One of the best things invented in the state in the past 10 years are Venita Blackburn’s stories, host John Freeman said, as he introduced Blackburn, the author of Dead in Long Beach, California, the July California Book Club selection. It’s a book that contends with grief. Freeman commented that normally grief is “handled with such kid gloves” but that the way the book begins allows us to feel its weight, and also “feel it as a kind of genre of literature, almost.”
Blackburn responded, “I always argue that every story, all literature, is a grief story. It is a loneliness story. It is a love story. All of these things have to work in conjunction with each other, even if we prefer to think of them as separate and that you can isolate these feelings. But I do think they overlap. These moments of deep loss only happen if you have loved deeply.” Although she is far away from “the hard crack of grief” of losing her parents and being orphaned, Blackburn explained that those experiences caused big shifts in how she thought about “what it means to be alive and the danger of, you know, loving people and the unfairness of losing them.”
Freeman asked how much Blackburn was intending the novel within the novel, Wildfire, to interact with the present-day story of the protagonist, Coral, who finds that her brother has died by suicide and dissociates so strongly that the voices of her machine characters take over the novel’s narration. Blackburn, who is an associate professor of creative writing, commented that there was more Wildfire in the first draft and much less of Coral’s story but that she always tells her students that they have to tell the story that is hard. “You have to tell that story that’s nagging you. The one that you might be purposely avoiding.” Accordingly, she removed 10,000 words of Wildfire and expanded the present-day story, which allowed her to do something new with memory.
Freeman asked her to talk about the “clinics” in the novel, which are theaters where Coral’s memories are performed and where we learn about them. Blackburn explained that the clinics allowed her to access memory in a way that would make it comfortable. “It’s hard to say, to sit down and say, I’m going to write about my childhood trauma and an abusive mother.” She wanted to write in a way that would still make it entertaining for the reader. “That’s when it became theater. That’s when the voice was able to, to construct these moments in a way that was separate.”
Special guest Myriam Gurba joined Blackburn in conversation. She noted that the first paragraph of the novel captures the Long Beach scene: it’s a “community known for its polyphonic sounds.” She asked Blackburn, “How do you think you pulled off this feat of translating that musicality onto the page?”
Blackburn said that she wasn’t thinking as much about the music as the sensory details of Long Beach. She’d grown up in Compton and had family in Long Beach; she continues to have friends in Redondo Beach. She said, “All the beach cities are part of my world. I know the feeling of my body in those spaces. That’s what I was trying to channel.” While Fresno is becoming home now, the memories of those places where she grew up stay with her: “the texture of the feel of the air. Also just sort of the bend of the streets.”
Gurba commented that she thinks of Long Beach as a funerary site, and as she read the novel, she started to think that Coral was possessed by her brother’s spirit. Coral’s performance of her brother to other people seemed to be the act of a medium. Later, Gurba noted that the narrators’ “computerized expression of selfhood” reminded her of her favorite definition of spirits—that they are “distilled intelligence.” To her, it felt as if the machine narrators were channeling spirits.
Blackburn said she liked this, musing that a lot of the language for experience has been lost through time, nations, and imaginary structures. “I feel like we may have lost the language for all these things, so we’re always trying to excavate it and know how to name this way of being, way of seeing, what we feel.”
Freeman asked Blackburn to talk about the unsustainability of the world we’ve built and how so much of labor is producing so much of wealth—a condition that informs Coral’s mental state.
Blackburn remarked that people know there’s a problem but don’t try to fix it, instead putting more effort into blaming others and being selfish. “You’re always on the edge of salvation and destruction, I think, as a species collectively,” she said.
She continued, “There is hurt and beauty everywhere—and we get to choose. We’re just always close to it. Where are you going to tilt? Sometimes your choices will be the way that will affect you. Sometimes you have no choice. And that’s the hardest part. But sometimes you’re right there. And you still have to remember that being alive in total is not just the hurt. It’s going to be everything else, too.”•
Join us on August 15 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Helena María Viramontes will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Manuel Muñoz to discuss Under the Feet of Jesus. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
