If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes,” reads the epigraph (by filmmaker Agnès Varda) to Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, the California Book Club’s June selection. The book is organized into chapters titled after elements of landscape: storm, hawk, sky, oak, and dirt, among others. It’s about California’s relationship to fire, accounting for the different kinds of intervention deployed by Indigenous people and settlers, but it also came about, as Martin puts it, because the author was trying to write an essay about what had happened to her body since she’d moved to Sonoma County, “how this land—my garden and the forest around it—had become my companion in damage and renewal.”
The partial removal of an IUD harmed Martin, leaving her with chronic pain. She writes, “As my body continued to react to what had happened, I became intensely invested in tending the garden. And I worried intensely about hurting the plants.… Just as the forest around me was testament to the harmful interventions of settlers and the less harmful interventions of Indigenous people before them, my well-tended garden was a dynamic specimen of long-standing cycles of care and injury.” Her book elucidates how her direct relationship to land while gardening taught her to understand the world in its complexity, rather than in its binaries. The ecologies of the inner life of one’s body and the outer life of Northern California and the world are gorgeously intertwined throughout these pages. “As I grew into the realization that the pain might never go away, and my body would certainly never be the same as it was before my surgeries,” Martin writes, “I also grew more at ease with experimenting in the garden.”
Tonight, we’re pleased to welcome journalist Susan Orlean, also keenly fascinated by humans, as a special guest to talk with Martin and host John Freeman about The Last Fire Season. Orlean and Martin both write from a place of deep interest in the world, whether they home in on personalities or how things have come to be a certain, interesting way. Both are willing to guide readers along fascinating tangents. As Orlean describes in her excellent forthcoming memoir, Joyride, she had no road map for pursuing the kind of writing that seemed like her calling, pieces that might bring a reader to empathize with a life that might seem impenetrable to them—she began her career writing for small newspapers and then magazines, becoming a New Yorker staff writer in the ’90s. Orlean has received numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Shorty Award. She served as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2004. Her first book, Saturday Night, about what ordinary people do on that night, was published in 1990.
Her 1998 book, The Orchid Thief, tells the story of orchid enthusiasts, and in particular John Laroche, a Florida orchid poacher whose passions arrived “unannounced and ended explosively, like car bombs”; Laroche had dedicated himself to finding the very rare ghost orchid and was arrested. Charlie Kaufman adapted the quietly beautiful book for director Spike Jonze’s wild, zany, and popular meta-film Adaptation. Later, certain of Orlean’s magazine profiles were compiled and published as The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People (2001). Other books followed: My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere (2004), Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend (2011), and On Animals (2021). In each book, Orlean brings to vibrant life the people—and animals—she writes about. The pages of her books include a 10-year-old American boy, surf girls in Hawaii, a female matador in Spain, a star German shepherd, a mouth-to-beak resuscitation of a hen, and many more figures and stories. She writes in On Animals, “People can be figured out, but animals are enigmatic, so the best we can do is try to understand them through the lens of people living with them or using them or raising them or wanting them.”
Orlean’s The Library Book (2018) tells the story of the Los Angeles Public Library, which was the site of the largest library fire in the United States, but it is also a discursive treatise on reading, books, history, and libraries more broadly. She describes, for instance, an essay contest to raise funds, in which most of the entries “read like confessions of an almost brutal sense of loneliness, eased only by a place like the library, where lonely people can feel slightly less lonely together.”
As in Orlean’s other books, people are vividly drawn, entertaining almost in the manner of Charles Dickens’s casts of characters. Charles Lummis, a self-promoting reporter at the Los Angeles Times, “had a long, oval face, a fierce gaze, a beak of a nose, and a rosebud of a mouth. He was small and sinewy with a prizefighter’s tight, taut muscles.” His L.A. Times columns were “funny and chatty and exclamatory,” Orlean writes, and he went on to become the most famous librarian in America, perhaps because of his legendary reports to the library board. Uninterested in the status quo, as city librarian, “he worked on an ambitious plan to make the library one of the best in the world, and at the same time, he made recommendations on what his staff should eat for lunch.”
Martin and Orlean are two superb, curious authors who plumb the textures of the world and its inhabitants to generate extraordinary books. You’re in for a treat tonight at 5 p.m. Pacific as they discuss The Last Fire Season and more.•
Join us tonight, Tuesday, June 17, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Martin will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Orlean to discuss The Last Fire Season. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
SCARS OF FIRES PAST
CBC host John Freeman writes about wildfires, crisis, and tending to living things in Martin’s The Last Fire Season. —Alta
BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
Chris Daley reviewed The Last Fire Season when it was published, writing, “The author demonstrates an impressive command of both the story and its stakes—the mix a good memoir offers—as well as the engaging research of the best narrative nonfiction.” —Alta
HIPPIE DREAMS
Read critic Chris Vognar’s review of Dennis McNally’s The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties. —Alta
GOLD IN THE HILLS
Read an adapted excerpt from Josh Jackson’s soon-to-be-released The Enduring Wild: A Journey into California’s Public Lands, about the lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management and owned collectively by the public. —Longreads
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