Arboretum Library: Reading the Western Landscape Community Book Discussions 2023

“…[T]he book is both a personal memoir and a cultural study, written with poetic charm. ...Specktor reflects on the mythos of Hollywood and the storied elements and landmarks of its built environment. …[He] is particularly dedicated to failure here, as he traces stories of writers, actors, musicians, and directors whose careers were sidelined for a variety of reasons...As each chapter is a slice of biography from a particular perspective...the stories feel somewhat incomplete. Specktor would not be wrong in hoping that those narrative gaps create curiosity. To draw the reader in, then inspire the reader to search online, to watch the films, to listen to the albums, indicates a quality book.” — Linda Levitt, PopMatters.com

In 2006, Matthew Specktor moved into a crumbling Los Angeles apartment opposite the one in which F. Scott Fitzgerald spent the last moments of his life. Fitz had been Specktor's first literary idol, someone whose own passage through Hollywood had, allegedly, broken him. Freshly divorced, professionally flailing, and reeling from his mother's cancer diagnosis, Specktor was feeling unmoored. But rather than giving in or "cracking up," he embarked on an obsessive journey to make sense of the mythologies of "success" and "failure" that haunt the artist's life and the American imagination.Part memoir, part cultural history, part portrait of place, Always Crashing in the Same Car explores Hollywood through a certain kind of collapse. It's a vibrant and intimate inspection of failure told through the lives of iconic, if under-sung, artists--Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry, Warren Zevon, Tuesday Weld, and Hal Ashby, among others--and the author's own family history. Through this constellation of Hollywood figures, he unearths a fascinating alternate history of the city that raised him and explores the ways in which curtailed ambition, insufficiency, and loss shape all our lives. At once deeply personal and broadly erudite, it is a story of an art form (the movies), a city (Los Angeles), and one person's attempt to create meaning out of both. Above all, Specktor creates a moving search for optimism alongside the inevitability of failure and reveals the still-resonant power of art to help us navigate the beautiful ruins that await us all.

Here is the passel of questions I wrote while I was reading the book.

What is the author generally trying to grasp at?
What is the best thing about this book?
Do you find his nods to more modern thinking such as on p. 241 genuine, pandering, or something else? Why?
Is it useful to use artists', authors', or actors' lives to compare with our own? Why? Why not?
What did you think about the line at the bottom of page 258?
Does the book deal with toxic masculinity? How/How not?
Why do you think the author chose success/failure as a topic and what does that mean to the author?
What do you think of how he portrayed Los Angeles?
Do you think the author pulled off the combination of memoir and his explorations of authors, LA, movies, etc. Did the book have to be framed this way? Why/Why not?
Do you think he read his mother's challenges correctly? Why/Why not?
Did the book make you want to see any movies or read any books he wrote about? Why?/Why not? Which ones?
What's the difference between luck and fate on p. 138?
What do you think of his writing style?
What do you make of his assertions about courting disaster on p. 154
Why does he veil his references to people as he does on p. 198?
Any ambiguities we need to clear up?
Favorite line, image, or passage?

“A bruising, powerful memoir… He cuts through the thicket of language and cultural contradictions, offering up both humorous looks at his life and troubling memories. ...Urrea's honest personal account will trigger anyone's memories of growing up where culture, ethnic identity and language clash. In today's America, that's nearly everyone." — San Diego Union Tribune

“With his blended background and his borrowed, adapted, stolen language, ‘America is home. It’s the only home I have. Both Americas. All three Americas, from the Arctic circle to Tierra del Fuego.’ Borders criss-cross his experience, yet Urrea remains fluid, refusing to succumb to ‘a nightmare of silence’. He shares his love of words openly, freely, hopefully.” — BookDragon

