"We need to have a powerful solidarity and coming together"

Nine days ago, on January 8, I evacuated from Los Angeles with my partner and our toddler after watching the Sunset Fire start from our bedroom window. We packed and left in under an hour.

It has been a profoundly destabilizing time. I would like to write about it, but I am both still figuring out what to say—and trying to find the time to say it, as we lost (but are still paying for) our regular childcare when we fled L.A.

I want to write about L.A. I want to write about David Lynch, whose death (like his life) has profoundly impacted me, and I want to write about how we keep going through what comes next. I want to do a lot of things, and also to feel normal and safe and well. I am Working On It.

I discovered, in my addled, interrupted research for this newsletter, Jenny Offill’s Tips for Trying Times. I think this is a good friend now, even though parts of it scare me. I am trying to look right at things and hold space for my reactions. I am trying.

The last time I sent out a Not Knowing How, I announced that I would be in conversation with author and critic Anita Felicelli at Sunny’s Bookshop in the greater L.A. area on January 18. Due to the events of the past week, however, we have relocated this event to Oakland’s Womb House Books, thanks to the incredible generosity of proprietor Jessica Ferri. I’d love to see you there tomorrow.

On Saturday, January 18 at 7 pm, at Womb House Books, located at 470 49th St, Temescal Alley, Oakland, CA 94609, Anita and I will be in conversation about her new book, How We Know Our Time Travelers. Our conversation will be followed by a Q&A and book signing. Hope to see you there! Please join us.

It’s my pleasure to feature a short interview with Anita below.

Anita Felicelli is the author of the novel Chimerica and the award-winning story collection Love Songs for a Lost Continent. She is the editor of Alta Journal’s California Book Club. Her short stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Air/Light, and The Normal School, among other literary journals, and have been anthologized and performed. Her criticism and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Slate, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New York Times (Modern Love). She lives in the Bay Area with her family. Her latest book is How We Know Our Time Travelers.

I first met Anita when I edited her story “Elephants in the Pink City” for Joyland 2016. Then, in 2019, I attended the Bay Area Book Festival, and had the chance to meet Anita in person. She was lovely, warm, and friendly, and I felt honored that she took the initiative to make sure we met face-to-face. In the intervening years, I’ve been lucky to be edited by Anita myself, and to welcome her as a guest faculty member and speaker at the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference and at the Antioch MFA. I love Anita’s criticism, fiction, and essays, and I’m delighted to have had the opportunity to speak with her about her powerful new short story collection.

LL: You’ve spoken about the personal circumstances that led to the writing of How We Know Our Time Travelers: your experience of the pandemic as an immunocompromised person, the creeping sense of unease brought on by the 2020 election, the wildfires in Northern California.

Sorry to start with a heavy question, but how are you feeling about the themes in the book now a month after its release, with Trump headed back to the White House and L.A. so profoundly impacted by the Palisades and Eaton (and other) Fires? Is it déjà vu, the curse of prophecy, or something hopefully more hopeful?

AF: I feel the world right now is in sync with what I believed about it as I wrote this book, and I am profoundly sad about that sensation of alignment. I was one of those unbelieved people who thought Trump would make it the first go-round and also believed he’d be back if he tried again and wasn’t stopped by dramatic legal interventions. By training, I watch the Supreme Court, so I had this feeling that our democracy was shattering once Republicans refused to confirm Merrick Garland, and then again when RBG died, and most of all with the ruling in Dobbs.

That said, I also have this infinitely looping déjà vu sensation—some of the stories in How We Know Our Time Travelers rest on past physical experiences of déjà vu, I’ve met you before like this and we are doing it again—and when I pay attention to the news, I do have the sense I’ve lived through all this before, to the point where I need to set aside discrete news catch-up time and then the rest of time live my extremely short life of children and editing and art.

And yet...despite the sensation of aligning, I don’t feel the bleakness and hysteria I felt when writing these stories because what I was afraid of has come to pass. I don’t think our future is already written, and I think perhaps a lot of people do need to feel what it’s like to live this in order to become single issue voters against fascism in this country. Not everyone sits around imagining the worst and creating art out of that, and that’s as it should be. I seek out the optimistic activists as much as anyone, perhaps more.

I do think that living through horror might cause some of us to rethink how we want to live our lives, in terms of values—how important it is to be tender with other people and look out for each other, look out for each other's families.

In Trump round 1, people spent a lot of time in denial, not least because in the beginning we had a functional Supreme Court. This time around will be strikingly different. Would-be fascists have every branch of government and many of us, the initial resistance, are exhausted from COVID, the lack of psychological recovery, and feeling powerless as we protest in whatever ways against a host of pressing, dire issues.

For this reality to go better, we need to have a powerful solidarity and coming together, knowing and staying calm and focused and generous about being the only ones coming to save us, and stop with tossed off harshness that might feel momentarily better but strains relationships.

Change might be a long time coming, but I do have a tremendous amount of hope it will be better in my kids’ lifetime.

LLN: In an interview with Rebecca Godfrey about her novel Weather (a novel I found so scary that I got rid of my copy after reading it, and actually, thinking about it, I don’t think I even finished it—it frightened me too much, I just stopped reading and got rid of it), Jenny Offill and Godfrey have the following exchange:

My question to you, Anita, is—what was/is the experience of writing and having written these stories? How did they impact the experiences that produced them, your memories of those experiences, and how does it feel to be with them in book form now? Do you feel, as Offill hints, that this process gave some order to your subjective experiences? Or—?

AF: I felt throughout the writing of these stories that I was a conduit for something, not quite my real experience but its shadow, what could have happened if only a few choices were different. Like Offill, I don’t think in terms of catharsis; I’m not releasing anything that’s repressed. It was more that I needed to make shapes out of my visions because they would not leave me alone.

I needed to give language to them, even knowing that language, for however long you sit with revisions, proves inadequate to living, that it’s made up of abstract symbols that require communities, not artistic isolation, to mean. I was giving ghosts of the future life, giving this interior world—which was occurring simultaneously with the wildfires; the 2020 election; the news; and the pandemic—containers, by making this book. The urgency was overwhelming.

My life outside art is baggy and often random and full of things I don’t feel like doing like everyone’s, so when I’m with the stories in book form, I feel like I’m with another person’s art that has staked out a separate territory in the world.

My memories are separate. For me, things went—dramatically—other ways.

LLN: What is a question you have always wanted to be asked? I’ll ask it!

AF: This is a fascinating question, Lisa. I've literally never considered it. I guess I wish someone would ask me variations on why I’m drawn to reading and writing experimental and quasi-continental fiction more so than American fiction (and maybe fight me on that just so I can see if I can gain clarity on myself).

Related, why do I love most the writers who slant toward the idea that fiction writers are artists, not only craftsmen?

Maybe, if it got really heated, why do I keep writing aesthetically strange, anti-capitalist books (and if someone is feeling mean, if I truly believe in the politics that buttress my books, why do I keep reviewing books that are actually fairly capitalist in design and intent and published by the Big 5 in a time of conglomeration?)

I don’t know that I have an answer for any of these though.

Thank you to Anita Felicelli for generously doing this interview on short notice, and thank you for reading! Stay safe, everyone, and rest well.