Life in the Pyrocene: The West in the Era of Climate Change
Aftermath of Eaton Fire, Altadena [photo: Gary Leonard]
PEN World Voices Festival, May 3, 2025
with Xitlalic Guijosa; Ruben Martinez; D.J. Waldie; Daniela Naomi Molnar
The Huntington
Sometimes you don’t see the San Gabriels until the streets stop and the mountains start. The veil suddenly thins, and there they are, in height and magnitude overwhelming. You plunge into a canyon flanked with soaring slopes before you realize you are out of town. The San Gabriel Mountains are as rugged as any terrain in America, and their extraordinary proximity to the city, the abruptness of the transition from the one milieu to the other, cannot be exaggerated.
John McPhee, Los Angeles Against the Mountains
Should an ember ignite the canyon one day, what would I want to save, what would be too painful to lose?
Ruben Martinez, A Political Ecology of Fire in Los Angeles
It’s the concluding event of the four-day PEN World Voices Festival. We gather in a horseshoe configuration on the green lawn of the Huntington, all of us facing east towards the San Gabriels. The San Gabriels, however, are not to be seen. The mountains are often shrouded with those “persistent vapors,” as McPhee noted, “which is why the early Spaniards called our basin ‘the Bay of Smokes.’” We gather with memories and grief from the Eaton and Palisades wildfires still fresh in our minds, our hearts, our communities.
What follows are excerpts from the readings by four wonderful writers—poets, essayists—whose spoken words that chilly afternoon created a useful collective narrative: about how we are shaped by place; about vulnerability and loss on this warming combustible planet (and region) about the necessity of sharing stories, excavating memory, grieving loss collectively as a way to move forward, towards action.
Though the towering San Gabriels preferred on this day not to reveal themselves, they suggested a listening presence.
Youth Poet, Xitlalic Guijosa a poet, writer, printmaker and community organizer from Southeast Los Angeles read her poem, Donde se da la Malva/ Where the Malva Grows,” in which we meet her resourceful grandmother teaching her granddaughter to recognize the medicinal plants growing wild in the midst of urban Maywood. Here, an excerpt:
My grandmother had her ways
and understood reciprocity was important.
So she exchanged conversation
and love for gardens and its medicine.
She taught me that plantitas will heal you, nourish you and abundantly love you.
Plants, the earth, water, fire, wind will heal you.
So she had me looking for Malvas
And taught me about the gardens around Maywood and the knowledge that person had.
A library of medicine and food down 61st street.
Each walk a lesson calling out the plant name.
Seeing the sunflowers outgrow the milk carton.
The nopales that give tunas/ prickly pears.
County avocado trees.
Xitlalic Guijosa reading [photo: Randy Shropshire]
Ruben Martinez, author, journalist, professor, and performer, read from his essay, “A Political Ecology of Fire in Los Angeles.” Excerpts:
The only question about one’s view of the mountains in L.A. is one’s distance from them. Regard them from the foothills in Altadena, where Rodney King grew up, or from the Rose Bowl, close to where I used to visit Mike Davis when he lived in the area in the early 1990s, or in Fontana, where he was born and spent his first years. All these places are in the rural-urban interface – black bears jumping into swimming pools, mountain lions slinking down the avenues at night.
The mountains: their monumental scale unavoidable as geological fact, as eco-spiritual trope, as climatological key to the region: rain shadow for the Mojave desert, buffer against desert heat for the basin, but also the accelerator of Santa Ana winds when high pressure gradients over the Great Basin turn onshore flow to offshore and prime the land for burning.
*
On the morning of January 8, after a singularly terrifying night of fire in Los Angeles, people miles away from Altadena or Pacific Palisades discovered more than ash in their backyards. The pages of books, some almost entirely blackened and illegible, others serrated and singed by flame from which fragments of text emerged, had been ripped, I imagine, out of peoples’ burning homes by hurricane-force gusts. These were the remains of intimate archives, the runes of lives scattered by fiery winds.
An old African proverb holds that when an elder dies, a library burns. As our city burns, we lose bundles of essential letters of all kinds. The singed pages fall to earth; we breathe in the ash of our stories. Recovering and rebuilding will mean many things in the months and years to come. Remembering especially that which we never realized had been forgotten should be the foundation of any meaningful return.
