Essay commissioned for the catalogue of MEREDITH MONK: Calling, Haus der Kunst Munich and Oude Kerk Amsterdam #hausderkunst #meredithmonk

Air/Light Magazine, Issue 7, Fall 2024

I never wanted to be born in Los Angeles. My childhood, I suspected, was misplaced. My mother and father were both New Yorkers. Thanks to a trove of correspondence that I discovered after my parents passed away within months of each other, I can pinpoint the exact date—August 1, 1941—that determined my destiny as a native Angeleno…

Los Angeles Review of Books, May 21, 2019

I WOKE UP around 5:00 a.m., disoriented in an unfamiliar bed. I did not know east from west, up from down, where I’d find a floor to take the weight of my body. The hazy proportions of the room gave no clue; curtains blocked the winter light. In the moment my eyes opened, I lost my connection to those essentials that are, as Proust assures his readers, held fast by our psyches during sleep: “[T]he sequence of the hours, the order of the years, and the worlds.”

Los Angeles Review of Books, August 6, 2018

IN 1970, when artist Robert Smithson first set his gaze on the Great Salt Lake's Rozel Point Peninsula, he knew that he’d found the right site.

Los Angeles Review of Books, October 5, 2015

Each person here respects the effort, the frustration of trying to locate the words, the sounds that form a sentence. After all, this is not an ordinary book group. This is the weekly meeting of the Aphasia Book Club, intended for those who have suffered damage to an area of the brain that affects the use of language. Larry continues:

When I read a book, it puts me in the future,

even when it’s written in the past.

Los Angeles Review of Books, February 27, 2013

We are all collaborators. On a more or less grand scale, for a day or a lifetime. All that differentiates us are the experiences and the circumstances, which allow us to gauge the extent of our compromises.

— Agata Tuszynska, Vera Gran: The Accused

Los Angeles Review of Books, Jan 29, 2011

What better place than Crete to read about archetypal patterns or, in Hillman's words, "Gods affecting our styles of consciousness."  Europa swam back to Crete after being mounted by Zeus in the form of a bull; royal dolphins leap blue waves on murals in the royal palace at Knossos, where King Minos threw Theseus into the labyrinth to face the Minotaur.  [“The Cyclops Eats One Last Sailor,” print by Scotty Mitchell]

June 27, 2011, Los Angeles Review of Books

Why have we never heard of Jacob Glatstein, a modernist whose prose is as mordantly humorous as Philip Roth, as eerie as Kafka, as weighty as Bellow? The answer is obvious: Glatstein wrote in Yiddish, and as Ruth Wisse, the editor of this volume, reminds us, "to a writer, language is fate." [Drawing by Louise Steinman from a 1946 photo in the Memorial Book of the town of Radomsko]

A visit to a friend’s house in Beverly Glen during the AIDS epidemic in LA. , published in anthology ANOTHER LA

Los Angeles Magazine, October 2005

Virginia McKinney has spent her life helping her students prove they’re not too old to learn.

L.A. Weekly, February 27, 2003

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s hands are delicately boned, with long, tapered fingers. As she gestures, you can’t help noticing them. If you’ve read her book, A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness, you can’t help thinking that these are the same hands that reached out to touch the shaking clenched hands of Eugene De Kock, the man known in South Africa as “Prime Evil” for his relentless pursuit and extermination of anti-apartheid activists.

Reed Magazine, February 1999

Twenty-five years have passed since the winter we hosted Reed College’s poet-in-residence. We were living then on Southeast Schiller in a tiny two-story cottage set back from the street behind three towering European birches…

Washington Post, December 1992

A visit to my friend, painter Scotty Mitchell, a working painter on Crete for 20 years.

Contemporary Architecture, Vol 11, 1989/1990, Lausanne, Switzerland

Since childhood, Murch has been fascinated by ruins and abandoned buildings…

LA Weekly, February 7, 2001

In Iran, this gentle, soft-spoken, middle-aged poet had been an ardent revolutionary. When asked for an interview, he was slightly incredulous: “Haven't you read my poems? My life is already an open book.” Nevertheless, over the course of several weeks, he patiently attempted to describe to me his experience of the 1979 revolution he so fervently worked for, the revolution that so spectacularly failed, the revolution that ended up turning so many lives upside down and inside out. [original photo of Majid Naficy by Debra DiPaolo for the LA Weekly]