I don’t even recall how I got to New Hampshire because I didn’t own a car. I do recall wearing a burgundy suit because at age 23, I thought you had to wear suits to get jobs. I was hired, and somehow moved my stuff from New York to coastal New England. Thankfully, there wasn’t much to move. Shortly after unpacking in my new, very cramped apartment, there was the smell of gas and the kitchen stove acted funny. I moved out within weeks of moving in to go to another cramped apartment where a couple next door fought almost constantly.

Local news was a big deal and a backbone of the community. There were no influencers. There was the usual attention-seeking but no attention economy. The “news desk” was a large room with bad lighting where about fifteen people mostly age 40 and under worked long hours at small desks, and everyone could hear everyone’s phones ringing because phones were objects that weighed about five pounds and sat next to a clunky desktop computer that even I found inelegant back then. Everyone heard everyone’s conversations all the time. The top dog of this operation who had final say on copy was an old white guy with a bulbous nose that had turned Rudolph-red from heavy drinking, and who had probably given up on himself long before the grind of a daily newspaper had consumed him. He was definitely someone who would not get past the HR teams of today. Everyone on staff cheered on the Patriots, ate and drank Dunkin Donuts religiously, and there was no such thing as privacy. We were all still figuring out the Internet.

Once a month, I was given the police radio to take home, and my job was to basically not sleep and respond to any car accidents, robberies, or any other “breaking” event that required a police response. Once, I covered a car accident and remember the blood on the wind shield. I also remember being jealous of a staff writer who had to report on stolen egg rolls from the town’s one Chinese takeout restaurant because that sounded like a fun assignment. Most of the time, I had to attend town council meetings where long timers debated for hours on matters that seemed small to me but were big to everyone else in the room.

My friend and fellow author, Sarah Stodola, recently posted that 40 percent of local news outlets have closed in the last 20 years. The year 1996 was the beginning of the end for local newspaper journalists, and it would soon become apparent that I would have to pivot, which was fine because I always saw myself as a long-form magazine writer, not someone chasing the scoop, but magazines would disappear, too. Since 2005, 3,5000 newspapers went out of business. During this same time period, local newspapers shed a staggering 75 percent of its workforce and print newspaper circulation dropped by 70 percent.

Walk around anywhere in America, and you see and hear TikTok from other people’s phones. What stands out now is when you hear different things. During my first full day in Paris, a man sat next to me at the cafe where I was having breakfast and scrolling through Instagram. He set his phone down, started on his newspaper and drank his coffee. I had missed that sound; the sound of a newspaper being cracked open. We exchanged smiles and comments about the heat. He went back to his newspaper.

It’s the middle of August again and this week, students returned to schools around Los Angeles, and I am teaching writing skills to 13-year-olds who have never experienced life without smartphones. I am guessing most don’t know the sounds of newspapers. Students can speak to data centers sucking up water, but they struggle with organizing their own ideas on paper—and this week was completely on paper with pencils, zero tech, as we practiced journaling.

There is a push to return to paper and pencil writing for students, and it’s not lost on me that I learned about this from my local news radio station, KCRW, while getting ready for the school day. LAUSD will limit screen time for all students, a policy that apparently is the result of a grassroots parent effort to reduce the reliance of computers in classrooms. School officials want students using paper and pencil more to boost critical thinking.

We all hear about too much screen time, and it’s during this debate when I feel grateful for being a GenXer because I can’t actually handle excessive screen time. After having a gazillion tabs and dashboards opened on my work computer, I go home, stare at the cerulean blue of the swimming pool I share with my neighbors, and I listen to podcasts in French. My brain needs different things by Friday at 5 PM, and perhaps my brain needs this shift because I grew up in rural Upstate New York where my mother didn’t want us in the house, so I climbed a neighbor’s tree and read whatever we had gotten from the library that week. We didn’t visit the library every week because my mother was an educated liberal; she had not gone to college and she voted Republican. We went to the library every week because we had no money and the library was free. So, I read a ton of books as a kid. Fast forward to now, and I am sensitive to screen overload.

As I walked around watching students do what I used to do in the 1980s, I couldn’t help but marvel that I am now teaching them the writing skills that were recently reduced by technology. Freelance writing careers tanked with AI. From 2013 to 2021, I was a freelance writer for Meredith, a major publishing firm, and making pretty decent money until suddenly I wasn’t. Who needs a freelance writer when there’s ChatGPT?

Now, we need teachers to teach kids how to structure narrative, and here I am, in this new chapter of my zigzag career, oddly at home with this new role and yet baffled that I have witnessed how technology has altered writing as well as undermined my chances at a job. My skills are back in demand, but in a new way, at a time when my writing career is older than some of my colleagues. This also baffles me because that first hot August day on the job in Dover, New Hampshire, feels like yesterday as well as lifetimes ago.

The 90s were an awesome time to be a young adult. They just were. I’ll go into that another time. Back to 2026 where my old-school skills have got my back: I still carry a notebook everywhere because I know I am more likely to remember something if I write it by hand than if I type it or dictate it. I have never read on a Kindle. At airports, I read a big, clunky book that adds unnecessary weight to my journey. At home, I actually don’t know how many books I own but they take up half a wall in my living room. If you’re talking to me in person, then I am not on my phone. I am actually listening to you not because I am polite but because journalism trains you to be active listeners. I use ChatGPT daily yet spin something from my vinyl collection on weekends when there’s time. I stopped subscribing to magazines because the clutter annoyed me (I was a New Yorker subscriber for 20 years). I am a subscriber to my local newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, but I read it on my phone. I’m on Spotify exploring podcasts every day. I deleted Facebook in 2018 after eight years of use; Twitter and TikTok in 2022 and I haven’t missed any of it. My only social media is Instagram, Substack, and LinkedIn. I tried out influencer content but got bored, though I’m not entirely sure why, or maybe I am actually following a few influencers but they’re so entertaining and so subtle about their influence that I am reeled in without my awareness.

What I do know is that my analog and digital lives are fully intertwined, and I honestly don’t understand any of my media habits other than they are uniquely mine, like dietary preferences.

Last summer, my daughter came home with a box filled with random stuff from her friend’s mother’s garage, and among the random stuff were a bunch of old tape cassettes that she admired like they were moon rocks. She is GenZ, and I asked her what the appeal was of “physical media,” as she calls it. She explained that anything online can suddenly be removed. Content survives in some cloud and can be used but it’s never yours. Ownership was the issue, she told me. When she buys a record or a book, it’s hers forever–it won’t just disappear because of some corporate algorithm.

It was that simple.

Students today engage in passive consumption of endless media. My guess is many do not have trees to climb where they can read, and fewer kids are motivated to read when there are endless games and reels and posts online. I read books in the neighbor’s tree not because at the tender age of 11, I was more evolved or out to make good choices. I read books in the neighbor’s tree because my parents fought, there was nowhere for us to go given we were surrounded by farms and woods, and my brother and I were left to figure out our day on our own.

Reading saved me. A love for books turned into a profession, which has survived multiple hits while having glamorous moments, like reading my work on a barge parked on the Seine last month. That August day in that newsroom in Dover, New Hampshire, I had no idea what was ahead for me or for the journalism industry, but here I am, in a classroom in South Los Angeles, talking to teenagers about the importance of a hook in a story while they take notes with pencils.

I tell my students that reading and writing led to a career that took me around the world, from New York to Dover, New Hampshire, to Macau to Paris to Australia. My byline remains a thrill, but 30 years later, I’m beaming with joy as I walk past a 13-year-old who was asked to hand write five sentences but instead has nearly filled a page and shows no signs of stopping. It’s ownership in motion, and I feel lucky to witness it.

If you’re cool with that, let’s carry on.

Three nights ago, I returned from two weeks in Paris where it was far too hot far too often. You felt it the second you stepped off the plane–this heat tsunami, thick and misplaced. Suddenly all those towers of airy macarons appeared fragile, even the ones in the airport.

This kind of summer intensity doesn’t belong in a city like Paris. Unlike Los Angeles, Paris is not a city of swimming pools. It is many wonderful things, but swimming pools require more searching. I found a few, but it took effort.

Still. I had flown 6,400-plus miles and Paris should never feel like a Yucca Valley parking lot in August. I don’t have air conditioning in my L.A. apartment because I don’t need it. Yes, I live in Southern California and need year-round sunlight to keep the serotonin afloat but oppressive heat is not my jam. I arrived angry at Paris (and at global warming).

This wasn’t Paris’s first heat wave, and the people push through, with respites here and there though it felt like the city was being pushed to the brink. Taxis have air conditioning; half of the metro cars do not. Cafe servers spritzed their faces with hand-held plastic bottles while balancing a tray of cafe au laits (I can’t even imagine the inferno heat in the restaurant kitchens). Workers worked: construction workers, delivery folks, shopkeepers, all out in the heat doing whatever they needed to do. The Louvre and the Eiffel Tower both closed early while I was there. People jumped into the Seine. Ladies fanned themselves with gorgeous fans that like all things in Paris probably ranged from cheap to overpriced but looked exquisite, nonetheless. Fans became the fashionable reply to La Canicule.

I was among these ladies who fanned themselves, and I gotta say, carrying a red fan from L.A.’s Olvera Street all around Paris is now a top highlight of My Hot French Summer. I grabbed this beautifully painted plastic fan last-minute when packing after I saw the rising temperatures on the weather app, figuring why not. I tossed this fan into my bag, and once there, it was forever in my grip like my smartphone.

And honestly? I miss walking around stunning Baroque architecture fanning myself like I’m the Queen of Someplace Very Important. Women who carry fans already know how awesome being a fan carrier is–I am new to this club. All those historic, sepia-toned photos of ladies donned in lace on a hotter-than-hell day holding their fans with all the mystique required of the moment? They knew.

There’s that crack when you snap open your fan, which means you mean business, whether it’s waiting for your drink at a bar or waiting for the metro or waiting for an Uber. There’s the hummingbird-like waving, the generation of some much-needed yin to the explosion of yang, the changing of this uncomfortable, historic La Canicule into something somewhat less intolerable. Fans are momentum.

There is now a difference between waiting for life to happen while fanning yourself with some beautifully printed fan and waiting for life to happen without a fan. I now prefer the former. A woman holding a fan is a woman who knows things and has boundaries. You see this in thousand-year-old murals of Japanese women dancing with their fans or Renaissance-era oil paintings of ladies posing with their fans and I saw this on the 4 Line last week. These women are poised, confident. Carrying a fan is a timeless feminine wisdom.

I fanned myself at cafes, museums, metro stations, and on street corners, like an influencer impatiently holding court. I’m still unclear why fans possess such feminine power (I did not see any bro fans, but men should definitely carry them, too), but I now know I will never travel around Europe (or anywhere above 85 degrees) without one. There was something inexplicably sexy about cracking open and waving my bright red fan that who knows is how old while fading away in 105-degree heat (yes, triple digit heat several days in a row). That fan hadn’t been used or even touched in years, and suddenly it’s one of the five most important items in my possession during my two weeks in Paris. Do I have a photo of myself with this fan? Sadly, no. Next time.

Also, when did women stop being ladies with a sense of flair who carried fans? Why am I not huffing and puffing around the produce aisle at Ralph’s navigating U.S. inflation with my Olvera Street fan at full speed?

While fanning myself, Paris debated the pros and cons of air conditioning. Cold champagne was literally available anywhere and everywhere, but cold water was not, let alone bottled water—sometimes grocery store shelves were empty, though there was always chilled cheese. There are many, many, many things that France does better than the rest of the world—managing heat waves is not one of them.

Years ago, I wrote about my obsession with hotel swimming pools for both the Los Angeles Times and National Geographic Travel, and on this trip, I found two swimming pools during my hot two weeks in broiling Paris (to be fair, there were four days when it was not broiling but otherwise it was broiling). One was underground, very small, and seemed like this secret hotel managers really didn’t want people to know about. It cost 35 Euros to use for one hour, which was the equivalent of a Franprix grocery haul because food in Paris is very high-quality and not expensive.

The other was a neighborhood pool where I didn’t hear any American English because I stayed in a neighborhood where American tourists don’t really go. Swim caps were required at this neighborhood pool, and I had to buy one from the lobby vending machine for about 5 Euros, much like purchasing a Snickers bar or a bag of chips. I accidentally bought a children’s swim cap, and the attendant told me with a devilish grin I had made a good choice.

The neighborhood pool, Piscine Hebert, was first built in 1896 and then had a retractable roof added on, so it has this cool indoor/outdoor vibe. This was a cheap way to chill out that I wish I had learned about earlier in my trip, especially since it was a 13-minute walk from the flat. I wanted to check out the Josephine Baker Pool that’s on the Seine, but that involved a metro ride, and the heat did factor into movements and decisions. Sexy fan or no sexy fan, schlepping through 95-degree heat to get from A to B is work and involves carrying a water bottle. Sometimes, I felt up to the adventure and went out anyway; sometimes, I opened the balcony door, stood for two seconds outside and quickly went back inside.

