David L. Ulin: Good evening, everybody. Welcome to Alta Journal’s California Book Club. Tonight, our guest is Venita Blackburn. She will be speaking with John Freeman in a minute or two after I finish introducing the program. And we have Myriam Gurba as a special guest. Before we welcome Venita and her novel Dead in Long Beach, California, fantastic novel, I do want to talk a little bit about Alta Journal and the California Book Club. I'm the books editor of Alta Journal, we are a quarterly print publication with a very active web presence.
As many of you know, if you're members, we decided in the last few years to take the counterintuitive position of boosting book coverage when everybody else was cutting back on it. And I think that that has been a decision that continues to be the right one. So thanks for being here. Thanks for being part of our coverage. Thanks for being part of our commitment to the literature of California and the West.
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You can find out more about that at altaonline.com/join. Well, that's enough from me. I want to get us to the event as quickly as possible. It's a real thrill to welcome Venita Blackburn tonight and to get this ball rolling. Let me turn it over to my colleague, John Freeman.
John Freeman: Thank you, David. Hi, everybody. Nice to see some people from Long Beach at tonight's event. When we started this club four years ago in the middle of the pandemic, I think we basically were hoping that we would put together some conversations with people about books that we loved. We didn't want California to only be the state known as, I know this is not the only way it's known, but as the inventor of sourdough bread and WD-40 and the Cobb salad, and ice pops, some other wonderful things have been invented there. And I would say one of the best things in the last 10 years are the stories of Venita Blackburn.
If you're looking for something short and amazing, swift, funny. You have something that slides away from reality and expands it, you can go right away to How to Wrestle a Girl or her other collection, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes. I think they're two of the most exciting collections that have been published in recent years. It's always very interesting when a short story writer writes a novel, but I don't think anyone could have expected this book Dead in Long Beach, California because it does so many things you want a novel to do.
It's a book about sex, and love, about the future, about money and debt, but it is also a book about grief. And it does this by blending together different ways of imagining that are not often put together. The book opens as if you haven't read it yet, the main character, Coral, her brother has just committed suicide and his phone is there. She makes the decision in the first page to do something rather than to not do something. I'll let Venita explain what that is, but this information is coming to us in the book from a computerized source, which is imagining what it's like to narrate the life of Coral.
She's not telling the story herself. Coral is a graphic novelist, and as we move forward through a week in which she's dealing with the death of her brother, we have some flashbacks from her childhood with him. We see Coral with her brother's daughter who's getting increasingly curious about where her father is. We also get sections from a novel, a graphic novel that Cole wrote about a lesbian assassin and debt collector at the end of the world who's falling in love with a genetically enhanced woman who is a scientist. So that takes us really way out into the most exciting realm of the future. I think it's so exciting that she's here to talk to us. Venita.
Venita Blackburn: Hello, John. What a great introduction and a very thorough explanation of the book.
Freeman: Yeah. I just thought we might as well just lay it all out there so in case anyone is catching the club before they read the book, that they would have a little bit of the lay of the land.
Blackburn: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of pieces to hold onto in there, but I think you touched a lot of them, for sure. And the further away I get from the actual first release, the more I think people are reading deeply, I guess, into the book, and it's fun to talk about it. So this is going to be the most in-depth, I guess, I'll be going.
Freeman: All right. Well, if you don't cry, that will be good, but if you don't cry, maybe I'll feel bad.
Blackburn: No promises. I mean, I cried when I wrote it.
Freeman: Normally, grief is handled with such kid gloves, and I feel like the way that this book begins that it allows us to both feel the weight of it but also feel it as a state, as a kind of genre of literature almost. And the book rejects that genre and says, "Okay. Let's just see if another way will get us into how it actually feels to feel crazed, to feel manic with grief." I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, about creating a state of grief. Well, I mean unusual.
Blackburn: Okay, good. I mean, I love the idea of grief being a genre in itself in literature, but I always argue that every story, all literature is a grief story. It is a loneliness story and it's 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 in that you can isolate these feelings. But I do think they overlap. These moments of deep loss only happen if you loved deeply something, someone, and all of these things I have to think about now.
I'm in a position where I'm further away from sort of the... I call it the hard crack of grief that I experienced in my 20s when I lost my mom and my parents. I was orphaned during those years, but they were big shifts in my brain on what it means to be alive and the danger of loving people and the unfairness of losing them and that kind of reality.
So combine that with my weird aesthetic in the terms of prose and all the things I read and I like, then you end up with something like Dead in Long Beach, California. And also comes down to the forms that I'm really interested in too, because I love flash fiction. So I love really condensed narratives that can do magic tricks with time and with voice, and with having complex feelings, certainly named and named thoroughly in a very small space.
I'm fascinated by that form. So take that on top of everything else, my philosophy about grief and then it starts to look like this book. I love that the author... Not the author, the artist that did the cover, put novel in quotations because what is a novel? How did you know-
Freeman: Yeah. There is. It's like sort of quotation marks in novel.
Blackburn: Because you have these preconceptions about what novel should be, this kind of elite form. It always carries more weight just in our culture. When we say a novel, it's going to be this thing like, "Oh, I'm writing a novel." People say, "Oh, good luck. You think you can write a novel? La, la, la." Versus, "I wrote a short story. It's 500 words." People are like, "Why did she do that? What a waste of time. Nobody cares." So there's that kind of feeling that comes with the idea of a novel, this grand elite thing that's supposed to be heavy, and big, and complex and all these kinds of things.