Here's a story about a family that comes from Tijuana and settles into the 'hood, hoping for the American Dream. . . . I'm not saying it's our story. I'm not saying it isn't. It might be yours. "How do you tell a story that cannot be told?" writes Luis Alberto Urrea in this potent memoir of a childhood divided. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an Anglo mother from Staten Island, Urrea moved to San Diego when he was three. His childhood was a mix of opposites, a clash of cultures and languages. In prose that seethes with energy and crackles with dark humor, Urrea tells a story that is both troubling and wildly entertaining. Urrea endured violence and fear in the black and Mexican barrio of his youth. But the true battlefield was inside his home, where his parents waged daily war over their son's ethnicity. "You are not a Mexican!" his mother once screamed at him. "Why can't you be called Louis instead of Luis?" He suffers disease and abuse and he learns brutal lessons about machismo. But there are gentler moments as well: a simple interlude with his father, sitting on the back of a bakery truck; witnessing the ultimate gesture of tenderness between the godparents who taught him the magical power of love. "I am nobody's son. I am everybody's brother," writes Urrea. His story is unique, but it is not unlike thousands of other stories being played out across the United States, stories of other Americans who have waged war--both in the political arena and in their own homes--to claim their own personal and cultural identity. It is a story of what it means to belong to a nation that is sometimes painfully multicultural, where even the language both separates and unites us. Brutally honest and deeply moving, Nobody's Son is a testament to the borders that divide us all.

Here are the questions discussed, February 22, 2023 on Zoom

Icebreaker: Tell about a time where you felt you were the "other" and/or a trip to Tijuana.

What has changed with his subjects in the approximately 25 years since this book was written?
Why do you think he wrote this book?
How did you process the Ed Abbey essay?
What is the amalgamation of these tales for you?
Who was your favorite person/character in the book? Why?
What was your favorite section of the book? Why?
What did you make of what looks to me like clustered black marker lines at the chapter beginnings?
If you were an editor for this book is there anything you would have encouraged the author to do differently? Why?
What other wonderings do you have about this book and/or the author?
Favorite line, image, or passage?

“The beauty of the Southwestern American desert is a deceptive cover for the violence — born of fear and hatred — that lies beneath it in a tawdry, seedy underbelly familiar to noir.... We can expect no easy answers, because the answer is not the point. Hugh Densmore’s search ... is prompted by the apparently selfish desire to save his reputation. Yet Hugh Densmore is not a selfish man; he is, by any reckoning, a good man, who loves his family and wishes to save them from the grief of hearing him branded an abortionist and murderer. His is not the superhuman intellect of Holmes or Poirot; Hugh Densmore is only human. That, in fact, is the truth that hides within noir: it is the stories of the only human, tawdry and stained and yet somehow golden for all of that.”— Eleanor Gold, Full-Stop.net

"It was surprising what old experiences remembered could do to a presumably educated, civilized man." And Hugh Denismore, a young doctor driving his mother's Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix, is eminently educated and civilized. He is privileged, would seem to have the world at his feet, even. Then why does the sight of a few redneck teenagers disconcert him? Why is he reluctant to pick up a disheveled girl hitchhiking along the desert highway? And why is he the first person the police suspect when she is found dead in Arizona a few days later? Dorothy B. Hughes ranks with Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith as a master of mid-century noir. In books like In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse she exposed a seething discontent underneath the veneer of twentieth-century prosperity. With The Expendable Man, first published in 1963, Hughes upends the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver a story that engages readers even as it implicates them in the greatest of all American crimes.

Here are some questions discussed at the meeting on March 22, 2023:
Icebreaker: Tell about a road trip you once had.
What did you think about the tempo of the car drive across the desert?
Does this book resonate with the movies of the same time period? Yes/No Which? Why?
What did you think of the paragraph at the bottom of p. 99 to the top of p. 100?
Is the author's language or plotting that makes the story so propelling or both? How? Why?
Do you think the chapter breaks are as they were in the original? Is that more propulsion? Why? Why not?
Who was this book written for?
How realistic does the plot seem? Why?
What is the author trying to tell a white audience? Another audience?
Imagine the different lenses of a black author, a male author, written now? What may be different?
How does this tale of abortion look through today's lens?
What do you make of the focus on reputation?
Did you guess any of the plot twists? What? When?
What did you think of the ending?
Favorite line, image, or passage?
Any other questions?

