The first time I saw my Los Angeles in print—in all its unglamorous poverty and seductiveness, its stucco and street corners, bougainvillea and bleeding beaches and ruined lives—was in Kate Braverman’s first novel, Lithium for Medea, and like many a proto-goth L.A. girl, I read my copy to shreds. I loved her paradoxes: swaggering and vulnerable, passionate and wounded, incantatory prose that retained its poetry.
Largely self-taught, I had already spent years assembling my magpie’s nest of craft, picking up shiny bits wherever I could. But, as a rejection from the Santa Monica Review revealed—“Good enough story, but what’s unique about your sentences?”—I was missing an elemental piece, the thing that separates “good enough” (not good enough) from truly artful. Language. Poetics. The beauty of one word up against another.
This article appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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I’d never had a mentor to guide me out of the doldrums of the pedestrian, to help me find the writer I knew was inside me. So when I learned that Braverman ran a private workshop out of her home in the flats of Beverly Hills, I dared to approach her at a reading—this black-haired siren with glossy bob, bright red lipstick, and an off-the-shoulder Mexican blouse, this enfant terrible of the L.A. literary scene, whose prose sang like poetry—and asked how I might join her workshop. To which she curtly replied that she never worked with anyone who hadn’t taken her weekend class at UCLA. (I would come to know her never and always well, her predilection for absolutes.)
I took that weekend class with a friend, a writer teaching in the same program. My friend was in tears before lunchtime. I saw how it would be with Braverman—you could either take the heat or fuck off. But I had been writing for 15 years, stacking up hundreds of rejections against a mere dribble of acceptances. I was ready to take whatever heat I had to. In that short weekend, Braverman provoked an entirely new kind of story from me: For her, I discovered unusual imagery, surprising turns of phrase, something to delight in.
She was the one I’d been waiting for.
She called me the following Monday, inviting me into her private workshop. “There’s a morning group and an afternoon group,” she said in a voice both droll and self-consciously dramatic. “The morning group brings Danish. The afternoon group just brings their egos. You’re in the afternoon.”
I arrived at that nondescript apartment to find an array of talent such as I’d never imagined—men and women from 16 to 60, superstars and lieutenants, foot soldiers and saints. Over time, their numbers varied from 12 to 20, depending on the level of despair or recent recruitment. A ninja army. The training was savage. There were days after workshop when one could spy a line of cars at the curb under the jacarandas and in each a writer crying, while purple blossoms drifted down in pity. And there were days when you emerged without your feet ever touching the walkway. “There’s no such thing as a permanent state of grace,” Braverman would say, a bit of wisdom that has never failed me.
First came the sword. There would be no easy language. Whole lists of words were banned, words like beautiful, like golden. No hearts, no souls. No brand names, no pop psych, no sentimentality. No puppies. No kittens. No hugging, eye-rolling, thumbs-up. No labeling of emotions. No tresses, no dancing. Cliché was the enemy. Anything you’d ever seen or heard or read before was a cliché and forever banned. We were expected to generate fresh language with every sentence, and her scorn was withering. She’d slap some poor unfortunate’s manuscript and declare, “This is a crime against the page.”
Never had anyone demanded so much of me. Nobody there received a prize for showing up. Ours was more the relationship between a master craftsman and her journeymen. She observed our skills, flogged us when we missed the mark, but was equally lavish with her praise—repeating a choice phrase slowly, savoring the syllables as if eating the most delicious confection. “Yum, yum…” she’d say and write dollar signs on top of the first page. “Now that’s real writing.”
She taught us to recognize the moving parts of prose and understand what, exactly, made them move. It was a read-aloud situation—poet to the core, she wanted us to hear as well as see our work. So many times, I’d bring in pages I’d thought decent, but as soon as I’d begin to read, I’d instantly hear every false note. Reading aloud became a lifelong habit that I urge upon all my own students.
Braverman was my muse, my difficult-to-please mistress. Her personality defects could fill a Britannica, but nobody, nobody, loved good writing—an astute turn of phrase, a subtle explication of character—more than she did. Her gods became our gods: Robert Stone, Neruda, Paz. Plath and early Didion. Literature was a sacred calling, and Braverman devoted herself to it in a decidedly unmodern, undemocratic way. Anything short of sublime was a monstrosity, a degradation to be stamped out like campfire sparks. She wasn’t exactly mentoring you, guiding your tender sensibilities into bloom; she was protecting literature from you, from your mediocrity, your good-enoughness. Not taking you from crayons to perfume.
She pinned me as a default smart-ass and challenged me to drop the shtick—glib and snarky was too easy, she said. “You think you’re being clever, but it’s keeping you from being a better writer.” Shockingly, I had to become a better person to become a better writer. It was a struggle to leave my armor behind.
A penetrating reader, she’d not only point out things that needed opening up in our work but also create exercises on the fly, flinging them out like Mardi Gras beads. If someone mentioned a superstition in a story, she could order us to “list a hundred superstitions you might give to a character.” A hundred phobias. Forty antisocial acts. I still hear her voice when I’m writing. “If you can have your character think about dinner or think about God, have them think about God.”
These teachings are evident in her 1990 collection Squandering the Blue, to be reissued this summer by Outsider Editions. Her story “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta,” a 1992 O. Henry Prize winner, reveals her instantly recognizable signature—the uniquely rhythmic prose and the way people “track” psychologically, tuning in on a private wavelength—as when the oddly seductive addict male antagonist zeroes in on a lost, newly sober woman. Watch how the pace of his dialogue crowds her. Note her drifty surrender. Degraded paradises, the Los Angeles of her childhood, landscapes of alluring extremes, and how humans participate in their own destruction—these are the themes that define Braverman’s work.
You pick your muse, your mentor, for the similarities, for resonance of taste, of proclivities, and I sought someone with a penchant for intensity, for drama, for the music that I already had within me, but had been unable to reach. Working with Braverman was that dream made manifest.•
SQUANDERING THE BLUE: STORIES, BY KATE BRAVERMAN
Janet Fitch is the author of five novels, including, most recently, Chimes of a Lost Cathedral.