The heat management strategy that my hosts shared involved two steps: keep the curtains drawn and take cold showers. Unfortunately, the cold water ran hot the entire time I was there. Nothing but champagne is cold in Paris. I’m not even sure if the water in all of the city’s grand water fountains is cold, though I do regret not being that crazy American tourist to publicly give that a go. The Medici Fountain was tempting, but people behave around that fountain because, well, it’s the Medicis, so I stayed the course and sweated it out like everyone else.

Still. Paris never disappoints. Despite feeling hot (literally though sometimes figuratively, too, because of my sexy fan) as well as cranky, Paris showed up for me after a rough start. Baristas warmly greeted me and remembered me after a single visit. There seemed to be a collective sympathy from the French about current American leadership, as if France was saying “we’re there for you whenever you’re finally out of this toxic relationship.” I had a lovely dinner in absolutely lovely St. Germain with Sacha, author of A Good Vintage, whom I first met 25 years ago when we were both scrappy freelance writers in Washington, D.C. I got to stand on stage and read my piece published in the Best Women’s Travel Writing Volume 13 at this stunning literary barge venue salon with a view of Notre Dame. I finally got to see the Luxembourg Gardens where Reflection Pond Green might become the trendy hot new Pantone color no one cares about. I asked for ice almost everywhere and rarely received des glaçons. I scored during some consignment shopping in Montmartre. I mastered the Line 4 metro and in true French fashion, it suddenly closed while I was on it. I lit candles at Sacre Coeur. I had a clunky conversation in French with a taxi driver who tolerated my verb choices. I ate this pink, whipped buttercream, gluten-free concoction not once, not twice, but four times. Why? Because France makes gorgeous things including gorgeous desserts and fanning myself while diving into this decadent pink raspberry tarte was better than some dates I have had.

My Hot French Summer was sexy, annoying, frustrating, beautiful, surprising, a bit dehydrating, sometimes noisy, sometimes sticky, and never lacking in intrigue. I’ve barely unpacked the effects these two weeks had and will have on me. This was my fifth time in 33 years to the City of Lights, and on the flight home three days ago for the first time ever, a view of the Eiffel Tower from the plane window. Not once had I ever seen this iconic landmark from the sky. The first time I visited Paris in 1993, I was a 20-year-old college student standing at the base of the Eiffel Tower, looking up—not down—thrilled beyond words. The Eiffel Tower was always huge, a beacon that over the years, has welcomed me as a student, a wife, a mother, a divorcee, and now a writer with award-winning work to share.

As the plane climbed, the Eiffel Tower growing smaller in view, Paris sprawled out below cramped and crowded under wisps of heat, I instantly missed all of it despite the inability to get a glass of iced water. I was eager to walk the beach back home and feel the sand under my toes again, for a more horizontal life of coastline and mountains, and then Paris said to me, “I’ve loved every version of you. Come back soon.”

Life is crazy.

For everyone.

Especially now.

The fact is when it came to free time not working at a middle school in South Central Los Angeles, all I wanted to do was sip coffee on my balcony, listen to music and podcasts with my big, bulky headphones on, and tune out the world. I had zero energy for platform-building. I was navigating some pivots, plus the domestic and global messes we’re in thanks to narcissistic leadership. It’s chaotic out there. I’m sorry for all that people are enduring right now. I truly am.

Two years ago, I wasn’t that busy, had a ton of time on my hands, and at a very low point, I wrote an essay in which I begged Los Angeles to not let me down. I was struggling to find work, this man I was dating was proving to be a complete jerk in need of psychiatric care, and my novel had been rejected. I had moved out to Los Angeles in 2018 to get divorced, reinvent myself, not have seasonal winter depression, bike the beach in January, and be the woman I had always imagined myself being. I poured all of this heartbreak and hope into an essay that my amazing editor, Matthew Webb at Panorama, published in March 2024.

One year later, that essay won the Grand Prize Best Travel Story Of The Year Solas Award. One year after that, this essay is now part of an anthology available for pre-sale at Amazon and Bookshop, and will be released on June 9. The anthology’s editor, the very lovely Lavinia Spalding, wrote a fantastic Substack about this a few days ago detailing the story behind the stories (plus, a writing prompt!). My essay, initially published by Panorama, is titled “It Can Be Beautiful For Everyone,” and I’m super excited to say that it’s among quite a lineup: Roxane Gay, Susan Orlean, Ann Hood (who always knitted beautiful things when we were on the bus together in Cuba!), Marcia DeSanctis, and my dear friend and indefatigable globetrotter, Lisa VanderVeen.

Stories have their own journeys, how they happened, how they’re told, where they go, who reads them. I remain very, very surprised by the wings on this one essay and all the places it is going to. Someone in Amsterdam posted my essay on their Facebook. Again, stories have their own journeys.

This year marks 30 years of writing and publishing; 30 years of seeing my byline in newspapers or magazines or online, 30 years of watching my industry become almost unrecognizable, something I wrote about here last year. However, never in my 30-year career have I been in an anthology listed among authors I have admired for so long, women I would love to have a margarita with (and chips and guac) so that I could hear more about their travels—where they went and why, and how their restlessness for travel transforms them as it transforms me, though the irony of this anthology is that in this piece, I didn’t go anywhere. My first travel article was about London and was published by The Boston Globe in 2001. A full quarter of a century later, here, in The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 13, I roam the enigmatic 405 and the beach 20 minutes from my apartment—apropro for an L.A. woman.

It’s strange to feel so blessed when there is so much suffering going on. Two years ago, when I wrote this essay and was in an extremely dark and somewhat scary funk, I imagined the world outside as this ongoing disco that I wasn’t invited to—bright and loud and vibrant, where everyone was always happy and resourced and dancing and having too much fun to worry about anything.

Of course, I was telling myself this fantasy to amplify my own disappointment. The human mind is a hall of mirrors.

It’s not hyperbole to say writing this essay helped pull me out of this funk—that, and telling myself to shower each day and at least try to step outside of the apartment. Small steps count. Sometimes, I did make it out of the apartment, just to feel the California sunshine on my face, and sometimes I didn’t because for whatever reason, I needed to sit inside my own darkness that day. Two years ago, despite my wandering thoughts, I definitely couldn’t have imagined this.

So imagine all of it, and see where it takes you. When I wrote this piece, I immediately heard it in second person before anything else, and I want to thank my intrepid editor, Matthew, for allowing me to go wide and weird with this. Creative freedom matters. I wrote “It Can Be Beautiful For Everyone” shortly after my agent at the time told me that my next manuscript should be in a single point-of-view and told in a more linear way. She’s a lovely person, but I always resented this feedback to write to market, to be more commercially viable, and so I wrote an essay that was anything but commercially viable and it is now in a book. Meanwhile, the multi-POV, non-linear novel I wrote in 2022-2023 that was under acquisitions review by a Big 5 imprint and then rejected by a sales team for being “too literary” now has a publisher. More to come later this year.

Gratitude is an understatement. Thank you, Lavinia. Thank you, Matthew and the Panorama team. Thank you Travelers’ Tales. Thank you, readers. Thank you new subscribers who discovered me from the recent New York Times profile on the amazing Sari Botton. Please consider pre-ordering The Best Women’s Travel Writing Volume 13, whether you live out of a suitcase or am an armchair traveler or anywhere in between.

There’s a saying that the world is round and the roads are curved so that we will never fully see what’s ahead. Let the journey surprise you, as it continues to do for me.

With love,
L.A. Woman
xo

Also not far from all these pumpkin spiced goodies we didn’t know we needed—all the decorative gourds that Earth can bear: green ones, “Cinderella” ones, white ones, classic Charlie Brown orange ones, even the pockmarked ones sharing center stage.

Fuck yeah, y’all! It’s fucking fall!!!

Okay, why all the f-bombs on a chill Sunday after a relaxing morning swim in my L.A. pool because L.A. pools stay open after Labor Day?

Well, given the onslaught of political chaos that is currently America, the presence of this pumpkin spiced capitalist bullshit is the orange life raft I need. I went to Whole Foods yesterday. (Yes, you can be anti-oligarchy and still shop at oligarchy places because you’re a single lady on one paycheck and Whole Foods is actually the closest grocery store, and for whatever reason, the 365 brand is inexplicably cheaper than Pavilions.) The Whole Foods autumn food tower is next level, with the usual pumpkin spiced stuff but something I have never witnessed before, and I am a well-traveled person: candy corn coffee creamer.

This is what 2025 has brought us: chaos and candy corn coffee creamer.

I didn’t look at the list of ingredients in this creamer because, well, I was scared, in the same way I’m now scared of news headlines.

Oddly, pumpkin spice season is offering a surprising orange, cinnamon-scented respite. Moreover, the origin story of pumpkin spice season is odd and a uniquely American cultural phenomena. You don’t visit Japan or Nepal or France or Mexico and see these countries go batshit for pumpkin spiced everything as soon as late August arrives. Nope. Like jazz, baseball, greasy spoon diners, and brutal bipartisanship, pumpkin spice is All American.

Many of us predate pumpkin spice season and remember a time when fall was when you simply drank cider, maybe got a pumpkin from a grocery store the week before Halloween, and maybe went trick-or-treating or attended costume parties and then by November 1st, it was over. That was it.

So here’s a brief timeline of how pumpkin spice season came to be for those not yet in the know, and how, in late summer of August 2025, facing a column of glass jars of pumpkin spice marinara sauce, I felt rescued by reassurance.

In 1934, McCormick & Company introduced a pumpkin spice medley consisting mostly of cinnamon and nutmeg, and a few years later, canned pumpkin appeared on store shelves.

And then not much happens pumpkin spice-wise for the rest of the 20th century, but then fast forward to 2003 when Starbucks invents the pumpkin spice craze.

You read that right.

The place where you get your Frappuccino or Peppermint Mocha is the brains behind All Things Pumpkin Spice. Actually, Starbucks didn’t set out to start a craze; the team in the Liquid Lab needed something catchy for the fall lineup and they brilliantly tapped into an autumnal vibe meant to evoke nostalgia and warmth. In essence, Starbucks sells coziness.

I always found this part interesting since I couldn’t recall once feeling nostalgic for pumpkin spice anything even when Starbucks placed pumpkin spice nostalgia directly in front of me. Pumpkin spice was not what was happening in the mustard-and-avocado 70s’ decorated kitchen when I was growing up—but for whatever reason the idea of Starbucks’ pumpkin spice concoctions tapped into my personal memories of fall in Upstate New York: chilly nights, heavier sweaters, actual pumpkins on doorsteps, so bravo, Starbucks! Absolutely brilliant marketing.

Within the first decade of the 21st century, pumpkin spice momentum hit stratospheric levels, and fall became an unequivocally ALL OUT THING. In 2009, McSweeney’s published the battlecry and love letter for All Things Gourd-tastic, and the obsession with fall things kept going! Gourds of all shapes and sizes had somehow achieved a cultural status alongside all the Western, Christian stuff marketed to us: Christmas trees, Valentine hearts, Easter eggs and bunnies. (Interestingly, when I was in Macau in October 2017, there were paper rabbits adorning the streets everywhere, and I learned rabbits are a popular fall symbol in parts of Asia, representing abundance during the harvest).

No joke: my neighbor had a gourd wreath on her door hours after Labor Day weekend was over. Americans take gourd decorating very seriously. Before the shock of candy corn coffee creamer, I was browsing the pumpkin bins and found myself overthinking my choices: this one had nice even orange stripes, this one had a crooked stem, this one was a bit flat on one side. Yep. I went there because obsessing about gourd decor is easier on the emotional and cognitive bandwidth right now. Obsessing about gourd decor is the new self-care.

Also, you’re not imagining things: pumpkin spice season does start earlier each year, now overlapping with beach season and back-to-school season, with pumpkin spice marinara somehow gaining a foothold in August, what should be treasured vacation time.

I used to mock this pumpkin spice crap because life was easier back then and democracy was somewhat reliable (or maybe I was just taking it for granted, I don’t know) and hanging overpriced gourds on one’s door seemed silly. During simpler times I couldn’t appreciate simple (corporate-driven) pleasures.

