Get your favorite cafeteria food and drink your fancy cocktails too — while enjoying literary conversations. Come to the next Angels Flight • literary west Salon — where I’ll be chatting with fellow author Lilliam Rivera!
But first about the salon: Put together by local literary journal Angels Flight • literary west, these monthly events happen at Clifton’s Republic in the second-floor Ballroom — a lovely historic space with idiosyncratic decor, including a lion that looks over the proceedings! Each event brings together a pair of featured writers who read a bit and discuss their work in conversation. Below are Matthew Specktor and Tyler Malone who talked at the February event.
Afterwards, a handful of writers recently published in the journal give lively readings. Then, attendees mingle, eat, and drink — since after all, Clifton’s has a cafeteria and a handful of bars with fancy cocktails.
In case you’re not familiar with Angels Flight • literary west, this online zine seeks specifically to “explore uncharted stories of Los Angeles and beyond,” with a new issue coming out every six months.
Want to read at a future salon? Submit your work to the journal for consideration! Want to attend future salons? Follow AFLW’s Facebook page to find out about the events.
And please do come to the next event: Angels Flight • literary west Salon With Lilliam Rivera & Siel Ju. Themed “The Good, the Bad & the In-Between: Choices & Redemption,” the event will feature me and Lilliam in conversation, reading and discussing our new books — my Cake Time and her YA novel The Education of Margot Sanchez.
There’ll also be readings by Patrick O’Neil, CLS Ferguson, Chris Daley Tod Goldberg, and Stephanie Zhong.
I’ll have early copies of Cake Time for sale and hope to see you there —
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Every month, I interview an author I admire on her literary firsts.
March’s featured author is Louise Wareham Leonard, author of 52 Men — a thinly veiled memoir written in tiny, flash pieces. Each of the 52 snippets features a guy with whom the narrator had a relationship — some affairs brief, some longer, some intimate, some cruel.
In this interview, Louise talks about autobiographical fiction, the shame of secrets — and Milo Yiannopoulos.
Sign up with your email below to be entered to win a copy of 52 Men — and to get notified of future interviews!
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Siel: I’m curious about the writing process you took to complete this book. The 52 short flash pieces take place over a lifetime. Is this a book you worked on in bits over decades, or within a more focused period of time?
Louise: I was living with my husband in the outback of Western Australia, in the deep desert, as far from the New York City life I grew up in as I could get. We were there a year working for the aboriginal people, and others, and in that time my past life seemed a total dream to me – that chemical madness dream Fitzgerald talks of. All these faces and their stories kept flashing at me from the sky, speaking to me, and I just had to write them down.
Why 52?
A Trappist monk I met last year — who is also the poet John Slater — read the book and said, “Louise, here are 52 of the men you’ve known — now you have the other one hundred thousand.”
I think he grasped the idea that the number was random, or maybe that 52 cards in any pack is a good enough amount to play your game.
Relatedly, will there be a sequel?
They say that white people picked their constellations out of stars, but the aborigines in Australia picked theirs out of the pattern the darkness made. My 52 men are just the white shining surface. Right now, I am working on exploding the entire terrain. So yes, there’s something coming that’s related, though it is far more open and expansive, a change for me.
52 Men ends with a longer story about a girl who has a sexual relationship with her older step brother — at first as a young girl who’s being molested by him, later as a woman, consensually. This story goes to all the uncomfortable, murky, in-between places around consent, desire, and power — and because it does so, is very different from most of the neater, more binary abuser-victim stories we hear regarding sexual abuse. Did you have fears about the reaction to this story when you put it out into the world, especially considering the growing popularity of the “yes means yes” type rhetoric that tries to define consent and rape in definite, clear-cut terms?
I think it’s clear that when a child is ‘turned on to’ sex – whether a girl or a boy by, say, a priest, that child has been sexualized. However, for me at least, it’s not always what happens physically, exactly, but how it happens and what emotions it causes: particularly shame and self-loathing and the feeling of powerlessness over one’s own body and self.
That Elise forgives this guy Ben, the older stepbrother in the story, is her big mistake. Or not that she forgives him, but that she trusts him, forgets that he has consistently done her harm and could do so again. She’s young there, and naïve and foolish.
At the end, however, when she discards his letters, I think she has faced the truth about him – that he is weak, not she.
