Our Home in the World

Stories of the West: Sky, clouds, water, hiking, boats, machines, wide open spaces, grasses, mountains, caves, racks of antlers, mustard seed growing...

I grew up in a cult. Things were simpler there. Someone told you what to do. You were given three outfits. (No need to worry about style.) You attended sermons. You worked, prayed, slept. That was your whole life.

I left. Things got tricky. At first, I was paid for tiny jobs, like babysitting and house cleaning, always in cash, but then someone gave me a piece of paper.

“What’s this? I want to be paid.”

“Take it to the bank. Put it in your bank account.”

At the bank, I asked some lady what to do with the piece of paper. She said,

“Next time you come to the bank, wear shoes.”

I said, “Is this a super important place like a library?”

She said, “Some people think money is more important than books.”

I said, “That’s crazy.”

She explained the whole bank account thing. I wanted to ask if the bank ever got robbed, but didn’t ask, since I was pretty sure I looked like a bank robber myself.

Then, I had tiny jobs, tiny checks to deposit, a car, books in the back of the car.

Then, California. Kids. Family. Publishing.

When Red Hen Press was small, it was easy. The budget was small, one or two staff, everything compact.

Now, the press has seven staff who work four days a week and five who work five days a week, myself included. With twelve staff and a budget of over a million, I am on it all the time. Raising money to make the wheels go round.

Besides, there’s writing/family/dogs/gym/thinking/life/

What I thought my life would be like working in publishing: Dreaming to create literary culture. Editing manuscripts. Curating reading series. Working with other arts leaders. During times of crisis, we need art more than ever to remind us of our human stories.

The journey has been long.

I grew up on a farm in New England. At nineteen, I took a bus West to Colorado to visit friends. I stayed with them briefly, then moved to Virginia, then to Arizona, but on that trip to Colorado on a Greyhound bus, I made a decision that I wanted to be involved in the world of books. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be a writer or a publisher, but I knew I wanted to be involved in stories of the West.

On the long bus ride, there was a mediocre guitar player and people who sang along. Riders passed around weed and shared cigarettes. Once, someone passed donuts down the aisles. We were a tribe traveling together.

At one stop, I got out with another woman in the early hours; she had curlers in her hair, the pink foamy kind. She wasn’t dressed up, just jeans, a torn sweatshirt, and Keds. We were somewhere in Nebraska.

“What’s with the curlers?” I asked.

“I’m meeting my lover boy at a truck stop in the morning,” she said. “Gotta look good. He just got out.”

“Right,” I said, “That’s nice.”

In the morning, she combed out her hair, applied lipstick, and exchanged the sweatshirt for a fluffy sweater. “You think I look nice, like a peach pie?” she asked me.

“Like a peach pie in July,” I said.

Riding in that Greyhound Bus, listening to badly played Paul Simon, I realized that stories of the West were different. Stories of the West: Sky, clouds, water, hiking, boats, machines, wide open spaces, grasses, mountains, caves, racks of antlers, mustard seed growing, wild orchids, waterfalls, giant people who could throw you across a room, hairy people with beards, people who live in trailers and cars and boxes, truck drivers, Mexicans, nuclear bombs, test sites, Las Vegas, military bases, guys that work on cars, cat-owning soldiers from Kansas, women with no teeth and curlers in their hair in case they go out later, and all of us eating the dark that is America.

It took me years to build the room of stories. It’s harder than I thought it would be. More of a drain on my own writing life than I ever imagined.

Los Angeles has music, architecture, and museums, but it is not a literary city. As a result, we spend too much time figuring out how to pay bills, and not enough time creating a compassionate literary culture.

This is the year we are stepping into a transformative gift. I am sure of it. A transformative gift that will allow us to move from one conversation to a bigger conversation. I am on a plane to New York for meetings, and then I am going to the London Book Fair. When I get back, there is AWP, the biggest convention for writers, agents, and publishers in the United States, taking place in the heart of Los Angeles.

Over the years, I’ve been told many times that we should move Red Hen to a city that loves and supports the arts: San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, New York, Boston. My husband would prefer to live in any of these cities to living in Los Angeles.

Minneapolis has three presses. San Francisco has Heyday and McSweeney. Portland has Tin House. Seattle is near Copper Canyon. New York is the mothership of literary culture and media.

At nineteen, I watched a woman shake out her curls and approach her boyfriend at a truck stop. He was missing teeth. He had wicked tattoos. He was bald. He put his arms out to her, and he howled. She dove into him, her home in the world.

We uplift stories that will help readers find their own home in the world, to see themselves and know who they are. The stories of the West need to be published in the West. In my wild, thrumming life, I’m ready to find the next story. Life is big and messy and complicated, but we get to make art, to work with writers.

Once you climb a mountain, three things are clear:

You are good at mountain climbing.

There are many mountains to climb.

You need to choose carefully who you climb with.

I have not always chosen my companions wisely. But now, maybe, I’m old enough and wise enough to do better. It’s worth living in the West if you live for challenges. So far, I’ve continued to believe that Los Angeles is where we belong.