And now? Now, I’m shimmying between rainbow bins of gourds and stacks of weird, seasonal foods, and I am bursting with relief and gratitude. Chasing the dream at 50 in LA LA Land means holding on to civility and touchstones you didn’t know would become touchstones because they gained an unexpected significance during so much loss. “There’s still this!” I tell myself. There’s still this bizarre, Cucurbitaceae madness that is both sacrificial and festive. Masked agents randomly grab Latino workers off the streets. Federal funding for public services has been decimated. People live paycheck to paycheck–still. Elizabeth Gilbert’s saccharine narcissism and its echo chamber clickbait are everywhere, especially here on Substack. Free speech is under constant threat. And yet in the face of injustice and instability, despite the relentlessness of the attention economy, seasons quietly do what seasons have always done, changing on time, indifferent to the mistakes we make here on the ground. The fall equinox arrives whether we have our shit together or not, and amidst this rust-and-ginger tinted disorder that has sadly become quotidian, cartons of candy corn coffee creamer offer some artificial sweetness against life’s harsh unpredictabilities.

P.S. Weekdays are for NPR and KCRW, and weekends are for music, so I was beyond thrilled when the new Buckingham Nicks album dropped this past Friday, songs that are either my age or older now part of the algorithm. I haven’t broken out the Stevie Nicks shawls yet to dance (who is witchy AF in all the cool ways), but my favorite track is “Long Distance Winner.” We all know that Nicks and Buckingham commodified their love spats, and god bless them for it! If you’re going to share a sound booth and a stage with someone who both turns you on and pisses you off, why not pad your bank account doing it? “Long Distance Winner” is about that artistic and romantic tension, the struggles with perfectionism, opening with the beautiful line, “Sunflowers and your face fascinate me.”

Happy Equinox, friends. Power up with some candy corn coffee creamer and go dance. Get your gourd on. Get witchy. Be kind.

For example, among the many prompts generated by AI about my writing, one was “Tell me more about Katrina Woznicki's writing style.” Well, shoot. If someone asked me this at a bar, I wouldn’t know what to say. When I began the UCLA Extension screenwriting certificate program in 2022, I was asked about my brand or writing style. I told the UCLA representative I had no idea, so he asked me to name what I watched. I ran off a few titles and he said, “I would say your brand leans towards social commentary.”

This turns out to be true. My rom-com is social commentary. My horror WIP is social commentary. This Substack is social commentary. AI agrees, noting my observations about defining success on one’s own terms (holy crap, that’s true!), cultivating resilience, and navigating mid-life while exploring the “nuances of place and identity” (holy crap, that’s true, too!). AI adds that my writing style is “evocative, thought-provoking…with an emphasis on place” and that my prose is “clear and engaging.”

Well, shucks, AI, thanks! (Or “A1” as the insipid Secretary of Education put it; though A1’s Instagram reply was BRILLIANT!!! Super smart—more on Instagram below).

Surprisingly, the somewhat gushing AI response meant a lot after enduring years and years of old white dudes ripping up my soon-to-be clear and engaging prose with their red pens and strong opinions. Thank you, old white dudes, for the thick skin, and thank you, AI, for leaving me flattered, humbled and further confused about my situationship with technology because I can’t seem to put a label on what this is.

AI cited specific examples of my writing, such as “It Can Be Beautiful For Everyone,” which won the 2025 Solas Awards Grand Prize, and “Under A Blood Red Sun,” both published by Panorama, where I write a column about life in Los Angeles, with the latest installment now available in audio. (Audio! Okay, tech is cool!!) It’s really weird to read about yourself, and weird/fun/cool to hear your writing being read by some software program you’ve never heard of.

Once I stopped blushing, I dug a little deeper. AI was more right than wrong, but it did cite a few travel articles I had never written, once referencing my experience with a waiter in Paris. Wait, what waiter? And Paris when? I’ve written about an experience with a waiter in Havana, but never Paris. This turned out to be a blatant error; when I clicked on the reference, there was no mention of my name, so I am not sure how AI pulled this into its aggregated response. Like a contrite boyfriend, AI acknowledges its mistakes but wow, a lot was right. Did I mention this was weird?

What gets reflected back, what gets picked up—and why? Does anyone really know? This AI exercise reminded me of how my students remember some small tidbit that I said to them three months prior that made some significant impression on them. No one knows what’s going to stick, and for all my anti-branding ranting, being anti-brand seems to be evolving into, well, my brand.

I might’ve unintentionally branded myself at school, too, where students are brand savvy. I have a few key catch phrases I always use to kick off explaining expectations and instructions at the start of every class, and apparently one phrase caught on so much that at the end of the year, students asked me to write it on their backpacks or T-shirts. Middle school is high energy, and my go-to phrase that just kinda happened is “Chill Vibes.” I write “Chill Vibes” on the white board every time. Every. Time. If class gets too loud, I’ll say “Are these chill vibes?” The class will say no, and things simmer down. These two words have proven to be effective redirection. “Chill vibes” is not in any classroom management instruction I’ve encountered. This phrase vibed with students to the point where I overheard one boy tell another boy who was being disruptive, “Bro! Chill vibes!” and he meant it. The other kid quieted down. When I told my GenZ daughter this, she said, “Mom, you’ve branded yourself. You’re an influencer.”

Yikes. Maybe?

A cornerstone of branding is consistency, and without trying, I am consistent, in and out of the classroom, on and off the page. AI seems to think so, too. I consistently return to key themes often using landscape as character. AI cited this Substack as an example, and now that I’ve written more about branding and identity and influencing here on Substack, AI may one day cite this, too.

Welcome to the algorithmic echo chamber where I write stuff (now called content creation) that might appear in someone else’s algorithm that might come across as brand impact because I’m reinforcing key messages about myself that might later appear in someone else’s search engine (which, by the way, Instagram is about to become a bigger engine of SEO since GenZers prefer searching via social media versus Google) that might one day show up in an AI feed when I or a complete stranger or someone I knew back in the third grade types in my name.

Too much? Yes, all of it. That run-on sentence, algorithms, echo chambers, all of it.

Briefly circling back to the Instagram-as-search-tool thing, this interesting Glossy article explains why, noting the younger generation’s ease and dependence on imagery over text, something I’ve definitely noticed when teaching middle school. Google has started indexing Instagram, or as the article puts it, Instagram’s “metadata will now be scraped by Google.”

Whew, that sounds invasive! Scraping? Also, is your head spinning from all this digital momentum? Mine is. I quit most social media except Instagram, and while my caption game is strong, I’m not sure if it’s scrape-worthy, though after this AI self-discovery experience, who knows? But captions and hashtags are gonna be scraped so post mindfully.

No wonder there’s a nostalgia for analog media.

I get algorithm fatigue easily–maybe quicker than most–and I likely won’t AI myself again anytime soon (that might not be true, I don’t yet know). There’s so much over-sharing and trauma dumping, and yes, there’s an audience for everything, and I’ve learned I am not that audience. I don’t want to know everyone’s feelings all the time–I just don’t. If we’re sharing feelings, then it’s in person, over wine and gluten-free junk food or cocktails the color of birds found in rainforests.

Those are my boundaries.

Here in the Substackverse, I’ve “manipulated” my algorithm to the best of my ability so that my Substack feed is top-heavy with pictures of: Paris, travelogue, flowers, and attempts–successful or epic failures–at cake decorating because the content saturation is too much. There were WAY too many feelings and daily affirmations on my Substack, so I changed that shit up quick: the Eiffel Tower and cupcakes and people’s watercolors of chickens. I’m calling this digital resilience.

Which brings me to analog media or what my daughter endearingly refers to as “physical media.” For me, analog means primarily books, vinyl, and travel triptychs, including a 1932 travel brochure about San Diego that includes maps, recommended hotels, cleaners, hair stylists, and restaurants as well as a palm reader and where to get breakfast for 15 cents. I never got into CDs or DVDs even when they were the things to buy. This summer, my daughter came home with a box of tape cassettes, CDs, and vinyl from her friend’s mother’s garage. Tape cassettes! Mixtapes! I picked up one cassette and handled it like it was some delicate fossil about to decompose in my hand.

Post-pandemic, it appears we’re in a growing undercurrent towards IRL experiences. Swipe culture is dying with speed dating venues selling out as singles get tired of dating apps with pay walls. Substack used to feel like a virtual Algonquin Round Table with emerging writers sharing interesting work, and now Substack feels like a very crowded party where we’re all yelling to be heard, and the floor is super sticky from spilled booze. Instagram long ago stopped being the fun place to share your vacation pics; captions are carefully crafted as part of your brand, with Instagram now becoming a go-to source for online searching.

I don’t have rose-colored glasses about the good ol’ days because they were dominated by CIS white male Christian norms and I’m done with all that, but when it comes to my media diet and IRL, there’s something perfect and irreplaceable about the click of playing a mixtape or the soft scratch of a record ending. There’s something perfect and irreplaceable about flirting at a bar and having no idea that you would be flirting at a bar versus swiping profiles. There’s something perfect and irreplaceable about the smell of libraries and shelves of dusty old books versus another screen with more content. I love Spotify algorithms, but I still need the tangible world. I don’t want to know everything all the time.

So, where does this leave me and tech? Likely right where we started, with me AI’ing myself and then reading about brands and metadata scraping and then feeling weird followed by a rushed hug to my books and vinyl where I shout, “IT’S ALWAYS BEEN YOU!!!” It leaves me watching my daughter admire a box full of old cassette tapes because they might as well be moon rocks to her. It leaves me deleting apps and social media accounts and then making really great friends through Instagram–seriously, I have formed a few solid friendships specifically through Instagram. I met the talented Blair Glaser through Instagram, she’s nearby, we have coffee, and she writes a very thoughtful Substack on human intelligence called The HI Stack that you should check out. Google can scrape whatever, but social media can truly be social.

I’ll AI myself again at some point–it’s like trying on lingerie in a very over-lit dressing room, feeling pretty and exposed all at once. And maybe this is human history with new tools, from fire to AI, the “Wow, WTF” reaction, the “this feels good—maybe/kinda/sorta—what else can it do?” reaction.

Here I am, Internet. I’ve known you since you were in diapers. Let’s do this.

P.S. Is anyone having a carefree summer? No. I am craving a vanilla summer now like you wouldn’t believe. Vanilla is the new safe-and-stable. Chaos continues, and L.A. is still taking hits, and don’t even get me started on the racist raids that are the wrath of Stephen Miller. Santa Monica is EMBARRASSED AF about that twisted dude. Is there a dystopia mixtape yet? Someone or many someones are working on that somewhere.

Meanwhile, not vanilla but more gossamer is a replayed tune on my Spotify: “She’s My Baby” by Mazzy Star, which was released in 1993 and immediately takes me back to every college bar I ever danced in. This song is time travel. And on the turntable at the moment is the god formerly known as Prince, specifically his 1983 album “Piano and a Microphone.” Rolling Stone called this album “brilliant” because it is, and I feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t like Prince and am jealous of anyone who hasn’t yet listened to this album because to hear it for the first time is like being bathed in warm gold (cuz that’s how we roll at Chez Woz). It’s only 34 minutes, but trust me, it’ll be 34 awesome minutes, and if you don’t think so then we’re not compatible in any way. Besides, you’ve waited longer for DoorDash.

I discovered this album last year with a true WTF moment, but I am often late to most parties. 2025 has been a shitshow year, so it’s no surprise I’m going back to the 80s and 90s for some calm. Things were easier then, and hopefully, Stephen Miller and his ilk will be held accountable, and things will become easier going forward.

Be kind. Stay connected. Read stuff. Be creative.

And yet.

If you’ve been following the news, Los Angeles is making headlines once again; 2025 has been quite the year for my beloved LA LA Land, and we’re barely halfway through. First, wildfires and now ICE raids, and I have found myself closer to both than I might have expected. Since January, I’ve worked at a school in South Central Los Angeles. My students are Latino. My colleagues are Latino. When I park my car, there’s a little old Latino lady behind a gate who waves to me while she sweeps her driveway. I hear Mexican music playing all the time. There are roosters crowing near the parking lot. On the penultimate day of school, I played Loteria or what’s sometimes called “Mexican bingo” with students. Not too far away, ICE agents roamed. Teachers were asked to stand near the gates at dismissal to ensure students’ safety. Thankfully, the final week remained celebratory, everything went smoothly. ICE didn’t come by. An ice cream truck parked in the courtyard and doled out sugar under a hot sun. Students asked me to sign their T-shirts and backpacks. The kids were loud and laughing, the sounds of summer.

I’m very proud of how L.A. is standing with immigrant communities and pushing back against these racist raids. L.A. is the Latino community, not red carpet Hollywood. Yes, Hollywood is the signature industry here, which is going through its own difficulties, but it’s a small piece of L.A. My L.A. is the one where someone blasts Mexican love songs and keeps a rooster behind a gate (one that cock-a-doodle-doos at all hours, including at 4 PM) a few blocks away from a Tom’s Jr. My L.A. is the street corn vendor I pass by when I walk to my car (before I reach the loquacious rooster). My L.A. is five different people selling the exact same bundles of white sage for different prices along a bike path facing the ocean while skateboarders from all kinds of backgrounds are briefly airborne before they loop around one another. My L.A. is driving by that giant fiberglass donut advertising Randy’s Donuts because that’s my commute home and–no joke–I smile every time I see that big ol’ fake pastry peeking out from behind a highway overpass.

