In The Fluency of Light, Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s essays read like meditations on themes of identity, race, and family. Her writing is sharp—one might say spare—and her descriptions, clear and beautiful. Her essays are a guide that help me navigate my way through my own writing. I study her essays in terms of their structure, I study her craft. Her essays sparked memories of my father, of my mother, and of growing up biracial in Los Angeles, memories that were once buried. Her work is a map to my memory.

I felt grateful and delighted to have the opportunity to talk to Aisha about her writing. I found her to be sensitive, smart, and sincere, and I appreciated that after I asked a question, she would take a long pause and then respond in a way that seemed thoughtful. We met at LACMA on a weekday afternoon; the day was dry and sunny, a typical LA day. We sat in the middle of the courtyard surrounded by people and art.

ZOE RUIZ: Why did you decide to write a book of essays and how did you decide to organize the essays by location?

AISHA SABATINI SLOAN: In college I started interviewing people. I did interviews in Los Angeles, Paris, London, New York, Northfield, Detroit, and eventually South Africa. The project had different manifestations of “doneness” over the years. I wrote a lot to make that project coalesce, including these essays that attempted to capture the cultural/emotional/historical backdrop in each city. But one day, I sat down at my desk, and the interview portion of the project just slumped out of my arms and onto the floor. I took a deep breath, and I weeded out the portraits of my interviewees just to see what was left, and it was the essays about place. I felt like I was seeing the framework of a coherent project for the first time. Maybe ever.

Behold: a vision, a prize—“a black unicorn with golden hooves, a tail like splayed fire, horn a glinting spear, eyes like emeralds, seraphic wings.”

Beware: the voracious solar bear, which “subsists primarily on sunlight, drawing supplementary nutrition from the lightsap found in gem-pines—‘cocaine trees,’ in the traditional folk parlance,” and which brews its own sunhoney mead from lightsap ferment.

Sympathize with: Hamnlet, the protagonist of Jonathan Callahan’s story “Hamnlet Pursues the Black Unicorn,” from Callahan’s debut collection The Consummation of Dirk. Hamnlet has sworn to find and possess the black unicorn, and to do so must avoid the solar bears (not to mention the bats). Does Hamnlet—trudging through Underwood Forest, armed with his father’s sword—realize black unicorns and solar bears don’t exist? Yes. Yes he does. Does that preclude or delay or cut short his quest? No. No it doesn’t.

“Hamnlet” emblemizes many of the stories in The Consummation of Dirk: absurd, manic, fantastic, darkly funny, and often narrated and/or propelled by a person in denial if not suicidal. (Callahan says audience members at readings often appear unsure whether or not they’re allowed to laugh. Note: they are.) In “Cymbalta,” an American teacher in Japan ignores his rising alcohol intake, sinking career, and dying relationship, instead pouring all his energy into scary-candid four am emails to someone who may or may not be author Rick Moody, who may or may not be responding to said emails. In “A Few Thoughts in Closing,” an angry teenaged boy tries in his diary to plan an attack on his high school, only to be repeatedly derailed by a maddening adoration for his walleyed English teacher, Ms. Kim.

Julie Sarkissian’s debut novel, Dear Lucy, tells the story of Lucy, a girl with evident but unspecified special needs who has been sent to live on a farm with Mister and Misses, a married couple with the grit and stoic exterior of American Gothic.

Emboldened by routine and purpose and desperate to please, Lucy carries out perfunctory chores around the farm: she gathers the eggs from the chicken coop, feeds slop to the pigs, and weeds the garden. She is hell-bent on “having good behavior” so that she will be allowed to stay at the farm to appease her mother, Mum mum, who dumped her there because she just couldn’t handle the day-to-day struggle of Lucy’s limitations.

Also living on the farm—somewhat of a repository for black sheep—is Samantha, a pregnant teenager who befriends Lucy, attempting to teach her to read and see the world more clearly. Lucy’s only other friend is Jennifer, a baby chicken who survives Lucy’s attempt to horde eggs in her dresser drawer. Jennifer becomes Lucy’s accomplice on a quest to help Samantha reunite with the father of her child and remain with her baby, who is bound for adoption.

Told mostly from Lucy’s perspective but with periodic glimpses through the eyes of Misses and Samantha, Dear Lucy is deceptively suspenseful. Mister and Misses seem like decent, Bible-driven folk who are out to help these girls with nowhere else to go, but the story reveals motivations that are dark and complicated. Reading this book was uncomfortable at times—Lucy is a vulnerable character without much of a safety net. But her passionate good intentions make her incredibly endearing.

Audrey Bilger is one of the key voices to follow on marriage equality. She’s written with razor-sharp expertise and more than a pinch of humor about LGBTQ rights, gender norms, the lesbian word “wife,” and why straight folks should follow Prop 8 for variety of publications, including Ms., Bitch Magazine, Huffington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Bilger is a co-editor of Here Come the Brides! Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage and the author of Laughing Feminism, and she also teaches literature at Claremont McKenna College, where she directs the Center for Writing and Public Discourse.  

In early March, I sat down with Bilger at the Coffee Gallery in Altadena to talk about gay marriage and the marriage equality movement. With the Supreme Court hearings on Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) starting today, our conversation was laced with history in the making. As Bilger points out, the marriage equality movement affects everyone—so gay or not, marriage advocate or not, now is a good moment to tune in to what’s shaking down.

K. BRADFORD: You’ve co-edited Here Come the Brides and you’ve written a lot about the marriage equality movement. What has it been like to witness the different turns, waves, and sweeps inside this movement that keeps on evolving?

