A program celebrating a long-ago artist and writer whose work I am curating at an upcoming gallery show. Today I read his self-published book, Aliso Creek, a singular and defining introduction to the work of Peter Carr (1925-1981) and invite listeners to visit the late October show I am helping curate at Cerritos College Art Gallery.

My guest is Jackie Wu, who worked for the Orange County Registrar of Voters. She’s written a firsthand account titled On the Front Lines of Democracy: An Election Official’s Story of Protecting the Vote in 2020. It’s an insider’s account of administering, defending, and advocating for one of the nation’s best voting systems.

I attended the recent launch party reading celebrating the arrival of a must-read, must-own anthology. Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California is out from the new collaborative publisher Angel City Press at the Los Angeles Public Library. It includes essays which write and rewrite stories and experiences of California with a range of writers.

Today, my guest is Larry Beinhart, perhaps best known for a novel adapted into the film Wag the Dog (American Hero) but today talking about and reading from Salvation Boulevard. It’s both a detective story and a novel of big ideas, about “faith” and skepticism, a murder mystery with philosophical chops.

Today, my 2009 interview with Victoria Patterson on her debut book, Drift, a defining —- for the author and her hometown, Newport Beach —- short story collection from and about Orange County, California. This is where it started for the writer Victoria Patterson, who with Drift was a finalist for the California Book Award, the 2009 Story Prize, with Drift selected as one of the best books of 2009 by The San Francisco Chronicle. Since then she’s written the novel The Little Brother and a second short story collection titled The Secret Habit of Sorrow.

Today, my 2010 interview with Luis Alberto Urrea on his smart, funny, sincerely moving Into the Beautiful North, a comic and woman-centered take on the classic film The Magnificent Seven by way of a border adventure story with a twist. It’s a sort of alternative version of his award-winning nonfiction classic The Devil’s Highway but with a light, humorous, humane touch.

Today, my 2009 interview with Dylan Landis on her debut novel-in-stories, Normal People Don’t Live Like This, a singularly poignant, tough and smart coming-of-age novel set in 1970s New York City. This is a good one, folks.  

My guest this week is short story writer Mary Jones. She has written and published dozens of short stories for many years, earning acclaim, and establishing a reputation, all of which is affirmed in her debut collection, 28 short stories, titled The Goodbye Process. The short and short-short stories offered in The Goodbye Process are dark, funny, meditative, often initially realistic episodes which necessarily and logically enter the comically, tragically absurd via empathetic and artful fable. These are economically and powerfully communicated short moments and everyday stories about loss and tragedy and betrayal transformed into deeply resonant, deadpan sincere, sometimes fabulist but simultaneously grounded tales of the familiar turned profound and, occasionally, tragedy turned into empathy or painful wisdom.

My guest this week is Kevin Allardice, the author of short stories and five novels, of which I have no read three. His most recent is Weft, and it’s a full-length work like his debut novel, Any Resemblance to Actual Persons. I’m also a big fan of his shorter works, closer to novellas but no less rich in voice, wit, fabulist or absurdist themes, each a celebration of association, word choice, digression and totally entertaining immersion in character and place. These are totally engaging romps, fast-paced, and wildly imaginative.  He discusses all his books, his writing career, and especially to talk about and read from Weft, a kind of horror novel meets critique of late-stage capitalism, take-apart of the long con, and an examination of the collapse of a self-constructed identity. Wicked fun, thoughtful play, and both an embrace and elevation of the form. Here’s his website: https://kevinallardice.com/

My guest this week is Suzanne Greenberg, a much-published short story writer whose novel Lesson Plans was a Library Journal Editor’s pick.  Her previous short story collection Speed-Walk and Other Stories won a Drue Heinze Literature Prize.  Now Suzanne Greenberg is out with Shopping for Dad and Other Stories, its title, from one of the defining stories, a helpful nod to the wry, funny, sad engagement with irony, sincerity, loss and unlikely insights offered in these sixteen stories, many centered on missing children, estranged spouses, and disappeared domestic objects. Deadpan tragedy meets necessary if qualified hope, with plenty of attention to the everyday quantification of emotional transaction. Shopping for Dad is out now from Arroyo Seco Press. Suzanne Greenberg teaches creative writing at Cal State University Long Beach

To kick off the next season of Bibliocracy Radio on Community of Writers Podcasts, we are presenting a very special episode.