But it can also be, in my mind, undefined because it takes on the shape of the period that it develops in. It's a mark of an era. It's also a mark of a brain. So there're always going to be these amorphous kinds of creations. And that's sort the beauty of it that I think we forget. And that also offered me some freedom when I said, "Well, let me see what my brain will do, what this time period will do in a form like this." And so it got a little wild.
Freeman: I love those kinds of novels where you get to fall in love with the way that the novel is notices and how they notice. And you are extra able to do that in this book because the narrator that's telling us Coral's story is a computer and it's sort of making pattern recognitions. And while it is approximating human consciousness, it's also telling us things about humans and how they behave. I love when the book moves into those modes and it sort of actually begins on the very first page when you start the story.
I was wondering if before we deeper into it, if you could maybe begin and read a little bit from the book so we can hear what it sounds like and then I'll come back to asking you some more questions.
Blackburn: Excellent. All right, good. Let's see. So I'm going to start on the very first page and just read that paragraph for you all. And we're going to come back. Remind me to talk about this voice and what it really is, who it really is.
We are responsible for telling this story mostly because Coral cannot. She just discovered her brother dead in his apartment, suicide. Coral's brother, Jay lived in Long Beach, California. It was a cheap apartment even though he could afford more. Jay didn't like the idea of moving because no one really likes the idea of moving, especially men nearing 40.
People like to dream of being elsewhere and suddenly having all of their things elsewhere with them. But moving is what Coral refers to as some bullshit. We've done the research. The apartment peaked out from between a row of houses and one other multi-unit building. Bougainvillea, gardenias and other low water-tolerant plants that add pops of color to lazy landscaping crawled along the facing. Long Beach was an oily, salty city nicknamed Weirdbeach by those not likely to fly a gay pride flag on their lawns anytime soon. The long sleepy horns of boats at the extremely active port moaned into the night. Coral had finished a brief conversation with Jay about 11 minutes before arriving at his apartment. He didn't mention the suicide. We are certain.
Okay. Now, we're going to jump a little further. I'm thinking about voices too, because there's another section and it's a rare section one where Coral, the main character is absolutely lucid and she's speaking in her own voice authentically, and it's not a kind section, but I do want to show that contrast here. I had to channel a lot of what I felt when I was going through, and I also keep going through these stages of grief. It's not always sadness. First it's anger. So I was tapping into a lot of that. So bear with me.
Coral opened her brother's contacts list and scrolled through the names. The scroll was quick, barely 30 people. "How is that?" She said out loud. She paced the small dark room speaking to the walls and furniture. "Is that normal? Is this how men are? How do you have no friends? Is this a plumber? You haven't had a house in 15 years. Why do you still have that plumber in your phone? You don't know any of our aunt's numbers even. They always call me and ask how you are. And now what? I don't care what they think. One more fucking thing, I swear, I had to do it all by myself before too. Pay for everything when I was barely out of college, debt for a funeral before I even knew people charged for all those goddamn flowers, more dead shit. It never ends for me."
"And sometimes it gets to be about me, okay? I'm a person. I'm not some kind gay nun with a credit card. I have shit to do. Now, I have to be the middle man in the family because you never talked to anybody. Stupid. You didn't make a single friend worth putting in your phone all this fucking time. Who does that? Men are always drying up and dying at 50 because they don't know how to socialize. You all just think about whatever the fuck you think about and that's it. You work and that's it. You get a wife once or twice and that's it. You don't go to the doctor. You don't exercise. You eat steaks like beef is supposed to save your soul or grow your dicks. Stupid. Your brains aren't even bigger. Your skulls are just thicker. And I have to do every fucking leftover thing for you for the rest of my life." Okay, I'll stop there for the sample on that note. Oh, you can ask me anything. What do you want at this point?
Freeman: I want to talk to you about voice because there's so many... As a technician, a sort of magician of the small space, you can do so many things in a novel when you don't take space for granted. One of them is to have different sounds of voices within a very small space and to have them flow in and out. And this lacuna that opens up and her voice steps forward. It is so clear and so funny. And yet there's not a lot more of her in the book in terms of... directly that way.
Blackburn: Not directly. And that's the trick too, right? Because technically the computerized voice, the chorus for Coral is it is her. It is actually her mind finding a way to connect where she is so dissociated from the moment. So even though it's technically this outside voice that knows everything that can see that can reach the ends, it's still her imagined perspective. She created this. For Wildfire, for the internal book, she made this in order to tell this hard kind of story, this fantasy story, this escape kind of story, which is perfect for this moment that she's embracing.
So no matter what, it's still a human, it's still a human narrative, but it's being given a privilege, I guess, in a certain way.
Freeman: And it's fascinating to watch her tell this story in that mode as she's also telling a different story that doesn't necessarily have to do with what's happened on page one, but also tells us a lot about what she feels like she can fantasize about and how she projects herself into a fictional space or a version of herself. I wonder how much you were intending for those two stories to interact, Wildfire, the fiction that she has written, which runs through the book, which has a main character who's an unnamed assassin, debt collector. And Coral, who's in some ways come to the very end of a life, which is the end of debt.
