Books Are Living Events
A public reading in Santa Cruz for La Vieja: A Journal of Fire and What Dinah Thought
Books are not objects. They are living events that draw us into their strange knowing, into the vital dynamic that comes from the ways they hover over time and space and between the worlds. Two books, one published in 2022 and the other published in 1989 and republished in December 2023, insist on their exact and necessary relationship to this very moment. Two books who insist on having their say now.
I wrote an essay about my latest novel, La Vieja: A Journal of Fire, on August 25, 2022. But it could have been written today, February 27, 2025. So below, I offer the opening and closing of that essay, with only a few changes needed for the current day. I am doing this because on March 16th I will be reading from La Vieja: A Journal of Fire at my first public reading since before the pandemic, in Santa Cruz, CA at 3-4:30 pm.
At this event, I will also read from my novel What Dinah Thought. It is as unnerving to realize its exact relevance to this moment as it was to understand that What Dinah Thought had to be republished in December 2023, that it was as necessary to be brought into the public dialogue, as it was during the first Intifada when I wrote it.
The original motivation for What Dinah Thought was to investigate a Biblical story, still unacknowledged, the ancient core of the inter-tribal conflict remaining very much in our collective DNA. The book set out to understand this story which has not been mourned, for which amends have not been made, to see if the retelling of it in a new way, the reliving of it, even if only in the creative imagination, could offer healing to the terrible history which was (which is) once again exploding in violence. In December 2023 What Dinah Thought was re-issued in order to inject a vision of possibility for this time.
I did not write these books. The books, the spirits of the books, the characters, history integrated themselves into Story and came alive.
Here is the paragraph from the essay “La Vieja in These Times,” as if being written now: If you click on the original essay as you read the following words you will see that time and space co-exist and Story is the form of its teachings.
I am writing this from Topanga, where the mountain meets the sea in the Tongva language, a canyon village in Southern California. What inspired this essay was the raging Pacific Palisades wildfire which reached and encircled my land this winter, caused by historic weather conditions. The official fire season hadn’t ended yet, and there had been several vegetation flare-ups where I live. I had already packed my car to evacuate three times so I would be ready to leave in no more than 10 minutes.
La Vieja, the protagonist of my latest novel, La Vieja: A Journal of Fire, (Hand to Hand, Los Angeles, March 2022) is an Elder alarmed by the Anthropocene, the consequent climate dissolution, our out of control burning planet. In the past, fire season raged from August to November and recently in California, it has been beginning in June and continuing and continuing. The Eaton fire and Pacific Palisades fire of January 7, 2025 became the largest, most destructive fires in Los Angeles history, only to be “relieved” by equally record setting rains and major floods. (But not sufficient to end the drought.) The debris, toxic waste, fire damage, flood damage are not close to being remedied.
I did have to evacuate this time and for eleven days. While I was with my son and daughter-in-law, several fires, believed to have been set by an arsonist, flared around us due to wind conditions and we thought we might have to rescue her mother and all of us evacuate. A minimum of 10 people. Go where? Colorado maybe. In 2002, the Marshall fire, southeast of Boulder, Colorado, had gusted 50-to-100 mph winds, burning more than 6,000 acres and destroying over 500 homes.
16,000 structures were lost in the joint Eaton and Palisades fires and an untold number of non-humans who burned to death and an untallied number of trees.
Ultimately La Vieja and the Writer, who having agreed to write the book understands she must take on La Vieja’s consciousness as well, are together concerned with all the fires, all the kinds of fires we set, and the work to gain the ecological intelligence necessary to subvert the oxygen of violence which our culture breathes so deeply.
Again, I am called to rewrite a paragraph from the essay in contemporary terms; it does not take much effort, requires only the addition of a word or two.
This year, I am not only looking for fires but following the horrific violence being inflicted by the wars against Palestine and Ukraine which are simultaneously wars against the Earth. It is important not to distinguish them. A single on-going war with different faces is being waged violently with many victims: humans, animals, birds, Earth. All those injured and terrorized call us to experience their on-going agony as if it is our own, as if we are suffering it, which we are.
And so, the final words of the essay,:
We can choose between the ongoing brutal assaults on the Earth, from war to extraction industries that support our life-styles, the forests burning, the devastating heat waves and floods, for which we are all responsible—all of us, you, the reader and I, myself, absolutely—and the peace and beauty that emerges from the vitality that is intrinsic to the network of connections between all beings of the natural world. Even or because We are responsible for the devastation, We can choose the alternatives; We can—and I pray will—find the beautiful ways toward peaceful co-existence and restoration of the natural world.
La Vieja retreated to a Fire Lookout in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest from which she could see fifteen miles in all directions, because she decided to spend the rest of her life in order to see. To truly see, not only to catch sight of incipient sparks before they blaze, but to see what has brought us to this time in history and whether it is possible to extinguish the fires we are currently setting before they engulf the future.
Please join me in Santa Cruz for a public reading and book signing on Sunday, March 16, 2025, 3-4:30 pm, at the Resource Center for Nonviolence. Information and ticketing information here. Event hosted by Carolyn Brigit Flynn.
My original essay “La Vieja In These Times,” August 25, 2022
My essays “What Dinah Thought - A Story of Israel and Palestine,” October 30, 2023,
and “Dreaming Peace No Matter What - Reissuing What Dinah Thought,” December 12, 2023
Carolyn Brigit Flynn’s Substack essay on first meeting Deena Metzger and hosting this reading