In 2023, I did an event for Mecca, my ninth novel, with the writer Vanessa Hua, who told the audience that my work was about hidden kingdoms. A trace of recognition touched the back of my neck. Hidden kingdoms. The perfect way to think about my beloved California, and the characters who inhabit my days and nights. I wrote my first short stories at 15, when my mother sent me to summer school at Riverside City College, to keep me away from friends who were selling marijuana. During the weekends, I helped clean my stepfather’s three laundromats, but at night I wrote about the San Jacinto Mountains, the brittlebush and manzanita, and the Coachella desert, with its smoke trees and shimmering heat. Since those first sentences, I’ve never wanted to do anything but write fiction and essays.
One of my earliest influences was the writer Ernest J. Gaines, who came to live with his mother and stepfather in Vallejo when he was 15. In a 1999 interview, Gaines said, “I did not know I wanted to be a writer as a child in Louisiana. It wasn’t until I went to California and ended up in the library and began reading a lot that I knew I wanted to be a writer. I read many great novels and stories and did not see myself or my people in any of them. It was then that I tried to write.”
This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
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I felt exactly as he did. I was born in Glen Avon, a rural area of Riverside County. Glen Avon is just over the Jurupa Hills from Fontana, which is in San Bernardino County. San Bernardino is the largest county by area in the United States; Riverside County is the fourth largest in California. This homeland of mine is bigger than nine states in America, and just under five million people live here. So many stories—on a walk along the Santa Ana River, a man will tell me how he went to Vietnam at 18, came back changed, and has lived at the river ever since. That same evening, I’ll walk beside a woman with her small sons; cutting sage stems with a paring knife, she’ll tell me that her grandmother is Cahuilla and wants sage tea for her diabetes.
As a writer, I am always listening, always thinking of the perfect detail, and always writing in a notebook or legal pad. But I write fiction to keep some kind of control and order in my life, which has rarely been in my control. I started my first novel at 19, working swing shift at a gas station near the confluence of three freeways. All afternoon, men came in from truck routes and from the nearby raceway, and I listened to their stories. In the evening, men came in looking dangerous, and I had to lift cases of Budweiser while evaluating whether one would try to rob us. Being a writer meant I memorized immediately the details of their hands, their mustaches. At midnight, I’d sit in my car and write in a notebook—those pages were the opening chapters of Highwire Moon, which I didn’t finish until I was 34.
I write, as Ernest J. Gaines said, because I want to see my people on the shelves of the library. I write because as I travel the country for events, readers will hold open one of my novels and say, “You put San Jacinto in here! I’ve never seen my town in a book.” Rialto, Mecca, Cabazon, Los Feliz, East Hollywood. Hidden kingdoms.
I write in my car, even now, last week on the side of a windy avenue in Indian Wells, after a woman told me how her mother, a housekeeper, found her employer, a beauty queen, floating in the pool, lifeless. This week, I drove through San Bernardino, where my novel, Sacrament, is set, and then through the Central Valley. Headed to Oakland, to watch my baby grandson, born in Highland Hospital, where the nurses told me the history of the beautiful old buildings. On the sidewalks, my daughter’s neighbors, born in Vietnam and Louisiana but Californians now, will see me in my Dodgers hat, and they’ll call, “Hey, Riverside, you back in town? Come on, let me tell you a story.”•
