Santa Cruz, CA

This year I am going to feature California, the Golden State, on my blog. My friend Charise has a website titled Prayers and Cocktails with Charise Olson; I love that title! It is so – California. Charise describes her fiction as “having a certain flavor that is distinctly Californian: opportunity, diversity, and an oddball (or two). And befitting the state with mountains, beaches and redwood trees – beauty. Beauty that stirs your spirit, soul and funny bone.”

But California doesn’t seem to have a strong literary tradition. (I’m hoping for a deluge of comments that prove me wrong.) There is the Southern literary tradition (niceness with menacing undertones), New England cozies (retreats to cottages on windswept bluffs to recover from heartbreak and find new love), Texas generational sagas (twisted love, fortunes made and lost, lots of guns and ammo), but California? It’s all over the map. Maybe that’s the problem. 

When people say they have visited California, I always ask, “which one?”  We are two different states, Northern and Southern, with two distinct cultures and multiple subcultures.  Rub a story set in San Francisco up against a story set in “Jefferson,” the northernmost section of California where people want to secede and incorporate the southernmost section of Oregon, and you’ll get sparks.

This year I’m starting a blog series I’m calling Writing California. I have a lineup of guests who will discuss novels and short stories that feature the California landscape. I’ll also share resources for finding good California reads, like TripFiction.com , a website that lists, rates and reviews books that are matched with locations.

Reading tip: If you are planning a trip, read a book that is set in the location you plan to visit. Reading Edward Rutherford’s Sarum while we were in England touring Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge deepened the experience in a way that the best tour guide could not approach.

Tweetables: 

Planning a trip? Read a book set in the locale you plan to visit.

The Southern novel we know. What about the California novel?