Community of Writers Podcasts

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.  She is also the author of The Peerless Four and the Edith Whartonesque OC classic, This Vacant Paradise.

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.