Ruben Martinez [photo: Randy Shropshire]
D.J. Waldie, author and historian of Los Angeles, read “Aspects of Loss in Los Angeles,” from his about-to-be released book, Elements of Los Angeles. Excerpts:
There once was a tall sycamore called El Aliso that flourished for 400 years where drivers today take the 101 across the Los Angeles River to Boyle Heights. The Kizh-Tongva lived around the tree or near it until colonial disruptions dispersed them. The city’s oldest residents remembered the tree as a landmark showing the way to the heart of the newly American city. Later, the tree stood among the buildings of the Maier brewing company until the tree grew old, its trunk hollow. El Aliso was cut down for firewood in August 1895. There’s a bronze plaque where the tree might have been, set into the sidewalk on Commercial Street across from a strip club. It’s probably the city’s least visited historical monument.
We feel something slipping away. The ground beneath the Palos Verdes peninsula is moving.
Lloyd Wright’s Wayfarers Chapel was dismantled in 2024 to save it from collapse in the slow-moving landslide. Almost all of Palos Verdes is at risk of sliding into the Pacific. The coastline is eroding faster because of sea level rise. Nothing we have is solid, even what’s under our feet.
We lost (a short list) Wanda Coleman, Octavia Butler, Kevin Starr, Robert Winter, Carolyn See, Ray Bradbury, Barry Lopez, bell hooks, and Eve Babitz. They told us what we were and might become.
Having become old, I’ve come to the place the old keep that is loss, familiar as a room I can safely cross in the dark. My lightless body knows where to place each step, unconsidered, without reflection. When everything of mine is gone, as it is going—when the room itself will be gone—knowing that about the room will remain.
DJ Waldie reading [photo: by Randy Shropshire]
Daniela Naomi Molnar, a poet, artist and writer who works with color, water, language and place read her essay, “How to Build a Kite,” written after fires in the Pacific NW. Some excerpts:
It’s late August 2020. I’m poised and ready to flee, almost eager, shot through with adrenaline. My car is packed. My house is a tinderbox surrounded by flames.
I snap a photo of myself at my desk, gas mask on. The air is so thick with ash I can’t see across the street. The end-of-summer heat has gone clammy and cold in the dense gray air. The gas mask allows me to breathe through the ash but won’t filter out the deadly, invisible pandemic that also lives in the air. Air itself, gone poison. Air, that most elemental of connectors.
Birds fly into windows, confused. A coyote sits on the curb outside my house one morning, seeming to stare at me through my windows, bewildered.
*
As a culture, we believe that following a trauma or a loss, closure is both possible and desirable. Psychotherapist Pauline Boss challenges this myth of closure. Boss believes that what is often experienced isn’t closure but ambiguous loss. An ambiguous loss is a loss that occurs without closure —a type of ongoing relationship in which presence and absence coincide, unresolved. In ambiguous loss, “Mystery persists … sometimes forever—and even across generations.”
One type of ambiguous loss is solastalgia, the longing for home that can be experienced while one is still physically in a home-place. We feel solastalgia when our biospheric homes come to seem so different, so impoverished compared to our memories. I used to wake to the sound of birds; now I wake to the sound of traffic. I used to see tapestries of stars; now I see an artificial orange glow. I used to drink from my river; now the water is poison.
Throughout our lifetimes, our planet has been dramatically and violently reshaped by socioecological disasters. In the last forty years alone, we have seen the loss of most of the world’s life forms. This is ambiguous loss writ large, across species. As a culture, we have barely begun to acknowledge the depth of this loss, which begins by acknowledging that the loss is ambiguous and will be ongoing.
This reality hurts like hell. It makes sense for us to want to look the other way. But the loss and its pain is a story we’re all compelled to live, and, like all stories, it demands to be shared. Stories are cultural glue, a way to be alive together. There is an urgent personal and cultural need to share this ongoing loss, image by image, word by word. Because when we share our stories, a transformation occurs—we do not simply reiterate the brokenness. To tell the story, we go deep into the brokenness and it’s there that we find the love that lives at the core of all grief. As a culture, we are beginning to understand this vital truth. A heart doesn’t break like a machine, which stops working. A heart breaks like a seed, revealing an ecology of potential made of open questions. Breaking binds us to life: to each other and to the living earth.
Daniela Naomi Molnar [photo: Randy Shropshire]
In answer to Ruben Martinez’ question, “what would I want to save, what would be too painful to lose?”… from my own recent panic experience during the fires, the first object that came to mind was the silver kiddush cup my grandmother Rebecca brought with her from Ukraine. I sought it out, clasped it in my hand, seeking that ancestral connection, the memories of her stories, as the skies turned red/black.
Thank you to all the writers who participated in the vibrant PEN World Voices Festival in NYC and Los Angeles and to our Festival partners and funders. Thank you to the Festival team on both coasts!
LS persuading the San Gabriels to reveal themselves, with encouragement from Ruben Martinez. [photo: Randy Shropshire]
Allison Lee doing a yeowoman’s job as Managing Director of PEN America in LA! [photo: Randy Shropshire]