I never, ever thought I’d move to Los Angeles. I was way too NorCal, too tree-hugging, too uninterested in celebrity, too traffic and concrete and smog averse, too uninterested in plastic surgery and New Age scammery, and definitely too *deep* for this place. LA? Me? Never. Nuh-uh. Not gonna happen. Until 2013, when I was living in San Francisco and missing some kind of vital thrum in my creative life. The writing world there felt too historical, too tied to its beat poet past, which I’m sure likely meant I was mostly looking in the wrong places.
But the Bay Area was also undergoing massive change, as its lifeblood became suffused with tech cash and hyper-development. I began to consider what it might feel like to live in a city—Los Angeles—whose lifeblood, for as many ways as the industry may be corrupted, is art and creativity. Where one could actually make a living being an artist. Buoyed by this new possibility, I moved.
Within a year, my creative life was thriving. It was certainly never easy. I learned to live on a crazy tight budget. But all those shallow, fame-obsessed, nature- and truth-hating LA Barbies I was worried about? They didn’t exist in my version of this city.
My LA is a place where the asphalt pulses with creativity (I swear I can see it sometimes when I’m driving at night), where cliffs bow to the ocean, where the land taught me to revere indigenous culture, where humans dream new futures with the sincerest and most brilliant of hearts, where I found refuge in community gardens, where I studied photography and learned how to use a real camera, where I met my amazing literary agent and reconnected with friends who’d been in my life for almost two decades, where I discovered rich new friendships rooted in beauty and activism and truth, where I wrote two books and moved to one of the most exquisite, wild places on the planet, where I learned to hang art and make a home of my own and tend a greenhouse, where I learned to love sweet Lola Bear, the best dog on earth.
LA has had me for going on seven years, and LA will always have me. This city full of calamity and possibility and fire and injustice and longing and art, forever.
Here are a few photos from my time here.