L.A., like many American cities, is a city of immigrants, and if you’re not standing with immigrants, you’re on the wrong side of history. I voted for Kamala. I won’t even say that other guy’s name and I won’t go into the sickness that’s consuming American politics right now. You can doom scroll and find that anywhere and everywhere. What I will go into is what does chasing the dream in L.A. look like in 2025? Is anyone dreaming anymore? Why bother amidst all this dystopia? There’s been so much going on lately, it’s been difficult for me to write, and I tend to under-share, under-post, under-promote, not because I’m shy (unless it’s karaoke, which is a hard no). I’m not. IRL is where I am fucking fine. Posting stuff when America is in a free fall? I go inward, but thanks to my friend who is chasing her dream in France, here I am, writing, firing up the creative juices, carrying on.

Chasing the dream in Tinseltown involves more zigzagging now. It’s going to be more uphill because everything now is more uphill. Not only am I of an age when people don’t usually try to “break into” a new industry, there’s less industry now to break into. L.A. is on the precipice of becoming a rust belt town, having outsourced the very industry it built. It’s too expensive here and the production of film and television is increasingly moving to anywhere else that’s cheaper, from New Mexico to North Carolina. On-location shooting is down by more than 22 percent this year and it’s expected to continue to decline. A few weeks ago, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass signed an executive order to make it more affordable to shoot projects in L.A. and to support the development of film and TV crew jobs, many which were lost after the 2023 Hollywood strikes in which I regularly picketed (mostly at Amazon’s studio). Folded up in a dresser drawer is my blue WGA T-shirt, which I wore at every picket, even though I’m not yet part of the WGA because I haven’t yet sold anything, and even now there might not be anyone to sell to unless government and industry turn things around.

It’s contraction in every direction, this widespread sense of decline and worry. I had coffee with a screenwriter a few weeks ago who’s had a fair amount of success in this town, and she thinks L.A. is going to belly up like Detroit after automobile manufacturing abandoned everyone.

No one has any good news to share lately.

So what am I doing to cope?

This past week, I started writing a horror film after the idea pinballed around my mind for a month. This makes no sense (or maybe it does?) but stick with me for a sec.

I started writing a horror film and on top of that, a rom-com I wrote two years ago got accepted into a competitive writers’ workshop at UCLA Extension that takes 12 students who are committed to polishing up their work and submitting it to contests and the marketplace. It’s not a workshop for hobby writers; they made that clear. It’s a workshop for people who better fucking commit to this craft. And, hopefully, there will be a marketplace to go to.

So, I’m writing a new screenplay that’s kind of Cthulhu meets Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening,” (very English major nerd stuff) and dusting off another one (my only completed screenplay so far) when there is nothing in the current environment to indicate entrepreneurial fecundity of any kind. How many screenwriters or writers of any discipline started writing down an idea when everything around them was going to shit? Probably several. At least ten of us. No, one hundred. Possibly a thousand. Maybe thousands and thousands over the years? A huge group of disillusioned writers who had no idea what to do with their fear and their rage other than to write it down? Like Facebook big? Binders big? Yeah, that’s it. Consider me part of that group now.

I write not because I want to “break into” anything; I love teaching and I love my school. I plan to remain a teacher, hopefully at my current school. I hope to sell my novel. I hope to sell a screenplay. I’ll keep on showing up to school every day. I write because I love writing. It’s All The Things.

When shit goes sideways, dries up, whatever, that’s the time to create, to reconnect with our humanity. Am I a novelist? I don’t know. I wrote a novel. Am I a rom-com writer? I don’t know. I wrote a rom com. Am I a horror writer? I don’t know that either but I’m writing a horror flick. Given the current administration and the dissolution of democracy, I would imagine many of us might possess untapped horror writing skills. Let’s see what the next two to three years generates in terms of books, film and TV.

I can’t tell you why I’m writing a horror feature other than I am and it seems to be gelling. I should be writing another book but this horror feature idea is so present. Sounds ridiculous, but it’s true: it’s showing up for me. It’s saying “Write me. Please. Now. I’m here. This matters. Fucking do this. Do not give up.”

Last Sunday, I was at The Georgian Hotel having brunch and sipping a pink cocktail, a mix of prosecco and watermelon juice. Who doesn’t want to feel a bit numb these days as the U.S. Constitution takes brutal beating after brutal beating? Dining at this hotel has been an L.A. dream of mine, and nearly seven years later, I finally got to do it. On the outside, I looked kinda glamorous even though on the inside, I felt like shit. Not far from The Georgian is my bike path and the sage vendors and the skateboarders and the dudes with dad bods playing volleyball and the hot girls on rollerskates and the guy with the bleach blonde hair who yells out “Champion!” to everyone and anyone and the lady in her sixties or seventies who wears a thong and has a killer serve and my gaze is towards everything I love, love, love about L.A. My city. Where all kinds of super fucked up shit happens, where all kinds of commuities live side by side, where ideas come to life, and it’s because of these struggles and complexities that I feel my commitment to the City of Angels deepen, I feel my creativity take root.

Let your landscape surprise you, as mine did.

P.S. I’ll fix typos after I hit “Publish” as we all do here on Substack, so apologies for anything that’s not squeaky clean, but I needed to get back on the Substack horse. Meanwhile, I’m trying not to listen to mopey music. I have on vinyl Ella Fitzgerald “Live At Montreux 1969” and I’ve had that on replay on Spotify, specifically the first track, “Give Me The Simple Life.” It’s a peppy, pink cocktail-at-The-Georgian song, very old school even though 1969 was its own tumultuous year; the song was written by Reuben Bloom in 1945 and introduced in the 1946 film “Wake Up and Dream,” speaking of dream chasing. No doubt 1945-1946 were years people wanted to feel good again. “Wake Up and Dream” is classic Hollywood, a musical that was filmed at 20th Century Fox Studios on Pico Boulevard, a 20-minute drive from me. I don’t know the movie but I am charmed by the lyrics, including:

“Some find it pleasant dining on pheasant
Those things roll off my knife
Just serve me tomatoes and mashed potatoes
Give me the simple life…”

I’ve eaten many things all over the world including camel, barracuda, and alligator, but never pheasant. Right now, for me, small, simple pleasures have become magnified during these horrible times. A pink cocktail near the beach. A favorite song replayed. Kids eating ice cream. That rooster near my school. That old lady waving hello. Stay connected. Be kind.

However, think about this: if men gushed blood once a month, experienced menstrual cramps, nausea, migraines, and all the other PMS symptoms—never mind actually getting pregnant, which is a whole other process in itself; I’m only talking monthly PMS symptoms and the actual period—then capitalism would likely be unrecognizable from what we currently know, far fewer hoarder vibes and hopefully less punitive. Would there even be guys like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk??? They’d be in bed with heating pads on their abdomens, groaning in agony, popping ibuprofen, and cursing the gods.

I can’t even list all the things that would change if men menstruated, but among the capitalist biggies: workplace culture, paid leave, family leave, work-life balance, equal pay, retirement accounts, the New York Stock Exchange not to mention all the finance bro energy on trading floors worldwide, as well as all the shit that keeps us on this frenetic grind. All of it would be far less toxic and far more compassionate.

Why, you ask? Consider what menstruation requires: collective compassion.

If your girlfriend comes to you bleeding out and needing a tampon, you immediately start fishing through your purse. There’s not a woman alive who hasn’t had this experience. Seriously. Gosh, even if a stranger in the restroom asks for a maxi pad or tampon from behind the stall—you can’t even see each other, you’re just two strangers who had to pee at the same time—you pitch in and offer what you got. Or, if she’s doubled-over cramping or rubbing her forehead with a headache, you check your purse for Advil. Menstruation by its very nature requires having each other’s back, not shoving each other down. Bleeding, even predictable bleeding, is messy business.

Half the global population menstruates. Bleeding every month creates compassion. This is why capitalism would look so different if men bled as women bleed.

Believe me, I would love to gush about palm trees again, but here we are. Instead of the constraints of capitalism and all its design flaws, I would love to dive into my favorite ism: escapism, which for me doesn’t involve video games or anime but planes, trains, and automobiles taking me somewhere, anywhere, everywhere. Show me palm trees prettier than the ones by my garbage bins. Show me a coastline that glistens brighter than my bike ride along the Pacific. Show me a shrine or a giant Buddha statue or a cemetery covered in flowers. Show me things I’ve never seen before. Show me things I have seen and should see again. You get the idea.

Fewer of us seem to be traveling right now. This time two years ago, I did April in Paris, and, wow! That experience lives up to the song and more! Spring break two years ago felt expansive, gorgeous, promising. A time for dreamers.

Fast forward to 2025, and it’s been a sit tight situation in America since January. Capitalism is wreaking some serious havoc on us all, and unpredictability usually means staying close to the nest. I did a modest spring break that was scheduled before the tariff trauma—four days in Arizona where I ate my bodyweight in guacamole, swam in cold water, slept past 8 AM, read poetry around 8 PM, orchid- and agave-bathed at the Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix, and dipped Oreos into my morning coffee because (a) it’s spring break, so there are no calories during that time period, and (b) it tasted amazing. The flight from Los Angeles to Phoenix cost less than my weekly groceries and is barely 45 minutes; the ice in your drink doesn’t even melt.

That said, sitting tight sucks and I miss international travel. Give me long flights to interesting places, and this is where capitalism comes in (again). America has its workers hard at work, no one is going to take a vacation and spend money while appearing less valuable to their employers. There are lay offs, hiring freezes, everything costs too much now, the stock market is being manipulated, and we’re all caught in this shitshow. This chaos makes me miss April in Paris and all forms of travel because travel for fun means freedom. Escapism—the kind of escapism I want to do like kayaking the fjords along coastal Greenland and having my own White Lotus Season 3 moments in Thailand and strolling downtown Zanzibar to admire all those beautiful doors—costs moolah.

Money may be about numbers, but ask anyone: money is really emotion, human desire run amok. Like most of us, I have strong feelings about money. The universe apparently sensed this because I was then connected with U.K-based, best-selling author Keris Fox, whose new book The Harry Styles Effect comes out May 30. Keris also writes the Substack The Ladybird Purse, where she interviewed me about my GenX attitudes towards money.

To sum up, I’m freaking out.

I have zero chill about moolah, and readily admit here that money comes with all kinds of family drama, trauma, and stuff. You can read the full post here, where Keris dives into a delightful rabbit hole about 80s music, and you can read me answering Keris’s questions and freaking out below.

As always, thanks for reading and happy Substack-aversary to L.A. Woman! Be patient with one another as we ride out this rollercoaster and I’ll try to do the same.

This week’s interview…

…is with Katrina Woznicki, who I discovered via her brilliant Substack. Her post about the LA fires has stuck with me (“Many people were going about their work day, landscapers, construction workers, and cleaning crews out and about. Not everyone has the privilege to leave.”) and then last month she wrote Fellow GenX Creatives: We’re Not Alone:

How do you explain this […] experience in media; how the Internet and now AI have completely, indelibly altered your career, that you have 30 years of experience but your income has tanked; that freelance word rates have remained unchanged since the Clinton administration; that you earned more at age 26 working at a dot-com and being handed fistfuls of stock options that you had no idea what to do with, but thankfully you did smart things like pay off student loans and invest.

There’s loss. There’s arrogance. There’s anxiety. There’s grief. There’s need.

Career is identity for so many of us. It is purpose, so when your industry bellies up, what do you do? Who are you, and who do you want to be?

An interview with Katrina Woznicki

Katrina Woznicki is an award-winning writer and a 2025 Pushcart Prize nominee. In 2025, she received the Solas Awards' grand prize for Best Travel Story Of The Year for her piece, "It Can Be Beautiful For Everyone," which was first published by the London-based Panorama, The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature in 2024. Her essays and reporting have appeared on the cover of AAA’s Westways magazine, as well as in The Toronto Star, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Catapult, Guernica, Flung, and National Geographic Traveler.

She also has a background in corporate communications, having produced online and print marketing material for clients. Her debut novel is represented by Word One Literary Agency.

What is your relationship with money currently?

I live in the United States, and, like everyone else, am currently riding out the anxieties of the unwanted tariff wars that are sending the stock markets into a slide, so unfortunately, my daily dose of morning news radio is filled with words like "tariffs, recession, inflation, bear market."

