LA's Last Bookstore ⌛️📚, Poetic Horror 😱, and Erewhon's $19 Smoothie 🥤
And investigating a matcha fountain 🍵 ⛲️ on the way to SoCal’s Free-for-All
Hello from the City of Stars!
March’s adventures have covered Austin and Las Vegas and now take us to Los Angeles. Thanks to the spiffy public transit system in Los Angeles, we were able to cover a lot of ground across Downtown LA (or DTLA, not to be confused with last week’s DTLV).
One of Writing Atlas’ favorite bookstores in the world is the Last Bookstore by Pershing Square, a beautiful complex with countless shelves, side rooms, and even an art gallery on its second floor. (El Ateneo in Buenos Aires, in a former theater, is another must-see bookstore). Not only does the Last Bookstore sell books both new and old, but they also have thousands of vinyl records they buy and sell. (They even make house calls for large collections).
After the requisite Last Bookstore visit, we always pop over to the nearby Kazunori, the reasonably-priced sister establishment of Sugarfish, for an intimate sushi hand roll experience. The rolls, including bay scallop, lobster and crab, are all constructed right in front of you, so the rice is still warm when you pick them up.
In nearby Little Tokyo, we made a quick pit stop at one of America’s sixteen Kinokuniyas. On the way, we discovered what looked enticingly like a matcha fountain. After all, it was right next to a shop called Midori Matcha—it only made sense! Unfortunately, our investigation revealed it was not in fact a matcha fountain (right color though!), but such marvelous things do exist—using the apparatus typically reserved for chocolate fondue.
Our next newsletter hails not from LA but from equally-sunny-yet-much-(much)-muggier Georgia. This week’s contributor is Mads Gordon, a student at Emory and a south Georgia native (who joined Writing Atlas team at Sundance!). While Writing Atlas is a project about fiction, specifically short stories (for now), Mads comes from the poetic tradition, and as such, trespassing from one genre to the next, brings with them lots of insight about the nature of form, technique, and … horror? Indeed, Mads takes us on a literary journey about the things that truly, genuinely horrify us, whether in fiction, in art, or life as a whole.
Poetic Horror: the Stories That Haunt Us, by Mads Gordon
I had practically no experience with horror prior to my first time interning with Writing Atlas in Summer of 2023. As a poet, I spend most of my time reading other poets, and rarely venture into the world of fiction. If I did, it would be a novel in verse or a poet-written novel (See: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar). Horror was definitely not on my radar, though. Then, I spent my summer reading, summarizing, and tagging horror shorts everyday. By the end of the summer, I was hooked.
Horror and poetry have such a strong overlap in intent and quality. I think every poem has an underlying sense of horror– a bold confrontation of the unknown, the uncertain, the questions we have yet to answer. I return again and again to a Lucille Clifton interview where she explains that “poetry is a way of trying to express something that is very difficult to express, and it’s a way of trying to come to peace with the world … it’s about questions. So you come to poetry not out of what you know but out of what you wonder.”
In trying to make this peace Clifton describes, we often have to confront the dark underbelly of our lives and the world around us—the horrific! It’s the fact that poems- and horror- are asking questions rather than giving answers that leads to works from these genres lingering with us, too. The haunting element of these works is that they leave us with no answers to comfort or assuage our confrontation with the things that unsettle us. They force us to sit with them, to continue to bear witness, and to search for the answers on our own.
In the spirit of this sentiment, I wanted to gather some of the stories I read that first summer that have stayed with me ever since, haunting me and urging me to continue exploring the questions they raise, the emotions and uncertainties they stirred up inside of me.
”The Pain-Eater’s Daughter” by Laura Mauro
A story that initially seems more focused on physical pain than psychological wounds, The Pain-Eater’s Daughter explores themes of complicated family dynamics and the nature of mercy. What does it cost us to care for others, and to what extent might we go to ease another’s pain? Without revealing too much, the ending of this story leaves you feeling raw and exposed, with losses where there is no villain to blame, and nowhere to point the finger. The painful reality presented to us is that sometimes life is full of hurt, and even our best attempts to bring healing to others will eventually lead to suffering. And yet, there is still some hope left as the protagonist, a young girl, continues down the journey her father took, and the many family members before the both of them began. She leaves determined to find hope and healing, giving the reader some sense of ease at the end of conflict.
