Wildfires are Changing California Forever
ALEX ESPINOZA: Can you walk me through the genesis of Miracle Country? How did it start?
KENDRA ATLEEWORK: Miracle Country is a reckoning with the idea of home. For me, my home is the biggest and most important part of who I am — the writer self that made this book, but also the self that gardens and cleans the house and watches the mountains as they change every day (I can see them as I write this, fuzzy with rare rain clouds). The process of making the book began during a college writing class where I was assigned to write about grief.
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The Dark History of Eastern California: A Conversation
ALEX ESPINOZA: Can you walk me through the genesis of Miracle Country? How did it start?
KENDRA ATLEEWORK: Miracle Country is a reckoning with the idea of home. For me, my home is the biggest and most important part of who I am — the writer self that made this book, but also the self that gardens and cleans the house and watches the mountains as they change every day (I can see them as I write this, fuzzy with rare rain clouds). The process of making the book began during a college writing class where I was assigned to write about grief.
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A Quiet Rhythm, Pierced
In the middle of the shutdown I do something wild and crazy. I give my little brother a ride to his girlfriend’s house. It’s just five minutes, but we aren’t quarantining together, so I make him sit in the backseat kitty-corner to me and hang his head out the window like a dog. We drive down Line Street and then Main…
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Powerlines are Burning the West
We wore rubber gloves to sort the rubble, but there was not much rubble to sort. The air smelled of sulfur, and mostly only dust lingered, as if a great storm had picked up the walls and roof and furniture and lifted everything away.
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Dawn of Tomorrow — Territory
In San Francisquito Canyon, just north of Los Angeles, a dam that held Owens Valley water broke a few minutes before midnight on March 12, 1928, releasing twelve billion gallons, a wall nearly fifteen stories high, that drowned or crushed more than 450 people, hours after the engineer William Mulholland inspected and dismissed potential damage to the foundation. In trial, the beloved saint of the Angelenos said that he envied the dead.
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Charade
When it rained in Swall Meadows, Elizabeth and I took to the street. The best rains fell at night in the autumn, out of clouds resting on the side of Wheeler Crest, fat and freezing.
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On the essay "Charade"
In Tim Burton’s film “Corpse Bride,” my favorite movie when I was sixteen, a young man accidentally proposes marriage to a dead woman. After a ceremony in a moonlit winter woods, he leaves his drab Victorian village and enters the land of the dead. In the end, he almost prefers what he finds to the lot of the living.
It was the land of the dead that I wanted to inhabit when I was sixteen.
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A Public Inheritance
I came to the University of Minnesota without having done much creative writing outside of undergraduate courses. I knew I wanted to write about my home region in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains of California, but I didn’t begin to understand how to narrate the book until I took a 1,400-mile road trip in the summer of 2014 to observe California stricken by drought.
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