Blackburn: That's good. The initial structure of the book was much different actually. So I'm learning that I'm an overwriter. Who knew? So the ratio was very much skewed. So there was much more Wildfire in the initial draft and far less of the present story. And then I started, as I was reading, I realized that that is not where the core is. And it was harder to write the present story than it was to write the fantasy story. And I realized why. It's because all of the emotions and the heaviness, and the true grief, and the feeling is concentrated there.
I always tell my students too, you got to go to the sacred places. You got to go to the things that are hard. You have to tell that story that's nagging you, the one that you might be purposefully avoiding for a lot of reasons, for a lot of good reasons, and sometimes just a lot of lazy reasons or cowardly reasons.
That's probably where the story is. And that's when I realized, "Okay, let me reduce." So I took a lot of pages off. So it was like 10,000 words of Wildfire that I had to cut because it was not where the story needed to connect. And then I began to expand deeper into the present story, which allowed me to do something with memory that I wasn't doing before.
So that was also really a good kind of healthy way to tell a narrative. You have to have a good relationship with past, present, and future in your structure. Your characters don't. They can be broken. Most people don't have a good relationship with their past, and present, and future. They're either stuck in their present. They're very, "Give me the things that feel good. Give me, whatever." They're sugar people. They just want things that taste good and make them feel good in the moment, but it's bad for them ultimately. And they're also blocking off some things that might've been really hard in their past.
So it's not healthy generally. And so you can have those people in your story. So Coral is clearly not a healthy person. So she's there, but the narrative itself has to have a better relationship with her past and what the future might be, and also the hard crack of the present moment. So that's when I started to do that, reducing a lot of the story within the story that opened up a way, a mirror or whatever metaphor you want, mirror, window, crack, gap, chasm into Coral's past. And so that was really useful and really helpful for me to access that hard story.
Freeman: I love the way it moves around in time too. It allows you a lot of freedom to show, I don't know, the way that it takes a while to get to certain parts of the past. They don't come back readily. And you almost feel in the way that this book is constructed, that as the week goes along, the choral is resisting going to certain memories. And that resistance is only portrayed in the way that it's ordered, not necessarily in the way that the things are booted up. But there are these categories in which the voice that she's created for herself deflects the power of some of these categories as new chapters come up. She's like, "We are narrating." Can you talk a little bit about these categories?
Blackburn: You mean the clinics?
Freeman: The clinics, yes.
Blackburn: Yeah. So those were, like I said, ways to access memory and also in a way that would make it comfortable. So it's hard to say, to sit down and say, "I'm going to write about my childhood trauma and an abusive mother." Nobody wants to do that, or they do and they just, I don't know, but that's not me. So it's how do I write about this trauma in a way that still makes it entertaining for the person that's experiencing it? So that's when it became theater. That's when the voice was able to construct these moments in a way that was separate.
It's like we're going to pretend to be these people even though these people are real, even though these people are us, and act it out in a way that understands it. Also, it's very generous. It's offering compassion to those that do harm and often are offering compassion to the self as well, and the judgment.
I love that the judgment in those moments. It's not about anger or resentment, or anything. It's looking at all of these sometimes beautiful moments too. Of course, with equal, the cruelty, the wonder of being alive is approached with such pleasure and delight. And I like that. And that makes the trauma palatable. You can tolerate it. I needed Coral to have that, right? She's in the middle of the worst crisis of pretty much of her adult life.
So she needs to be able to be at peace with the nightmare that's unfolding. It has unfolded. And remember that that is not all of what life is. So that's what the clinics, these performances of her memory allow to happen, I think. That was my goal. Who knows what actually happened?
Freeman: No, it feels that way on the page, and it reminds me that it's probably a good time to bring in for a little bit, Myriam Gurba, who I think has done more as a memoirist to explode the categories of writing about the past and trauma than pretty much almost anyone writing in the category today. And does that through modes of collage, which I think are probably touching some of the things that you're doing here. Her latest book is Creep, which is a National Book Critics Circle finalist.
Blackburn: Love it.
Freeman: Come on and ask some questions of Venita.
Myriam Gurba: Hi.
Blackburn: Hello.
Gurba: I'm so excited.
Blackburn: I'm excited. I love Creep. I have it on the table now, and my wife was looking at it. She was like, what is this? She's like, "Is this me? I feel seen." She was reading some of it.
Gurba: Oh, I love that. Thank you so much. I have your book right here. I love it. I loved reading it so much, and I'm so happy that you chose to read that introductory paragraph because that paragraph to me captures what I think of and what is widely identified as the Long Beach sound.
Blackburn: Yeah.
Gurba: Long Beach is a community that isn't necessarily known for its literary output, but it's so strongly associated with music. And there's so many different sounds that are specific to Long Beach. And rarely do I perceive that sound emanating from the page. And your novel does that. Your novel manages to emit that. And so-
Blackburn: I appreciate that.
Gurba: ... that's one of the pleasures of reading the book. I love that Long Beach was described as an oily, salty city nicknamed Weirdbeach. I remember that when I first moved to Long Beach, the nickname that I learned for it was Wrongbeach.
Blackburn: Oh, yeah.
