was the Outer Sounds Sauvignon Blanc: a dry New Zealand wine with notes of lime and gooseberry. And my favorite happy hour eat was Light-Hearted — a.k.a. the Chef’s Seasonal Pizzetta — a gluten-free, dairy-free pizza that’s actually delicious! The einkorn and kamut flatbread was soft and pliable, the vegan cheese creamy, and the dusting of toasted coconut flakes a sweet touch.
For a lighter meal, get the Honoring (Mediterranean Tapas) or Fearless (Korean Collard Spring Rolls). The former lets you spread zucchini cilantro hummus, spiced tomato chutney, hempseed tabbouleh, kalamata olives, and gremolata on raw flax crackers; the latter gives you your greens wrapped over oyster mushroom bulgogi, avocado, cabbage, spicy pickled vegetables, and kim chee, with sesame wasabi dipping sauce on the side. It didn’t taste very Korean to me, but it still made for a delicious hand-held salad.
I’ll be back to try the loaded heirloom potato fries next time — available in nacho, Hawaiian, and Bollywood styles. Happy Hour at Gratitude happens weekdays from 3 pm to 6 pm.
*** Winner selected! Congratulations to Isaly in Fort Worth, Texas! ***
I’m one of those people who don’t function well when there’s a lot of drama going on in life, yet I often find myself pulled towards it, and to people who go out of their way to seek it out. I think many people are this way — which explains why Isadora Duncan, with her brief, wayward life, provokes such fascination in the public imagination.
Widely considered the mother of modern dance, Isadora had quite the dramatic life, traveling all over the world to live, teach, and perform, flouting social mores to take on many lovers, and finally, dying tragically at 49 when her scarf got caught in the wheels of a car she was riding.
Many biographies have been written about Isadora, but Amelia Gray’s fictionalized account of Isadora’s life — plainly titled Isadora and published earlier this year by FSG — focuses on a lesser known period — when Isadora’s two young children drowned in a car that lurched into the Seine River. The historical novel follows Isadora through the time after the accident as she grieves, growing unpredictable, ascerbic, and mentally unhinged.
It’s a gorgeously-told story of a downward spiral. Isadora goes to the Greek island of Corfu to recouperate — where she struts around nude, urinates in public, and eats her children’s cremains: “It has come to be that I can eat only when the flavor is attended by the subtle ash of the children in my mouth.”
Yet she retains her wit, and her incisive observations of humanity. Of her skeevy doctor, Isadora muses: “The silver tray of his heart holds two brown tincture bottles, each offering their own opiate. The first is marked Desire and the other Virtue; one clouds the mind and the other turns the stomach, but they have the same general effect in the end.”
The novel is actually written from four perspectives: Isadora, her lover Paris Singer (the wealthy son of the Singer sewing machine magnate), her sister Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s lover Max. Each protagonist is uniquely vulnerable — and insufferable — preoccupied with their individual hopes and self-pity and senses of entitlement. Yet it’s hard not to be drawn to them, selfish as they may be. Elizabeth’s constant emotional repression, for example, is especially touching. She consoles herself through lonely times by gorging on rich food, “and hid[es] happiness from the others so they wouldn’t suspect her for it.” When she writes a new lover, she edits and re-edits her letter, excising all allusions to desire, herself, to home, until all that’s left is a single sentence: “R — Can you picture the morning?”
Isadora is the kind of book that makes me want to wallow and revel in despair, numbness, unprovoked aggression, self-loathing — all the habits and emotions I generally try to run away from. It also makes me want to live bigger, less afraid of what may become of me. “What use is there to life and love without the mystery of circumstance?” the fictional Isadora says. What indeed?
I’m excited to be giving away a copy of Isadora to my readers! All current email subscribers will be automatically entered to win one copy. Subscribe now if you’re not yet getting my occasional newsletters.
For a second chance to win, comment on this post below with the title of the last historical novel you’ve read. The giveaway closes September 30, 2017 at 11:59 pm PST.
Come back mid-month to read a Five Firsts interview with Amelia Gray.
If you follow me on Facebook, you know I just quit my day job. And while I suddenly have a lot more time for socializing and posing for pics with photogenic purple veggies, I’d love to see you at one of my three September readings — all of which are free and open to the public:
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I’ve wanted to be a part of this monthly series at Chevalier’s since forever — so this reading is a dream come true for me! I’ll be reading with poets Charif Shanahan (Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford), Victoria Chang (recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship) — and the wonderful Rich Ferguson (New Jersey Me) will emcee
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Back at the beginning of summer, I wrote about 90x90LA — and I’m psyched to be taking part in one of the series’ events! Spend an afternoon in the park listening to lit from Allison Conner, Lynell George, Daniel Jose Ruiz, Oscar Sagastume, and yours truly. Snacks and drinks will be provided.
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Hope to see you at one or all three — Each will be pretty different, and I’ll wear three separate outfits, so you won’t be bored!