I would characterize my current relationship with money as a state of panic, but these are bizarre geopolitical times. Money is always emotional, and as a single, middle-aged woman, I feel like I will never earn enough to stay on top of everything.

What’s your earliest money memory?

My parents argued about money quite a bit, and later divorced when I was 14, so I remember money always being tight.

My father was diagnosed as manic depressive in the 1980s, and he was the breadwinner, so things were very unstable in our household. I remember he would buy new sneakers to run marathons but we couldn't get new school clothes, things like that. Not the happiest memory.

On the positive side, I started babysitting at age 13, and remember being handed cash for my time and saving what I earned. I also remember picking strawberries on a nearby farm very early in the mornings, the guy counting how many pints we picked and handing us cash. That felt great!

Did you have a job as a teenager? If so, what did you do? Do you remember what and how you got paid?

Yes, babysitting, strawberry-picking, and then a job that had a huge effect on me was getting hired at age 16 at the local country club to clear tables. The country club became a community for me, a home-away-from-home, and honestly, a calmer, more stable place to be where I had enjoyed working.

The country club hosted banquets, weddings, all these fun events, and I just loved working there. I worked my way up to waitressing. Sometimes, the staff--many of us were teenagers at the time--would go swimming in the club pool after our night shift.

I loved the buoyant atmosphere there, and I collected both a paycheck and tips. Honestly, even though it was a very physical job it didn't feel like work. I have many positive memories working at the town country club.

Did you feel pressure to ‘have it all’ - a career, a relationship, a family, etc.? And if so, do you still?

Capitalism would look VERY different if men menstruated. Think about that. Think about all these CEOs, who historically have been mostly CIS men, if they had their periods every month. Think about what family leave and equal pay and workplace cultures would look like. So I try not to buy into the "have it all" mentality because that framework comes from a limited place.

Women are constantly pressured at every age and stage, it's really annoying. I recall family members trying to sell me on the idea of how you buy a starter home when you start your family and then "upgrade" to a bigger house, or after I gave birth to my daughter I was repeatedly asked when I would have a second child even though I was trying to establish myself in my career.

Having more, buying more is pushed on people all the time. The "American Dream" that heavily emphasizes material comforts is outdated, based largely on mid-century values when people didn't have to pay as much out of pocket as they do now. I don't like following other people's notions of what success should look like. Everyone has their own path.

Growing up, what did you learn about women and money from TV, film and music?

The honest answer is I learned a lot about money growing up in a single mom household with a mentally ill father who fought providing child support.

We didn't have cable growing up. Books were borrowed from the library; there was no Amazon. You made your lunch and wore the same clothes until they were worn out. Then you get into the working world and realize the sexism and the Motherhood Penalty because daycare is calling and you need to leave a meeting early because your kid has a fever. Those were my lived experiences.

Everything I learned about money came from being in it. Dolly Parton's song "Hard Candy Christmas" is about women struggling to make ends meet and all the things women want for themselves. I always thought Dolly Parton excelled at that, capturing what women really want for themselves versus the challenges of being able to afford those things.

What advice would you give your younger self about money?

Honestly, I would cheer myself on and give myself a big high-five. I would tell myself that I did great by saving up money in high school despite difficult home circumstances, and when I earned stock options in the late 1990s working at a dot-com, I would congratulate myself for paying off student loans first. I didn't go out and buy new stuff at that age, my mid-20s; I just wanted to be out of debt. That time in 1999-2000 was really pivotal and set me up in positive ways later on.

Also, don't use credit cards. Credit card companies were on my college campus pitching to students who ended up in even more debt, myself included. Credit cards are evil. I still carry credit card debt and am paying that off. I tell my daughter, "Pay cash whenever you can." I'm very proud of her.

What have you learned from the generations on either side of Gen X (Boomers and Millennials) about money?

I'm generalizing here, but Baby Boomers seem to operate thinking some sort of net exists, such as a company pension or intergenerational wealth or that "hard work pays off." I know plenty of people who worked hard and couldn't get far financially because their industries were undermined by changes in media and technology.

I don't know what Millennials think of money. I particularly love and appreciate the resourcefulness of GenZ. My daughter is GenZ, her friends and roommates are GenZ, and they are mindful, thrifty, and intentional. I'm sure other GenZers are spending money they shouldn't spend, but GenZ thrifts everything, crochets their own clothes, hosts potlucks, like the stuff my grandmother used to do during the Great Depression. I love this!

What’s the best thing you’ve ever spent money on?

I spend money on international travel, all kinds of travel. Travel has always been a priority for me. I spent a semester in college in London, and feel travel is the best education.

You don't need to travel in luxury, just go wherever you can and see as much of the world as possible. My 2022 trip to Nepal was life-changing. Can't put a price tag on those experiences.

Do you have a retirement fund? If not, do you have a plan?

I do, however the unwanted, current tariff war is wreaking havoc on my retirement savings. So I have a plan, which is currently being ruined by a spray-tanned fascist. Sadly, this isn't hyperbole.

What would you do with $10,000?

Give half to the Los Angeles Mission where I used to teach creative writing to men and women in recovery, and use the other half to pay off credit card debt.

What little treat would you buy with a tenner?

Invite a friend to the beach, treat that person to coffee, and sit and admire the beautiful Pacific Ocean.

If you were me, what would you want to ask women about money?

Why aren't women paid the same amount for the same job as men? Why is this still an issue 25 years into the 21st century?

There’s loss. There’s arrogance. There’s anxiety. There’s grief. There’s need.

Career is identity for so many of us. It is purpose, so when your industry bellies up, what do you do? Who are you, and who do you want to be?

All of this is captured in a fantastic New York Times article about GenX creatives feeling their careers bottom out that I happened to read hours after I walked out of an AWP panel last Friday, March 28.

So, allow me to back up a few hours here and lay out the day, because it was a fair amount of career disillusionment, as well as relief, all in one afternoon.

I walked in late to a panel about pitching Hollywood. There was one moderator and two panelists. One panelist is someone I’m going to call Accomplished Old White Guy, who told the audience what he thought was a funny story about how he pitched a project that he eventually got. He said he told producers how he was a middle brother, had to navigate complicated family dynamics, the funny shenanigans that ensued, I’m assuming in that “Malcolm In The Middle” kind of way, and he got the job. “Fake it til you make it,” which is a motto embraced by many in Hollywood and elsewhere, and I get it. Capitalism is rough. Everyone wants in.

And yet.

Accomplished Old White Guy then admitted he has no brothers, and that he used the stories of his friends to engage producers. “Exaggeration,” he called it. He laughed. Audience members laughed. I silently seethed because the truth is he was on a panel joking about lying.

How many non-white, non-guys could have gotten away with that in what is basically lying during a job interview because for those who don’t know, that’s what pitching is: selling the idea and hopefully landing the job.

I got up and walked out. Goddess energy, warrior energy, you name it; I was fired up. I opened the door and a middle-aged blonde woman was walking in; a sister from another mother. Maybe she’s chasing the dream at 50, too. I said to her, “This guy has no integrity.” That’s all I said. Her eyes went wide. The expression on her face was “WTF is going on?” I exited the room. I mean, it’s Aries season, right? I just had a birthday, and being an Aries means not tolerating the status quo.

A few moments later, this woman approached me in the hallway as I was checking the schedule. She asked what happened. I told her. She looked disgusted, like she immediately got it because women have to work harder to get any gig. We just do.

Back home from the Los Angeles Convention Center, I read this article about GenX creatives losing work, losing income, losing their sense of identity, and all the grief and confusion that follows. I know this road very well. The third paragraph of this piece, written by Steven Kurutz, was the equivalent of the best therapy session you could have, where you go through half a box of tissues bawling with release because finally someone acknowledges something you’ve been voicing and carrying and losing sleep over for years. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this seen:

“If you entered media or image-making in the ’90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there’s a good chance that you are now doing something else for work. That’s because those industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically, shutting out those whose skills were once in high demand.”

What’s described in this article is 100 percent my journey. I began my career as a newspaper journalist. I wrote for magazines and dot-coms and then pivoted to copywriting. I freelanced for CondeNast and earned $2 per word. I freelanced for Newsweek and earned $1 per word. I freelanced for U.S. News & World Report (online) and earned 25 cents per word. Freelancing can be lucrative but you are at the whims of industry swings far beyond your control. The instability is exhausting.

At my staff writing jobs back when staff writing jobs existed, my bosses were old white men who drank too much, complained about their wives and children to subordinates, who commented on female co-workers outfits, who said things that would now get them reprimanded or possibly fired by HR, who took the young men reporters out to lunch to groom them while the young women were put on night shifts and not given much to do. Remember Mad Men? Nothing about those office scenes felt fictionalized to me.

Continuing on the old white guy path, my college professors were mostly old white men who had enjoyed illustrious careers in newspaper journalism. They repeatedly gave the same advice on how to build a portfolio, never once considering that one day, a platform would matter more than a portfolio or that technology would write better poetry than some English department hopefuls. And sometimes I bristle when I recall my professors’ dismissiveness and arrogance toward anything that wasn’t the path that had made their own careers. And sometimes I think, how could any of my professors have known how big the Internet would become, what AI would do, that the industry that afforded their retirement would no longer exist? Did the people of Pompeii know what would happen when Vesuvius erupted? Again, there’s only so much we can predict, and as I’ve learned from L.A.’s love for astrology, most of it is off.

It would be easy to slide into professional bitterness: the white male privilege, rapidly-changing technology (though isn’t that the very nature of technology—that it moves fast?), or this didn’t happen, that didn’t happen, this publication closed while I was pitching them, that publication fired half its staff and ohmygod, this website has zero budget. I grew up in rural upstate New York, a 10-minute walk from a slaughterhouse, where I would buy green glass Coke bottles for 25 cents and see pigs dangling from the hooks in the background. There are many times when this is how my career felt.

And yet.

While a smooth, linear career might have been preferable, I have learned resilience and how to pivot and more importantly, how to advocate. I have written about my zigzag career here, and maybe, like others quoted in this New York Times article, my destiny was never meant to be linear. Maybe I’m supposed to witness, write, and speak up against bullshit. I’m glad I told that woman entering the panel what I thought. I can’t and don’t and won’t lie during job interviews, or well, anywhere. I’m an Aries, and the goddess-honest truth is that lying makes my stomach churn. I can’t do it, it causes side effects, and I won’t tell anyone I’m a troubled middle child to get the gig. A favorite professor of mine once told me he thought I would’ve clicked with Che Guevera. I would love for this to be true.

Working as a teacher emphasizes advocacy and integrity. Writers, I get it; there’s less to go around and we’re all hungry to have our words and ideas devoured. Who doesn’t want to be professionally valued? I love having readers, and I love having readers comment on my writing, the good, the bad, the in-between. And, I love being in the classroom trying to encourage 12-year-olds to want more for themselves, to grow up to be the kinds of professionals who don’t feel compelled to lie on a panel and who genuinely desire to lift all boats and who don’t want to slash entire departments due to budget cuts. Moving between these two worlds, teaching and writing, has restored a balance I greatly needed. Teaching is way more than a biweekly paycheck and employer-funded health insurance. I actually give a shit–despite the Monday through Friday 5:15 A.M. alarm. There are so many creative industry GenXers who have done similar pivots and have found a path equally rewarding.

All that said, among the many things I appreciated about Kurutz’s reporting was the acknowledgement of grief, of seeing something many of us spent decades of blood, sweat, tears, sexism and all kinds of isms building no longer being an option–not because we weren’t talented enough but because the infrastructure no longer exists. And that’s something I hope to teach my students going forward: be flexible; be ready to pivot; be inclusive; think wide. Yes, the future is yours, and yes, the future will always, always surprise you. Be ready to speak up.

Usually, I have a thought, a theme, a single, linear story to share but this time it’s a random list of things happening, which seems appropriate for the spring equinox, right? Not one tulip pushing through the cold, crusty, winter-heavy earth, but tulips and daffodils and crocuses and all life in all its many forms pushing up everywhere with zero consideration—just a drive to go, go go. This post is the opposite of a coordinated, geometrically provocative French garden and instead more like the seeds a bunch of fifth graders dropped last fall that’s now unexpectedly sprouting up: beautiful and messy. I wish I could call it braided narrative but that’s too generous. It’s simply stuff going on.

Let’s begin.

Cuckoo for Cacao

What I love about L.A. is that this city will turn anything into a circle and a ceremony, and most likely charge an admission fee. Wellness is big biz in LA LA Land. Don’t get me wrong, I am not anti-circle or anti-ceremony; this Friday, I return to the Women’s Fire Circle, which I love. What’s trending here—and this city is obsessed with trends and healing and monetizing healing—is something so old it’s new again: cacao ceremonies, or what the Los Angeles Times delightfully dubbed “Ayahuasca-Lite.”

