My California: Journeys by Great Writers is a collaboration between Angel City Press and CaliforniaAuthors.com.
All publishing proceeds benefit the California Arts Council, an agency which was forced to suspend school writing, arts education programs and other grants in 2003 because of state budget cutbacks. Since its publication, more than $100,000 from sale of this book has been donated to literary programs in California schools.
To make the project possible, all of the writers donated their work. Malloy Incorporated generously donated the first printing of the book. The CaliforniaAuthors.com editor and creative director and the team at Angel City Press―including the sales manager and representatives who work with Angel City Press―are also contributing their services and talents.
In addition, world-renown artist David Hockney and the J. Paul Getty Museum have contributed use of Hockney's "Pearblossom Hwy (11-18th April 1986―second version)" on the cover.
Contributed essays include:
- • Introduction ― Pico Iyer
- • The Big Valley ― Mark Arax
- • Transients in Paradise ― Aimee Liu
- • Showing Off the Owens ― T. Jefferson Parker
- • The Distant Cataract About Which We Do Not Speak ― Mary Mackey
- • Ode to CalTrans ― Héctor Tobar
- • Montalvo, Myths and Dreams of Home ― Thomas Steinbeck
- • The Last Little Beach Town ― Edward Humes
- • Surfacing ― Matt Warshaw
- • Bienvenidos a Newport Beach ― Firoozeh Dumas
- • Cotton Candy Mirrors ― devorah major
- • Berkeley ― Michael Chabon
- • California Honky-tonk ― Kathi Kamen Goldmark
- • 909 ― Percival Everett
- • The Line ― Rubén Martínez
- • Flirting with Urbanismo ― Patt Morrison
- • Waters of Tranquility ― Carolyn See
- • An Ordinary Place ― D.J. Waldie
- • Almost Home ― Gerald Haslam
- • My Little Saigon ― Anh Do
- • The Nicest Person in San Francisco ― Derek M. Powazek
- • The Un-California ― Daniel Weintraub
- • Rocks in the Shape of Billy Martin ― Deanne Stillman
- • How Many Angels ― David Kipen
- • Centered ― Veronique de Turenne
- • Returning After Fire ― Chryss Yost
- • On Being a California Poet ― Dana Gioia
From Pico Iyer's Introduction to My California:
To those of us who came to California from far away as so many of us do the place we imagine (and so find) seems located somewhere around the day after tomorrow. Ever since Hernando Cortez named this stretch of land, by some accounts, after a fictional island of the Amazons (fashioned in a fifteenth-century Spanish novel), California, more than anywhere, has been a province of the imagination that confounds most of us who confront it in reality. A state of consciousness, you could say, on which outsiders, who soon become honorary Californians, famously project their hopes and frustrations. It has always seemed apt to me that the home of physical and metaphysical gold rushes the "Great Western Paradise," as the Chinese called it is also the place, some say, where the fortune cookie was invented. Fortunes, futures, gimcrack versions of futures: They re all mixed together here, drawing us from afar, potential consumers, potential producers of a dream that we come to see too late can best be appreciated from afar.
"It s a state of mind," Robert Redford once said of California s fictional capital, Hollywood, passing on the conventional wisdom, and it s an actual location. The location is scarred, scary and full of those who ve lost their way; but as a state of mind, in Redford s words, "it s transporting and unique: the end of the rainbow, the melting pot, the edge of the continent." Or, to put it another way, Hollywood Boulevard has long been a slum, but the Hollywood sign shines in the world s imagination.
This all has become part of the received wisdom of the place, the first cliché for the newcomer to see through; but what the Californian veteran often loses sight of is that the place really has managed to remain one step, one thought, ahead of the rest of us.
