John Freeman on Why He Writes

When I was growing up in California, my grandmother, my mother’s mother, sent me postcards. She went to school on a horse as a child, and in her 50s, 60s, and 70s, she traveled widely, to Stockholm and Shanghai. She wrote from her home on the Finger Lakes, too. Her style was casual, spoken, ironic—there were never more than 10 words between jokes or wry observations. That she wrote toward me in this urbane tone made me feel elevated, addressed. As if sensibility was shareable information, just like the weather.

My grandfather, my father’s father, who was born in San Francisco just after the Great Earthquake and Fire, shared in a different way. When he traveled, we didn’t get postcards but a post-trip slideshow. Maybe because he’d grown up poor, he couldn’t believe where he was going until he saw himself there. Capri. Beijing. Lahore. He and my other grandmother in every single snapshot. After each long trip, my family gathered in front of the 1970s version of Instagram—the slideshow—and watched their vacation.

Growing up between the poles of these grandparents, whom I loved and who loved me in different ways, I inherited a few ideas about being in the world. Some of which I’ve had to figure out how to undo. The world isn’t out there, for instance, unless you separate yourself from it. Still, one notion I’ve kept—and which wound up being related to reading, for me—is this: There’s a pleasure in sharing remarkable journeys.

This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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I loved our house in Sacramento, its backyard and eucalyptus garden, where our rabbits lived; the nearby grove where we walked our dog. The hot, dry, cracked basketball courts where I practiced my sky hook, since I knew I was going to grow to at least six foot six—this is what the doctor said. The pool where I learned to do a flip turn and earned a lifetime of sun damage.

My first writings were an attempt to reply in kind to my grandmother’s letters and tell her the news from where I was now from. These communications were short on incident and long on vocabulary that I didn’t fully comprehend. I once, at age 13, signed off one note to her, “I hope this letter was voluptuous enough for you.” I think I was reading a lot of Thomas Hardy at the time.

As I began to read constantly, my vicarious experience—the news from my heart—caught up with my vocabulary. And though I had not even left the country, thanks to my reading of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Virginia Woolf, Dylan Thomas, and Ralph Ellison, I felt as if I’d crashed in the Sahara, that I had spent all day trying to get to the Godrevy Lighthouse. I had lain indoors in a rainy winter in Wales listening to the chimney’s music. I had walked vaulting up 125th in Harlem, feeling at once homesick and home.

Too much reading gave me a similar feeling. I felt at home in books. And yet, it was rare, going to school in Sacramento in the 1980s, to read about where I was from. One or two Steinbeck novels were required, but virtually every other book that we read and studied took place outside California. It’s not as if my teachers lacked examples: Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Randy Shilts, and Gary Snyder all lived in California and had important news to relay in their books. None of them were assigned.

It was a revelation in my teenage years to begin reading poetry written by Californians, something I discovered by accident. My older brother brought home a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Planet News, and I was transfixed by its casual brilliance, the spoken toward feeling of the poems. Even in his LSD-influenced “Wales Visitation,” I could feel the poet reaching through the lines as if to ask, Can you see me seeing this vista? “What did I notice?” he concludes. “Particulars!” As in: Are you seeing them too?

A few years later, away at college on the East Coast, I was invited to my roommate’s family’s Passover seder. One of the other guests was his high school English teacher, who told of Ginsberg’s visit to their school when my roommate had been a student. It seemed incredible that this bardic god had shared the same molecular space as my roommate. Upon returning to campus, I decided that if Allen Ginsberg could visit a prep school in Boston, surely he could visit a tiny Quaker college near Philadelphia. I was actually taking a class on Buddhism in American literature at the time, a course full of Californians, finally—the poet Lew Welch, Snyder, Diane di Prima, all of whose books had been waiting for me at City Lights. My roommate’s teacher sent me the PO box for Ginsberg in Greenwich Village, and I wrote there. A few weeks later, a postcard came back in the mail, not from him but from his assistant, who said Ginsberg would actually be in Philadelphia that fall, and he could stop by my school for what I now realize was a rather modest fee.

And so, after some cajoling, there was Allen Ginsberg, in my dorm room, sitting in a circle of students talking about dharma and poetry and Ezra Pound. We asked him questions and he answered, matter-of-factly, cheerfully, his assistant cradling Ginsberg’s harmonium as if it were an elderly cat. Oh, but it sang later that night when he gave a reading and had several hundred of us chanting from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, antiwar slogans, singing along to some of his own poems. One of the magics of that night: All of us in that room of many hundreds of people, all of us felt we were being talked toward.

This was 31 years ago, but it feels like nothing. That year, I heard some of the best poets I’d ever hear in my life: Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney. Not a week goes by now when I don’t read one of their poems. Another visitor to Swarthmore who made me came that spring, not a poet: the editor of Time magazine, Roger Rosenblatt. The talk he gave I remember so clearly, I could almost recite it now. The title: “Why Write.” Rosenblatt had been to Rwanda that summer, and he described the devastation of the genocide he’d reported. He returned wondering, How, after you see the worst things that humans can do to one another, do you decide to entertain? To amuse? To share small news. How, in the face of such slaughter, do you choose to tell such stories? How do you tell the worst possible stories?

The talk made a huge impression on me and several other people in the small room. Six of us became journalists of some sort. Drawn into a world to communicate by love, but living in a world made in part by slaughter and domination—not to mention collaboration, the evolution of life forces, migration, and wonder, too—I struggle to know how to choose what to say, what to tell, what to pass along. What counts as an extraordinary journey? It is not a simple question. Drawn to write by a simple impulse—I saw this, it was wonderful, can you see it too?—I realized I had accepted a calling far greater than myself. A calling to see the world and how it was made.

This included my own home state. When I was growing up in Sacramento, the city’s history often seemed like shallow water to me. That’s because I lacked proper depth perception. I couldn’t see what I didn’t understand, and as I began to read and write seriously in my 20s, I came across books that I wished I had read growing up there. Books that helped me learn to see where I was from, and appreciate how it came to be, and understand that the forces that created modern California were not dissimilar to those in Rwanda. Books by Mike Davis, Rabih Alameddine, Maxine Hong Kingston, Luis J. Rodriguez, Julie Otsuka, and Walter Mosley.

All of these writers, except Mike Davis—sadly, we missed him—have been in the California Book Club. When Blaise Zerega asked me if I’d be up for hosting the club for Alta Journal during the pandemic, he didn’t have to ask twice. I felt I had a debt to my state that it had taken a lifetime of learning for me to figure out how to repay. Surely, if I longed to see this place described, and evoked beautifully, others did too? They did. Soon, over 10,000 people were in the California Book Club, and we had no lack of good choices to read. My grandmother had long since died, and I had been on so many remarkable journeys in the pages of the books we read in the California Book Club. In a way, they were all journeys home. There is such variety in these tales. Such incredible vistas. Such family stories. That I get to ask “Can you see this with me?” and I don’t have to write it on postcards? Wow. I only hope when you read my essays, you understand I write this toward you.•

Join us on October 16 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Freeman will sit down with special guest host Walter Mosley to discuss California Rewritten. Register for the Zoom conversation here.