Some are happening right on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, which has been crowned the “most coolest block in America” though having spent a fair amount of time in Venice, I’m gonna respectfully disagree. Sure, Abbot Kinney is BoHo chic, but it lacks the grit I like that’s so bountiful elsewhere around Venice and Venice Beach and in downtown L.A. Cacao ceremonies are a thing, and involve sitting in circles or small groups and quietly sipping Central or South America-farmed cacao with intention while letting shit go, something we should all do every day whatever we’re drinking.

I haven’t yet attended a cacao ceremony. I’ve done fire circles, dance circles, and yeah, I dig a robust sound bath. I fully embrace L.A., this weird working class city of beaches and McMansions and wellness ceremonies. However, I pause a bit when we start putting everything under the wellness marketing umbrella, and yes, plant medicine falls into this category. It’s like slapping “Detox” onto an item and charging more for it, and while cacao ceremonies aren’t being marketed as detox spas—yet—there’s a cleansing vibe to it because here in L.A. we’re in a constant state of cleansing. This is where I raise an eyebrow to L.A.’s obsession with wellness trends. I don’t buy detox anything. I do buy a lotta lemons and drink a lot of hot lemon water, the OG detox and most likely, the cheapest. Is lemon water—with organic lemons—plant medicine? I have no idea. Maybe? Spin it any way you want. Cacao ceremonies are being promoted as plant medicine, and this is where I think “huh?”

I find the term “plant medicine” a bit cringy and wonder if it’s a reaction to America being a pill-popping, addicted, struggling nation. I don’t know. I firmly believe in the power of phytochemicals, which is why I also believe that not all plants are innocuous. I have allergies, carry an Epi-Pen and have broken out in hives in reaction to someone else’s skin products. I don’t do essential oils anywhere ever. They aren’t essential to me. Allergies change. A decade ago, I wasn’t allergic to bees and now I am, as well as hornets and wasps and who knows what else now. Can I go and safely sip some cacao at a ceremony without needing Benadryl? Maybe, possibly, hopefully, but I honestly don’t know. Do I want to pay $45-$50 for this experience? Not really. Should I use that money instead to fill my gas tank for my commute to work? Probably.

Fire circles cost nothing except a requested small donation towards the firewood. Dance circles cost around $25, usually to cover the expense of the studio rental and the DJ. A sound bath takes some skill and those cost more, ranging from $50 to $150, depending on the location and practitioner, though at my yoga studio, I can attend at no additional cost as part of my monthly membership. To sit in a circle with or without intention and drink hot chocolate–sorry, cacao–with strangers while breathing deeply—sorry, breathwork—amidst ridiculous tariff wars, inflation, stock market crashes and all the other turmoil America is in, is a wellness trend I might skip for now. There are new moon cacao ceremonies happening on March 29, my birthday, which is also the day of an eclipse in Aries (because if you live in L.A. you follow astrology like the weather). On that day, I’ll be terra firma, near my beloved Santa Monica Pier eating gluten-free cake from my favorite bakery in Venice, no cacao for now.

If I really, really want to eventually hop on this cacao wellness bandwagon in a less pricey way, for $25, I can purchase Ecuadorian ceremonial cacao and sip solo with intention at home in the comfort of my pajamas, or if I crave a community vibe, I can invite a few friends over, pass the cup or cups, and we can talk about what’s on our minds, which then really goes back to my 1980s Girl Scout campouts and sleepovers when we drank Swiss Miss and kinda did the same thing. Amirite???

Actually, that sounds perfect right now given all the chaos: friends gathered around a small campfire on the beach, and we sip some commercial hot cocoa that likely has too much sugar and not enough goddess divine in it but it’s community, we’re connected and isn’t that what wellness is really about—taking care of each other in this way and not monetizing a practice that people have been doing with or without intention for centuries?

That One Time Of Year I Don’t Declutter

People talk about spring cleaning but for whatever reason, spring is when I enjoy a small shopping spree. I love the winter holidays but I am not a big shopper at Christmas. Ask anyone who knows me: I constantly purge and am in a permanent budget-state-of-mind. I love thrift stores and $8 sweaters. I don’t gamble and have never bought a lottery ticket. I make red lentil lemon soup over and over and over, which does get boring but saves moolah. I cancelled DoorDash and deleted a bunch of subscriptions I wasn’t using. I wear boots I bought five years ago and scarves I bought when I was in my 30s. Yet every March, my birthday month, the wallet builds a little heat. Nothing crazy, but I’ll buy these earrings because I want some funky, beaded, fossilized-looking fish dangling from my earlobes, and I’ll buy daisy-shaped napkins for no good reason other than it’s spring, and I’ll buy discount vinyl because that’s my jam, and I’ll buy new socks because the old ones have holes. I also splurged on funky new plants and succulents–speaking of plant medicine. Plant stores are my candy stores, and this one in Marina Del Rey is my go to. I have seasonal affective disorder, and those barren months from November until April in the Northeast coupled with the complete lack of green really affected me. SAD symptoms feel like breathing mud. Yes, I’ve heard the stories about how winter helps the earth rest and get ready for spring, that winter is restorative.

Fuck that.

Here in L.A., roses and calla lilies bloom in January, and by March almost everything is blooming. I belong where life blossoms 365 days a year, so here I am, with my own external-not-so-internal approach to plant medicine; I don’t want to eat or smoke plants (I’m not counting salads, here). I want to admire them and be surrounded by as much green as possible. Perhaps this is why my March Madness involves all this emerging and abundance. I was born one week after the spring equinox and have been told more than once that I have “spring flower energy.” Spring is when I want more, more, and more, when I want to dance across my apartment complex or the beach or the grocery store and sprinkle rainbow fairy dust on everyone because it is spring and that is enough. This mood tapers off sometime in late April or early May when I come back to reality and put whatever is left of the rainbow fairy dust away for next year, but it’s a clockwork vibe that hasn’t skipped a beat so far. Spring is my new year, my harvest, my All The Things.

Happy Spring Equinox dear readers. Rainbow fairy dust sprinkled over all of you.

I Won Something!!!

As stated above, I’ve never bought a lottery ticket, but two weeks ago it felt like I won the lottery when around 11 PM on a Friday night, I received an email that I thought was spam. Turns out, I was the 2025 Nineteenth Annual Solas Awards for Best Travel Story of the Year Grand Prize Winner. As in The Prize. The Gold. The top story. Among all the submissions, this one got picked. People I don’t know voted for my piece, first published in a literary journal this time last year, and sent me a check for $1,000. The truth behind this piece is that I wrote it in a few hours feeling broken-hearted about a gazillion things in early 2024. Some births are easy, others are painful and take forever. This essay slid right out of me while I replayed Mazzy Star’s “California.” It became the first installment of my L.A. column for Panorama–a London-based literary journal that I encourage you all to check out–-and thanks to Solas, will appear in a printed anthology next year. I’m over the moon, which right now is currently in Libra because in L.A., mystical updates are just an app tap away.

Heartbreak is powerful energy. I wrote “It Can Be Beautiful For Everyone” expecting absolutely nothing except to feel less sad, and a year later, this happens. My cacao-free cup runneth over, and I’m beyond grateful. I love writing in second person; it’s active and intimate in a way that first person isn’t, and I’m extremely thankful for my Panorama editor, Matthew Webb, who allows me to go wide and weird. In an age of algorithm-driven, hyper-commercial content, his carte blanche approach is a huge gift that I do not take for granted.

P.S. We haven’t talked tunes in a while because I’ve been remiss in posting regularly. What’s on your playlists lately? I can’t stop playing Bad Company’s Seagull, which debuted in 1974. Maybe it’s how this song reminds me of long walks on the beach (no, really), and long drives out to the desert, and seeing seagulls sometimes around gritty downtown Los Angeles or the grocery store parking lot, and how the plane takes off from LAX and circles over the Pacific. This song also transports me back to being a teenager and growing up in rural upstate New York, driving chunky, gas-guzzling cars when gas cost around a dollar, and blasting classic rock back when these singers were barely middle-aged and middle-aged seemed old then. Seriously, I listen to this one song and see all of these memories play all at once, my then and my now finding each other in the thick of these beautiful chords. May we all have a favorite song like this that ties the various chapters in our lives together.

Also, given all the newcomers, some light housekeeping on what this is and isn’t.

L.A. Woman is not about anything remotely GOOP or Kardashian-esque, and I have zero clue about celebrity culture. Yes, Hollywood keeps folks employed here but L.A. is more complicated than that, which I try to show in my various profiles of various women ages 50 and up doing cool entrepreneurial, creative, community-focused things. A lovely driver in New Jersey recently asked me which celebrities I saw while grocery shopping or out running errands and I told him that in my six-plus years of living here, I have not seen a single celebrity. This remains true today. It’s not like Tom Cruise or Jennifer Aniston browse Trader Joe’s, and if they do, they probably look as ragged off-camera as the rest of us so I wouldn’t recognize them anyway. I do feel very L.A. when I bike the beach at a time of year when the rest of the country is shoveling snow, zipped up in winter gear. And along the beach I’ve got a sage connect named Ra because let’s get real: 2025 is gonna require a lotta sage! We will be smudging hard for quite some time. Ra’s around if you need him.

So, let’s say you get to LA LA Land and you want to see the things. Here’s the first thing I hope you see coming into LAX, perhaps the biggest steel and concrete donut woman or man has made. Hopefully, this will whet your appetite for all things Angeleno and disavow you of the notion that the less touristy parts of my beloved adopted city–many of them found in downtown known here as DTLA–are worth skipping. I think of Los Angeles as a working class town with beachside McMansions. The beachside McMansions already get too much air time. Let’s briefly unpack the other stuff.

This 32.5-foot giant steel-and-concrete pastry-thing greets you from the popular Randy’s Donuts, a beloved landmark and truthfully, the best welcome mat any city could offer. Randy’s is located in an L.A. neighborhood called Inglewood, a community near and dear to my heart because it’s next door and where I’ve worked teaching first-generation Spanish-speaking students English and history. It’s appropriate that people see Inglewood first and not some place like Beverly Hills, that this is the introduction before wheels touch the tarmac.

And you can see the sprawl as you fly in, donut or no donut. Los Angeles is kinda everywhere in every direction, and developers might’ve kept going if not for the Pacific Ocean or the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains. We’ll never know. What’s unfortunate is that most people fly past downtown L.A., get dropped off at LAX, which is three miles from the ocean, and very few circle back to the actual city.

I get it.

Nothing about accessing downtown is convenient. There’s no direct anything anywhere–public transportation not being an L.A. strength, a problem that has been discussed by city officials since white dudes with big bucks started showing up here and is one they’re now scrambling to resolve to accommodate the 2028 Olympics. Downtown is 18 miles from the airport via the 105 and the 110, two frequently clogged freeways that will leave you rethinking your itinerary, and–at minimum–a $60 Uber ride. Why go downtown gritty when the golden grit along the Pacific is right there? Plus, all those rumors that downtown is sketchy and there’s no real downtown anyway–this isn’t New York, a city that specializes in convenience and density.

I’m here to tell you that amidst that cluster of glass and concrete that you fly by is a city rich with ambition, vision, and inspiring Art Deco and Renaissance Revival design; that there’s sound and color on every corner; that it’s beautiful, grimy, ornate and weird—like Rome or Paris but different, thick with shiny promise and sooty decay, especially after last month’s wildfires. I’ve always been a sucker for paradox, so I am frequently downtown, as I was this past weekend, and, like any good relationship, being present requires energy and time, or in this case, gasoline and patience.

First, Clifton’s Republic, where I spent a Friday night catching up with a friend, sipping sangria, listening to vinyl, and reminding myself that a massive faux redwood tree in the middle of a building not only seems appropriate but necessary. I recently wrote about Clifton’s Republic “comeback” for Westways magazine, and the delightful Atlas Obscura offers a two-hour walking tour that dives deep into the establishment’s history, and, quite frankly, why there’s so much weird shit packed into so many dark rooms and why it works: dioramas reminiscent of the Natural History Museum, multiple bars and dance floors, more sofa nooks than what seems legal. Part speak-easy, part menagerie, Clifton’s is the sole survivor of a chain of eateries owned by quirky restaurateur Clifford Clinton, with this particular eatery on Broadway being a “poor man’s lounge” or cafeteria serving laborers building up L.A. in the 1930s. Now, it’s everyone’s lounge and the menus are scheduled to make a comeback with current restaurant management promising to bring back Salisbury steak, Jell-O, and Thanksgiving food favorites, high-caloric foods meant to keep you dancing.