A Journal of the Plague Years, a compendium of work which developed out of the excellent online journal founded by writer Susan Zakin.

Gail Tsukiyama delivers the closing talk to round out the fifty-fourth year of the Community of Writers summer workshops. Introduced by Karen Joy Fowler.

Gail Tsukiyama is the author of nine novels, including Women of the Silk, The Samurai’s Garden, The Color of Air, and her latest novel, The Brightest Star. She has been the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence, and the Asia Pacific Leadership Award from the Center of the Pacific Rim and the Ricci Institute. One of fifty authors chosen by the Library of Congress to participate in the first National Book Festival in Washington D.C., she has taught at San Francisco State University, University of California, Berkeley, and Mills College.

Alex Espinoza, Monica West, Andrew Nicholls & Janet Fitch discuss writing beyond the Community of Writers summer workshops. Moderated by Lisa Alvarez.

Dana Johnson, Karen Joy Fowler, Susanne Pari, Amy Tan & Monica West discuss Voice & Dialogue in this panel.

Rachel Howard delivers a craft talk on Improvisation in writing.

RachelHoward is the author of a novel, The Risk of Us, and a memoir, The Lost Night. Her stories and essays have appeared in StoryQuarterly, ZYZZYVA, the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues. She served as Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow and Interim Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing at Warren Wilson College and teaches nonfiction and novel writing at Stanford Continuing Studies. For more than 20 years she has written dance criticism for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Sands Hall, Michelle Latiolais, Keenan Norris, and David Ulin discuss genre.

Katy Hays, Alex Espinoza, Tyler Diltz, Stacy Spruill, and Martin J. Smith discuss plot in fiction. Moderated by Andrew Tonkovich.

Tom Barbash presents an exploration into “Foster” by Claire Keegan, and “Switzerland” by Nicole Krauss.

Tom Barbash is the author of four books as well as reviews, essays, and articles for publications such as McSweeney’s, Tin House, the Believer, Narrative Magazine, ZYZZYVA, and the New York Times. His short story collection Stay Up With Me was nominated for the Folio Prize and picked as a Best Book of the Year by the Independent of London, NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose Mercury News. His novel The Last Good Chance was awarded The California Book Award and was a Publishers Weekly and Anniston Star Best Book of the Year. His nonfiction book On Top of the World, about the fate of the bond firm Cantor Fitzgerald on 9/11, was a New York Times Bestseller. A well-regarded speaker, panelist, and interviewer, Barbash teaches the novel, short fiction, and nonfiction at California College of the Arts. His most recent book, the novel The Dakota Winters, was a National Bestseller, and named as an Editors Choice by The New York Times Book Review, Oprah Magazine, Rolling Stone and People.

Martin J. Smith presents interviewing advice from someone who has been doing it for nearly fifty years.

Martin J. Smith is the author of five crime novels and five nonfiction books including Going to Trinidad: A Doctor, a Colorado Town, and Stories from an Unlikely Gender Crossroads, a finalist for a 2022 Colorado Book Award. The veteran journalist and magazine editor has won more than fifty newspaper and magazine writing awards, and his novels have been short-listed for three of the publishing industry’s most prestigious honors, including the Edgar Award, the Anthony Award, and the Barry Award. He is a former senior editor of the Los Angeles Times Magazine and Orange Coast Magazine.

BJ Robbins, Kirby Kim, and Michael Mungiello. Moderated by Katy Hays.

Reagan Arthur, Leland Cheuk, Jean Garnett, and Dan Lopez. Moderated by Michael Mungiello.

Lily Grimes (Faultline), Andrew Tonkovich (Santa Monica Review/Citric Acid), David Ulin (Air/Light), and Blaise Zerega (Alta Journal) discuss west coast literary journals.

Dana Johnson, Sameer Pandya and Gregory Spatz discuss the craft of the short story. Moderated by Tom Barbash.

