Zócalo is exploring L.A.’s Literary Public Square, where writers and readers come together to share and write the story of their city.
I honored a promise recently. It required that I make a snaky multi-freeway trek across Los Angeles, winding through the snarl and late-spring microclimates. Spitty drizzle and a scrim of grim storm clouds hovered in the northeast, but as I threaded westward, the skyline changed, as did the atmosphere. The clouds still hung high, but glowed white with an iridescence; the sun filtered through, silvery and gentle.
Keeping promises and being “in community” here requires effort, but it often comes with silvery rewards. Community can be defined not just by mappable coordinates but by a sense of yearning, inspiration, synergy. Finding community, here in L.A., really means making community. It takes active effort, a buy in. It requires an open spirit. And, in turn, it opens things up for new creative contexts, new frameworks; meaningful gathering spaces slowly grow into significance with time and ritual.
The “promise” I was threading across the rainy city to honor was precisely this, a recognition of creative community touchstones that start life as casual landmarks: a launch for a recent book, Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores. Its author, Katie Mitchell, enlisted writers across the nation to pen homages to essential spaces dedicated to fortification, resistance, and resilience. (My contribution: an embroidered thank-you note to L.A.’s gone-but-never-to-be-forgotten Eso Won Books and formal praise to a recent addition: Pasadena’s Octavia’s Bookshelf.) Independent bookstores, the best of them, do more than order, stock, and hand-sell, they foster community, create safe harbors, and function as essential third places.
Reparations Club, a newish bookshop and gathering space, not far from the Crenshaw strip, one of Black L.A.’s historic thoroughfares, served as the evening’s host. The dreamy space occupies a sleek, low-slung building painted a deep charcoal. Its can’t-miss-it chartreuse front door opens onto a bright, busy space, splashed with warm textures and colors: soft chairs, expansive couches, conversation nooks; a finished jigsaw puzzle rests at the center of a coffee table; bins of vinyl— jazz-heavy, some soul and R&B—sit amid shelves and tables stacked with novels, poetry collections, photography monographs, and more. It’s channeling a time-traveling 1970s rumpus room vibe—in the best way. People sprinkle in. Students, librarians, artists—from all over the basin—lean in to sidetalk. The air is buzzy and anticipatory.
When I was a teen, trying on the guise of writer in L.A., I didn’t realize that I was seeking something like this. More accurately, I didn’t know that it was possible. I thought, this happened in other places. While I had absorbed memoirs and novels about New York’s and San Francisco’s vibrant bohemian cafes, lofts, and galleries—locations that participants walked or subwayed to—in late-1970s Los Angeles, spread out across those microclimates, falling into a casual writers’ community felt more elusive.
Later, in college at Loyola Marymount University, one of my writing professors, the novelist Carolyn See had proffered a challenge to her students—our participation grade required that we move out of our narrow familiars, that we gather experiences. In retrospect, it was one of the best pieces of writing advice I’d received: It forced us into the world—to make worlds.
Los Angeles can feel impenetrable. Even if you are a native and know it like the back of your hand. It also changes in a blink; your map keeps shifting. You must keep recalibrating, searching for what still feels like yours.
I needed a pathway in to construct my own L.A. My first step: I gathered up the free weekly newspapers delivered in messy stacks on Thursdays near campus, and combed the listings to map out new routes. I pushed out into the city, attending readings at now long-gone venues like Dutton’s Bookstore in Brentwood, Papa Bach on Santa Monica Boulevard, Midnight Special Bookstore, in its various Santa Monica locations, and of course, Eso Won on La Brea. I began to understand how community worked: Who were the same faces that showed at specific spots; the obsessives who religiously shadowed the same writers to different locations across the city; the people who shared my off-path tastes and obsessions; those who might emerge as fellow travelers, even friends.
We moved across all that space to make it ours.
With time and miles I quilted together my personal Los Angeles-creatives map. It was how I located my inspirations. It wasn’t Musso & Frank Grill or the Chateau Marmont. Sometimes it was drafting and dreaming on one of the tall wooden stools of the Rose Cafe in Venice after a reading at Beyond Baroque. Or feeding on happy hour odds and ends and L.A. Weekly gossip on a banquette at the Martini Lounge at L.A. Nicola on the eastern end of Sunset Boulevard with my mighty micro-writer crew, watching the Lakers at the peak of the Showtime years. We might peel off from there and head over to Chatterton’s Books (now Skylight). It was there that I stood in a long line to hear the poet Allen Ginsberg discuss his collection of photographs and talk about his years in San Francisco at Six Gallery and Caffe Trieste—those magic landmarks.
I had found my way into a writer’s life, my own micro-climate of bookstores, cafes, and bootleg backroom venues that felt like home enough that sometimes I’d earned my own VIP perch—a rickety chair or reserved table sunk deep in the shadows.
A painful few of these casual monuments remain. For one: A room in Hollywood where I heard the poet Wanda Coleman soaring—lifting her lines off the typewritten page like a jazz chanteuse. She stunned a room silent. That narrow hole-in-the-wall is long, long gone, but when I approach its blank storefront—it all flickers alive again. Iridescent in my memory. This is true about so much of L.A.—a familiar crosswalk, wide vista, a threshold leading to that L.A., those people. Those connections are still alive and vibrant. I feel them in my body.
Sitting in the front row at Reparations Club, I realize that this spot will most likely find its way onto a personal map for some of tonight’s participants—the young man who took Metro from East L.A, attends to be energized, to feel a part of something; the librarian on busman’s holiday to celebrate the thing she loves the most—the open-door promise that books can deliver.
Later, as I circled back east, I replayed a revelation Rep Club’s founder Jazzi McGilbert made from the stage. This venture, she told us, represents a world of loss—her late mother’s books filled the shelves in the early days, and her now-gone father, the “digger” for a time assembled the vinyl selection and made new friends among the clientele.
Through this venture she’s built, inadvertently, a monument to their memory, as well as a vibrant space to host those of us who need a new place to convene and gather sustenance; to hear the heart-splitting poem, to participate in the conversation of the moment, to find the next book or avenue of thought. A new instance that, now and again, becomes ritual, and evolves into one of the monuments to our creative life.
Lynell George is a Los Angeles-based journalist, essayist, and author. Her most recent book, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, was a Hugo Award finalist.
Primary editor: Talib Jabbar | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard