about crime fiction as well as civic politics and the changing urban milieu that so often inspires crime stories. He concludes that report today.)It was now 8:00 p.m. straight up, and a few folks had trickled into Gallery 727. The writers who were scheduled to appear in the first set had arrived, as had the event organizers. So, if nothing else, the show would go on--even if only a handful of people were there to watch. Quickly, I conferred with Andrea Gibbons and Gauri Goyal, the two main young woman who’d been working like fiends to pull this event off. We figured to give it till 8:15, and then whatever else, we’d roll. DJs Pay Ray and Mago were spinning the wheels of steel, while a few people browsed the bookstore PM Press’ Ramsey Kanaan had going upstairs, next to the cash bar. Exercising a modicum of strength, I decided not to have a blast prior to getting things underway. Better to be sober and worried than slightly blitzed and panicked.
Somewhere between pacing back and forth out front, then traipsing upstairs and down, we got the first group of writers and organizers on stage. Damned, too, if we didn’t have more people in the joint by this time, including Christa Faust (Money Shot), who’d brought her pops, The Thrilling Detective Web Site’s Kevin Burton Smith, and Mr. Noir hisself, Eddie Muller, with his wife, Kathleen Maria Milne.
Showtime, baby ...
Larry Fondation started off the evening’s festivities. A working-class lad from Dorchester, who went on to Harvard, Larry was a community organizer for the Industrial Areas Foundation (begun in the 1940s by Saul Alinsky, of Rules for Radicals fame). He worked for a decade and a half in South Central Los Angeles, Compton, and East L.A. Since that time, he’s been writing stories about the underclass, about petty thieves and homeless folks who hustle to get by.
Larry read from a piece entitled “Hollywood and Vine.” Part of it went like this: “Yesterday I was reading Poe. Today I am reading Hawthorne--short stories. Yesterday this one guy walked by. I’ve seen him before. He says hi, gives me a dollar most times. I think he parks his car at the Metro station. Yesterday, he said, ‘Good book,’ about my Poe volume. It’s just a beat-up paperback. I got it at this used bookstore down the street. He was on his cell phone, so we didn’t really talk. I try and wear a little makeup. Sleeping outside takes its toll, but I think I am still a little pretty.”
Jervery Tervalon (Understand This and Dead Above Ground) was next up, and he read from a riveting piece of his called “Hope Found Chauncy,” wherein two struggling young women--one with a baby--scramble to get by day-to-day in the inner city. “The Snooty Fox Inn wasn’t really the kind of hotel you’d stay in with a baby; it wasn’t the kind of hotel you’d stay in with a family or by yourself,” went Tervalon’s story. “Purple, everything was shades of purple except for the shag carpet, which was thick and white. The ceilings were mirrored and so was the bathroom. Neither one of them could figure out why anyone would want to see themselves on the toilet. First time Hope saw the mirrored ceiling above the toilet she shrugged and said, ‘Freaks got to be freaky.’”
The third writer on deck was journalist-turned-author Denise Hamilton (Prisoner of Memory, The Last Embrace). She read a chunk out of her 2003 novel, Sugar Skull, in which her alter ego, Los Angeles Times reporter Eve Diamond, is looking for a man/woman named Pia, who’s living at a transvestite-homeless encampment near the Los Angeles River, under the Fletcher Street Bridge.
“Bad word choice,” I apologized, then stood there, shifting my weight from foot to foot, feeling acutely self-conscious at my lack of make-up and ragged nails, hair pulled into a pony tail, the linen shirt and khakis that hid my own curves. Here at the edge of a ruined river, in a camp for outcast transvestites, I was struck with guilt for squandering my god-given femaleness when others worked so hard to conjure up its essence.And so it went. For a recap of the night’s three sets, click here.
In the end, Write to the City got some press, and the writers and organizers who participated had a good time at the event. We had a standing-room-only crowd at one point and received nice feedback from some people who weren’t there, but who heard about it through the weekend at Book Expo America (BEA), being held nearby at the L.A. Convention Center.
To be coldly analytical about it--from the standpoint of a genre writer who’s always looking to expand his audience--I don’t delude myself into thinking that the majority of arty types and loft dwellers who attended this happening went right out and bought one of my books (though some did at the gig). However, it paid off, nonetheless. Write to the City was right in line with my politics, and I think that the more often crime and mystery writers can break out of their expected venues (which is not a put-down of mystery conventions, by the way) and participate in these sorts of “cross-pollination” events, the better it will be for all of us. And the better it will be for the genre, as we reach out to a wider audience.
READ MORE: “Write to the City,” by Sara Paretsky (The Outfit).
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