Victoria Patterson kicks off day 2 of our writers’ workshops in olympic valley with a talk on show vs. tell. 

Victoria Patterson’s latest story collection, The Secret Habit of Sorrow, was published in 2018. The critic Michael Schaub wrote: “There’s not a story in the book that’s less than great; it’s a stunningly beautiful collection by a writer working at the top of her game.” Her novel The Little Brother, which Vanity Fair called “a brutal, deeply empathetic, and emotionally wrenching examination of American male privilege and rape culture,” was published in 2015. She is also the author of the novels The Peerless Four and This Vacant Paradise, a 2011 New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her story collection, Drift, was a finalist for the California Book Award and the Story Prize and was selected as one of the best books of 2009 by the San Francisco Chronicle. She currently teaches at Antioch University’s Master of Fine Arts program.

With Leslie Daniels, Leland Cheuk, Louis B. Jones, Andrew Tonkovich discuss unreliable narration in their own work and the work of others. Moderated by Victoria Patterson. Subscribe to our podcast feed to get new episodes as they arrive.

Jason Roberts, Janet Fitch, Karen Joy Fowler, and Gail Tsukiyama discuss historical fiction at the 2024 Community of Writers Writers Workshops. moderated by Sands Hall. Subscribe to our podcast feed to get new episodes as they arrive.

The first craft talk of the 2024 Writers Workshops in Olympic Valley: Staff member and board member Margaret Wilkerson Sexton kicks off day 1 with a craft talk on writing a character’s journey throughout a life: Writing Across Generations. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast feed to keep up with this summer’s excellent programming, wherever you may be. Thanks for listening!

As a podcast special, we wanted to share the late Gill Dennis’s welcome address from 2014, ten years ago. Gill Dennis died less than a year later in May of 2015. He was an enormous part of our community for decades. Along with Tom Rickman, he founded and directed the Community of Writers Screenwriting Program. His screenwriting credits include Return to Oz, Walk the Line, and Forever.  He was Master Filmmaker in Residence at the American Film Institute Conservatory and won the LA Drama Critics Circle Award for Distinguished Direction in Theatre. He taught his “Finding the Story Workshop” at the Community of Writers for many years, which has lately been revived, and is now taught by Gill’s good friend Leslie Daniels. We are missing Gill this year, and remembering his wisdom, wit, and joyous presence as we approach the ten-year anniversary of his death. Please enjoy this podcast throwback to 2014, and remember to subscribe to our podcast feed on your favorite app to stay abreast of the goings on at this year’s Writers Workshops from Olympic Valley.

Leland Cheuk Welcomes us to the 2024 Writers’ Workshops from Olympic Valley, introduced by Andrew Tonkovich. Subscribe to our podcast feed to stay abreast of the goings on at the 2024 Writers Workshops in Olympic Valley. Links to subscribe are above.

My guest this week is a world-renowned expert on fascism, populism, and dictatorship.  Federico Finchelstein’s newest book is The Wannabe Fascists: A Guide to Understanding the Greatest Threat to Democracy.  He makes important distinctions even while educating, contextualizing, and warning, once again, of fascism’s rise globally and explaining its antecedents.   Finchelstein carefully considers what false or “wannabe fascism” is in the context of populism, Trump, dictatorship, all revisited, defined, and redefined toward apprehending the difference between movements, strategies and singular leaders.  The book is a history, a thesaurus, a field guide, an encyclopedic review and, yes, delivers a not entirely unexpected if important argument.  Federico Finchelstein teaches history at the New School for Social Reseearch and Eugene Lang College in New York City. His previous books include From Fascism to Populism in History and A Brief History of Fascist Lies.  