Gurba: Yeah. That was one of my favorites. "Oh, you live in Wrongbeach." And I was like, "Oh, I like this."
Blackburn: Yeah, that one is sassy. You can own that one.
Gurba: Exactly, exactly. And then the other aspect of this book that was appealing to me is the element of grief and the elements of mourning that are incorporated into it. Because for me, Long Beach has also been like a mortuary site, and it's been that across my lifespan because Long Beach is the first place where I attended a funeral.
And so for me, my introduction to death was set in Long Beach. And so when I saw this title, I was like, "Oh, ah!" A novel that appeals to my personal history, but also my sensibilities. I wanted to talk to you more about that notion of voice and that notion of sound and Long Beach as a community that is known for its polyphonic sound. I'm curious about how you think that you hold off this feat of translating that musicality onto the page. How do you think that was accomplished? What went into that alchemy? I'm curious.
Blackburn: I love that analysis of it. I wasn't really thinking about the music so much as the sensory details of Long Beach because it is very much that it has a smell. It has a sound for sure. I grew up in Compton, so it's one of those tangential kind of cities. So I know Compton very well, and we have family in Long Beach, so I would go in and out and that kind of thing. And I still have friends that live in Redondo Beach. All the beach cities are part of my world that I am constantly invested in.
So I know the feeling of my body in those spaces. So that's pretty much where I was trying to remember and channel that when thinking about it. In terms of loss. I grew up in Southern California. The big losses happen there for the most part. And there was always this place that is home in a way, even though I don't live there anymore. But when I think about home, it does look a lot like that part of my life. Even though I'm growing my home now here in Fresno. And it's still weird.
Have you known Fresno? We can talk about it. But it's definitely becoming more home. But the mind, the memory of those places, of the textures, of the feel of the air of night, also just sort of the bend of the streets and that kind of thing and looking out from one area to this urban kind of world into the next area, you can see the ocean. Just everything is very concrete and a little bit hard, but also a little bit soft and definitely feel salty. So all of those-
Gurba: Absolutely. Right? And for me, the salty reminder is the ubiquity of seagulls. Regardless of where you are in Long Beach, there is a seagull watching you.
Blackburn: Yeah. That's the haunting of the birds, the desperate birds. They're just out there.
Gurba: Exactly. And you see them eating the strangest things. I mean, my favorite is to see a seagull eating chicken, but that's my penchant for cannibalistic animals.
Blackburn: They'll eat each other. Bird fights were not uncommon.
Gurba: Exactly. Exactly. And Long Beach also has a haunted quality to it. And I think you're touching on that when you describe its sights and sounds, its saltiness. Salt is a preservative. Salt was used to embalm. And Long Beach was... Well, not Long Beach itself, but near Long Beach there were salt flats. So that was specifically a place where salt was harvested. And I think children were at one point in time taken on field trips to the Salt Flats, which were out towards San Pedro.
Blackburn: It sounds familiar. I think I passed by the Big Hills. That was all.... Yeah, I remember. I actually do. I haven't thought about that.
Gurba: Yeah. So I was thinking about Long Beach as a mortuary site, as a funerary site, as a site of grief. And Long Beach is also the first community where I encountered the phenomena of the funeral car wash. That was the first place where I encountered stopping at an intersection and being beset by young people who are fundraising, bury a fellow young person. It's such a common practice in Long Beach. And so I had these cultural touchstones in mind as I was reading the book.
Blackburn: I don't know if that's a Long Beach thing or a California thing, but that is something that is done, funerals, collections through whatever means you hold a sign up on the street or whatever it is, or offer to do the car wash thing. But that does absolutely feel like that area. One other thing too about Long Beach is that it's not that big in the grand scheme of things. A lot of the story is just sort of this branch off into LA, into Compton, into Long Beach, because they're all kind of connected.
Gurba: All the way down to Morongo.
Blackburn: Go to the casino.
Gurba: We're going to the desert. We're going to go to Cabazon and see the dinosaurs.
Blackburn: I'm telling you these are my worlds and we're going through all of these areas that are spread out, but they're still, they're connected to this moment, to this character's life and also this particular unique region. So I was thinking about that too as the map of this place.
Gurba: Absolutely. And then another thing that I thought about was, I think very early in the novel, there is a passing mention of Santeria, which made me giggle because I associate that with the Sublime song, about Long Beach. And so I was wondering if that wasn't a very subtle sort of nod toward that lyric because that lyric is now inextricable from Long Beach's identity and the history of Long Beach.
But then as I read through the novel and I am trying to make sense of Coral's behavior, I started to think about Coral as being possessed by her brother's spirit. And one of the features of Santeria that tends to be really frightening for practitioners of Western religions is that it involves spirit possession. That's one of its defining characteristics. And so I started to think about Coral's performance as sort of a medium and her interactions with all of these figures who are involved in her brother's life as this active mediumship.
Blackburn: I like that. I wasn't thinking about the lyric, but that does make sense. It's just know serendipitous, they're Sublime. I was all connecting in there. But I am really fascinated by religious practices around death and grief. So I have seen a lot of the shrines that are built, and they're just really interesting. I'm always fascinated by how the mind and this object, this odd little thing, this domestic thing that gets folded into this shape, this sculpture, what it means to the person and to the family.