My ultimate point is that Ben is essentially a weak man. He lets down his step-sister by abusing her in childhood, then he lets her down later when she gets pregnant and he runs away. Abusers often, oddly, really are weak boundary-less unevolved people.
Maybe they are manifesting other people’s problems, or maybe some evil has them captive – but that’s being generous to them.
I was not of age to give consent; nor, by the way, was Milo Yiannopoulos who recently, perhaps unwittingly, dug his grave by saying how great it was for him to be molested at 14.
One thing I think helps a lot is to see that both in my case, and in Milo’s the relationship was secret. If it’s secret, there’s shame — and when there is shame, there is either abuse or betrayal, yes?
Even among thinly-veiled memoirs, 52 Men stands out to me as a book taken very much from life. Dubbed “autobiographical fiction” in the description, your book includes cameos by well-known men. Why did you choose to make and call this book fiction instead of memoir?
Even if someone abused you, I don’t think you have the right to destroy them. Not unless you have gone to court. It just doesn’t feel fair to me. People can apologize, and change, and though I believe in outing lies, and abuse, I am no one’s punisher — let alone for life.
Then again, some might say I am protecting my abuser, and my family. The day I stop doing that, which could be very soon, unless my abusers get a bit nicer, lol, it’ll be called memoir.
If live music by Cut Chemist and remixes of Emily Dickinson poems sound like the makings of a perfect Saturday in the park for you, head to Grand Park for Downtown Bookfest this weekend.
There, you’ll be treated to performances, workshops, and readings — including one by me, along with other Red Hen Press authors!
But first, about Emily: This year, the event will be a special treat for Emily Dickinson fans — with a book-making workshop inspired by Dickinson’s collection of 400 plant specimens and refashionings of Dickinson’s poems via vintage typewriters, thanks to Writ Large Press. That’s all part of the City of Los Angeles’ Big Read honoring Emily Dickinson’s work.
Other fun stuff includes a Write Your Own L.A. Poem Workshop, paper artmaking, and popup bookshops for your literary shopping.
Stay around until 4:05 for the readings by Red Hen Press Poets! I’ll take the stage with Brendan Constantine, Kim Dower, Blas Falconer, and Ron Koerte. Hope to see you there —
Downtown Bookfest. Grand Park’s Olive Court, 200 N Grand Ave., Los Angeles. March 11, 2017, noon – 5 pm. Free.
*** Winner selected! Congratulations to Gary in Dallas, OR ***
“I find a list of pros and cons about me. Pro: Great sex. A good person. Con: Needy, both emotionally and financially.”
* 52 Men is a thinly veiled memoir by Louise Wareham Leonard, written in tiny, flash pieces. Each of the 52 snippets features a guy with whom the narrator had a relationship — some affairs brief, some longer, some intimate, some cruel.
The 52 men glimpsed through this book all are so unique — there’s one guy that sounds curiously like Jonathan Franzen, another who jousts with the narrator so she’ll remember him, several who die young…. The book’s like an ode to ex lovers but also an ode to the fragmentary memories of them.
After the flash pieces, this book ends with a longer short story about a girl who has a sexual relationship with her older step brother — at first as a young teen who’s being molested by him, later as a woman, consensually. This story goes to all the uncomfortable, murky, in-between places around consent, desire, history, and power and is sure to make you think and feel intensely for a long time after you’ve finished the slim volume.
*** This giveaway is now closed, but join my email list to be entered into future giveaways! ***
Come back mid-month to read a Five Firsts interview with Louise Wareham Leonard.
Brief reviews of books by contemporary authors I read this month — along with photos of what I ate while reading. The list is ordered by the level of my enjoyment:
“Curious girls get what they deserve.”
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If you haven’t read Ottessa Moshfegh’s stories yet, treat yourself to them now. No one writes self-loathing and disgust quite the curiously addictive way she does. One of the things I love about Ottessa’s writing is her precise, unsympathetic physical descriptions of people. I really admire her panache in taking on writing about people that are difficult to write about — the mentally challenged, the predatorial, the physically deformed — in an unsentimental, matter of fact way. This is my favorite short story collection probably since Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior.
“Women are like water. They are tempting like that, and they can be that treacherous, and they can seem to be that bottomless, you know? — and they can be that shallow. And that dirty.”