“A handsome new edition... — page upon page of well-dressed people having a good time framed by a blunt and lucid history of postwar San Francisco as a viciously segregated city. There are almost no white faces here, a testament to how fully people cast into a ghetto created their own world. One striking note among many: five people gathered in front of Rhythm Records on Sutter Street in 1947, behind them a poster advertising Andrew Tibbs’s smooth, after-hours 78 “Bilbo Is Dead” — a number about the infamous Mississippi racist so slick you can’t even hear the sarcasm as Tibbs runs through the “One Meat Ball” melody to tell you how he’s not sure he’ll ever get over the death of his “best friend.” — Greil Marcus, Los Angeles Review of Book

In the 1940s and 50s, a jazz aficionado could find paradise in the nightclubs of San Francisco's Fillmore District: Billie Holiday sang at the Champagne Supper Club; Chet Baker and Dexter Gordon jammed with the house band at Bop City; and T-Bone Walker rubbed shoulders with the locals at the bar of Texas Playhouse. The Fillmore was one of the few neighborhoods in the Bay Area where people of color could go for entertainment, and so many legendary African American musicians performed there for friends and family that the neighborhood was known as the Harlem of the West. Over a dozen clubs dotted the twenty-block radius. Filling out the streets were restaurants, pool halls, theaters, and stores, many of them owned and run by African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Filipino Americans. The entire neighborhood was a giant multicultural party pulsing with excitement and music. In 220 lovingly restored images and oral accounts from residents and musicians, Harlem of the West captures a joyful, exciting time in San Francisco, taking readers through an all-but-forgotten multicultural neighborhood and revealing a momentous part of the country's African American musical heritage.

Here are the questions up for discussion on Wednesday, April 26, 2023, 7:00 p.m.

What was your favorite club, story, photograph, and why?
Which musician would you most like to have heard in a club there or just listen to now and why?
What does this book make you think about this time period in San Francisco and why?
Is this a typical history book? Why/Why not?
       How does the book benefit from its particular way?
What do you think was special about the author and photographer that were able to make this book happen?
      Is there anything you would suggest which could have been done differently?
How did the social and economic forces make this neighborhood? How did the people who lived there make this neighborhood?
What did you think of Leola King and Charles Sullivan and their successes?
Does this book make you think about life differently?
How? Why?
What emotions did you feel as you read the book? Why?
What questions did you have as you read the book?
Favorite line or passage?

“What happens when a lesbian couple—a college professor and a nurse—decide to forsake the expensive city and move a few miles south to Seaview, a foggy coastal town in Northern California where homes are affordable but some neighbors far from welcoming?...In lyrical, often shimmering, language, Mirosevich finds meaning and memory in the lives lived by the “confused” sea, the name, she explains, given to the sea when waves go back and forth on a windy day. “Confused but still beautiful,” the narrator insists. These stories both comfort and surprise. You will want to read them over and over again, like waves going back and forth, revealing something new each time.”— Elaine Elinson, New York Journal of Books

After moving to a coastal town a gay couple is drawn to a group of outsiders living on the edge of the sea In Spell Heaven, a linked story collection, a lesbian couple moves to a coast town and unexpectedly finds a sense of belonging with a group of outsiders. Stories include the tale of an undocumented boy's drowning when a wave pulls him out to sea, an ex-FBI agent's surveillance of a man who leaves chocolate bars at a tree in a weekly ritual, a mother on meth who teaches a lesson on mercy, and Kite Man, who flies kites from a fishing pole and sells drugs on the side. His motto- When the kites fly, you can buy. The narrator of these stories, raised in a working-class Croatian American fishing family and immigrant community, chooses an early career in labor-oriented jobs. Years later, she finds herself in an academic position in a white-collar world "where the clothes are clean but the politics are dirty." She questions her own stereotypes about her neighbors and gradually begins to question her life path. Spell Heaven celebrates those who are looking for a human connection in an increasingly isolated world.

Here are the questions we started with:
Ice breaker: What's your relationship to the sea or beach? Why?

