Last night’s Write to the City event rocked. Standing room only, authors and organizers gradually building an aligned spirit with each other and the audience through the time-honored tradition of story-telling.

We've got a few photos ready , and we’ll post video highlights and some of the original text produced for the event as they become available. 

But for now, here’s a little flavor, in order of appearance.

Set 1

Larry Fondation’s story set us up right down the street at a time when apartments were being demolished to make way for the Staples Center and tenants had to move, focusing on the hapless plight of a homeless person who is literally swept away with the debris.

Jervey Tervalon drew us into the hard times of a young single mother who ends up in a quick trick motel with mirrored ceilings and just before we sink into despair, her baby smiles, delighted, waving at his own reflection in the mirror and laughs.  And so do we.

Denise Hamilton’s alter ego reporter is looking for Pia in a transvestite homeless encampment in the L.A. river.  My favorite line:  “Here at the edge of a ruined river, in a camp for outcast transvestites, I was struck with guilt for squandering my god-given femaleness when others worked so hard to conjure up its essence.”

Davin Corona, SAJE lead organizer, recounts the last days of Markie Anderson.  African American.  Paraplegic. Alchoholic.  Yet a leader nevertheless in the fight against the slumlord owners of the infamous Morrison Hotel.

Lydia Avila followed with her own memoriam – hers to a street vendor and with it a sensibility of street vendors as the ties that bind the community, an essential part of life in East L.A., though sadly disrespected by the agencies that control the streets.

Set II

Bob Ward read about the despair of white and black laid off steelworkers who are competing to land a $3/hr job parking cars, exposing 1970s Baltimore’s raw race and class scars through the voices of his characters.

Luis Rodriguez presented Harangue #184, a “rant” on gentrification – his words, not ours – walking us through injuries, neighborhoods and where the intersections lie between L.A.’s competition for land and housing and a criminal justice system that attacks the poor.

Sara Paretsky’s private eye V.I. Warshawski is getting displaced herself as her office building falls victim to Chicago’s booming real estate market.

Aquilino Soriano of the Pilipino Workers’s Center knocked our socks off by singing her original composition a capella in a voice reminiscent of Dinah Washington’s.  Tiny woman.  Big beautiful voice.

Leonardo Vilchis took us on an emotionally evocative journey of his grief over the loss of the projects in East L.A., pain about pragmatism replacing hope, and the inspiring power of the people who continue to claim the neighborhood.

Set III

Rick Dakan’s story starts with a corpse and moves Geek Mafia’s low wage tourism industry workers and a pair of con artists through Key West’s astonishingly unforgiving housing market.

Nina Revoyr read from Southland, her love song to Crenshaw, interweaving loss and change and guiding us to fall in love too, despite the shuttered storefronts and memories of things that once were.

Gar Anthony Haywood, son of an architect,  read his own testament to development’s disregard for L.A.’s texture.

Gary Phillips, program MC, read from Violent Spring, “L.A. may well be heading for a low rent Blade Runner future, but to beat and too broke to pay for the special effects”

Andrea Gibbons and Monic Uriarte, two gentle warriors, shared their travails against police, pit bulls, armed guards, and greed – just to enter the Morrison Hotel – and when finally victorious, only to discover boarded up doors where two thirds of the residents had already been displaced.

About The Event:

Can you imagine Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe hanging out at a gastro-pub? Or Dashiell Hammett writing the Maltese Falcon from a luxury loft?

Today, noir and mystery writers are documenting a common phenomenon.

Their characters’ lives are all facing a big problem: they’re grappling with the changing face of their cities.

The vibrant city celebrated in noir books and stories is fast disappearing. Its residents and local businesses are facing the same fate as those in the non-fiction world.

Gentrification is forcing them out of their communities.

Write to the City is a one-of-a-kind slam that will pair some of the country’s foremost noir and mystery writers with inner-city activists to trade stories in a genre-melding way. We hope you’ll join us on May 29th for a literary and political exploration of the city, and a chance to talk to someone you don’t know over a whiskey sour and a background of good music.

We’ll hear from Rick Dakan (Geek Mafia novels), Larry Fondation (Angry Nights and Common Criminals), Denise Hamilton (Eve Diamond crime novels), Gar Haywood (Aaron Gunner crime novels), Sara Paretsky (V.I. Warshawski crime novels and literary memoir Writing in an Age of Silence), Nina Revoyr (Southland and The Age of Dreaming), Luis Rodriguez (poet and author of Always Running), Jervey Tervalon (Lita DuChamp novels), Robert Ward (Shedding Skin and Red Baker) and emcee Gary Phillips (Ivan Monk crime novels and co-editor of the Cocaine Chronicles, L.A. Noir, and Politics Noir).

SAJE and PM Press will bring you an unforgettable night that showcases some of our most esteemed noir writers, and we promise to both entertain and move you.

Join us on May 29th at Gallery g727, situated in the heart of our City of Angels. It’s at Seventh and Spring, on a block full of contradictions. In the shadow of lofts and skid row, right on the front line of the struggle and its visible face, bona fide L.A. noir.