Success on the Edge of the Literary Landscape

Most everyone knows Southern California for its broad, breathtaking vistas, the provocative curve of coastline or its vast grid--the stock-footage flourish of the establishing shot.

Getting up close, though, has proved a challenge. Moving out of the cliche of Southern California and into the hidden particulars has always vexed, confused or stymied outsiders, who cling to the common notion that “there is no there there.” But senses attuned by years of observation find worlds where others see a drive-through neighborhood, a void.

Writers Wanda Coleman and Susan Straight have long worked at the edges of the literary landscape, obsessively tending corners of Southern California soil. Uncompromising in style and content, they have found the large truths of small places and told them in big voices, giving import to lives too often scrawled in margins. And they have not just subsisted but thrived.

Coleman and Straight don’t dabble in grand myth-making or polishing the California dream. Instead, they have persisted in writing peeled-back stories of race, class and language--with all of their untidy intersections.

This year both authors have been nominated for the National Book Award, Coleman for her collection of new poetry “Mercurochrome” (Black Sparrow Press, 2001), which engages a broad range of themes from poetry and the academy to day-to-day, between-the-lines racism, and Straight for her novel “Highwire Moon” (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), in which she returns to her fictional Inland Empire neighborhood of Rio Seco.

They appear on a list of nominees that New York Times book critic Janet Maslin referred to as “eyebrow raising” in a recent piece. Just what Maslin’s assessment might have meant, Straight and Coleman can only guess as they meet to discuss the awards and their work. But the comment doesn’t surprise them. They, too, could find their nominations “eyebrow raising,” most notably because they reached this rung without compromise--despite all the urgings to the contrary they got along the way.

“I was sending out these stories, and people were saying, ‘This worldview is so bleak,”’ says Straight, casual in jeans and a rust-colored sweater, her butter-colored hair tucked behind her ears. “And I’m in Riverside thinking, ‘Really? That was one of my cheerful ones.’ At that point, a bunch of my friends were dying of drugs or accidents. I couldn’t figure out anything. I just kept writing the same stories and would just put them away in the closet. I thought--there’s another bleak story. And it’s set in Riverside. It wasn’t even from L.A.”

“Well, that’s been part of the criticism [of my work], too bleak or whatever,” says Coleman, her drape of dreadlocks hanging loose, framing a serious face, her spectacles balanced, trademark fashion, precariously at the tip of her nose. “I’m sorry, I’m an urban animal. ... I’m not about writing about some young couple sitting under the sweet gum tree down in the Delta--that’s not my trip.”

They sit at a table crowded with colorful plates of L.A.’s version of comfort food--taquitos, burritos, warm chips, hot salsas--in a fancifully overdressed Mexican restaurant on the Silver Lake/Echo Park border.

Aside from passing nods and quick “hellos” at book festivals or panels, Coleman and Straight have never sat down to compare notes on their writing, the publishing world and the local literary scene they share. Their missed connections have been a function, they figure, of busy lives and the Southland’s sheer size. Both have come to lunch today with stories, family photographs pulled from wallets and brag books, memories triggered by this neighborhood’s looping streets and impossible hills.

Straight’s father once lived in Echo Park, and a great aunt studied to minister with evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson at the Angelus Temple just down the road. Coleman recalls a moment long ago when she and a first husband tried to move into the area. “But no one wanted to [rent] to a mixed couple. Particularly when I was pregnant and black.”

This small crook of a neighborhood, tucked away from even the fringes of gentrification, is much like the ones they both visit repeatedly in their work--full of workaday people who are tested by the limits of economics, time, opportunity and luck. The renderings in Straight’s four novels and a collection of stories have a vastness that is at once rich and arid. Coleman’s poetry pulls details into tight focus. Even the briefest couplet is long-lingering--an ever-blooming pile of bills, stark street violence against soft sunsets, the lethal combination of exhaustion and worry. The poems, even at their starkest, unspool lyric documentaries filled with the particulars of urban life in communities of color.

They’re the sorts of details that Coleman, 54, can pull from her own experience of “working two or three jobs and still trying to be an artist, not just someone who cranks it out. I’ve had three children and lived at the whim of what I feel is essentially economic cruelty,” says Coleman, who has written nearly a dozen collections of poetry, short fiction, essays and one novel.

Cliquish, if not rigidly segregated, L.A.’s literary scene in those early years was reflective of how racially balkanized the city had become. “I found a photo of my high school class a few days ago. Class of ‘55-’56. ... It was fairly integrated back then--American Indian kids and Mexican kids and black kids and Filipinos all together in one classroom, and the very next year the nightmare began.” Busing sent many white students out of the neighborhood and classrooms, a shock to the system. “You could see it on the faces of the teachers ... and in their body language. In thinking and writing about these things, with distance, they almost seem fictional.”

Straight, 41, is part of the post-civil rights revolution generation--a mishmash of colors, customs and tongues--out in the wilds of Riverside. There Straight ran with a collection of military brats with parents claiming roots from Louisiana or the Philippines--places that seemed equally as exotic and far-flung.

“I came of age in the late ‘70s when drugs were big,” says Straight, “so this novel has methamphetamine in it, and my other novels have drugs in them too. I guess I wanted to write about my generation’s fascination with drugs--their self-destruction, and the next generation, with absent parents, the desire to ‘let’s just survive this.’ I’ve always wanted to write about men trying to be good fathers. In every book, I think I obsessed with how men become good fathers.”

“M y obsession is being a single parent and trying to raise a child in a hostile environment,” says Coleman. “Not being able to get the kind of jobs that would really support you. ... About what lives are like when they are devastated, economics and how that impacts. That’s my obsession in all of my writing. To put a human face on the statistics that people conveniently forget. The thugs and welfare moms--the whole nine. I feel it’s my responsibility. I’ve been given this wonderful gift, these stories. And it’s important to me to tell them.”

