A writerly window on the West

Take four writers from the western U.S., place them in Los Angeles and get them talking about their latest books -- all set in this loosely defined geographic and ideological area called "the West" -- and what do you get? A panel on regional literature? Maybe not.

"We're trying to use our backyards to tell American tales," author Mark Arax (co-author of "The King of California") explained at a Book Festival panel today. He referenced his own work with marijuana farmers in a particular corner of Northern California. "That's a story that could only take place in Humboldt County." His latest book, "West of the West," is a collection of these "encounters on the land," stories that are uniquely Californian while illustrating a generally American landscape. "The DNA of America is the West, really," Arax said.

Deanne Stillman agreed.

Extinct words to live by?

 

We like this, and found it -- where else? -- on fffound.

-- Mary Forgione

Social activists, with pen in hand...

A crowd of knowledge-hungry Angelenos packed UCLA’s Korn Convocation Hall this morning to hear the “Writers as Activists” panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Braving the early morning hours and festival traffic, cuppa joe in tow, audience members got much more than they expected -- in a good way.

Moderated by Leslie Schwartz (author of “Angels Crest”), panelists included Sandra Tsing Loh (contributing editor for Atlantic Monthly, commentator for NPR and author of “Mother on Fire”), David Goodman (independent journalist and author of seven books including “Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times”) and Donna Foote (former Newsweek correspondent and author of “Relentless Pursuit”).

Each author read an excerpt from their book; Goodman read a captivating passage about a young black boy in rural Jena, La., who dared to sit under “the white tree.” The idea for this book came while doing previous book tours, and meeting people across the country who were inspirational to him and his sister, Amy Goodman, who co-authored the book.

Fiction writers won't disclose their cold cases

One thing that unifies L.A. from its beginning until the present: murder.

Such was the topic of the Book Festival's “Cold Cases” panel hosted by the Mystery Writers of America that featured authors Tom Epperson, Denise Hamilton and Nina Revoyr with Sarah Weinman moderating. Panelists were asked the reason for writing about L.A.'s past, why they chose historical fiction rather than nonfiction and what mistakes they see in from their writing in retrospect.
 
Writing about Los Angeles while living here “is like writing someone a love letter with them in the room,” said Nina Revoyr, author of “Southland” and “The Age of Dreaming.” 

Among the cases that inspired the panelists was the disappearance of Jean Spangler, who vanished after tucking her daughter in to bed in 1949, which was in part the inspiration for Hamilton’s “The Last Embrace.”

Philosophical riffs, and 'Lowboy' on the subway

At today’s L.A. Times Festival of Books fiction panel “The Breaking Point,” discussion veered towardthe heavily philosophical, with novelists John Haskell, Hari Kunzru, John Wray and Antoine Wilson weighing in on matters of social realism, sense of self and unreliable narrators.

Wray noted that one of the many risks of tying a narrative into the larger social scheme of things is that “you could end up writing a sort of polemic, where the novel gets burdened with your own opinions.” This is certainly not the case in “Lowboy,” Wray’s third and latest novel, where his main character, a 16-year-old schizophrenic who’s gone off his meds, takes to the subway, and whose unraveling mind begins to paint a surrealistic perspective of the world around him.

Wray, 37, wrote much of the book on New York subway trains, as he said, wearing a pair of “enormous, ridiculous, noise-canceling headphones.” He’d finished his second novel, “Canaan’s Tongue” and felt completely spent and wasn’t sure what his next book would be about and was “very afraid that it was going to be crap.”

Marilynne Robinson, on 'Home' and places in her heart -- like Iowa

 

When Susan Straight interviewed Marilynne Robinson on Saturday at the Festival of Books, the pairing couldn’t have been stranger.

Straight had ample energy and funny quips. Robinson, on the other hand, was composed, calm and dignified: a persona that matched her prose. She cocked her head to the right as she spoke, as if confiding to the microphone. 

They began by talking about place in Robinson’s fiction. (She was awarded the L.A. Times Book Prize for fiction on Friday night for "Home.") Straight wanted to know whether Gilead, the town of her last two novels, was inspired by a real town.

Robinson initially denied that it did -- “It’s a composite of a bunch of small towns” -- but later admitted the origin of the town’s history: “There is a town in Iowa called Paper. A lot of the history in Gilead is drawn from Paper.” Robinson then complained that many people ignore Iowa, saying folks go to the West Coast and East Coast but skip the middle. To her, the area's beauty is quite unparalleled: “When I travel around Iowa, it looks a lot like France, a lot like Ireland.” She also argued for Iowa’s progressiveness, noting that it  recently passed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage.

