Three essayists mine Californiaâs multitudes of stories at the Times Festival of Books
âSearing honesty and a little bit of edge.â Thatâs how USC historian William F. Deverell described the authors who assembled for âWriting California,â the panel Deverell moderated on Saturday for the L.A. Times Festival of Books â namely Matthew Specktor, Ken Layne and Greg Sarris. But it could just as easily apply to what the state â with its complex history, culture and geography, its (broken) dreams and (burned) redwoods and (ravaged) Indigenous populations â has given the writers.
Deverell asked the panelists how Californiaâs diverse traditions figured in their books. What they emerged with was the essence of all writing â stories.
For âAlways Crashing in the Same Car,â a study of success and failure among the authors and mythmakers of Hollywood, Specktor began with more than 20 Californians whose stories fascinated him, intending to write about each of them. âBut it winnowed itself,â he said, so that the individuals who feature in his book âbecame a way of investigating a set of questions that were both pertinent to me at the time of writing but also hopefully that are pertinent to the American idea. I think Hollywood is such an incredible place where something that we really need â which is art â gets made, and something that we all struggle with âwhich is capitalism â prevails and in that tension thereâs something that feels infinite.â
Layne described the characters whose presence he felt while writing âDesert Oracle,â an idiosyncratic essayistic guidebook to the American West with forays into the occult. Chief among those inspirations was the environmentalist author Edward Abbey, whose work he first encountered as an âimpressionableâ 17-year-old. Layne had been struggling to figure out what to do with himself, and here was a solution.
Panels, prizes and people â lots of them. Coverage of the L.A. Timesâ first in-person Festival of Books since 2019 begins below.
âI just thought Abbey had a hell of a job,â Layne said. He laughed at his youthful notion, based on Abbeyâs example, that as a writer âyou donât really work. You drive around, go on hikes. You talk to people and you learn stories. Itâs got a moral component, and if you get a moral component in something you love doing ⊠you look forward to doing your work.â
Sarris, a celebrated Native novelist, mined other California veins for his recent memoir, âBecoming Story: A Journey Among Seasons, Places, Trees, and Ancestors.â It wasnât written culture that influenced him, but the stories in his people and his territory.
âMore than anything else itâs my elders from the tribe and the trees and the land itself,â he said. âI canât understand myself as an Indigenous person separate from the land. Our women made incredible baskets at home, and I think everything that goes into a basket is as old as the stars.â
Sarris challenged the notion that narratives are to be found primarily in urban cores, with natural places reserved for inspirational retreats. âEnvironmentalists go out to the redwoods or the desert for peace,â he said. âWhen I go into the redwoods, thereâs so many stories that itâs worse than being on Wilshire Boulevard.â
Matthew Specktorâs âAlways Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California,â probes the no-manâs land between success and failure.
Sarris admits to being puzzled by the attention celebrities get when nature matters so much more. He told the story behind one of his bookâs essays, âIf Oprah Were an Oak Tree.â Attempting to take a break from an exhausting day, he switched on the television and saw an episode of âOprah.â âI was looking at the oak tree, and right now, weâre dealing with âsudden oak death,â and itâs been a staple food for us and theyâre dying. I thought if Oprah were an oak tree, movie stars would be drawn to them, and all the advertising would educate people about the tree and taking care of it.â
Both Layne and Specktor recalled past Californians whose stories shed light on the stateâs peculiarities. Specktor said he is haunted by Carole Eastman, the screenwriter for âFive Easy Pieces.â He sees echoes of Eastmanâs life in that of his mother. âIâm interested in the way the film industry could curtail a personâs creative outputâ â but perhaps even more in how those who were so curtailed could form a satisfying identity around their limited lives.
For Layne, it was George Van Tassel, originally a quality control engineer for the reclusive magnate Howard Hughes. Van Tassel became a magnet around which a community of counterculture celebrities and UFO enthusiasts gathered. âEventually, he built a magic buildingâ â famous domed Integratron in Landers., Calif. â âso people could live forever.â
In the way of California stories, it didnât quite work out that way, said Layne: âIn a perfect circle of how we do things, you can now go in the Integratron and pay money to have a sound bath, but you still canât live forever.â
Thousands of Angelenos descended upon the USC campus over the weekend for the 2022 L.A. Times Festival of Books. Hereâs what they said about being back.
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