Writing the Golden State
Writing the Golden State
The New Literary Terrain of California
edited by Carribean Fragoza, Romeo Guzmán, and Samine Joudat
foreword by Susan Straight
Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California explores California through unique essays that look beyond the clichés of the “California Dream” to the
realities of a complex and ever-changing state, delving into the themes of familial genealogy, migration, land and housing, national belonging, and identity.
The essays come from a range of emerging writers and established voices, including Myriam Gurba, David L. Ulin, Ruth Nolan, Wendy Cheng, and Susan Straight.
Writing the Golden State portrays a California that, as the editors note, can be “deviant and recalcitrant, proud and humble, joyful and communal. It is a California that reclaims the beauty of the unwanted, the quotidian, and the out-of-place.” A California for us all.
- 192 pages
- 9"h x 7"w; 24 images
- hardcover; ISBN 978-1-62640-121-1; $35.00
Contents:
- Foreword by Susan Straight
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Memories of My Tata’s Frutería by Marco Vera
- Chapter 2: In Rancho Santa Fe, We Were Orientals by Wendy Cheng
- Chapter 3: Park Place Material: Privatization, Homeowners Associations, and My Dog by Elaine Lewinnek
- Chapter 4: Cima Dome, East Mojave National Preserve by Ruth Nolan
- Chapter 5: Looking to the Sky in the Antelope Valley by Lisa Covert
- Chapter 6: 160 Miles East of Los Angeles: On Covering the Eastern Coachella Valley by Ruxandra Guidi
- Chapter 7: The Tides That Erase: Automation and the Los Angeles Waterfront by Jennifer Carr
- Chapter 8: We Are Our Own Multitude: Los Angeles’s Black Panamanian Community by Jenise Miller
- Chapter 9: Behold, Buddha by Cassandra Lane
- Chapter 10: In the Rubble: Picturing LA’s Housing Crisis by David Helps
- Chapter 11: Corntassel by Carolyn M. Dunn
- Chapter 12: To Eat a Fig Is to Swallow Ghosts by Kenji C. Liu
- Chapter 13: Lost by David L. Ulin
- Chapter 14: Road Signs Taken for Wonders by Daniel Lanza Rivers
- Chapter 15: A Chumash Line: How an Old Email and Five PDFs Revealed My Native Californian Roots by Melissa Mora Hidalgo
- Chapter 16: Here—And There—Lies Home by Samina Najmi
- Chapter 17: El Corrido del Copete by Myriam Gurba
- Chapter 18 : Adolescent Blues by Ramón García
- Chapter 19: Showcase Theatre, Corona by Chris Greenspon
- Chapter 20: Oh, Salinas! Song, Story, and Punk Rock Behind the Lettuce Curtain by George B. Sánchez-Tello
- Chapter 21: Acts of Grace: Memory Journeys Through the San Joaquin Valley by Brynn Saito
- Chapter 22: Possible Footsteps in Berkeley by Annabelle Long
- Chapter 23: Fred’s Goin’ to California by Fred Williams with Sue Mark and Heidi Herrera
- Chapter 24: Good Vibrations from California’s Deaf Geographies by Peter Sebastian Chesney
Editors:
- Carribean Fragoza was named after a body of water. Though she is a terrible swimmer, she insists on living as close as possible to three bodies of water: the Pacific Ocean, the San Gabriel River, and Legg Lake. Ironies abound. The San Gabriel Valley will forever be her home but wherever she goes, she needs at least one mountain to orient her. She is interested in the inner lives of rocks, plants, and birds. If she had unlimited wealth and influence, she would channel all of it to empowering indigenous people to recover their homeland and their ancestral knowledge of all nature.
- Romeo Guzmán was born in Goleta, California to migrant parents from Guadalajara; he has deep affinities for Pomona and South El Monte/El Monte. He came to know Pomona by practicing and playing at many of its elementary, middle school, and high schools futbol fields. He hung out at the old pool hall on second street, where the owner, Leo, played classic rock. He has come to know El Monte and South El Monte through family parties and celebrations as well as the slow and beautiful labor of collaboratively writing its history.
- The movement that has shaped Samine Joudat’s upbringing in the world–born in Iran before immigrating to different parts of the United States and Europe via Ecuador–now shapes the way he thinks of home. Beyond a place locked into land, he finds home in moments, people, notes, and words, too. His mind is never far from pondering the forces that uproot, displace, and transfigure notions of home and the longing we often feel for it. He finds duty, meaning, and joy in the negotiation between looking back in search of recovery and looking forward in search of transformation. He hopes that all beings are afforded the dignity to do the same.
“Beautiful! Essential! Writing the Golden State is like California itself—full of life and surprises. The voices in this book are poignant, funny, moving, and sharp-eyed. And they reveal our fraught and magnificent California as it truly is.”
—HÉCTOR Tobar, author of Our Migrant Souls