Journal of Alta California

JAY MCINERNEY “The Magic of Malibu Colony,” page 10 Have you encountered a community of artists similar to the Malibu Colony elsewhere? When I first visited the Hamptons, specifically the village of Sagaponack, it was something of a writers’ colony. I stayed in George Plimpton’s house, and my immediate neighbors were Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, James Salter, Truman Capote, and Peter Matthiessen. But as with the Malibu Colony, the Hamptons have sadly become too expensive for all but the most successful writers and artists. DAVID WOLMAN “No Pity,” page 50 You live in Hawaii, so how did you end up following a crew of stolen-vehicle vigilantes in Portland? Last summer, a friend in Northeast Portland wrote to tell me about a guy he knew from the dog park who had this crazy tale about the theft and subsequent recovery…

The “Soviet” soldier threw me to the ground. I was hooded, hands trussed behind my back, thighs pushed to my chest, and a leather strap slid beneath my folded knees. Two of his comrades used the thong to hoist me up, then lower me into an oil drum that was buried vertically in the earth. When I didn’t fit, they pushed with their booted feet to wedge me inside the steel barrel. I sensed them placing a plywood lid above me. That was followed by the crunching sound of a spade digging into dirt and the soft thumps of soil burying me alive. It was the summer of 1985, and I was a West Point cadet who’d been ordered to Colorado’s Front Range to take part in the military’s Survival,…

SFO was aflutter with student volunteers in red T-shirts, their signs held aloft announcing the name and the place and the fact that this would be the first day of our four years together at Stanford. The volunteers were all very…upbeat. Almost impossibly upbeat to my just-off-the-plane-from-New-York eyes and ears. Speaking of ears. My left one was angled 90 degrees from my head like a wing, crusted with dried blood. Not more than 48 hours earlier, three men, and a dog, had tried to murder me. They’d only succeeded in bashing the side of my head with a broken bottle. Now that it was stitched up, poorly, it hurt too much to wash, so I’d left it as is. A blond, blue-eyed volunteer skipped up to me. “Are you GENE?” “I’m EUGENE.” “Great,” she chirped,…

Matthew Zapruder is the author of five books of poetry. He is the editor at large at Wave Books and teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Saint Mary’s College of California. He is the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2022. A book of prose, Story of a Poem, will be published by Unnamed Press in April 2023. As the poem says, I had never really had the serious urge to garden. Then one day I felt compelled. I was so worried about my sunflowers growing at all that I did not realize the problem was that they would get too big and not be able to support the weight of their heads. It’s just a myth that sunflowers turn to follow the sun. Apparently they always face…

My very first morning in residence as a homeowner in the Malibu Colony, I was out on the street with my dogs when three surfers approached from the lagoon side, wetsuits peeled to their waists, carrying their boards. I recognized some new neighbors—Edward Norton, Jonah Hill, and Flea. Norton greeted me—we live in the same building in New York, and I’d run into him during a recent stay in the Colony, while I was visiting a friend. He has a house here—an architectural landmark designed by John Lautner—as do the other two. I returned the greeting as the trio ambled down the road past Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson’s house. Such was my welcome to the Colony—a mile-long stretch of houses on a south-facing beach, sealed off from the real…

They finally dismantled the Confederate statues on a summer Saturday morning. Shoppers were heading to Charlottesville’s downtown farmers market when the crane and flatbed truck arrived to cart away the controversial memorials to Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. For those of us who live in this central Virginia town, a two-hour drive from Washington, D.C., the Lee and Jackson bronze statues underscore the volatility of our nation’s history. And how we frequently play with fire when it comes to remembering the nation’s past. Since their removal in July 2021, the Lee and Jackson representations have taken markedly different paths. The likeness of Lee is scheduled to be melted down and used as local art (though court proceedings have put these plans on hold). The Jackson figure, however, was sold by…