What do you think about how the author arranged the stories? Does this make it a narrative? Why/Why not?
How do you tell these are short stories, not memoir? Does it matter? Why/Why not?
What makes this different from other short story collections you have read?
What is one thing you learned from this book?
Does the lapsed Catholicism fit in with these stories. Why?/Why not?
What is your favorite story in this collection? Why? Which one, not so much? Why?
What do you think about the author's exploration of friendship as portrayed in these stories?
Does the book resolve her dilemma with the sea? Why?/Why not?
Was the author successful in writing out of despair? Why?/Why not? Is the emotion despair?
How did it change your reading when she mentioned cancer? Covid?
Favorite line, image, or passage?

Selected verse from the poet who "expanded the scope of lyric poetry" (Rafael Campo, The Washington Post). The work of Federico García Lorca, Spain's greatest modernist poet, has long been admired for its emotional intensity and metaphorical brilliance. The revised Selected Verse, which incorporates changes made to García Lorca's Collected Poems, is an essential addition to any poetry lover's bookshelf. In this bilingual edition, García Lorca's poetic range comes clearly into view, from the playful Suites and stylized evocations of Andalusia to the utter gravity and mystery of the final elegies, confirming his stature as one of the twentieth century's finest poets.

“... 60-year-old, strong-willed widow Vera Wong discovers a body with a flash drive in its hand in her tea shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown. ...Vera is thrilled to delve into detective work when a handful of people who knew [the deceased] come into her shop looking for information. ...Seeing them as potential suspects, Vera lures them with her distinctive teas and cooking, developing genuine friendships with each one, but also easily able to sniff out their lies. The engrossing plot, which is full of laugh out loud humor and heartfelt moments, builds to a satisfying conclusion that will leave readers eager for more Vera.”— Publishers Weekly

A lonely shopkeeper takes it upon herself to solve a murder in the most peculiar way in this captivating mystery by Jesse Q. Sutanto, bestselling author of Dial A for Aunties. Vera Wong is a lonely little old lady--ah, lady of a certain age--who lives above her forgotten tea shop in the middle of San Francisco's Chinatown. Despite living alone, Vera is not needy, oh no. She likes nothing more than sipping on a good cup of Wulong and doing some healthy detective work on the Internet about what her Gen-Z son is up to. Then one morning, Vera trudges downstairs to find a curious thing--a dead man in the middle of her tea shop. In his outstretched hand, a flash drive. Vera doesn't know what comes over her, but after calling the cops like any good citizen would, she sort of . . . swipes the flash drive from the body and tucks it safely into the pocket of her apron. Why? Because Vera is sure she would do a better job than the police possibly could, because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands. Vera knows the killer will be back for the flash drive; all she has to do is watch the increasing number of customers at her shop and figure out which one among them is the killer. What Vera does not expect is to form friendships with her customers and start to care for each and every one of them. As a protective mother hen, will she end up having to give one of her newfound chicks to the police?

Here are the questions discussed on Wednesday, July 26, 2023, 7:00 p.m.

Icebreaker: What is your favorite beverage and why? Do you have any rituals associated with it?

Spoiler alerts ahead! Skip over the questions if you haven't finished the book.
What do you think of the plot device of Vera taking the thumb drive?
Does Vera seem to be 60 years old?
What do you think about how the chapters were arranged by person?
Are there plot holes? Yes, what?, No, why not?
Where did you laugh out loud as the review above said? If not, why not?
Are the characters believable? Is the plot believable? Do either of these questions matter? Why? Why not?
What did Vera do between when she woke up and when she called the kids? Aaah, it comes out later. What did you think on p. 174 when this was presented?
How does the repeated theory of people returning to the crime scene strike you?
Who is the audience for this book?
Is Emma's two-year-old behavior believable?
What do you think of all the tea descriptions?
What do you think about the author's San Francisco?
Did the people who broke into the shop open and empty all the tea drawers? Aaah, it comes out later. What did you think at the time of the "break-in"?
Any other questions, say about how the people relationships went?
Favorite line image or passage?