I can picture potential Jell-O shots at Clifton’s–this is a place where people like to get their groove on–however, I’m curious to see how the Salisbury steak will perform in a city obsessed with healthy eating and food trends. If a meat smoothie can get spotlight attention at Erewhon (which, by the way, I am very proud to say I have never stepped foot in), then perhaps a Salisbury steak at a cherished downtown hub has its shot, too. Clifton’s is also 371 feet from a favorite among favorite movie palaces (yes, they were called that back then), the Los Angeles Theatre, an opulent jewel with grandiosity masoned into every inch that was built (well, funded) by Charlie Chaplin to showcase the debut of his film “City Lights.” This theater is prominently featured in a piece I wrote for the London-based literary journal, Panorama: The Journal Of Travel, Place And Nature, in which I describe Chaplin’s ghost criticizing my outfit, an essay that was nominated for a Pushcart Prize (competitive, but fingers crossed…announcements happen in May!). Lavish isn’t enough of an adjective in describing this place, but if the afterlife looks anything like the theater lobby, I’ll be happy.

That was Friday.

Then came Sunday.

Grand Central Market on Broadway is a 10-minute walk from Clifton’s and a mere 177 feet from the stunning Million Dollar Theatre. Forget Erewhon anything. Grand Central Market is what you should do with your time when you have time. It first opened in 1917 and was then called the “Wonder Market,” which, thank goodness, someone changed that name! Surprisingly, Grand Central Market doesn’t look its age, but it’s a pro and edgy, as is anything that survives L.A. You can eat everything here: oysters, tacos, ice cream, chop suey, pupusas, pizza, pasta, eggs in who-knows-how-many-ways, burgers, barbecue, empanadas—I think you get the idea. Spend a morning, an afternoon, the entire day. Bring a date here. Bring someone’s grandma here. Bring someone’s grandma and her date here. Learn how Los Angeles smells, tastes, and sounds here among the vendors. Trust me, the vibe is WAY better than Erewhon, and I don’t need to go into Erewhon to know that because I drive by one and see who walks out. Also, if you’ve seen the almost 2017 Academy Award Best Picture LA LA Land, you might remember the romantic moment Mia and Sebstian shared sitting at Sarita’s Pupuseria (which I’ve done and you should, too).

Across from the vibrant Grand Central Market is the funicular Angels Flight, also featured in LA LA Land, and a bit older than the market by sixteen years. There’s nothing like an impromptu, round trip $2 ride on a cable car built in 1901 climbing a hill that feels like a shaky struggle but somehow it all works out. Story of life, right? We get there. At the top of the hill there’s a cluster of skyscrapers and a circle of park benches because one needs funicular breaks. So before heading back down, I spent an hour or so sitting on a city park bench doing very little except appreciating the moment. This wasn’t a Baywatch moment or a 90210 moment or even a LA LA Land moment. It was a quiet and cool and unscripted Sunday afternoon moment. I highly recommend these. Find a park bench somewhere and do nothing but watch the sky.

This is the Los Angeles I hope you get to see, and I’ve only covered a fraction of all that’s cool about downtown. More to come for sure. Meanwhile, know that we’re okay here in the City of Angels, that it rained hard last week, that we grocery shop without ash falling on our shoulders (or spotting celebrities buying green juice), that burned areas are being cleaned up and people are rebuilding in whatever ways they can. I’ve never witnessed so much community and the response here made me so proud to call L.A. home. All the love sent this way is greatly appreciated. It was scary, and everyone knows someone who lost too much. L.A. is good at many things, and one of them is starting over. We’ll be okay.

Can we unpack January for a moment?

No. I didn’t think so either. There is too much. Yet, what a year this month has been, starting with deadly wildfires here in Los Angeles and ending with a criminal returning to the White House. Unless you’re a rich, white dude, America isn’t an easy place to live; 2025 is already making us crave peaceful corners, wherever we might find them.

Despite the chaos, despite the destruction, despite the divisiveness, there is a peaceful corner near where I live that for half a century continues to quietly make a difference in the lives of women struggling with addiction.

If a new year is about beginnings and striving to do better, Denise Day, 57, the executive director of the women-exclusive sober living center Felicity House, is there to help these women chart a new course. Denise, a former resident who was appointed executive director in 2023, understands addiction, navigating recovery, and zigzag lives, that sometimes we have to begin several times—and that’s okay.

Established in 1974, Felicity House recently celebrated its 50th anniversary where Courtney Thorne-Smith, Jackie Monahan, and Tammy Jo Dearen were among the special guests. Felicity House has become a beacon in the community, repeatedly demonstrating that lives can be rebuilt, whether it’s second chances, third chances, or more. For years, I’ve parked my car right in front of Felicity House to walk to Veda Yoga Center having no idea that this place saved people. It’s a two-story, Craftsman-style home behind the cutest white picket fence on a residential corner where there’s miraculously free street parking available every Saturday morning. The house is painted a soft pale yellow, perfectly reflecting L.A.’s abundant sunshine on bright days and offering a splash of color on gray days. It’s a humble, lovely, old structure, as if trying to hide its own charm. There’s no loud advertising. There’s no big sign.

But inside, there’s a lot going on.

Addiction has some staggering statistics. According to Los Angeles County Public Health, as of April 2024, there were 2,990 alcohol and other drug-related deaths and 146,087 alcohol and other drug-related emergency department visits. Across the Golden State, the National Institute on Drug Abuse cites 6.4 percent of Californians having an alcohol disorder; 3.3 percent of Californians having an abuse disorder involving illicit substances; and 0.6 percent are addicted to prescription pain medication.

Nationwide, there was a significant spike in drinking during the peak lockdown period of Covid-19, with alcohol use rising by 20 percent between 2018 to 2020, according to a Keck Medicine of University of Southern California study that was published in Annals of Internal Medicine. This jump remained even in 2022 as life allegedly reopened.

That’s the macro point of view about a public health crisis that’s easy to ignore because alcohol is so ubiquitous. Numbers aren’t people, or their stories. What’s it really like being in the weeds of this epidemic, day in and day out?

Denise knows.

I met Denise at Felicity House right before she and her team were preparing their 50th anniversary gala. She gave me a tour of this lovely house, introduced me to residents, and then we sat in her office where she shared her story. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Me: I always begin L.A. Woman with the question: what brought you to Los Angeles?

Denise: I was originally born in Yonkers, New York, and my family moved out here when I was five. Then I lived in Arizona from the time I was 22 to around 37, which is when I got divorced and was in active addiction. I came back to L.A. needing help though not really knowing what to do so I called my dad, who struggled with heroin addiction. I had been hiding my life all those years. I wasn’t taking care of myself. I was on opiates and cocaine, drinking. I was helpless, hopeless, not taking care of myself, and self-medicating to not feel because I just wasn’t in my own body, my own skin. That’s one way to describe addiction–not feeling connected to yourself. My dad knew of Felicity House, and I arrived here in 2005. I was pretty broken by the time I got to Felicity House. I was basically homeless. I had lost everything: my job, my apartment, was putting everything in storage, and had nowhere to go. My dad brought me to Felicity House where I could begin to recover.

Me: How did addiction happen for you? When did you know you needed help?

Denise: I remember being 21, sitting in a bar with my ex-husband, holding a kamikaze in my hand—a sweet drink made with vodka, triple sec, and lime juice. That was the first time I felt what people call “liquid courage.” Suddenly, I could fit in. I wasn’t shy anymore. My ex drank too, and drinking became our normal. Years later, in 2000, I had spinal surgery and was prescribed Oxycontin for pain. That’s when everything changed. Like so many others, I didn’t realize how quickly pain medication could take over my life. Opiates became my drug of choice, but as my dependence grew, I turned to methadone to try to get off them. While on methadone, I started using cocaine to give me energy. It was a vicious cycle—I was constantly chasing something to help me function or escape, but I was only digging myself deeper. The truth is, in active addiction, I was trying to escape myself. I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin, and I didn’t have the tools to face life as it was. Substances became my way of numbing that discomfort, but they only made the pain worse. I didn’t know how to live a better life—or that one was even possible.

Me: How did Felicity House change your life?

Denise: Felicity House has completely transformed my life by teaching me the value of community, accountability, and vulnerability. One of the most remarkable things about Felicity House is the peer-to-peer support among the women and the incredible alumni network. Alumni frequently come back to give support, share their stories, and inspire the current residents. It’s this ongoing connection that makes the house feel like more than just a recovery program—it’s a family. I experienced this firsthand when the director who was here during my time later became my sponsor. That level of care and mentorship is life-changing.

Felicity House also provides structure and tools for recovery that help women rebuild their lives. Residents are responsible for their tasks, like household chores, and they’re held accountable in weekly meetings. We provide resources like guest speakers, workshops, resume assistance, and even holistic practices like breathwork. Every Monday night, we have a meeting where we talk about recovery and share what we call our “rose” or “thorn” of the week—what’s working and what’s challenging. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned at Felicity House is that recovery isn’t about doing everything perfectly—it’s about being honest and showing up, even when it’s hard. I try to remind residents that there’s no shame in struggling or making mistakes. For example, one of our newer residents recently shared how the holidays triggered painful memories of her mother’s passing. She got up and left the meeting, but I encouraged her to stay and sit with those feelings instead of running away. Growth happens when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and open to support, even when it’s uncomfortable.

At Felicity House, we resolve conflicts and celebrate progress as a group. If two residents are struggling with tension, we address it together, fostering an environment where everyone feels heard and supported. We also ask alumni who’ve lived at the house for nine months or longer to come back for a series of meetings after they leave. This helps maintain a sense of continuity and accountability while inspiring the women who are still here. Felicity House has shown me—and so many other women—that recovery isn’t something you face alone. It’s about leaning into community, building trust, and learning how to live an honest, fulfilling life.

Me: How do residents complete their recovery?

Denise: Residents typically complete their recovery journey at Felicity House in about a year, and we mark this milestone with a special ceremony in the backyard. It’s a beautiful celebration of their growth and hard work. Each graduate receives a medallion coin as a symbol of their achievement and commitment to sobriety. I still have mine from 20 years ago, and it’s one of my most cherished possessions.

During the ceremony, we pass the medallion around, and each resident shares something meaningful about the graduate—their growth, their impact, and the memories they’ve shared. Families are invited to join as well, which makes it even more special. It’s a time for reflection, gratitude, and connection. We also celebrate with food and fellowship, creating a warm and supportive atmosphere. One of my favorite traditions is reading from Dr. Seuss’s “Oh, The Places You’ll Go.” It’s a beautiful way to honor the journey they’ve been on and inspire them as they step into the next chapter of their lives. The ceremony is more than a celebration—it’s a reminder of the incredible strength and resilience of the women in our community and the bonds we’ve built together.

Me: That’s wonderful! I love that book. I gave a copy to my daughter for her high school graduation.

Denise: I love that. Yes, we read it at our graduations. The ceremony is really beautiful. You can’t do recovery alone. Addiction worsens when people feel pressured and alone. Felicity House is support and accountability.

Me: How are attitudes about addiction changing?

Denise: Addiction touches everyone in some way, and that’s why the stigma around alcoholism and addiction isn’t as strong as it used to be. Society today seems to be more understanding because so many people have been personally affected. Everyone knows someone—a brother, sister, aunt, uncle, or friend—who has struggled with addiction or found sobriety. It’s becoming easier for people to relate and empathize. Addiction doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t matter how much money you make or how little—you’ll find a way to keep drinking or using if you’re in active addiction. I’ve experienced this firsthand. I’m an accountant by trade, with a bachelor’s in accounting from Loyola Marymount University, and I worked at a law firm before coming to Felicity House. When I started my recovery, I didn’t think I would ever be ready to return to accounting or bookkeeping.

During my early recovery at Felicity House, I took a job as a barista at a coffee shop to rebuild my confidence and keep my stress levels manageable. After a few months, a headhunter provided by Felicity House helped me find a position in my field. Eventually, I realized the corporate six-figure life I had rebuilt was causing me so much stress that I feared it might jeopardize my sobriety. That’s when I made the decision to leave that life behind and step fully into my role at Felicity House. Becoming executive director was a big change for me—I’d never worked in nonprofits before—but I absolutely love what I do now.

This shift in my own life mirrors how society’s attitudes about addiction are changing. People are beginning to understand that recovery isn’t just about stopping drinking or using; it’s about creating a life that supports your sobriety and aligns with your values. The more open we are about addiction and recovery, the more we break down the stigma, and that helps everyone.

Me: What was the journey to sobriety like for you?

Denise: The journey to sobriety was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Detoxing was incredibly challenging. I began my detox during my six months at New Directions, and it took a good year for my body to fully rid itself of everything I had been using. I’ll never forget how physically weak I was in those early days—I could barely walk up and down the stairs. Sometimes, I had to crawl because my legs were so weak. Detox isn’t just physically draining; it’s emotionally and mentally exhausting as well.

