Community of Writers Podcasts

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.   

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

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. 

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

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.

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.

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.

The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.