“Ross ... explores the inner life of an artist, in an attempt to illuminate the mysteries of the art itself. Picture is more than a deeply reported view of the power struggles of Hollywood filmmaking; it’s a fine-grained study in one very idiosyncratic set of personalities whose blend was toxic—.... But Ross also sees exceptional and forward-looking individuals who put their livelihoods on the line, even in a losing battle, for their confidence in personal creation. ...Ross’s portrait of cinematic conflict and compromise yields, in passing, a portrait of true artistry in movies that stands untarnished to this day.”— Richard Brody, New Yorker

In the spring of 1950, when New Yorker staff writer Lillian Ross heard that John Huston was planning to make a film of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, she decided she would follow the movie's progress "in order to learn whatever I might learn about the American motion-picture industry." What resulted was Picture, which Newsweek has called "the best book on Hollywood ever published."Picture received raves from the worlds of film and literature in equal measure for its unforgettable portrait of the language, the ways, and the preoccupations of Hollywood: Charlie Chaplin called Picture "brilliant and sagacious" and legendary editor William Shawn termed it "the definitive book on the Hollywood community." Little wonder, then, that when the Top 100 Works of U.S. Journalism of the Twentieth Century were chosen by the New York University Department of Journalism and a distinguished panel that included David Brinkley, Pete Hamill, Jeff Greenfield, Mary McGrory, and Morley Safer, Picture had an honored place on that list.

Here are the questions discussed on August 23, 2023:

Icebreaker: What's your favorite movie and why?

How does it add/not add to the story to have all the physical descriptions of people and their clothes and their office furniture and wall colors, etc. etc.? Why?
Did the book make you want to watch the movie? Why? Why not?
What did you think about the weather on Huston's ranch? And at the Sacramento River?
What did you think about the author's writing style?
What did you think about the "something quite extraordinary is likely to come out of this" on p. 86? What did you think about these kinds of statements later?
Would it be likely a Civil War soldier had never heard a gunshot?
Why was everything "cream colored": clothes, house, desks, etc. etc.?
What are some things that seem to be of its time compared to now? What do you think hasn't changed?
What do you think about how the people work with each other?
What do you think about the role of the female editor and the patriarchy of the rest?
What do you think about Huston's using Audie Murphy, the war hero, and Bill Mauldin, the war cartoonist?
How did the African Queen movie fit into the book?
Were you surprised that Huston wasn't involved in the editing? Why? Why not?
How does L.B. Mayer's "It's greatness depends on how it is received by the public" resonate today? Or not?
What did you make of Huston's response to Reinhardt's letter on p. 235?
Favorite line, image or passage.

“I certainly wasted no time in absorbing Banham's view of Los Angeles when first I lived there... He provided the most coherent set of answers by far to the question about the city... "Why is it like this?" Many Angelenos have asked the same, … though often out of exasperation, even resentment; I asked out of an increasingly all-consuming fascination that did a great deal to motivate my move in the first place. But before one can address that question, one must define what it means to be "like this," a diagnosis no two observers of such an expansive, varied, and troubled city as Los Angeles will make in quite the same way. Whether one agrees or disagrees, the enthusiastic and erudite descriptions collected in [the book] have come to form a background for the discussion.” — Colin Marshall, Archinect

Reyner Banham examined the built environment of Los Angeles in a way no architectural historian before him had done, looking with fresh eyes at its manifestations of popular taste and industrial ingenuity, as well as its more traditional modes of residential and commercial building. His construct of "four ecologies" examined the ways Angelenos relate to the beach, the freeways, the flatlands, and the foothills. Banham delighted in this mobile city and identified it as an exemplar of the posturban future. In a spectacular new foreword, architect and scholar Joe Day explores how the structure of Los Angeles, the concept of "ecology," and the relevance of Banham's ideas have changed over the past thirty-five years.