All of that is really interesting to me. So I've looked up a lot of grief practices over time, or whenever I see it. It plugs into my brain. There's the people that they excavate their dead after a few years and then they hang out with them. They just prop up the body and just have lived their lives around a dance with the corpses.
It's just all of these things, these acts of love that can seem a little strange. But there are ways that they were trying to connect to loss, to something that's lost. And it's really sad. It's also really moving for me. So I'm always thinking about that. And then so that's a part of why the voice is almost creating a religion in itself to worship the past. So that obsession with... You can call it the computerized version of Coral or whatever you want to say is obsessed with humanity, is obsessed with our lives, and it's mourning us in this way that is performing what we used to do, the good and the bad, the hideous, the glorious, all these things.
And then in a way that is kind of a possession, if you want to think of it that way, where you are embodying this lost person, this lost family, this lost community, or they're embodying you. And it's a mutual exchange going on there, all for the desperate need to connect and to love, and to remember. So it's all mixed up in there.
Gurba: Absolutely. And that computerized expression of selfhood also reminded me of an explanation that I once read for spirit, and it's my favorite definition of spirit, which is that spirits are distilled intelligence. And so to me, it seems that the computers are channeling spirits because the spirit is speaking an intelligence.
Blackburn: I like it. It sounds good. And that's what we do, Myriam. All we do is we're looking for the language for these things that we feel, that we see, that we experience over and over again. And we don't really have a clear... I feel like we used to. I do feel like a lot of it is just lost through time, through whatever, through nations, through these imaginary structures that we build up around ourselves that end up pushing out a lot of our history.
So I feel like we may have lost the language for all of these things. So we're always trying to excavate it out and figure out how to name this way of being, way of seeing what we feel.
Gurba: Absolutely. And then what we can't excavate, I think we're sort of driven to invent, right? We're driven to invent language, to fill in these linguistic gaps that are kind of crying out for words.
Blackburn: I'm reading Parable of the Sower right now for Octavia Butler. I know you're a fan too.
Gurba: Oh my God. It's like you're reading my mind because I was going to ask you about that next. My next question was going to be about the relationship of Dead in Long Beach with other Afrofuturist works.
Blackburn: I've never actually read Parable of the Sower in its entirety, just sort of excerpts of it. I've read the standalone books like Kindred, so I wasn't familiar. Octavia Butler definitely, one of my literary heroes in the list of the juggernauts as I call them, like Tony North and James Baldwin. All of those are there, the ancestors for sure. Now that I read it's so terrifying. But I get it completely in terms of this girl, this young Black girl in the future, in this dystopian world that looks just like our own world and figuring it all out, seeing the avenues that will lead to nowhere, to suffering, to isolation, to the end of themselves, the end of her communities, and then having to create a religion in order to process that, in order to find her own escape, which is upward into the cosmos. It's so beautiful.
Gurba: It's gorgeous.
Blackburn: Right? And I'm like, "Yes, these are my people."
Gurba: And then when I think about art manifestations of the kind of Afrofuturist work that Octavia Butler did so beautifully, I think of Noah Purifoy's installations in the desert as a landscape where those sorts of stories could be enacted.
Blackburn: I love it.
Gurba: Have you visited his installations?
Blackburn: Not at all. Where are these?
Gurba: Oh my God. So these are out in the desert by Joshua Tree. Noah Purifoy built these installation landscapes that were rather like the Watts Towers, and they look incredibly dystopian. They're absolutely gorgeous and they're made of scavenged materials.
Blackburn: Wow. Okay. That's on my next version. If I can get these kittens adopted, we'll talk about that later.
Gurba: I love Purifoy's work. His work is another touchstone for me when it comes to Afrofuturists in California. About a year ago, I relocated from Long Beach to Pasadena, and I live right on the border of Pasadena and Altadena. I can have one foot in each community. Octavia Butler is buried here. And so I just almost feel like the soil is blessed here because her bones are here, and my neighborhood bookstore is called Octavia's Bookshelf.
Blackburn: That's cool.
Gurba: I feel like her spirit governs Pasadena and Altadena.
Blackburn: I love it. And also in terms of California writers Butler understood California, I think.
Gurba: Hell, yes.
Blackburn: It seems psychic. It seems prescient, of course, but it's also just this was there. I always argue too, that the apocalypse is right now for a lot of people. They're already at the end of the world, and that's part of what the book was considering that they're going to be the wealthy that have everything. They're trying to insulate themselves. It's an illusion in itself too. It just creates more suffering and all of that. And there are those that are already at the bottom. She's writing tangentially to them.
She's writing from that perspective of being close to the end or already there. And then where do you go from that point? I think that is the nature of California because you get it all. You get the extremes for sure in this state. I mean, of course it's huge. The vastness of it for sure is going to cover all of that. But you get the extremes of the financial states, the mental states, the spiritual states. You get all of that going on here. And especially in this particular region too that we're thinking about too, the Southern California area.
Gurba: You have such an amazing concentration and density of population. It's inevitable, given how many of us have to live here side by side.
Blackburn: Absolutely.
Gurba: Also, did you want to mention the kittens? We had talked about the kittens in the green room.
Blackburn: I will make this announcement. So I have two very cute kittens that were born under my house, and if anyone here in the chat wants them, please let me know.
Gurba: We need to make sure that these kittens are guaranteed a blessed future.
