The Place

The last time I saw my grandfather, Aram Arax, he was badgering an old black lady in the courtyard of their nursing home in east Fresno, his chest rattling with pneumonia and his mind stuck on one last poem he was still composing, an epic of early Fresno and his good friend William Saroyan, who…

From Valley Boulevard , it was a short drive to downtown Los Angeles . I circled past the skyscrapers and looked for the big beam of light that used to shine down on the Times Mirror building. Another seventy-five of my old colleagues, prize winners who had made the paper one of the world’s best, had been…

In a mansion in the hills above Glendale, a man named Mardiros Iskenderian rose from bed one recent morning and put on a white silk suit he hadn’t worn in twenty years. He stuffed a 9-millimeter handgun into his waistband and a .38-caliber revolver into his coat pocket and walked step by small step down the stairs. His…

I find myself standing here this morning with a mixture of delight and dread. The delight is easy to explain. I’ve been the literary equivalent of a long-distance trucker these past 15 years, hauling my story of this valley from one end of the United States to the other. So being invited to the Town…

I didn’t know Tulare Lake still existed, at least not as an actual body of water. It showed up empty on my map of California , not a drop of blue anywhere. I knew a bit about its past, that it had been the biggest basin of freshwater west of the Mississippi, that it had…

Like so many dreams that come and go here, this one began with the harvest under a brutal sky. It was a late afternoon in August, 103 degrees outside, and the boys from the McFarland High cross country team had been at it since five in the morning. They had spent the day in long…