Just like our home state, Alta Journal knows how to party. On Tuesday night, Green Apple Books on the Park hosted a celebration of Alta’s Issue 23. Alta fans closed out their Memorial Day weekend by gathering to enjoy readings by three magazine contributors and remarks by the night’s emcee, Alta editorial director Blaise Zerega. The program featured Keenan Norris, who recently published his latest book, Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings; Peter Fish, a professor of writing at Stanford Continuing Studies and a former editor of Sunset magazine; and poet Matthew Zapruder, the author of, most recently, Story of a Poem.
Green Apple’s events coordinator Kar Johnson welcomed the full house and underscored the value of sustaining literary communities and local writers by supporting indie bookstores. (Be sure to check out the store’s exciting calendar of upcoming events.)
Up next, Zerega explained the concept behind Alta’s quarterly issue parties; fun events intended to foster community, spotlight the work of our contributing writers, and, of course, support the bookstores Alta depends on.
Zerega then kicked off the program by introducing Norris, who read from “A State of Extremes.” The special report confronts California’s staggering inequality by exploring the state’s community college system. A professor who has taught at nine of the system’s campuses, Norris has “come to see it all as one vast, multi-perspectival prism through which to view the state of our state.”
Norris was followed by Fish, who read from his article, “Imperial Dreamer,” about Harold Bell Wright, a pastor turned best-selling author of a now-forgotten novel, The Winning of Barbara Worth. Published in 1911, the book’s ideological underpinnings and its vision for using water from the Colorado River to irrigate the Imperial Valley shaped much of the region’s agriculture. “Were Harold Bell Wright and [his character] Barbara Worth chiefly responsible for these and later engineered transformations of California?” Fish asked. “No, but they made reclamation heroic and romantic.”
When it was his turn to speak, Zapruder explained how the event “brings together two of my favorite San Francisco institutions, Green Apple on the Park, [the] beating heart of the city…and Alta, which is just a treasure.” He continued with moving readings of “Sunflower Poem,” which Alta published in its current issue, and “XO Is My Aloha,” a poem dedicated to the late Joanne Kyger, from issue 12.
The evening concluded with an engaging and entertaining Q&A with the audience, which wove together themes from the readings and finished with our contributors recommending works by California writers. Norris suggested Nightcrawling, by Leila Mottley; Fish praised Gordo, by Jaime Cortez, and Your House Will Pay, by Steph Cha; and Zapruder favored There There, by Tommy Orange. Coincidentally, the latter three titles are past selections from Alta’s California Book Club.
Don’t miss our next issue party, which will take place on June 22 at Village Well Books & Coffee in Culver City, with readings by Rachel Howzell-Hall, Lynell George, and Alta associate editor Ajay Orona.•
Eliza Gislason is Alta Journal’s Bookstore Partnerships Manager. She is a recent graduate of Pitzer College, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and World Literature.