Blackburn: Yes, and-
Gurba: Speaking of the future.
Blackburn: They're very spoiled. I don't even know how to feed them. I just feed them all the time and just in their... They can't run around freely. They need their own space. My dog wants to eat them. He's a terrier and he's got plans, so anyone that wants them... I want to get them adopted together. It's supposed to be a great thing to have more than one cat, so Myriam, you probably need another one.
Gurba: John, do you have any cats?
Freeman: I don't. I wish I could, but I'm allergic.
Blackburn: Me too.
Freeman: But I'd be so happy if the California Book Club became... Because some of your novel takes place at a no-kill shelter.
Blackburn: That's true.
Freeman: A kind of shelter slash homemaking device for animals who need homes. So please someone text in and add two living creatures to your home.
I'm going to bring Myriam back in a little bit. Thank you so much. That was really just utterly fantastic because we moved from installation visual art to the Long Beach, to the senses that this book evokes. And I want to bring up, because you brought in Octavia Butler and her ability to glimpse the future and where it was heading, where it already was. Towards the end of the book, you have this amazing line that I think deals with both the book's narrative strategy, but also what's the psychological topography of the book.
And its avoidance is a powerful drug. Her teeth, unbrushed, Coral secured a date the next morning for tea that ended up being at an off-brand Long Beach, no-kill shelter. And that's sort of the typical Blackburn style, which is to drop a bomb on you and then move you along swiftly in this sort of amazing scene making. Let's talk a little bit about avoidance because it touches on so much of what you've just said about unsustainability of the world that we've made and how so much of labor is producing so much of wealth for such a small amount of people and it's creating so much destruction.
And that is very much the backdrop that's pressing right into this book. Can you talk a little bit about that and how it informs know Coral's state of mind and the texture of her grief?
Blackburn: Yeah. And a lot of that has to do with probably my own philosophy, just observing the world. It might be very similar to what Octavia Butler saw and did, or not. Completely different, I don't know. But I do see the nature of people where we know there's a problem, but it's hard. So we'll not try to fix it. We'll put more effort into blaming others to just being selfish. The ordinary things, vanity and pride will get in the way of easy solutions and will work so hard to justify these acts, and we'll do that as we walk into oblivion.
But we also have this tendency to correct. What's really fascinating to me is that they're so close. You're always on the edge of salvation and destruction, I think as a species collectively is where my observations go, where one choice will tilt you in one direction for a long time or the other. At the same time, it's all happening. Your salvation, your destruction is still continuous throughout like I said, the apocalypse right now, for a lot of people. They are at their edge and there's nothing left to take from them.
And then at the same time, you have the other extreme, and that seems to be pretty consistent from one time period to another. Just depends on where you zoom in and where you zoom out, I guess, in the entire species of us. But I don't know how long that's going to be sustainable for all of us. I have a feeling that we will just keep going on this, that we are not going to truly, truly destroy ourselves and the world, but we'll keep going to make a lot of changes that might hurt for a long time, and then it'll get much better for a long time depending on who you are and if you're lucky to be born in one side or the other at any given point.
So I think that's part of my philosophy about grief, about life, about being alive, that there is hurt and there is beauty everywhere, and we get to choose. You're just always close to it. See where are you going to tilt? And sometimes your choices will be the way that affects 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. And I feel like that's part of what the structure is doing with the voice. But I thought it was interesting that you said this, whatever, you called it, the Blackburn, whatever, tendency or have it, to drop a bomb. A little poke a judgment and then leave it with some levity.
I feel like that is my instinct too, because if you're going to tell a joke, it has to have something serious going on with it, otherwise it doesn't matter. So I feel like the best humor is the most tragic.
Freeman: I mean, here's another example, because while Myriam was speaking, I remembered how much this book is constantly touching you and touching your skin, awaking your senses. And a little bit earlier from where I just mentioned, Coral has this memory where she's thinking about going to Christmas in Compton with her family. Her whole family's there. And you write, "Christmas in Compton did not smell of pine or cinnamon, but barbecue grills and faint ocean air if the wind blew hard enough. Their tree was fake. Fake snow, fake light, fake holly berries. Coral loved it and was the one who carefully unpacked and decorated the tree every year and just as carefully put everything back in the original boxes for storage until next season."
And then the first line of the next graph, "Their father's heart was working at 25% and he hadn't told anyone." It's like the nesting of the kind of coming apocalypse that you don't see with the comfort and love that you can curate is constantly shaping and reshaping across this book. I brought up avoidance because I saw that as a metafictional thought process, which is are we learning to entertain and avoid our way out of dealing with reality or does that even matter?
Is that just simply the strategy in which we live now because we're all so versed in telling stories and being part of narratives and trying to extricate ourselves from narratives by changing the story that we tell about ourselves, or that we tell about the world. But ultimately, it seems like a lot of these stories come back to love, to the irreplaceable nature of it. I guess I want to talk about this as a potential love story. It is the heart of the futuristic part of this book.
