Violet flowers against white skies

It’s been a while. I profiled the band L.A. Witch and wrote about the auction of David Lynch’s possessions for Alta Journal.

Registration for the 2025 Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference is still open, with seats remaining in a few workshops, and I’m happy to offer readers of my newsletter the opportunity to register with a significant discount. Use the code INDIVISIBLE100 when you complete your registration.

I’ll be reading a special short piece at the launch for Diana Arterian’s Agrippina The Younger this Saturday, June 14, at the Poetic Research Bureau at 2220 Arts+Archives at 7:30 PM. RSVP to join us here (it’s free).

Diana’s book is a spell for remembrance and creation, and everyone should read it. I’d love to see you there.

I’ve been writing, and not writing, this newsletter for weeks.

It’s jacaranda season in L.A., one of my favorite times of year (I’m basic), when trees on my block and throughout the city burst into vibrant purple flower. I can see a jacaranda from the window behind my desk as I write this, three from the window above my kitchen sink.

Did I notice the jacarandas on my own, or was I swept up into their mythology when I moved to L.A.? Did I learn to love them as part of becoming an Angeleno, or was this reaction native to me?

A long time ago, before I ever knew I’d live in this city, before I had ever seen a jacaranda with my own eyes, I read a Francesca Lia Block story with a character named Jacaranda who was beautiful and damned. It would be decades before I connected the name with the tree. It was longer than that before I met Francesca and became colleagues and friends with the favorite author of my childhood.

All of my dreams have come true in this city.

I love the trumpet blossoms that fall to the ground at the base of each tree. I can’t resist picking them up. I press them between the pages of journals. Once I sent a person I loved an envelope full of them. He opened my letter with his young son, who said, “Magic, Daddy! It’s magic!”

A few weeks go, walking my own son to school, I knelt to pick up a jacaranda blossom and handed it to him. When we got to his classroom and began the process of dropoff, I hung his backpack on its hook. His expression turned determined and he crossed the room. I was concerned he was going to have trouble with my departure, but I was wrong. He wanted to put his flower in his backpack, where it would be safe until the end of the day. When his father brought him home from school that day, he came in with a handful of blossoms, saying, “Mommy, I have jacarandas!”

Jacaranda flowers don’t last. I put the handful my son brought me in a white porcelain bowl with a cat painted on the side in dark blue ink. By evening they were shrunken and in the morning they were tiny and thin, almost unrecognizable.

I never know exactly how long the jacarandas will be in flower. There was one year when a tree on our block just didn’t blossom. The next year it was cut down.

When I wrote this we were about to leave town for two weeks. Maybe that will be it, I thought, the end of the season. Maybe there will only have been a day or two when I really noticed these flowers, appreciated them, experienced one of my favorite parts of life in L.A.

It’s up to me, I thought, to make it enough.

Before the President deployed the National Guard and then the Marines to protect his terrorist shock troops in their cruel and evil labor of abducting people from their families and destroying the peaceful social fabric of our city (and, of course, our country), I had been thinking: fascism makes me a housewife.

Many days since the start of the year I have been too ground down by the world, too frankly scared, to do creative work. 2025 has been all about fear for me. Fear management. Fear mitigation. Fear surrender. I do my jobs, I care for my child, I can do domestic work like cleaning, perhaps because it feels like a tangible way to make things better. But writing has been hard. I have occasionally had the fortitude to do what I described in my interview with Danielle Lazarin, open up a Word doc and shoving words in there even just for a few minutes. But on most of the days when I could have been writing, I’ve sat in despair, blinking at my phone. In mid-May I did a tarot spread for the wrong reasons—seeking reassurance—and for the first time in over a decade, I couldn’t read it. Not at all.

We left town to visit family in northern California. Living between L.A. and Mendocino gives my partner and I so much of what we want, a foot in both worlds, a life in both places, parallel lives, intertwined lives. When we fled the fires in January, we did so with the confidence that there was a place we could go long-term if we needed to, and we did. Thanks to the kindness of my partner’s family, I have a hometown that feels both mystically chosen and accessible to me, an experience starkly different from visiting my actual hometown, where my love and memories can feel painful and haunting. It is very nice there, and tranquil, and many things about life with a young child seem frankly easier. We talk about moving back.

