Literary Los Angeles: You Are Welcome

I was at a book party this week.   I didn’t know anyone well, but I recognized some names and faces, including the face of one man who looked so familiar I spent much of the evening wondering whether he was perhaps an old coworker or a friend’s husband only to have a blog post inform me the next day that he was an actor who had had a recurring role on a popular television show.   I spent a lot of time introducing myself again to people I had already met twice before.   I drifted around holding a hardcover copy of the fated book like a backstage pass, ready to produce it dutifully to anyone who demanded to know what I was doing there.

At one point I found myself in conversation with a very friendly, welcoming man whose own book came out last year.   I asked him how he knew the person whose book we were presently celebrating, and he said something like, “Well, there aren’t that many writers in L.A., after awhile you all know each other.”

I’ve felt that way, too.   And not only about L.A., my hometown.   There aren’t that many writers in California, it sometimes seems, or in the country, or on the internet.   I’m always surprised to find the number of “mutual friends” I share with other writers on Facebook.

Yet something about his comment rankled.   There aren’t that many writers in L.A.?   The more I thought about it, the more absurd it seemed.   There are, after all, almost 15 million people in our greater metropolitan area, and that’s not even counting the far-flung cities whose residents doggedly pretend that they live in L.A. even when they don’t.   (My apologies, but Anaheim is not Los Angeles.   It’s not even in the same county.)   In a city bigger than Paris and St. Petersburg combined, can it really be that all our writers look vaguely familiar, like someone who was once on that one T.V. show?

As a young writer, it’s easy to feel that way, too — that everyone knows each other and no one knows you.   That agents, publishers, and literary magazines are all combining to form a clique in some part of L.A., San Francisco, New York, Chicago — some place you aren’t going to be invited to.   But the truth is more complicated than that, and more hopeful.   You aren’t waiting to be let into a single group — you’re probably already in one, or in several.

There are, in fact, dozens of communities of writers in Los Angeles.   My friends who volunteer at 826 are not the people I find sharing stories at The Moth or reading poetry at Machine Project or Poetic Research Bureau or Farmlab.   My friends who write for the movie industry are not connected on Facebook to my friends who write for the stage, nor to my friends in MFA programs at USC or screenwriting classes at UCLA.   My friends who use the free wireless at Literati in Brentwood are not the same as the ones who use the wireless at Intelligentsia in Silver Lake, or Swork in Eagle Rock.   (And of these three, only the patrons of Literati enjoy valet parking.)

I’m not counting on this column on literary Los Angeles to bring these groups together, and frankly, I wouldn’t want it to.   One of the great strengths of L.A. is its complexity, its diversity, and its obsessive micro-regionalism, whether in food or in fiction.   But I do hope that an exploration of this city and the artistic and intellectual projects here will be of interest to people in L.A. and without, and a reminder that great things are happening here and everywhere, every day, and you’re invited.