You joke about it in the course of it, but it is like this kind of hot, sexy, funny phlegm-laced because that is part of a meet cute between the main character and her genetically-enhanced scientist lover is when she has to produce a sample of phlegm because she might've been sick. I mean, this is-
Blackburn: That's love, right? I thought they were really cute. And the internal Wildfire character. That was fun to write their story and remember. Also Coral, she goes on dates. What a weirdo. Like I said, she's not healthy. She's not in a good place to... She's no role model by any means for the crisis that's going on with her. She ends up trying to go on a date. Talk about avoidance and talk about entering into... And also the unfortunate nature of everyone that encounters her because they're not getting the truth right away.
All expectations are doomed right from the beginning for Coral. I like that idea of someone who wants to present this gift of possibility to everyone. That's the only redemptive kind of quality, I guess, I would give to Coral. I'm like her. She's fine. But as she's moving from one person to another in this world, trying to offer them something like love. This possibility of love, of connection, every time, and it will never happen. The timing is off. Everything is off. She's not going to be the one that can deliver this, but just the possibility of it is such a gift, I think. And she wants to do that because she knows that it's no longer possible for her in this really obvious way.
So I really liked that. I'm also a Christmas lesbian, just for the record. I love Christmas. I love all the pageantry of the time. And so all of that description right there was pretty accurate for what I used to see. Although it was much different with all of my different family members and all that kind of jazz. It was different. But there were things that I know now as an adult that I did not know then sort of family scandals and all kinds of things that were going on.
I was thinking about that kind of stuff when writing that particular Christmas scene where you are given this memory of something and then as you get older, information is put on it that's now layered onto that memory. So it changes the feeling every time. And just reaching into that next line, like you said, was that immediate kind of shift that I felt that I remember when I'm getting all these new details from moments that I thought were very safe and completely separate, completely separate from the Christmas moment.
But I do have a long list of those things of scandals in the past that I didn't know about that changed the memory and all of that. So I was thinking about those things. Is there another part of that question that I missed?
Freeman: Not at all. No. I'm going to bring Myriam back in because we were running towards the end of the hour. And while Myriam boots up, there was a question from one of the listeners who clearly loved Wildfire like I did, and is wondering, "What are you going to do with the 10,000 words that you cut? Do you think you'll ever write about the main character in Wildfire in another novel? Is there going to be a Better Call Saul essentially of Dead in Long Beach, California?"
Blackburn: That's funny. I'm going to pull up some of the pages now. I hand wrote a bunch of them. This is a stack of these under my desk right now. They have a bunch of the pages that I did not include, and I have no plans to finish Wildfire or do anything else with it. This is not the first time someone has asked about that. Maybe? Who knows? I mean, it'll look totally weird if I ever go back to it because I have to make things interesting to me too. And also, like I said, I hand wrote so much of it and that was just not a good idea.
I don't recommend that to people. They hand write your journals, but don't hand write your novels because you got to retype it. There are software that they say that can do it for you. But that was a hassle to have to type up everything that I hand wrote for this book. But maybe it was for the better. I had lines that I didn't know what I said. I can't read this because I had to rewrite it in the moment. So maybe it did make it better. I don't know. But yes, no plans right now for a sequel.
Freeman: Myriam, I wanted to ask you, since Mean had a similarly elliptical collage structure, and maybe you can address this too, Venita, how do you eventually know that you're getting close toward final shape, if it is made of discrete parts? Is there some point where the structure that isn't predetermined emerges from just a simple mechanical moving of things around on the floor, on the page, and you think, "Oh, this juxtaposition works. These sort things now make sense together."
Blackburn: What do you think, Myriam, then I'll answer?
Gurba: Well, that's a difficult question. That's a really challenging question. It's a good question and I wish I could answer it definitively, and I think my answer is going to be disappointing, I mean, I think that when we build stories in this very sort of modular way, it's mosaic. And so as you create mosaic, you step back and you see the accumulation and the accretion and you see the picture emerging.
So we're relating to words and ideas in the way that one would engage with tesserae, right? And assembling a mosaic of sorts. And then there's also a lot of intuition at play. For me, it's a matter of getting what I call a just right feeling or an aha feeling. And then I know once I have that feeling. So knowing that something is close to being completed or that it is completed is an embodied experience for me. I feel it somewhere in my body, typically it's in my gut, in my abdomen, somewhere. I'll get a sensation that it's ready. How about you, Venita?
Blackburn: I can agree with that feeling. I'll talk about the structure too because I have a more practical kind of approach probably, but for that feeling of whether it's done or not, it is sensory based. It's also just from one line to another. I'll know if it's not working for me, just on how it sounds, how it feels, how it makes... Do I get the chills yet? Do I get that chill of understanding, or that magic moment going from one line to the next. Or is it kind of dragging still as I'm reading it?
So all of those things will let me know if it's done. So I have a story that looks pretty good. It's got all the technical boxes checked, but it's not singing for me yet, so I'll have to wait and keep moving things around. And sometimes just a half a sentence here or in another kind of unifying moment up there makes it do that, get that feeling through.
Gurba: What you're saying about the sound is really important to me too because I read all of my work aloud to myself in order to determine whether or not I've mastered a rhythm. But I'm not necessarily even sure what that rhythm is until I hear it. And then once I hear it, I can assess the music. And then once the music sounds right, then I can move forward. So in that sense, it does feel like composing.