I am always missing other places, other times.

Do they still have snowstorms like the ones I recall from my first years in college, when the roads in lower Manhattan would become so unnavigable by cars that taxi drivers let me out on a random street corner and my friends and I walked in the middle of the road, as if we were in the country? Once I saw someone cross-country skiing on Houston. Even dread Connecticut had a special hushed, harsh solidity, a winter beauty I couldn’t ignore that iced me up in my big lonely apartment, where I sat writing at the kitchen table next to the door.

I long for the humid delicacy and breath of possibility in the Illinois summers of my childhood, the way a thunderstorm is always waiting on the other side of the afternoon there, that riotous inescapable growing green I feel as an aliveness in the deepest parts of my body.

After we came back from a visit to Chicago this spring, I wrote in my journal: “I think of that time [my childhood, in my childhood home] as green boughs raining down on me in the lush classic climate. Cold winters, full springs and autumns. It is alive to me—I have tried to reclaim it, but it is with me. I don’t need to go anywhere to be there.”

When I lived in Mendocino full-time I struggled. It was the smallest town I have ever called home, and I missed everything about city life, and by city I mean beautiful, garish, hot, foggy, stupid wonderful Los Angeles.

I don’t remember the first time I experienced the kind of L.A. weather in which the sky is white in the morning and the jacarandas burst proud across it, psychedelic in a city where everything is psychedelic, daring me to look, daring me to look away. I’m always trying to take pictures of it, even though I know I can’t capture it, not really. I’m always trying to freeze the moment when I feel it, the singularity of this place which is special because people from all over the world choose to be here, making it what it is.

Los Angeles is sacred because it is where we are together.

The trauma of the fires scarred my relationship with L.A. I keep thinking I’ll write about that here, when I get the chance, maybe to mark six months from the day we left after watching a blaze start from our bedroom window. About how I went swimming the morning before the fires began, and the wind moved a current in the pool, and then I went to the sauna I used to go to, in my first L.A. life when I was very sad, and listened to this dumb Zoomer whose horny retreads of Nine Inch Nails and The Weeknd had the capacity to really cheer me up. And then we left for a long time, we packed in 40 minutes and drove through the night to safety, and we stayed away for a long time and considered not coming back.

I was so scared to come back to L.A., but when we did, I went to the pool again, and the sauna, and listened to the same dumb guy again there.

L.A. has granted me continuity, a city whose history I can be a part of, a home that deemed me worthy of inclusion.

How I long to protect it, to defend it, to keep it safe.

The cause of the fires is not mysterious or unknowable; depending on how you look at it, climate change has the same root agents as the Trump Administration, which reminds me of how I once told my honors class at USC that the invisible hand of the market is the same hand that pepper-sprayed the protestors at UC Davis in 2011, on the day that Robert Hass was clubbed and Celeste Langan dragged by her hair. The insult feels doubled, even if the cause is the same.

When I hike in the hills above my house—the ones I saw burning from my bedroom window on the evening of January 8—I can see the fire’s scar. The difference between the plants that grow there and the plants that grow on the land that didn’t burn.

Jacarandas are not native to California—the variety so beloved in L.A., jacaranda mimosifolia, originated in South America and were brought here by Kate Sessions, the creator of San Diego’s Balboa Park—but, like me, they decided to stay.

All we have are the choices we make and the worlds we build through community and solidarity.

The flowers returned to us after the fires. What will we do to honor them?

If you don’t live in L.A. and you are seeking information about the situation on the ground here, I recommend L.A. Taco’s excellent coverage, especially the video reporting on their instagram account.

I hope that my photo essay about flowers does a good enough job of showing how tranquil most of the city is right now, but if you’re wondering: the flaming hellscape being shown on TV as propaganda is not real, nor is it representative of the experience of daily life in the city. What is real is the degree of fear, terror, sorrow, and grief ICE has inflicted on L.A. If you’d like to help, this spreadsheet is a good list of organizations to support.

Thank you for reading. Stay safe, everyone, and rest well.