Joan Braune has written a scholarly book which reads to this admirer like a handbook of liberatory insights, a history and a glossary, a philosophy text for beginners, with a provocative analysis at its conclusion.  If you think, as did I, you knew or understood the basics of fascism and the far right, the research and writing of Joan Braune will disabuse you, delight you, engage and inspire you.  Out from Routledge, her short but singular contribution to the “Studies in Fascism and the Far Right” series develops from, indeed, philosophical study but also personal experience fighting fascists in the Pacific Northwest.  The book is titled Understanding and Countering Fascist Movements: From Void to  Hope, a helpful title, instructive, and, finally, one of the most empowering books on the subject I have read lately, an intellectual self-defense handbook.  Joan Braune is Lecturer in Philosophy at Gonzaga University.  She is author an co-editor of various title including two books on Erich Fromm’s critical theory and a forthcoming book, The Ethics of Researching the Far Right.

Novelist, short story writer, and acclaimed teacher Molly Giles.  The author, most recently, of the novel The Home for Unwed Husbands, is out with a memoir in short episodes, vignettes, and meditations, built on her life crossing the Golden Gate Bridge.  In Life Span, Giles defines, examines, celebrates, and interrogates her writing life by way of the iconic bridge, each chapter marking a year in her own life. A terrific conceit, this is a joyful, wry, honest autobiography of a person, place, and avocation, the insights of a writer on whom nothing is lost, so much is observed, described, assessed and engaged in economical and poetic language.

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My guest this week is acclaimed short story writer and, now, novelist Venita Blackburn. Her debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California arrives after two acclaimed short story collections, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl. This new novel is a multi-form, multi-voiced chronicle of loss, self-discovery, of desperately sad if also playful strategies of identity and investigation. Its brilliant premise is matched by its engagement with language, much of it delivered via a collective consciousness which frames the storytelling, a formal device which makes such good sense because the protagonist is an author herself, of a dystopian graphic novel.  Dead in Long Beach, California is also a story of a Black LA family and of life in Southern California. Venita Blackburn’s earlier work has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction and the New Yorker online. She is an associate professor in creative writing at Cal State Fresno and founder-president of Live, Write, an organization that offers free creative writing workshops for communities of color.

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My guest today is Julie Schumacher, who will talk about and read from the final book in a trilogy which has earned its place on the shelf with other favorites in the weird, wonderful genre of academic satire, right next to Richard Russo’s Straight Man and, as it happens her first two novels chronicling the cheerfully doomed life of one Professor Jason Fitger, a divorced professor of English and creative writing, stalled-out writer and all-around sour puss…if for good reason, or at least good enough, by which we mean bad. The English Experience, out from Doubleday, follows Dear Committee Members and The Shakespeare Requirement, in which Schumacher engages and exploits and critiques nearly every possible — and impossible — complication or challenge facing our compromised but, in his way, committed hero. Except, hilariously,for a travel abroad program sponsored by Payne University, pronounced “pain,” for which Fitger, exactly the wrong (!) faculty member, is chosen (meaning coerced into) as teacher and chaperone. Julie Schumacher is the author of three Jason Fitger novels, winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and author of fourth novel, The Body Is Water.  She teaches in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota.

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My guests this week further remember, celebrate, and, today, read from (!) the work of the late short story writer, teacher, friend and mentor Dwight Yates (1945-2023). I am joined in Part 2 of this “tribute” by Susan Straight (Mecca), Victoria Patterson (The Secret Habit of Sorrow), and Gary Amdahl (The Daredevils), all accomplished and acclaimed writers. Dwight Yates was the author of dozens of short stories, many of them available in two award-winning collections, Bring Everybody and Haywire Hearts and Slide Trombones. Note: This podcast is just not big enough to have hosted all the friends and students of Dwight, for which I apologize. By all means, write or host other tributes, and purchase, gift, and recommend his books and stories.  His final gorgeous fiction appears in the newest (spring 2024) issue of the Santa Monica Review. Just sayin!   

I am so grateful for the participation of these fellow Friends of Dwight Yates, and for the opportunity to pay tribute to this excellent writer and exemplary human being. Bring everybody!