See: Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds
“The Only Ending We Have” by Kim Newman
The clear world-building in Newman’s writing launches you into 1950’s Hollywood. You can almost hear the story pouring out of a grainy car-radio, narrated with a trans-Atlantic accent. With minimal gore, this short is still able to bring chills to a reader by evoking the constant looming threat of violence that women for centuries have faced.
And yet, with a whip-smart, fed-up starlet lead, the narrative opens up into a brief sense of empowerment as she takes action to find freedom for herself. This sense of freedom, without revealing too much, is quickly crushed as the story takes an odd, Bates’ Motel-esque turn, and we are left to ask ourselves just how inevitable facing violence– or at least the threat of it– is for women in this world. It’s easy to stay hooked to the very last sentence of this story as new themes of family dynamics are introduced and raise the questions: what type of love and protection do we uplift and admire– and where do we draw the line?
See: Jennifer Grotz’s Still Falling
“As Dark as Hunger” by Qiouyi S. Lu
I mean, just read the title. Poetry, baby, poetry! The opening image of this story– a woman finding a mermaid with a face that mirrors her own– is one that I could not escape from for months after first reading. Qiouyi S. Lu’s writing is full of such images, shocking and visceral. An open wound you can’t turn away from. The opening of the narrative introduces themes of ancestry, memory, and a lack of clarity around the two, through beautiful imagery such as the aforementioned moment of mirroring the self within an other. Quickly, we push into territory of old flames, love lost and reignited, and ultimately betrayal by a beloved, and the wounds it can leave, both physically and emotionally. This story is restrained where questions need to be left to rest and sit with the reader, and wonderfully indulgent just when you want it to be.
See: Maya Marshall’s All the Blood Involved in Love
“Mulberry Boys” by Margo Lanagan
Converging the personal and the political through an emotionally-driven narrative taking place in a dystopian, surrealist world, Mulberry Boys is unshakeable from first read. It has all the makings of a perfectly satisfying dystopian read: an eerie parallel to our real-world, a protagonist with a coming-of-age arc that threatens systems of power, and the eventual downfall of exploitative systems through mild, but ultimately justified, violence. Apart from its satisfying narrative structure, though, I was impressed by how clearly Lanagan was able to world-build and create a deeply emotional connection to the “mulberry boys” who are being exploited for profit in her story. It’s through this emotional connection that Lanagan is able to confront themes of exploitative capitalism, colonial rule, and the responsibility we have as individuals to act against systems of exploitation in solidarity with marginalized individuals.
See: Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire
Each Thing I Show You Is a Piece of My Death by Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer
This story had me practically losing my mind after my first read. I spent the next three weeks trying to explain its narrative to anyone who would listen, and after unsuccessfully evoking the same emotions it brought about in me– fear, and a weird curiosity fueled by that fear, bewilderment, and obsession– I began sending the link to everyone I could. Now I’m back again to tell you all– please read this absolute mind-fuck. I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for the indie, experimental horror film concept the story is based on. But even then, I truly believe the writing in this story stands for itself. Taking on a non-traditional, found-media type style that pieces together fictionalized news articles, blog posts, and text messages to form the bulk of the narrative, this story is anything but predictable from the very beginning. Because I’ve never read anything that compares to the narrative that unfolds, with layers and layers of unexpected moves, I won’t even begin to try summarizing it. However, I will say that most interesting to me is the way that eventually, the world of the narrative is collapsed with the world of the reader with direct references to real world actresses and movies being affected by the supernatural? pseudo-religious? techno-cursed? events of the narrative, giving the story a particularly haunting essence to it. After reading, I found myself looking for the haunting figure of this story during my daily scroll through social media, while watching TV, or checking my email. This story is ideal for those interested in the power of form, especially how breaking and experimenting with traditional forms can lead to the creation of raw emotion directly translated to readers. The reading of the piece itself becomes an experience as you sift through the data presented like a paranormal activity investigator, or internet sleuth falling down a haunted online rabbit-hole.
