Homecoming for Writer With Local Roots

There was a time when a reading by Dagoberto Gilb in Southern California would have drawn only a handful of people, and few others would have recognized his name, despite the fact that he grew up in Los Angeles and had published a book of short fiction based in the city. There was a time not long before the publication of his first book in 1993 when Gilb couldn’t get a book publisher’s attention, either.

That changed for Gilb after he won a 1993 Whiting Writers’ Fellowship, a 1994 PEN/Hemingway Award for best fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner for his short story collection, “The Magic of Blood” in 1994. In the months that followed, he won several more awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995.

Soon, the New Yorker was calling, and literary agents who had dismissed Gilb and his work, which focuses on working-class Mexican Americans throughout the Southwest, as “too colloquial” were inviting him to lunch.

This time around, when he returns to L.A. from his home in Texas for the publication of his second collection of short fiction, “Woodcuts of Women,” (Grove Press; $23), Gilb hopes to make a slightly bigger splash than he did on his 1995 book tour, when two people showed up at one local reading.

Gilb, 50, who read at three local bookstores over the weekend, is scheduled to take part tonight in an evening that marks the return of the Great Writers Series at the Met Theater in Hollywood. The event will feature the author and actors Cheech Marin and James Gammon reading from Gilb’s books. (The series last ran in the mid-’90s.) Tickets for the event, which is a fund-raiser for the theater, are $50.

It’s a fitting, star-studded homecoming for a writer who considers himself the quintessential Angeleno, the embodiment of the constantly shifting demographics of this city and its disparate worlds--Eastside and Westside, middle class and working class, educated and uneducated, white and “other.”

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“I am the history of Los Angeles,” Gilb says during a phone interview from his home in Austin. “My mother was Mexican, my father was of German descent. That’s the future of this country. This kind of mestizaje is what we have, the culture we’re creating.”

Gilb also played a tiny part in the physical creation of present-day Los Angeles when he was a construction worker downtown during the late 1970s and early 1980s. “I worked a lot of jobs in downtown L.A. on the high-rises,” says Gilb, who then lived in the Silver Lake and Echo Park neighborhoods with his wife and young sons. “It was carpentry, classic carpentry. You build forms out of concrete, you build ramps and columns and decks. It’s very dangerous, but I was a good carpenter.”

Though Gilb holds a master’s degree in religious studies from UC Santa Barbara and teaches creative writing at Southwest Texas State University now, it is still the world of the blue-collar working class that he writes about. Day laborers, small-time crooks and department store clerks populate “The Magic of Blood,” his 1994 novel “The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna,” and now “Woodcuts of Women.” In these books, tales as tough and beautiful as diamonds gleam across the Southwest in cities such as Los Angeles, Santa Fe and El Paso.

Gilb finds inspiration in the lives of working stiffs. “I guess I care about ordinary people,” he says. “The common man, he has a dramatic life because he was born, which is incredible, and he’s going to die, and that’s dramatic.”

Gilb’s latest book is an homage to the women of that universe, and an exploration of the kinds of complicated romances that seem to confound hapless men. “Woodcuts of Women” introduces men caught up in love like deer caught in headlights, dazed and frozen in their tracks, unable to act reasonably.

In the story “About Tere Who Was in Palomas,” a man is so consumed with images of his former lover that he is unable, and unwilling, to thwart the advances of another woman he finds unattractive. In “A Painting in Santa Fe,” the protagonist refuses to allow his boss’ wife to paint his own wife, convinced she would be objectified and robbed of her humanity as he believes Native Americans have been in many Southwest paintings. In “Maria de Covina,” a thieving teenager juggles his young lover and a brief tryst with an older woman at the department store where he works.

“It was the phase of the woman,” Gilb says of the time in which he wrote “Woodcuts.” “It was a willful act to write stories about women.”

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As a large, physical man with a prominent nose and brow, strong chin and tanned skin, Gilb is constantly finding himself shouldering the burden of the term “macho,” which tends to pop up in reviews and profiles like weeds in a garden. Divorced, with two grown sons and a 4-year-old daughter, he says things that he shouldn’t in interviews, he admits. They come across the wrong way, these details of his private life.

Women are important to him, he says. He understands them in the way that only the only son of a beautiful woman could. “Well, 97% of my life is women,” says Gilb, whose mother worked as a department store runway model in and around Los Angeles and Hollywood in the 1940s. “I didn’t grow up with a dad. Women are my best friends; I’ve always had a girlfriend. There’s another reason I like women: Guys are boring. Women, I don’t find them to be boring.”

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The Great Writer Series is tonight at 8 at the Met Theater, 1089 N. Oxford St., Hollywood. Info: (323) 957-1152. Tuesday, Gilb will read at 7 p.m. at Martinez Books and Art, 1110 N. Main St., Santa Ana.