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My guests this week remember and celebrate the life and work of the late short story writer, teacher, friend and mentor Dwight Yates (1945-2023). I am joined by Susan Straight (Mecca), Victoria Patterson (The Secret Habit of Sorrow), and Gary Amdahl (The Daredevils), all accomplished and acclaimed writers for the first of a two-part show. Dwight Yates was the author of dozens of short stories, many of them available in two award-winning collections, Bring Everybody and Haywire Hearts and Slide Trombones. This podcast is just not big enough to have hosted all the friends and students of Dwight, for which I apologize. By all means, write or host other tributes, and purchase, gift, and recommend his books and stories.  His final gorgeous fiction appears in the newest (spring 2024) issue of the Santa Monica Review.    

I am so grateful for the participation of these fellow Friends of Dwight Yates, and for the opportunity to pay tribute to this excellent writer and exemplary human being. Next week, Part II, featuring more discussion and short readings (!) from his work.

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My guest this week is the writer, activist and podcaster from Chapo Trap House, Amber A’Lee Frost. Her debut book Dirtbag is a personal memoir, a journalistic account, a political autobiography, a take-apart of grassroots collective action, an insider look at Democratic Socialists of America, Occupy Wall Street, the Bernie campaign and, yes, podcast culture — all offered with great stories, wicked humor and yet smart, sincere analysis which defines the best of the so-called “dirtbag left.”

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My very special guest is Theresa Bonpane, a legendary Southern California peace and justice, anti-war and anti-intervention activist. Her memoir, Sister Rebel, is out now from Red Hen Press, and she speaks with me about her life, sharing stories and poems and more. Because this is a fund drive edition, KPFK is happy to offer you a thank-you gift for your support.  Thanks to Theresa and Red Hen Press, claim your gift of a copy of the memoir for a $75 pledge. 

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My guest is novelist and short story writer Katherine Haake, a co-founder of What Books Press. Celebrating fifteen years, this collectively run publishing outfit has worked collaboratively with prose and poetry writers to create dozens of gorgeous books, and each featuring cover art by the legendary artist Gronk.  For  more on What Books Press see WhatBooksPress.com. For more on writer Katherine Haake see her website, KatherineHaake.com. 

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My guest today is David Kipen.  He needs no introduction because he is himself the introducer, the anthologizer, the cultural historian, the literary booster and all-around celebrant of writers and literary culture for our state and our region. Book review editor, Director of Literature at the NEA, critic at large at the Los Angeles Times and, of course, founder-director of Libros Schmibros Lending Library. He’s one of a handful of go-to spokespersons for literary California, but he’s done that by being a sort of scholarly medium, a reviver, a teller of stories told by others, sometimes forgotten, urgently needing to be told.  He wrote the introductions to four classic WPA Guides and edited the now landmark Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters, 1542 to 2018. For this show he talks about and reads from the brand-new Dear California: The Golden  State in Diaries and Letters.  It’s a moment of celebration for readers, and for Bibliocracy. 

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In his prizewinning novella Rapture, debut writer Reid Sherline has with a very small book made an outsized contribution to the literature of dark, weird Southern California, a place (and moment) where the recklessness, confusion, disengagement of adults turns their ignored or innocent children into perversely exaggerated walking, talking, misbehaving monster versions of themselves.  Set in the Valley  in the early Seventies — Viet Nam war, drugs, social upheaval, divorce, cars — Rapture considers everyday suburban violence, religion, politics, and neglect from the perspective of a young protagonist whose experiences seem to mark those of a generation. A charismatic combat vet leads our anti-hero on a Book of Revelation-inspired journey in a coming-of-age story which seems to explain so much of our own current moment of fundamentalist religion, White Christian nationalism, conspiracy theories, endless war, and the infantilization of our politics. A moving and spooky and pitch-perfect novella, it’s the winner of the Harvard Review Chapbook Prize.

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This week my guest is Drue Heinz Literature Prize-winner KELLY SATHER. Her collection, Small in Real Life, features stories which are darkly funny, what I’d call a sort of Southern California feminist noir, but with sincerely and politically insightful portraits of women, as girls, as wives, as friends, as enemies. They are often set in real or comically dangerous settings, sometimes hard to tell which, and their pitch-perfect idiom is spooky, coercive, naïve or knowing.  Sometimes it seems the characters, the authorial voice, or readers might not know which, not until the story ends, and even then! Thanks for tuning in for my discussion with her, and to hear Sather read.

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