Listening and examining the 'writer's ear'

The opening gambit for this panel of women writers at the L.A. Times Book Festival on Saturday was what exactly is meant by the "writer’s ear."

Moderator Louise Ermelino answered her own question as “stylistic choices and language.” She then read selected phrases written by each of the panelists – Sarah Shun-lien Bynum ("Miss Hempel Chronicles" and "Madeline Is Sleeping"), Laila Lalami ("Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Secret Son") and Julia Leigh ("Disquiet").

In response to a question about her style, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum related how she has been a lifelong word collector since fourth grade, when she began recording vocabulary on index cards. Her favorite word at the time was “luscious.”

Laila Lalami was asked about a particular narrative technique that repeats the same language for different characters. In her answer, she outlined the difficulty and beauty of switching among languages -- in this case, Moroccan Arabic, French and English. The stylistic distinction found in Leigh’s work is a lack of interiority; she described using gesture to convey emotion instead.

Suffering from writerly guilt? Janet Fitch has some ideas...

 

For all the struggling novelists out there frittering away time on Huffington Post, the ever-sordid Perez Hilton blog or your humble literary servant Jacket Copy right here, let us offer a salve to soothe that writerly guilt.

Andrew Sean Greer, author of the bestselling and John Updike-approved “The Confessions of Max Tivoli,” also whiles away the hours on blogs (he mentioned the Queen of Gossip not once but twice). So it’s possible to write that picaresque masterwork between clicking refresh, refresh, refresh.

A predilection for Web gossip was just one of the many private details shared at the lively and relaxed “Intimate Strangers” panel in the Humanities building, a highlight of the L.A. Times Book Festival on Saturday.

Moderator and journalist Veronique de Turenne took a gentle hand in leading the discussion that naturally sprang forth from such time-honored panel favorites as procrastination, the drafting process, the vicissitudes of memory and whether writing is a natural-born talent or something that can be learned. Much to their credit, panelists Greer, Janet Fitch, Gina Nahai and Jean Hanff Korelitz brought fresh perspective to each of these issues.

Ray Bradbury, on Fellini and the bag of dimes it took to write 'Farenheit 451'

Ray Bradbury is an old-timer at the Festival of Books.  He’s been a featured speaker for nearly every one of the festival’s 13 years.  But this may be his last, he warned, in an ultimatum at a panel on Saturday.

“They used to burn books; now they’ve burned the Book section at the L.A. Times,” Bradbury opined in reference to the book-burning heresy of his famous dystopian novel "Fahrenheit 451."  He demanded The Times “resurrect the Book section,” which, like most of the paper, has seen staff and page count cuts over the past year.

“If they don’t, I’m not going to come here again.”

Dave Cullen talks about the myths of Columbine

In reviewing the recently released book "Columbine," Times Book Editor David L. Ulin wrote:

Forget everything you thought you knew. The girl who professed her faith in God before being gunned down in the library. The Trenchcoat Mafia and the feud between the goths and jocks. The idea that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold -- the two Columbine High School seniors who, on April 20, 1999, killed 12 of their fellow students and one teacher in what was, at the time, the worst school shooting in the history of the United States -- were disaffected, unpopular, motivated by resentment or revenge. Even the fact that the killings took place on Adolf Hitler's birthday was a coincidence: The boys had planned to do it a day earlier but hadn't been able to get the ammunition in time."

Author Dave Cullen spoke with Ulin on Saturday afternoon at the L.A. Times Book Festival about the book, which hit stores this month. "Columbine" marks the 10th anniversary of the tragic shootings that unfolded in the Colorado town.

Cullen recalled the moment he learned of the school shooting: He was at lunch “eating a budget gourmet frozen dinner,” and turned on the TV news to learn what had happened. As a journalist, he said, his relationship with the tragedy began that day, when he began covering the event.

The book, written in the third person to “avoid injecting [himself] into the story,” is a detailed narrative of the events that led up to the killings, profiles of the two killers -- Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold -- and the aftermath. But the events described in the book don't play out they way they are fixed in the public's mind.

Cullen spoke of the many myths about the shootings that he feels were fed to the public by the media, including descriptions of the two killers as being loners and socially inept. Those descriptions turned out to be false -- showing, Cullen said, that there is no uniform profile of a school shooter.