Los Angeles Is an Unreliable Narrator

The Truest Thing About the City: We Are All Just Making It Up as We Go Along

Los Angeles is an unreliable narrator. The very cityscape is an illusion, albeit on the grand scale—streets and buildings, the human design of it, erected on a bed of sand and tar. If you want to know what it is about the place, you need only visit my favorite local site, the La Brea Tar Pits, where the kitsch of Fiberglas mammoths comes face to face (literally and figuratively) with the existential reality of the tar lake, which are the existential realities of Los Angeles itself. The tar, after all, …

How Early Americans Narrated Disease | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

How Early Americans Narrated Disease

This Tradition of Storytelling Around Illness Still Pushes Us to Grieve—And Imagine a Path Forward

In April, as COVID-19 marched wearily into its second year, my mother became suddenly and unnervingly ill. Barely coherent, she was hospitalized.

Only a couple of days earlier she had …

Killing Your Audience Members Really Keeps Them Engaged

From Australian Sci-Fi to Music, Making Readers and Listeners Part of the Narrative Is an Underutilized Tool

One of the most common pieces of advice given to new writers is “Kill your darlings.” The Australian writers Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufman have turned this advice on its …