Here are the questions discussed on September 27, 2023:
Does this book work well as a historical view? Why/Why not?
Why do you think this English architect wrote this book?
What do you think of the author's writing style?
Why do you think he is so focused on Watts Towers?
What do you think about his statement that concrete owes its inspiration to adobe and that concrete or stucco covered boxes are great?
Do you think the San Gabriel Valley Area follows his explanation of the Foothills or Plains of Id chapters? Why/Why not?
Why would someone rip the page about Walt Disney and the Julius Schulman photo of Watts Tower out of the book?
Why do you think the author organized the book the way he did?
What do you think is the author's most reasonable assertion? His least?
Do you agree with his thoughts on freeways? Why/Why not? Do these thoughts hold up over time?
What did you think about the last chapter? His bibliography?
Favorite line, image or passage?

2023 Lawrence W. Levine Award Winner, Organization of American Historians Between the 1980s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, Asian Americans in Los Angeles moved toward becoming a racial majority in the communities of the East San Gabriel Valley. By the late 1990s, their "model minority" status resulted in greater influence in local culture, neighborhood politics, and policies regarding the use of suburban space. In the "country living" subdivisions, which featured symbols of Western agrarianism including horse trails, ranch fencing, and Spanish colonial architecture, white homeowners encouraged assimilation and enacted policies suppressing unwanted "changes"--that is, increased density and influence of Asian culture. While some Asian suburbanites challenged whites' concerns, many others did not. Rather, white critics found support from affluent Asian homeowners who also wished to protect their class privilege and suburbia's conservative Anglocentric milieu. In Resisting Change in Suburbia, award-winning historian James Zarsadiaz explains how myths of suburbia, the American West, and the American Dream informed regional planning, suburban design, and ideas about race and belonging. 

Here are the questions discussed, October 25, 2023:
Icebreaker: When you chose the current place you live what did you think about it? How have those thoughts changed during your time of residence?

What is your take on what "country living" and "Western rurality" mean?
Do you agree with the statement "sought an environment evocative of a timeless American West" p. 48. Why?/Why not?
Do you believe his research backs up his assertions? that his dataset or oral interviews was large enough? Why? Why not? What is the difference between the cited oral interview statements and the author's summaries of the people's desires & views that aren't cited (page 57 for example)?
What did you learn about local government from this book?
What does the book tell about how people feel about their homes?
What does the author mean by the end of the sentence "--even though, ironically, residents were the main cause of the problems they protested on p. 164?
What do you think about the author's emphasis on a "mythical California" on page 165 (for example)?
What did you think of Anthony Bourdin's statement on p. 191? "The San Gabriel Valley has the sleepy, sepia tones of a cowboy Western--a lot of building look, from afar, like they just might be a country-style honky-tonk joint.
Favorite line, image, or passage?

“... Written in seemingly effortless light verse, a sequence of sonnets, Seth tells the story of John and Janet, two California twenty-somethings in quest of love, personal gratification and the meaning of life. Set in the affluence and sunshine of Silicon Valley in the years immediately before the dot.com boom, The Golden Gate manages to be at once romantic, pleasantly sentimental and yet deeply satirical about the spaced-out hedonism of California's beautiful yuppies. When it was published, [it] was singled out as a remarkable tour de force and praised for its light comic touch, its parodic elegance and its speedy way with narrative. Now, … generation[s] later, it reads like a strangely elegiac portrait of a lost world of innocence before the corruptions of the Nineties boom and the psychological devastation of 11 September. — The Guardian

"At once a bittersweet love story, a wickedly funny novel of manners and an unsentimental meditation on mortality and the nuclear abyss. Always witty--and still profound--the book paints a truthful picture of our dreadful, comic times." --Vanity Fair "A splendid achievement, equally convincing in its exhilaration and its sadness." --The New York Times "The great California novel has been written in verse (and why not?):The Golden Gate gives great joy." --Gore Vidal From the Trade Paperback edition.

Here are the questions discussed on Wednesday, November 29, 2023.