* Giovanni’s Room centers on two young guys that have a confusing affair in 1950s Paris. It’s about love and shame and desire and self-loathing — it reminds me of Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You, which I also loved. The book also has deep feminist underpinnings about female identity at that time — how much it’s defined in relation to men, how dependent it is on male acceptance and approval. I loved every page of this book and am looking forward to the discussion at The Edison Book Club March 1!
“I googled: can writing a novel kill you? And found nothing useful.”
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This novel is about two sisters: a famous pianist and serial suicide attempter and her less famous and less suicidal writer sister. Despite the topic of suicide, the love and boisterous closeness in this funny, messy family was warm and sweet. Also, one of the sisters is often called Yo (short for Yolandi) by her sis — and I often call my own sis Yo (short for Yo-El)…. So basically this novel is about me, which is how I read most novels.
“You can’t get rid of memories; you can only try to ignore them.”
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If you love Black Mirror, Children of the New World is like a literary equivalent. Each story tells the tale of a different dystopian future — many having to do with the intersection of technology and memory — how false memories could be created by virtual worlds, how our experiences change if we can give others open access to our memories. Other stories portray life post ecological disaster — like a new ice age freezing up most of the US. It’s a chilling read — especially if you’ve just read Naomi Klein’s climate change book like I have.
Green Girl by Kate Zambreno (Harper Perennial, 2014)
“Sometimes she narrates her actions inside her head in third-person. Does that make her a writer or a woman?”
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I picked up Green Girl on a whim at the AWP Conference. This novel is about a listless, dissolute, and slightly self-destructive American girl who’s moved to London to try and forget a guy who jilted her — but is still unhappy, working as a perfume sample girl at Horrids and getting wasted and hooking up with guys she doesn’t even like for reasons she can’t put a finger on. It captures a poignant mood — one between desire and becoming and disappearing specific to young adulthood.
“Money keeps you from paying for things with your life.”
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I’d put off reading Grace for a few months because I feared its heavy topics (slavery, rape, etc) were more than I could handle when I was already despondent about current politics. The book stars 15-year-old Naomi, a slave in 1840s South, who escapes the plantation — to end up at a Georgia brothel. Some themes are resilience and hope in the face of oppression, fear, racism, and violence. But there’s also a lot of love in this book — and a happy ending — and, yes, frightening parallels to socioeconomic problems that still plague us today.
“The future made us older, but our wisdom was dubious.”
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An ex indie band member turned bartender finds a time travel wormhole in his bedroom. That’s the premise for Every Anxious Wave, which I picked up because I met the author, Mo Daviau, who’s the writing coordinator at Vermont Studio Center where I did a residency earlier this year. If you love indie rock, wry love stories and time travel tales, Mo Daviau’s novel melds all three into a sweet, lighthearted read.
“I denied climate change for longer than I care to admit…. I continued to behave as if there was nothing wrong with the shiny card in my wallet attesting to my ‘elite’ frequent flyer status.”
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There’s nothing quite like reading a well-researched and passionate tome about pending environmental disaster while sitting in a plane that’s spewing tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. I started Naomi Klein’s book while flying to DC for the AWP conference — and while the text would be worrying under any circumstances, I found it extra anxiety provoking considering what Trump’s done to the EPA.
Her overall argument is that if we’re going to have any chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change, we must stop valuing GDP growth over everything else and instead “place value on those things that most of us cherish above all — a decent standard of living, a measure of future security, and our relationships with one another.” The odds are stacked against us though: International trade laws hobble local environmental efforts, many enviro nonprofits greenwash even oil companies (The Nature Conservancy in fact drills for oil in Galveston Bay! And has been for a decade a half!), no techy magic bullet solutions exist — and we as individuals are reluctant to pay serious attention to the issue of climate change. We’re in the midst of discussing this book at the Current Events Reading Group.
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Need a literary staycation? Take a daytrip to downtown Santa Ana for Boca de Oro, Orange County’s art and lit fringe fest.
It happens Sat., March 4th, and it’s all free! With readings by esteemed local authors, writing and bookmaking workshops, collaborative art projects, open mics, and lots of readings, the all-day event should be really interactive and community oriented.
March’s featured author is Louise Wareham Leonard, author of 
Siel: I’m curious about the writing process you took to complete this book. The 52 short flash pieces take place over a lifetime. Is this a book you worked on in bits over decades, or within a more focused period of time?
