Event Recap: John Freeman’s ‘California Rewritten’

The tables were turned on California Book Club host John Freeman at Thursday night’s gathering. Walter Mosley, author of more than 60 books, including Devil in a Blue Dress, featuring the character Easy Rawlins, came on to serve as special guest host and interlocutor to discuss Freeman’s new essay collection, California Rewritten, the CBC’s October pick.

Of the depth that Freeman brings to his essays, Mosley said, “I always have the feeling when talking to you, and also when reading you, that you have this really deep understanding of what you’re reading, and you bring it to us in such a way that it’s you talking to me about a book I’ve never read before, but when I finished reading [any of your articles], I feel like I just read it five times.”

Freeman responded that he feels his job or calling as a critic is not only to put things in context but also to describe the experience of reading a book as closely as possible, such that the reader of the criticism feels it’s their experience, too. He notes that there’s the cultural aspect of people reading book reviews and then going to a party and talking about books they haven’t read. “But really, what I am trying to do is bring people into the anteroom of the reading experience,” Freeman explained. “Bring people in and say, This is what it’s like to be inside this book, or inside this person’s body of work. And these are the questions they’re asking.”

Mosley spoke about the qualities he sees in California Rewritten, commenting that it’s an intellectual memoir and that we learn a lot about not only the books that Freeman writes about but also him. He also considers California Rewritten to be a political history of the state in its own way, though not one where Freeman is saying, “Well, this happened and that happened and this happened.” Rather, Mosley continued, Freeman tells a political history of California by looking at what the books touch on and how they’re dealing with the world. He praised Freeman’s voice in the book: “That’s what’s so important when you’re reading or when you’re writing, is to have a voice, to have somebody to recognize who you are. Do you think that’s true?”

Freeman said that when he was starting out, he felt he had to channel and fabricate an authorial voice that was as objective as possible—“as close to a 60-year-old AI bot as possible.” When he met one of his first editors in New York, at the age of 24, she thought he had to be in his mid-60s because he wrote like a 60-year-old. It took another two and a half decades, Freeman explained, to sound like himself.

He remarked that when he writes criticism, there’s no character to speak through, and he’s averse to creating himself as a character when writing pieces of criticism. Still, he knows that “you can’t tell people a lot of information from the shadows. You have to step forward and reveal things and talk about things and place yourself.” He added that what he likes about the books that are now being written in the state is that they “are finally inviting us into all the different multitudes of what California is—the landscapes, the towns, the cities, the small villages.”

Later, Mosley said that “the thing that’s so beautiful about writing is that the reader is as creative as the original writer.” He continued, “Without readers, we writers wouldn’t really leave very much actually, but we—our work and other people’s works—are created and re-created, and are something like the story, but also something different like the reader, and I love that.” One of the chapters in California Rewritten is about how we sound, and it’s deceptively simple, Mosley mused. “It’s a celebration of music and the language that we use in our daily lives, and how the writer captures that sound, that feeling.”

Freeman said, “I think we all need forms of celebration and ceremony in our daily lives, even if we’re not believers, you know.” Even if we’re thinking about hard things, he insisted, we can deal with them by looking at marks on a page and ritualizing, to a degree, what it is we are. He continued, “You go into any place of worship, there’s always a thing where you do call-and-response.... Occasionally, the person stops singing, and then they let the audience kind of carry the song. And I think we need those things to feel like we’re in a world that’s together, you know?”

He pointed out that Mosley wrote Devil in a Blue Dress over 30 years ago, but it still sounds new. “It can still make me feel like I’m in a shared space with you, with Easy, with some people who live on that street,” Freeman said. “And to me, that’s kind of magic.”•

Join us on November 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Ada Limón will sit down with a special guest and host John Freeman to discuss Startlement: New and Selected Poems. Register for the Zoom conversation here.