If, like me, you’ve been part of Alta Journal’s California Book Club, reading John Freeman’s California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature is like a trip down memory lane. That’s because the bulk of the collection is made up of pieces published by Alta in the lead-up to each club event. I’ve always thought of them as table setters: primers to each month’s selection for those who may not know it and refreshers for those who do. And why not? Freeman, now an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, has been the CBC’s host since its inception in October 2020; the club grew out of an essay of his—refashioned as an introduction to this volume—that appeared in the journal earlier that year.
And yet, what’s most compelling about the work gathered here isn’t what it has to tell us about our past, however recent, but what it has to say about the present and the future of California’s restless and insurgent literature. Even a glance at the table of contents reveals the forward-looking nature of the project: essays on more than 50 writers, including both up-and-comers and established talents, spanning the length and breadth of the state. Karen Tei Yamashita, Natalia Molina, Javier Zamora. Tommy Orange, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Maxine Hong Kingston. Robin Coste Lewis, Gary Snyder, Percival Everett.
This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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A few of these essays—one on Lawrence Ferlinghetti, another addressing the work of Kay Ryan—are new to the collection, but that only bolsters the argument. What else are we to do with a literature as capacious as California’s but keep the conversation going? The writing of the Golden State is an expanding universe. To give it a shape and a structure, as well as to provoke new associations, to push the bounds of the conversation, Freeman has chosen to eschew chronology in favor of a set of thematically constructed sections. “The Suburbs,” “Exploding Fantasias,” “Who Is a Citizen?”: Each of these rubrics speaks to both what we think we know and what we need to know. That these are often not the same is the point. In that, the writing underlies what I have come to imagine as the most essential lens through which to look at California, as a place where every observation, every bromide, is by turns true and false.
This may seem confusing if you’re looking for easy answers, but that is not what California Rewritten is about. Rather, the essays here seek to prize out something more inchoate and complex. “There are five basic senses,” Freeman begins his essay on Jaime Cortez’s story collection, Gordo, “and the difference between good writing and that which fades—especially writing about a place like California, so throbbed by its elements—lies in how well these senses are evoked.” What he’s suggesting is a context, an angle of approach. So, too, here, writing about Naomi Hirahara’s novel Clark and Division, which has its roots in the Japanese American internment camps created during World War II: “History is not made by incidents. It is forged in their aftermath.”
At the book’s heart is the necessary notion that literature—both individual texts and a larger, more collective lineage—is dynamic, living, that it changes and develops as we do, that it can show us who we are. Such is the faith embodied by every writer represented in these essays, which speculate on where we’re going by mapping all the myriad ways we define ourselves.•
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.
CALIFORNIA REWRITTEN: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE GOLDEN STATE'S NEW LITERATURE, BY JOHN FREEMAN
