The Place
Walking the Graveyard with Willie Saroyan
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…
Read MoreMy Little Brother the Football Coach
My Little Brother the Football Coach Once before, I tried to write about high school football. It was my younger brother Donny’s first season coaching at Kerman High, and as I followed his Lions east and west across the valley, I found myself strangely drawn to the lights rising in the distance out of vineyards…
Read MoreMy Father’s Murder: An Epilogue
One day not long ago, I drove into a valley deep in the mountains of Oregon , a swath of green pastures edged by wild blackberries and split by a creek that filled up a nearby lake. It seemed a pleasant enough place in the world, a place I might even visit again to fish…
Read MoreStewart Resnick: The Reluctant Farmer
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…
Read MoreLegend of Zankou
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…
Read MoreHighlands of Humboldt
Back in the summer of 1994, when the marijuana growers of California were still outlaws, my mother-in-law, struck with real estate fever, invited us to spend a week in a place called Shelter Cove. Deep in the highlands of Humboldt County, something of a boom was at hand, and she had persuaded her husband, a…
Read MoreThe Great Ponzi Scheme of Sprawl
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…
Read MoreThe Ghost of Tulare Lake
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…
Read MoreThe Boy Runners of McFarland
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…
Read MoreThe Place
A boy growing up in the Great Central Valley didn’t hold much in the way of bragging rights. I don’t remember anyone ever calling our flatland ‘‘the Great’’ when I was a kid or thinking that we were part of some vast, shared landscape. No fine books in praise of the valley existed back then,…
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