Tom Pitts received his education firsthand on the streets of San Francisco. He remains there, writing, working, and trying to survive. His shorts have been published in the usual spots by the usual suspects. His novella,Piggyback, is available from Snubnose Press. Tom is also co-editor at OOTG’s Flash Fiction Offensive. Read more of his work at http://tom-pitts.blogspot.com.
Over the last few months, I’ve been collecting short essays, blurbs, whatever the hell you want to call them, from L.A. literary figures on their favorite L.A. Novels. I spoke with some fantastic writers — David L. Ulin, Matthew Specktor, Nick Santora, Natashia Deon — and other amazing people surrounding the book world. One of my favorite responses came from Bonnie Nadell, a literary agent in Beverly Hills who represented David Foster Wallace. She recalled working at Simon & Schuster when Less Than Zero came in as a manuscript.
So check out the full list of responses. I was blow away with the answers. Click here: 17 L.A. Literary Figures Pick Their Favorite L.A. Novels. Oh, and by the way, my favorite L.A. novel is Ask the Dust by John Fante. Followed closely by Bukowski’s Post Office and Chandler’s The Long Goodbye.
Heron’s sister and her friend came over this weekend and rearranged our house as a wedding gift. They put my books all around the house, and it provided a great opportunity to look at some of them I haven’t paid attention to in a while. So I decided to put together a list of my favorite book covers I currently have in my house. Now, I didn’t include art books, because I thought that would be unfair, and some of my books I gave away. But these are the books I find myself just admiring for the cover sometimes long after I had finished it.
For the last week, I have been participating in what I have been calling a “Weeklong Poetry-Commute.” Basically, I’ve been trying to figure out new ways to “cloud seed” the creative process with my poetry, and I decided that every day on my way home from work, I would tweet one line of poetry, as I was leaving my office in Westwood. Some nights I biked home; other nights I drove home in my Buick Lesabre. At the end of the week, the plan was to put all the lines together in a poem.
I don’t know if you are familiar with the area in Westwood, but the traffic is thick. I live about two miles away from Westwood Village and my work, but sometimes it takes me about 30 minutes to get home — that’s nothing for Los Angeles — and other times it takes about 15 minutes, which is about what it takes when I bike to work. Well, the area is so congested, because the commuters from Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and Westwood are trying to stampede towards the 405 on-ramp at the Wilshire exit. It doesn’t help with all the construction.
And as I was driving and noticing all the traffic, I couldn’t help but see the beauty in the wood beams on the blossoming highway overpass; I couldn’t help but see something strangely stunning in the faces of the veterans getting off the buses to head to the Veterans Hospital; I couldn’t help but be astonished by the way people behaved in traffic — the way we let our personalities shine through our cars. So I wanted to make this experience into poetry with a form that expressed this strange experience.
I’m always trying to figure out new poetic forms, and I think social media is providing artists with an entirely new outlet for creativity. The surrealists used to do a similar poetic experiment called Exquisite Corpse, except they used many different people. Also, Oulipo, the poetry movement started in France, has similar poetry games. My former professor, Denise Duhamel, used to teach us about all these different variations of poetry, and she brought a new life to a lot of our stale poems. She’s an awesome poet, and she taught us that poetry doesn’t always have to be put together so neatly as if it was a perfectly structured — and boring — apartment complex approved by the zoning board. In poetry, the building can look like it’s about to fall apart and be wonderful for it.
I’m not sure if the poem will come together in the end as a whole, but this is just an experiment. Below the sound cloud file, you will find the tweets in their original. Love to hear your feedback or if you have new ideas for new poetry experiments with social media — or an idea for a collaborative project.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a writer. And when I first started thinking about this idea, “writer,” in correlation with my life, I really didn’t quite have a grasp of the image of what made a person a writer — or how the hell I could become one. The one thing I thought I knew from reading my heroes (Hemingway, Twain, and Kerouac) was that I had to live my life, in some shape or form, as if I was living in a book.
Now, when I was younger, to try and fulfill this prophesy, I would travel and move as much as possible. In fact, I thought that if I didn’t travel widely, I wasn’t really actually traveling like a writer. Destination is death! I was hungry for experience to write about, searching for it in Guatemala, Prague, Detroit — places that have become as much a part of my identity as my childhood. And while that idea has changed — experiences come in all forms — the aspect that I still hold true about living my life like a book is the idea of structure. For example, like the old cliché goes, there are chapters to one’s life, closing a book, beginning a new, a personal renaissance — all that bullshit. Each year, each period, each section of my life plays a larger part in the whole, and I have begun to expect the dramatic changes — almost yearn for them. Because in a certain sense, saying goodbye is the ultimate freedom.
What I’m trying to say is that a chapter has ended; I am no longer a full-time freelance writer.
I’ve been looking back over this blog, and it’s been six months since I wrote my first real post about quitting my job, pursuing my career as a freelance writer, stopping the soul-sucking commute, and beginning to write, write, write. And I did. I wrote for some great publications — Salon, LA Weekly, OC Weekly, The Village Voice — and I told some great stories. I wrote about the ports, the closing of a fish market, Jack Kerouac, truckers, books, poets/actors. I even wrote a cover story. And it’s been wonderful. I worked with some great people who helped me out along the way down in the LBC and Orange County. (Sarah Bennett, Gustavo Arellano, Nate Jackson are incredible people!)
But in the end, I just felt that I couldn’t make enough of a living. My student loans, my rent, and my medical insurance bills were always speaking to me — “Hey, you know you’ve got to pay me, right?” — and I found that I wasn’t happy waking up and hustling for pieces that paid very little — though some paid much better than the others. And writing for me isn’t initially about the money, unless that’s your income — then, yes, it’s about the money. I do like security. I do like a steady paycheck, but I also love writing. If an opportunity comes up to be a full-time writer, of course, I’m going to consider it.
And I’m going to still freelance on the side and pitch the stories I want to pitch. Meantime, an opportunity came up that I couldn’t refuse. As of last week, I have started a job as a Writer and Social Media Specialist at a public relations firm in Westwood. From my window, I can see the Pacific Ocean, The Getty, and Westwood. I moved to West L.A., and I’ll be working 2 miles from where Heron will be working in July. It’s an opportunity that I feel lucky to have.
But there’s something else I’ve had to confront about working full-time as a freelance writer — besides the struggle to afford basic living requirements — is that I haven’t had enough time to work on my memoir.
I don’t know if you remember, dear reader, but a few months back, I wrote a post about revising my novel. Six months ago, an agent at an amazing literary agency asked for some revisions. The biggest revision: turning my novel into a memoir. Well, because I have been so focused on writing to make money to survive, well, I haven’t really worked on the memoir. I have pieces. But I don’t have a manuscript. And out of all the writing I’ve done, this is the most important to me, because it’s my story, my town’s story, my family’s story — the story I must tell before I can really write any other stories that I have in the back of my mind. And in order to write this book, I need some consistency in my life. I need to be able to come home from work and work.
So, I begin again a new but the same journey. So from now on when you read my blog, you’ll still see me sharing stories I’ve written for some magazines, but you’ll be following the longer journey of me trying to publish my book — plus, just what it’s like to live in L.A. And I’m no longer chasing being a writer, because, well, I am one. Nothing can take that away anymore.
I will share everything along the way. I hope you’ll stay around to see how this story develops. Really appreciate you being a part of this.
So let’s see what happens in the next chapter — Into the City.