AUDREY BILGER: Sometimes I feel like we just woke up to this issue recently, because even at the turn of the millennium it didn’t seem likely that we’d be talking about marriage equality as a reality in 2013. It didn’t seem that way. From what happened in the mid 1990s when DOMA first passed, it seemed like the strong animus against gays and lesbians marrying would keep the issue from gaining traction. But then things moved quickly after 2004.

Joshua Mohr is a fiction writer, San Francisco lover, creative writing professor, and soon-to-be cool dad. His newest novel, Fight Song, is a modern day rendering of The Wizard of Oz. Set in suburbia, the main character is a beaten down family man and video game creator named Bob Coffen, who’s accompanied on his comic road to redemption by a cast of misfits with big, sometimes questionable, hearts. Mohr’s first novel, Some Things That Meant the World to Me, was named one of Oprah’s ten best reads of 2009, and his sophomore effort, Termite Parade, was listed as an Editor’s Choice in the New York Times Book Review in 2010.

I took a creative writing class three years ago with Mohr during his time teaching at the Writing Salon in San Francisco, and I credit my decision to go to graduate school for writing in large part to him. A mentor to me as well as a fellow writer, Mohr and I talked shop about writing practices, balls, and Vanilla Ice.

BEL POBLADOR: You’ve published three books before this one: Some Things That Meant the World to Me, Termite Parade, and Damascus. Why was Fight Song the next book that you wrote?

JOSHUA MOHR: I’ve been really excited about Fight Song. I knew what my first three books were going to be. Then when I finished Damascus, there was this time of contemplation where I said to myself as an artist, “Ok, I’ve written three books about drunkards and artists in the Mission District, and I had a great time writing those books. But I don’t want to remix. I don’t want to rehash the same material anymore. I’m ready for some new adventures.”

Eileen Myles is a poet, writer, and performer who traverses geography and genre on a regular basis. Her most recent book, Snowflake / different streets, is housed in the dos-à-dos book form which allows two volumes of poetry—one based in New York City, the other in Southern California—to coexist and collide into each other from either ends of the book. While Myles’s roots lie in poetry—she got her start at the St. Marks Poetry Project in the 1970s, which she later became the director of—she has never located herself solely in the poetry world. Myles has written a poet’s novel Inferno, a libretto, journalism and essays, short story collections, and multiple volumes of poetry—in addition to touring globally as a performer. With her post-punk sensibility, her downright coolness, and her ongoing involvement with projects like a Zen homeless retreat, Myles keeps us following her next move. If that’s not enough, she also received a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship for nonfiction.

After our in-person interview in New York was bolloxed by Hurricane Sandy, Myles and I spoke over Skype in mid-December.

K. BRADFORD: Language is so loaded. Histories of domination and current realities shape the language we use. Language can be both rich and troublesome especially in terms of identity and culture. How do you see yourself working with that complicated terrain of language—pushing against it, resisting it, or creating new possibilities?

EILEEN MYLES: Everything’s about class in some way, in the same way that everything about sex is about class. Everything about language is about class. You’re always giving a huge amount of information, and you’re always speaking as a member of a certain group in a way. It’s never without context. I’m very aware of that.

Inman Majors is the author of four novels, including Love’s Winning Plays, a smart, nimble comedy about SEC football that made BookPage’s Best Books of 2012. Majors currently teaches creative writing at James Madison University in Virginia, where I was once his student.

I caught up with Majors this Thanksgiving to talk about his most recent book, as well as football, family, and writing. We met at his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains, just outside Charlottesville—a town which Majors, who hails from Knoxville, would probably not like us to use as a point of reference, because the denizens of Charlottesville “act as if that place is Paris, France.”

ROGER SOLLENBERGER: Could you first talk a little bit about your work preceding Love’s Winning Plays (LWP)? Maybe from your most recent novel, The Millionaires, on back.

INMAN MAJORS: Roger, this feels suspiciously like the kind of question you’d give me as a little payback for tormenting you and your classmates in workshop. I can see you chuckling.

There was the first book, Swimming in Sky, which is a kind of delayed coming of age story. My protagonist is having a quarter life crisis well before this was socially acceptable (the book is set in the early nineties). It’s a serious book with funny parts and kind of a post-divorce family drama. It has some nice lyrical moments, I think, and I like the rawness of the situation and the emotional honesty.

The second is Wonderdog, a political comedy set in Tuscaloosa, Alabama (where I got my MFA). It’s a full throttle comedy, rapid fire, and, I hope, linguistically interesting.

Antoine Wilson has just released his second novel, Panorama City, about a small-town guy with village idiot levels of good faith who spends forty days and forty nights in the San Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles. Oppen Porter, certain that he’s dying, narrates his story into a tape recorder from his hospital bed, for the benefit of his unborn son. His narration is both hilarious and tragic as he evolves from somebody who wants to be a man of the world to somebody who just wants to go home, and the way in which Wilson traces this evolution is my favorite part of the book—Oppen’s voice is a huge voice, an energetic voice, but one that’s also fragile. Over time, Wilson applies the hypocrisy of Panorama City to Oppen’s voice as if hypocrisy were a weight, and we as readers watch this voice bend and give, and we see Oppen discover what’s really important to him.

In the book, Oppen’s girlfriend is Carmen, an Hispanic former prostitute, and she mispronounces Oppen’s name. Instead of rhyming his name with “poppin’,” she rhymes it with “open,” and I promise that, in the next few lines, this tidbit will become significant.