Did you generally like/dislike the book? Why/Why not?
What do you think about the poetry? What is the best part of the poetry? The worst part? How is the sonnet working here? Can it carry all the things it needs to? Why? Why not? Do you have a favorite sonnet? Which? or Why not? How do you think the author went about constructing the rhymes?
What do you think about the author's portrayal of the Bay Area in the 1980s?
Why do you think the book was so popular then?
How is the plot? How do the parts of the plot work? or not quite so much? Why? Why not?
How does this story stand up to and/or compare to our current times?
Does it seem to be the work of an author in their 30s? Why? Why not?
How does the book differ or not from today's literature?
What did you think of the preacher's speech at the demonstration? How does it work with the plot?
How does Paul fit into the story?
How does the Ed and Phil conservation work in chapter 8? What did these two long speeches do for the book?
How do you think the author went about constructing the rhymes?
Any sign of wisdom in this book? Where? What? Or something else? What? Where?
Why are there thirteen chapters?
What did you think of the author's depiction of grief?
Favorite line, image, or passage.

“In [this] striking debut collection of stories, ... characters from the Osage diaspora travel the continent looking for home. In prose that’s sharp and funny by turns, Hicks depicts families fractured by American colonialism, patriarchy, and racism. [She] has written a beautiful book, especially valuable for offering Osage readers their world in print. Osages will try to identify situations, and they’ll compare details with the histories that were passed down in their own families. Spiders and their webs are a recurring motif, the ancient woman’s symbol, calling us all home. A Calm & Normal Heart is a gift for Osages and readers of all kinds.”— Ruby Hansen Murray, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Chelsea T. Hicks' deadpan dexterous wit can make you laugh and cry in the space of a heartbeat. A Calm and Normal Heartis the book I've been waiting for--audacious, tender, and fiercely committed.";--Louise Erdrich, author of The Sentence
"A Calm & Normal Heart is sharp, sexy, and endlessly surprising. An electric blend of playfulness and intensity in Hicks's prose ignites her characters' desires. Their stories dazzle and are to be savored. This is a gorgeous collection!";--Deesha Philyaw, National Book Award finalist and author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
"The stories in Chelsea Hicks's A Calm & Normal Heart are full of quiet truths and wry, soulful secrets. It is a book that doesn't at all feel like a debut story collection, but rather written with startling beauty and the flawless precision of a master storyteller. It is a genuine page-turner full of sentences so beautiful they demand re-reading.";--Brandon Hobson, National Book Award finalist and author of The Removed From Oklahoma to California
The heroes of A Calm & Normal Heart are modern-day adventurers--seeking out new places to call their own inside a nation to which they do not entirely belong. A member of the Osage tribe, author Chelsea T. Hicks' stories are compelled by an overlooked diaspora happening inside America itself: that of young Native people. In stories like "Superdrunk," "Tsexope," and "Wets'a," iPhone lifestyles co-mingle with ancestral connection, strengthening relationships or pushing people apart, while generational trauma haunts individual paths. Broken partnerships and polyamorous desire signal a fraught era of modern love, even as old ways continue to influence how people assess compatibility. And in "By Alcatraz," a Native student finds herself alone on campus over Thanksgiving break, seeking out new friendships during a national holiday she does not recognize. Leaping back in time, "A Fresh Start Ruined" inhabits the life of Florence, an Osage woman attempting to hide her origins while social climbing in midcentury Oklahoma. And in "House of RGB" a young professional settles into a new home, intent on claiming her independence after a break-up, even if her ancestors can't seem to get out of her way. Whether in between college semesters or jobs, on the road to tribal dances or escaping troubled homes, the characters of A Calm & Normal Heart occupy a complicated and often unreliable terrain. Chelsea T. Hicks brings sharp humor, sprawling imagination, and a profound connection to Native experience in a collection that will subvert long-held assumptions for many readers, and inspire hope along the way.

Here are the questions discussed on Wednesday, December 27, 2023, 7:00 pm.
Icebreaker: What do you think about the concept of "home" What is "home"?
What is your favorite story? Why?
Who is your favorite character? Why?
What is your favorite landscape in this book? Why?
What are the things this author does best with her stories?
What did you think about the order of the stories?
What did you learn from this book?
How does the title fit into the stories?
How do these stories portray home?
Any confusions we need to ask about?
Favorite line, image or passage?