See: Dara Wier’s Reverse Rapture
Mad’s Favorite Wikipedia Page: Indohyus
A friend recently told me that a whale’s closest relative is a deer. While that’s not exactly true, it’s also not exactly false. Indohyus is a now-extinct deer-like creature that is potentially the closest relative of the marine mammal order, cetacea. While most people I explain this to are shocked (and I’ve explained it to many people since learning), it makes perfect sense to me, in a vibes-based way. Think of it: deer and whale both seem ancient, somewhat mythical. They both seem to know something you don’t know, but they definitely aren’t going to tell you unless you answer an impossible riddle or speak their shared faerie-esque language. While my ENVS friends don’t necessarily take the bait on this argument, I will continue standing firm on it, and spreading the word about Indohyus!
Mads’ Favorite Emoji(s): 🐒❤️🔥🙏🏻
With these three emojis, you have a response to literally anything life, or your text messages, might throw at you.
Monkey 🐒, to say— you make me laugh, this was a good convo, I am up to something but will not tell you, I can’t wait to see you soon!
Flaming Heart ❤️🔥to say—I love you, that’s awesome, proud of you, I want to kiss you, my heart is exploding with joy.
Prayer Hands 🙏🏻 to say—Godspeed, thinking of you, grateful, thank you, I hope you get what you want, we’ll see.
Mads Gordon is a writer from South Georgia. They currently study Poetry and Religion at Emory University in Atlanta. When not at home causing a ruckus on their typewriter, Mads enjoys getting pummeled in a good mosh pit in Atlanta's local music scene.
Free-For-All Museum Day
Every year, 30 museums in Southern California have an annual Free-For-All, a free museum day, which is a great deal as long as you can withstand the long lines and large crowds. We headed to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), trying the internet-famous “Pink Black” latte (guess where that name came from!) from Series A Coffee (a Korean-style café) on the way. We also passed famed skyscrapers littered with graffiti, which once belonged to the billion-dollar Oceanwide Plaza project before getting abandoned.
As we waited for our admission time (remember the long lines) at LACMA, we meandered through the nearby Academy Museum, headed up to The Grove mall complex, and decided to brave our first Erewhon (which feels like Whole Foods back when it was still a local Austin chain). The hot—and also cold—item at Erewhon is the $19(!) “Hailey Bieber Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie,” so hot that the line of customers wrapped through the many aisles of this high-end grocery store. We couldn’t wait that long to brighten our skin.
When we finally got inside LACMA, it was so packed, you would’ve thought the mass of humanity was situated at a club or rave, but no, they were all here to see Rothko, Mondrian, and O’Keefe. (Our summary text to friends: “it sucks that I can’t look at this Picasso because someone wants to pose with it but at least museum culture is alive and well!”)
Austin’s Texas Toy Museum
Here at Writing Atlas, we’re still reminiscing on all of the good times we had while we were in Austin for SXSW. One such memory: the Texas Toy Museum on Congress Street (which got bumped from our last newsletter). You might ask: how did they get all of their over 20,000 (and counting) toys? Most times, they came straight from the source: toy manufacturers and people who worked for them! With toys and arcade machines spanning the last few decades, it’s a fun and whimsical trip down memory lane. We appreciated getting to play Galaga and Space Invaders in their originals, as well as getting to see how action figures have changed throughout the years.
If you ever would like to curate stories, or share quirky photos, foods, cool places to visit or roaming stuffed animals with the community, please let us know by leaving a comment or otherwise reaching out to us! As always, keep visiting our Writing Atlas homepage as we keep rolling out exciting changes and updates!
Sincerely,
Your Writing Atlas team