Blackburn: It does. It really does. I agree completely. Now in terms of the structure though of the book, and this was one of the... I wrote a novel before and people... Let me tell this horror story really fast. So I wrote a novel for my thesis, MFA thesis, and it was terrible. I reduced it down to four pages and then published it as a short story. So I know what it is like to write a lot of pages and just for that sake.
Going into another novel, it was very daunting because I've only been doing short stories for years and years and years. I can't see the edges where you're in a book that big. It's not as comfortable with a 700-word story or a 3,000 word story. You can see the edges right away. You know where you're going, where you've been.
But for the novel, I had to surrender that comfort in order to write it. And I did not write it in order. So I had an outline, a brief kind of wild outline. I tell people it just had one word, depression, and suede shoes or something like that was what I had to do in a scene. I'm tying some object together and I'm tying this feeling together and know I'm moving. I'm around like that. So I had a rough outline. So I would choose the parts that I knew I want to write at any given day and then just expand those.
So I would almost create another mini outline within the bigger outline for just that day so I could see the edges of it. So I could see the parts of the scene or whatever page I was working on. And that gave me some comfort. Maybe I have control issues. I was able to move trust it. I knew this slot into the story right there and then I just had to keep going.
I did that for about the first four fifths, I don't know, math or whatever of the book. But the final part was written in order chronologically. So I knew I was at the end and I was able to write those final pages, 25 pages or whatever it is, write out. Those were the hardest pages to do though. They were most emotionally taxing, I think, after the whole book.
I knew what I was doing right there. So I was able to keep going in a line without having to comfort myself at that point with any kind of structural tricks. Sometimes it does come down to that feeling in the body, that instinct, that connection of the brain, the intellect to the spirit or whatever you want to call it, that you can perceive as you read the work and reread the work. And then you'll know at that point.
Freeman: This is a good time to ask a question that also popped up, and it could relate to some of your work too, Myriam, or some thoughts you have about this particular novel. A Cooper asks, "Would you be open to a film adaptation of the novel?"
Blackburn: Me?
Freeman: Yes. I mean, because the way that Myriam described mosaic'ing and stepping back to look at a picture is something that this book does incredibly well in just lots of different ways. And often with film, you kind of lose that moment of dilation. Not all the time, but you could end up with a noir film called Dead in Long Beach.
Blackburn: That's funny. Shoot, I'm open. Write me a check. Talk to me. There's always whispers and murmurs. There are whispers and murmurs in the air about film rights and things for this book. I'll believe it when I see it. And so that's my approach to it. I really do think it would be challenging to translate into film 100%, but I think a lot of it would translate fairly well cinematically. But I know there are some companies right now that are doing great stuff like A24. I really like what they do right now, so they might be able to get the weirdness going for this one.
Gurba: I think it would make an amazing film. And one of the aspects of Long Beach that really tickled me, especially when I was working in the schools, was how frequently Long Beach masquerades as other cities in cinema and also on the small screen because it's inexpensive to film in Long Beach. And so Long Beach becomes Miami over and over, and over again. So for example, when I taught at various high schools, CSI Miami would be filmed there and then Dexter would be filmed there too. And then I also... There was a bar that I went to, I used to go to where HBO filmed True Blood.
Ulin: Really?
Gurba: And so I remember I once wrote a short story about Long Beach as a sex worker embodying whatever clients want it to be.
Blackburn: I love it.
Gurba: Thank you. But I feel sort of like Dead in Long Beach would be a sex worker just for the record as a city, yes. I feel like in Dead in Long Beach, some of that sort of cheeky spirit exists in the sense that Coral kind of shapeshifts and becomes this other person in the same way that Long Beach is really adept at becoming whatever it is that residents or visitors want. Alex's Bar. That's it. Alex's Bar. Somebody just entered into the chat, yeah.
Blackburn: I believe it. I haven't never thought of it that way, but I don't know the research of what's going on in the film world. But yeah, for sure. Coral is that kind of person who is trying to adapt and offer this kind of gift to people about what she perceives that they need in the moment and is willing to hand it over and willing to lie, and willing to sort of, like you said, shapeshift as necessary. That's really cool though. I love that as an idea.
Freeman: All right. Well, so we've come up with amazing idea for a film, a short story that someone has to publish. And we have two cats, which are still unadopted, but we have this amazing novel, which if you haven't read it, please go out and get it now, Dead in Long Beach, California. Such an incredible joy to talk to you, Venita, and such a dazzling and endlessly deep book. And Myriam, thank you so much for sort of singing the tone poem of Long Beach and bringing that into this conversation.
Blackburn: I love it.
Freeman: It's just been great talking to you and having you here.
Blackburn: Thank you, John.
Freeman: Oh, you're welcome.
Gurba: Thank you.
Freeman: I think it's time for David has to come on and walk us out. But thank you everyone else for coming.
Ulin: Thank you all. I will say it was a great conversation and exhilarating, and I appreciate all of you, John, Venita, Myriam. I want to remind everybody that this interview was recorded and will be up at californiabookclub.com very quickly. I'd like to remind you also everyone to be here next month when California Book Club will be hosting Helena Maria Viramontes for her novel Under the Feet of Jesus. A last reminder to get the Alta membership at altaonline.com/join, or again, the $3 digital membership.
There will be a two-minute survey that will pop up as soon as this event ends. Take care. Stay safe. See you all next month. Have a very good night. Thanks for being here.•
