Host John Freeman began the discussion of Susan Straight’s novel Mecca by asking Straight a question from the audience about what her research process is and how much of what she writes is from real life. Straight explained that she doesn’t do research in the way that people think of research.
She said, “I actually sit on the porch, and everyone comes and tells me stories.” She explained that one of Mecca’s central characters, Johnny Frías, came to her fully formed when she was writing a story for the anthology Orange County Noir. He was inspired by her friend Louis Lozano from Corona, who was dark-skinned and wanted to be a highway patrolman. He told her he had ridden in the back of a California Highway Patrol car and the officers told him, “You’ll never ever, ever work for the CHP.” The other seed was a friend who had longhorn bulls and horses, and she put those things together and knew that Johnny’s people had been in the Inland Empire since 1843, just like her friends the Trujillos. “The research part is more like hanging out.… I’m a much better listener than I am a storyteller.”
Freeman noted that it felt like a key decision to make her three principal characters Indigenous or partly Indigenous and asked how she made that selection. Straight commented that she doesn’t make selections. Rather, she said, “People come to me fully formed, and because I’ve lived here my whole life—my house is three blocks from the hospital where I was born.”
Special guest Gustavo Arellano joined the conversation. He commented that Mexico would be playing in the World Cup after the CBC event, and he asked Straight where Johnny would be watching the game, if he were real. Straight said that Johnny would be watching the game at the Eagles Lodge in San Bernardino—she noted that there’s a scene in Mecca’s sequel, Sacrament, where Johnny and another character, Grief Embers, are hanging out with nurses at the Eagles Lodge—and that they would be watching the World Cup drinking Mexican candy shots and cheering.
Arellano also asked Straight, “If you were born in another ‘overlooked’ part of California, how do you think your writing would be different?” Straight wasn’t sure how to answer the question. She said that she never thinks about writing anything different than her place in the Inland Empire. If she had been from Los Nietos, she said, she would write about Los Nietos.
“That is who you are. You are a child of place,” Arellano said.
Straight elaborated that she “grew up in this place that I considered paradise, and so when other people told me later that it wasn’t paradise and that it was awful, I was like, Huh, that’s crazy, which is exactly how you feel about your place.… I never wake up in the morning and think my place is overlooked—ever. This is the whole world to me, and I love every moment, and I would never live anywhere else.… I mean, every day someone tells me an amazing story.”
Freeman returned to the conversation. He asked a question from the audience about whether Straight outlines before she starts writing and noted that while Straight is a magnet for stories, there is a “beautiful order to this book.” He asked, “How do you get it into order?” Straight explained that she doesn’t outline—characters just show up. The only one of her books that she outlined was The Gettin Place, which was a complicated murder mystery. She added that even though she had outlined the book, “the wrong person shot the wrong person. I had to go back and change everything. So my characters are going to do what they’re going to do. They do not pay attention to outlines, so I don’t even try anymore. The characters take care of everything.”
She said that she does keep track of things like what the weather is and, with Sacrament, what times COVID would be peaking and when schools closed.
She went on to say that Mecca is the first in a quintet of books, and she is now working on Honey Bunch, the third book, which features several of the same characters: Johnny, Grief, Larette, and a phlebotomist named Natalie, who has shown up briefly in other books.
“I mean, it is an infinite universe that you’ve created,” Freeman said.
Straight observed that one of her models is the author Louise Erdrich, who also writes about the same characters in multiple books. “Our people mean so much to us that we miss them. Like, how could we not keep writing about them?… For me it is an infinite universe, and that’s lovely of you to say because I hope I can do this until I die.”•
Join us on July 16 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Adam Hochschild will sit down with host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
