Occult Los Angeles (And This Is Just The Beginning)

I wanted to direct your attention to this piece I wrote last summer for The Towner, The Architecture of Belief, about (of course) Los Angeles (of course) and the occult (of course):


Here is a story about Los Angeles: In 1935, a man who attempted to murder his wife gifted over 4,000 acres of land – previously owned by a man who had survived two attempts on his own life by separate, jilted lovers – to a corrupt mayor later driven from office by the efforts of a charitable Christian businessman with a side business in sexual novelties, who discovered that mayor’s secrets behind a false wall in a fake library. That businessman founded a thriving chain of restaurants built on the premise of giving away free food, one of which became the meeting place for a science fiction writer’s club, whose members included a man who conned a rocket scientist out of his life savings after first taking notes on how the scientist masturbated, and another man who convinced the city of Los Angeles to erect a three-story-tall fake Babylonian arch in the middle of Hollywood and then turn it into a shopping mall. This really happened, and I mention it here to remind you of the old saw about truth’s superlative relationship to fiction.


I've just started work on a book about the occult in the San Fernando Valley and I couldn't be happier. Have a story about goths in Burbank, psychics in the North Hollywood, or healers in Pacoima? Let me know!

In the classroom and on the air

Last Saturday I was on the radio talking about - what else? - shipwreck songs! On Bob's No Wake Zone Boating Radio Show, on KRMS 97.5. You can catch it in the archives here.

I was also a guest on the Brock Party podcast recently, where I was talking about ghosts - and a little about shipwrecks.

Up next, I'll be doing a reading about Bollywood movies at Machine Project.

Also I'll be teaching short fiction writing in two upcoming classes at The Writing Pad. The first is an intensive one-day workshop on Sunday, September 27, from 2:30-5:30pm.

Then I'll be teaching a five-week short fiction class starting Sunday, October 4, 2:30-5:30pm, also at The Writing Pad.

Come sign up and hang out with me - there will be snacks!

So You Want to Write a Shipwreck Song

I'm back in The Awl today discussing the only good kind of song.

How To Tell If You Are in a Dostoevsky Novel

"Every night Pontius Pilate berates you in a dream."

I forgot to post this earlier, but check out my recent piece in The Toast, How to Tell If You Are in a Dostoevsky Novel, and a special thanks to Nicole Chung for being the most helpful and patient editor ever.

Without a single apology to John Keats

"O Weazel Ball, tumble on! Bold weasel, never canst thou clasp thy prize!" is the best line I have ever written or ever will.

Check out Ode on an Abandoned Shopping Mall today on The Toast.  With hilarious illustrations by Shing Yin Khor.

Eating Kids, on The Awl

"Made you eat your kids" was the "your shoe's untied" of the ancient world.

I'm back on The Awl this week discussing the ancient Greek penchant for cooking and eating kids: "Episodes of Eating Children in Ancient Greece, Ranked in Order of Reasonableness."

Thomas Hardy and E. M. Forster

Thank you, Amber Sparks, for my sharing my new favorite author meeting story:

"Thomas Hardy once took E.M. Forster to his personal cat cemetery, and made him walk around for like an hour while he named all of the cats buried there (and there were many) and told Forster how they lived and how they died."

Found at the library today

Eleanor Roosevelt and the Scary Basement

Herodotus Writes the History of the 20th Century

"But there are others who say Rasputin survived these tortures by secretly drinking a mixture of ginger ale and pigeon’s blood, and that he roused himself from the river bottom and fled Russia together with his son, who was a lion."

I am beyond delighted to have a piece in The Toast, one of my absolute favorite publications.

The Last Cagot in the World

"When they went about, they had to wear a goose's foot conspicuously pinned to their clothes."

Thank you, Grant, for this incredibly strange story.