Journal of Alta California

“She Who Remembers” photos, page 6 Your portraits of Ayodele Nzinga prominently feature blue sky and bright colors. Why? Dr. Nzinga arrived at the portrait location with beautiful bright red glasses. That accent was such a signifier of her personalit

This issue of Alta Journal is a celebration of Joan Didion, the premier chronicler of California and beyond. She passed away in December, and we’ve spent the past few months mourning her death and assessing her legacy. We asked ourselves, How might w

To understand us, you must know that the North American African is a postapocalyptic being: we are, each of us, born in a certain year, be it 1619 or 1916, or this new year, and in a certain place, but the origin story of our dispossession precedes u

In 2020, an elected panel in San Anselmo, a 12,000-person town in Marin County, voted to remove Sir Francis Drake’s name on a high school because of his involvement in the slave trade. The following year, in May, the school board replaced the famed E

In Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle, a scientist invents ice-nine, which is capable of freezing all the water on Earth. Of course it gets released, and apocalypse ensues. The ocean turns into a blue-white pearl under a darkening sun. Tornadoe

John Freeman is the author of two poetry collections, Maps and The Park. Wind, Trees, his latest, will be published by Copper Canyon Press this fall. He is also the founder of the literary annual Freeman’s, an executive editor at Knopf, and the host

I magine the art you could buy with $40,000. A Picasso drawing. A Judy Chicago. An Ed Ruscha. Whatever it might be, a few pixelated animals on the internet probably don’t come to mind. Fedya Chobanyan, however, claims that purchasing these digital wo

At first they were isolated incidents, reported by TV newscasters struggling not to laugh. But as the sightings in California piled up, the phenomenon began to resemble the opening scene of a zombie movie. In downtown Riverside, a pack of feral hogs

GRIFFIN DUNNE on documenting his aunt LISA KENNEDY on a novel’s spellbinding adaptation DAVID L. ULIN on that singular voice KARL TARO GREENFELD on Sundays in Malibu DOUG AITKEN, ANE CRABTREE, BRET EASTON ELLIS & JANELLE BROWN on the writer’s influen

What struck me first about her was the voice. From the moment I encountered the work of Joan Didion, who died on December 23, 2021, at the age of 87, I was captivated by it—that sly mix of diffidence and knowingness, that sense of standing on the ins

To honor ancestors who traveled with the Donner party, Didion kept a framed photo of the Sierra Nevada on her desk. Her forebears were not present for the most infamous chapter of the journey—they wisely split off before the group reached the Sierra.

There were a half dozen regulars, and I was a child, so forgive me if I am leaving someone out, but in the core group, as I recall them, there were novelist Brian Moore and his wife, Jean Russell; there were journalist Barry Farrell and his wife, Mar

Since my aunt, Joan Didion, passed on December 23 of last year, not a day goes by when I don’t think to myself, Thank God I made that doc. Viewership of Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold on Netflix has accomplished what I hoped: that her devoted

FADE IN: EXT. MOJAVE DESERT – DAY Silence. A thousand square miles of empty desert, picked up by a HIGH CAMERA, PANNING almost imperceptibly. The CAMERA PICKS UP a road through the desert, and stops. An open car comes INTO FRAME, driven very fast alo

Joan Didion, I’ve long thought, wrote out of her own sensibility as much as out of what she did and saw. This is the key tension in her work, between Didion as character and Didion as observer, between the subjectivity of her voice and eye and the de

On December 23, 2021, as the country was wearying of a seemingly endless pandemic and a tense political climate, it lost one of its most important cultural critics. Joan Didion was a celebrated writer and journalist and a keen observer of human natur

I write because of curiosity. I like to look into things, to understand them, and then to find a way to write about them in a crime novel. It’s a curiosity that I’ve long held. Almost 50 years ago, it led me to a night in a police station that change

My mother is a teacher of fiction. She has read every novel under the sun. She wrote her master’s thesis at San Francisco State on Mrs. Dalloway while pregnant with [my sister] Emily. To celebrate a poetry publication of mine years ago she sent me a

The thing is, doing what you love and passing it off as work, a career, even—it’s the ultimate scam. The victim is either no one at all (it’s your life) or everyone else (no man is an island), but there’s no question that you’re getting away with som

There was a time in my life when I bounced from place to place around Fresno, not really feeling at home but knowing that I was welcome wherever I stayed. It was the late aughts, I was in my 20s, and I was between lives, transitioning from toiling as

Tongo Eisen-Martin is San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate. His curriculum on the extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again!, is widely used as an educational and organizing tool. Eisen-Martin’s most recent poetry collection, Bl

What is it poets are for these days? Increasingly, in a world where brevity matters, verse makers are anywhere words are under pressure—which is everywhere. At school, in church, in the town square. It’s not an accident that Audre Lorde’s and Adrienn

We knew what we were there to talk about. It was an autumn evening, 1998, when we settled in around my large kitchen table. The artistic director of Nevada City’s Foothill Theatre Company, Philip Sneed, had invited core members of our company—directo

We’re fortunate to work with many of the best writers, photographers, and illustrators the Westhas to offer, and we know how much you appreciate their talents. But there’s a lot more to these savvy creatives than their bylines or their art and photo

That schoolgirl gripping a miniature violin case on South Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles seems sweetly out of place on the crowded sidewalk as she bobs along in a flowered dress amid the glacial 50-story office towers. Striving to keep pace wit

ON A HILL OVERLOOKING THE VAST OCEAN, AN OLDman sat under a crooked cypress, telling story after story. Yes, this is a mukashi mukashi story. Taro watched, through the wispy strands of the old man’s long white beard, seaweed bobbing over undulating w

Growing up in humid Florida, Syren Nagakyrie relished the mild-weather days when they could sit in nature, dreaming up stories about the birds and the flowers. At community college, Nagakyrie took biological-science courses that brought them to the F