The impulse to create a sense of people at loose ends emerges in different ways in each woman’s work.

Straight remembers feeling that she almost needed permission to render the world of her stories--and found it after a college classmate shamed her into reading “Light in August.” “I thought, if Faulkner can do this, then this is what I want to do. But I never want to do it for anywhere but Riverside,” says Straight, who dips endlessly from her fictional dry riverbed community--Rio Seco--as she chronicles the lives based on both the successes and mini-dramas of family and friends, many of them African American. She was haunted by a sense of place.

“When I went back East to graduate school and it was cold and ... I was walking through the snow to school, I remember thinking about Riverside, in December--the tumbleweeds are really fat and happy. And they are that nice shade of green. They are lining up against that chain-link fence. I’d think, at home they are spray painting those babies and making snowmen. Here I am trudging through the snow, but I still wanted to write about home.”

For Coleman, conjuring “home” has involved traveling through the stubbornly constructed and the bravely imagined. She was born in Watts and grew up in South Central Los Angeles but has long crisscrossed the region’s confounding borders.

“I was coming of age at the time that JFK was assassinated, that era of the Great Society, going through a Teen Post [a federally sponsored youth service program] that became an art center,” says Coleman. “I’m evidence that those programs could have worked a lot better than they did. If there had been enough believers in [them]--or enough desire to change.” However, she recalls, as that first generation of busing began, it altered not just complexion but the ambition of her classroom. “I knew what I wasn’t getting,” she says. “I knew it even then.” And that is when Coleman sank deeply into her own self-guided tours of libraries and a committed love affair with books.

By Straight’s generation, the great hope was that the path would be cleared, that opportunities would be plentiful for her friends and family--people who, like Coleman, who had been struggling with so many financial and emotional burdens based on class and race. In her writing, Straight consumes herself with the multiracial environs that Coleman pioneered--a young, white woman writing eloquently about a very particular African American experience culled from keen observation of family and friends. And now, in “Highwire Moon,” writing about a Mixtec Indian woman, Serafina, “who doesn’t even speak Spanish,” she has dug into Riverside’s layered life. Straight’s subjects, like Coleman’s, might be buffeted by the unforeseen, be it violence or economic disaster, but they are often bolstered by faith, belligerence or a small gesture of hope, or love . “We came up in this mixture of spices and food and music and everything else,” she says, “and we had to sort of figure out our own way of how we were going to do it.”

For both writers, this determination to tell their stories--stories that don’t confirm assumptions about race or region or “appropriate” subject matter or party-line point-of-view--has created not just confusion, but consternation in some circles. “Imagine,” says Straight cracking a grin, “being me when [they expect] a black woman, and I show up.”

“To me, that is one of the unfortunate byproducts of American racism,” says Coleman. “People are constantly bagged--stereotyped.” The important thing, says Coleman, long familiar with tweaking expectations, “was that it forced me out of the ghetto of sending my work [just] to black publications. ... I was forced out of Watts into Hollywood, Beverly Hills or to Venice Beach ... to look for ... mentors ... or supporters--regardless of demographics.” Being uncompromising for so many years, however, doesn’t mean being unscarred. That’s why the nod from the book critics, both agree, is significant in itself.

It puts Coleman in mind of an old echo, a voice from a haze of a party from long ago--and a metaphor for this moment: “Who let Wanda Coleman in here?”

“I turned that moment into poetry,” Coleman says, and she’ll do the same with this one, whatever the outcome when the winners are announced Wednesday. “I’ve always felt that I was a winner. [But] a validation makes it sweeter, of course.” For Straight, this acknowledgment is incentive, if nothing else. “No one comes out to Riverside looking for anything. Except maybe gas on the way to Palm Springs,” she explains. “So this is gratifying for me. That somebody can look at a place like Riverside and say: This is a huge, rich fictional universe. ... I love that Faulkner quote, ‘my little postage stamp of soil.’ This is my little postage stamp. ... Maybe I won’t have people asking me: ‘Are you always going to write about that place?’ Because I am. And was before and I still will be.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Excerpts From the Authors’ Work

“Red Squall”

--after Stanley Moss

Building a lexicon of my precious dead

something like embracing an ocean

my heart takes in the water.

There’s no relief, but I refuse the flood

and sling my bucket possessed and mad and wet and

drowning, racked with sleeplessness

continuing to force love through glumness

my creation a fury married to the wind

in dark ritual of blood rain

I ride my broom, I whip my broom

dragon wings rip at my shoulders

I have not used my blackness well.

Wanda Coleman *

His hair fell the length of his spine. He said, “Trenzas. Braids. You don’t speak any Spanish? You’re not Mexican?”

“Half,” she said.

“Me, too. Half Mexican, half Indian. Half the year here, half in Dos Arroyos. I’m half crazy, and I do a half-ass job at school. And I like to stay half stoned. All the time.” ... In the dry arroyo, he showed her the shelter of branches and plywood, the windshield. The late-afternoon was hazy as water.

“So you can braid hair?” she said. “Big deal. Dutch people wear braids. Blond ones. And Africans wear cornrows. A million braids.”

“Your dad’s a cowboy, right?” he said. “Blue ’62 Ford. Your mom’s Indian?” She didn’t answer. ... “My mother used to catch moths. Brown ones. She took the dust from their wings and put it on her eyes. Here.” He touched her eyelids. “Like sparkly makeup. Cause she lived on the rez. No money. No car. No nothin.”

Susan Straight