I wrote many of these essays when all our bodies were ordered to stay still. During the pandemic, prompted by editors at Alta magazine, several friends and I got together to read books by and about Californians. It wasn’t a celebratory time, but we had time—all of us did then—and what better way to pass it than by reading and then doing what we normally did, talking about those books, on a Zoom call. The idea was meant to be temporary: a stay against the insanity of forced stillness. How good it felt to escape, all the way back to the Gold Rush, which was no easy time either, as conjured to life so freshly by C Pam Zhang in her novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold, which boldly imagines a character between genders making their way in miner camps just as the restrictions against Chinese laborers have begun to fall hard on anyone foreign. The next month we talked to Walter Mosley about Devil in a Blue Dress, and several hundred people attended. Speaking from his studio on the beach in Los Angeles, he swiveled between his desk and the collection of paints he uses to make visual art, the history of his great city and its sprawling present unfolding in vibrant color.
Months became years, and the California Book Club, as we were calling it, expanded from a few hundred members to twenty thousand. What began as a casual operation at Alta now involves a month-long exploration of each book, and the Zoom calls are exhilarating glimpses of the intensity with which stories about life in California are received—in part because they dramatize the lived experience of many readers. I’ll never forget being halfway into the Zoom call about Naomi Hirahara’s Clark and Division, a crime novel that unfolds in the wake of a Japanese American family’s departure from one of the incarceration camps in Utah. The book’s title proceeds from the address where the family in the book land, in Chicago. In the chat window of that call, one of the listeners said that not only had her family landed on that street corner too, but that, based on the description of the apartment in the book, it was probable they had lived in the same apartment as the characters in the book.•
Excerpted from California Rewritten © 2025 by John Freeman. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Heyday Books. All rights reserved.
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