Getting sober is about so much more than just removing substances from your system. It’s about facing difficult feelings head-on, building self-worth, and learning the tools to get comfortable in your own skin. That’s the real work of sobriety—developing the self-esteem to believe you’re worth the effort and the life that recovery offers. At Felicity House, we give women the tools and the time to begin that process. Our format is voluntary, so women stay anywhere from three months to a year, depending on what they need.

Many choose to stay longer, but not everyone is ready to commit to the process right away. I’ve seen women leave after only a month or two, and some of them relapse because they didn’t give themselves the chance to fully heal and rebuild. Sobriety is a journey, not a quick fix. It requires patience, persistence, and a willingness to be uncomfortable for a while as you grow and change. For me, that journey was painful and slow at first, but it’s also been the most rewarding experience of my life. The lessons I learned in early recovery—how to face my emotions, how to value myself, and how to build a support system—are what keep me sober today.

Me: How does Felicity House fit into the landscape and culture of Los Angeles?

Denise: Felicity House serves women from all over the country. While most of our residents are from California, we’ve also had women come to us from places like New York. Los Angeles has a unique landscape when it comes to addiction and recovery. California is known for its focus on health and wellness, but at the same time, the homelessness crisis here is impossible to ignore. Mental illness, addiction, and homelessness often go hand in hand, and in L.A., it’s visible on every corner.

In other parts of the country—like the Midwest—addiction and mental health struggles are often more hidden. People may feel ashamed or keep those struggles private, but here in Los Angeles, it’s out in the open. That visibility has created a different attitude toward addiction and recovery. People in L.A. are more aware and, as a community, many have stepped up to support those in need. But there’s still so much more to be done.

People often think of L.A. as glamorous—a city full of celebrities, actors, artists, or people chasing perfection. But addiction doesn’t discriminate. It’s everywhere, and L.A. understands that. Felicity House has been a consistent refuge for women in recovery for 50 years. While so much around us has changed, our approach has stayed the same because it works. The structure, accountability, and peer-to-peer support create a strong foundation for recovery.

One of the things that makes Felicity House special is our alumni network. Every Wednesday night, you’ll see alumni coming back to the house for meetings, sharing their stories, and supporting the current residents. This cycle of support is what keeps Felicity House thriving. Alumni want to give back because they’ve experienced firsthand the impact this house has on their lives. That’s what I love most about Felicity House—it’s a place of consistency, connection, and community in a city that can feel overwhelming and chaotic. It’s a reminder that no matter where you’re from or what you’ve been through, there’s a place for you here, and people who want to help you succeed.

If you know someone who needs help, contact the Substance Abuse And Mental Health Administration’s National Helpline, at (800) 662-HELP (4357), open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, and is free and confidential.

Cancellations began the next morning. Schools closed, and I was home Wednesday thinking I would be back at school by Thursday. I’ve never packed an emergency “to go” bag and didn’t have any intention of leaving. The alerts about the Palisades Fire continued, more news about the Eaton Fire, and then parts of northern Santa Monica were under evacuation watch by Wednesday afternoon. My neighbor downstairs, a former military man, texted me about conditions and said that he had a bag packed and “was ready.”

What’s ready supposed to look like? I had no idea, and still don’t.

Wednesday afternoon, I walked outside to the upper level of my apartment complex parking garage. The air was warm and weird. It smelled weird. It tasted weird. I’ll never forget that strange, foul smell and taste. Inside, my apartment smelled mildly smoky. I always have my balcony screen door open for fresh air and now the place smelled like an ashtray. I checked the alerts, the fire map. I stood in my apartment and looked around unsure of what to do. I don’t know wildfire other than it is unpredictable. I do know that Santa Ana winds are formidable. Listening to them in total darkness was spooky AF. I didn’t want another night of sitting in the dark without power, the smoke moving my way. I grabbed the cat, pet food, my laptop, packed a bag of groceries and threw an oddball mix of items into a small suitcase: the basics like sweatpants, socks and underwear as well as a small painting by my daughter and one of her ceramic pieces. I wasn’t under evacuation orders and didn’t think my neighborhood would burn but my biggest concern was the electricity going on and off with the high winds and the smoke. I also didn’t want to get alerts to suddenly leave in the middle of the night.

I drove east, past downtown L.A. which was buried in smoke. On the way out, a man stood in the middle of the street selling a bucket of bright flowers. Mango and coconut vendors were on the corner. Amazon drivers were making deliveries. Homeless people pushed grocery carts down the sidewalk. People stood at bus stops, masked up and waiting, talking on their phones. Not everyone has the privilege to leave. Many people were going about their work day, landscapers, construction workers, and cleaning crews out and about. I’m still wrapping my head around this, the mundane side-by-side with the catastrophic.

I drove to Joshua Tree to spend two nights with close friends who are like family. When shit gets scary, we need our people. They made me tacos, we drank wine, and doom scrolled, watching the news, everything orange and gray on screen, everything terrifying. People texted asking if I was okay. It was and is surreal.

I’m driving back to L.A. now. The Palisades Fire is 8% contained. Since it started Tuesday morning, 20,000 acres have burned, the Pacific Palisades community completely gone. The Eaton Fire near Altadena, which began Tuesday evening, is 3% contained as of this morning, and has burned 14,000 acres. Today, I will go grocery shopping and stock up. I am beyond fortunate. What I saw driving home Tuesday afternoon was unnerving. What I’m driving back to today is horrific.

The way L.A. is stepping up makes me love this city even more. A favorite restaurant of mine on Lincoln Boulevard announced closure to the public because it is serving meals to first responders, and more than 40 other local restaurants are doing the same. If interested, please consider donating to the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation, as I did, to help support crews out on the frontlines. There are also various roundups of organizations accepting donations to support those affected by the L.A. fires. The Santa Monica-based, NPR member station KCRW has numerous listings of resources, including food, and KCRW is also donor supported (I’ve been a monthly member since moving here in 2018; feel free to become a member.) There’s also the American Red Cross, the California Fire Foundation, the Los Angeles Food Bank, World Central Kitchen, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which helps immigrant day laborers and undocumented workers, who day and night keep Los Angeles going. The Pasadena Humane Society seeks support during its outreach to rescue animals affected by wildfire. And, of course, please consider supporting the Los Angeles Mission, where I got my start teaching creative writing six years ago, an organization that steps up in any crisis and never gives up on L.A.

Finally, The Los Angeles County Library is open to people without power, who need WiFi, who need to recharge the literal and metaphorical batteries. Libraries are our most democratic institutions left; truly anyone can use a library for free. If you follow me on Instagram, the only social media I use, my “note” is always the same: Read books. Support libraries. That Ben Franklin was onto something, establishing the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731. Libraries open their doors to everyone and anyone, and their community presence is mission critical in this era of capitalist greed where oligarchs run the show. Support and protect libraries wherever and whenever possible. I can’t emphasize this enough. It’s not just about checking out a free book for two weeks; libraries are beacons of community and democracy, two very fragile things under recurrent threats.

When I first moved to L.A. from the northeast, people asked things like “What about the wildfires?” which is subtext for “Why would you live somewhere that could suddenly burn to the ground?” I understand the question. I miss rain, the sound of rain, the smell of rain, how rain turns everything green. How can we explain true love? We can’t. All I know is that I fell in love with L.A. years ago. L.A. is home.

Thank you for reading L.A. Woman, thanks to those who reached out, and if you’re able to support any of the above organizations and help L.A. through this disaster, thank you, thank you, thank you.❤️

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I was alone there on Venice Boulevard; me and my shit ton of feelings spilling over onto a major, four-lane street typically swollen with buses, vintage cars, beat up Subarus, Priuses and Toyotas of all eras and colors, delivery vans, those ugly Tesla cyber trucks, dudes on e-bikes, and homeless people pushing rusty grocery carts. Venice Boulevard is all of America inching either east or west. But that night, Venice Boulevard was saying very little, making my thoughts too loud, the music from inside the dance studio muffled and vibrating through the walls. Not even a taco truck in sight–that guy was about two blocks away. I had stepped out to briefly to get some air, thinking I had kept the main door loose enough to stay open. I was wrong. It clicked behind me just as I had gotten comfortable, a loud reprimand on a quiet night that I should’ve wedged a flip-flop to properly prop it open.

The dance studio, called Dance Tribe, has since moved to Santa Monica, and this studio with the orange and gray wall that leads to the entrance is now a Pilates practice with the ubiquitous L.A. decor. When I walked by on a late December Sunday morning, the Pilates studio was locked and empty. The crowds were a few blocks down at the Mar Vista Farmers Market. I spent a few minutes admiring the wall, worried it would get knocked down one day because cities bulldoze the old for the new. The brightly lit Pilates studio where I had danced in protected darkness looked weird. The mystery was gone. Now, it was a room to witness the transformation of muscle and self-esteem, maybe as a way to inspire buying an overpriced membership, no longer a place where people of all ages with all kinds of bodies danced in all kinds of ways to music fast and slow.

I prefer this space as I remember it from the summer, when it was new to me even though it was about to relocate. That August night, as I leaned on this wall trying not to cry, one of the dancers, an older man, appeared on the other side of the door and gave me a thumbs up, as if asking “Everything okay?” I was locked out but not yet ready to go in. I smiled and waved, indicating everything was fine when everything wasn’t. He smiled back and disappeared into the studio. I wasn’t done crying about who knows what, and I wanted a few more moments alone with this version of Venice Boulevard, where a large part of my L.A. life happens.

Venice Boulevard is where I was introduced to “ecstatic dance” though I find that term misleading. Free-form dance or moving meditation makes more sense. I have taken dance lessons on and off for nearly a decade, mostly salsa classes, but didn’t know ecstatic dance at all and didn’t really know what to expect. It’s a very L.A. thing to do, like surfing or getting an herbal colonic or rollerblading in a bikini before purifying your crystals under a full moon while you spin some discount vinyl. At Dance Tribe, I didn’t see taut perfect-looking young women in cropped BoHo attire ecstatically dancing, as is often shown on social media, though I’m sure they’re out there somewhere having a blast.

Instead, I saw something far more compelling, including many elderly people moving through various forms of sorrow, and one woman dancing with another woman who had cerebral palsy. I met a widow who had lost her husband after 42 years of marriage. She was there to dance and process a profound loss. This was eye-opening, and maybe not the L.A. people get to see when visiting or one that they even imagine exists.

I don’t live on Venice Boulevard but if my L.A. life were an A24 narrative, Venice Boulevard would be the setting, possibly the lead character, and definitely a source of conflict. One of my first stops after arriving in L.A. in August 2018 was to sign up for yoga classes at Veda Yoga Center on Venice Boulevard, which became my sanctuary. I go to therapy on Venice Boulevard. I bought lingerie on Venice Boulevard. I get my jeans tailored on Venice Boulevard. One of my favorite sweaters was purchased at a thrift shop on Venice Boulevard where my daughter likes to shop. I’ve walked Venice Boulevard with others and alone. For six years, I drove up and down Venice Boulevard taking my kid to her summer camp job where she taught ceramics. I enjoyed a date night at the delightfully weird Museum of Jurassic Technology (more on that in another post), which is next door to my Venice Boulevard yoga studio. L.A. is so sprawled out with ribbons of concrete packed with cars going everywhere, so the odds of walking along and bumping into someone you know are pretty low—this isn’t New York City. Yet, that happened to me on Venice Boulevard. I bumped into someone I dated. I was leaving yoga and he was biking to dance, the man who would later bring me to the dance studio with the wall. (That part absolutely goes into the A24 movie.)

Like so many other things in this world, Venice Boulevard was born from dirt. It began as a path more than a century ago when railroad tracks shaped this country. And like so much of the American story, it expanded west until it ran out of dirt and into the ocean, connecting downtown Los Angeles with the Venice Beach shoreline. Considering how much I wanted to escape the Northeast and go as west as possible, I’m not surprised my future was waiting for me on what's sometimes dubbed “the last five miles of America.”

If I want to know what’s further down the road for me, two blocks from the orange and gray wall is a palm and tarot reader, because the future is always bearing down on us and no one does New Age mysticism with as much devotion as Los Angeles. I don’t know how the tarot readers afford L.A. rents but there’s always a neon shingle aglow promising insight along Venice Boulevard and elsewhere around town. These are expensive neighborhoods where other entrepreneurs were driven out by the pandemic closures but somehow the tarot readers remain financially solvent, scoring optimal store fronts. Maybe after 2020, many became frantic to know what was coming next and the palm and tarot readers now experience paychecks like electricians and plumbers.

Next door to the tarot reader is my tailor, a lovely, Spanish-speaking woman named Celeste whose shop is the size of a bathroom and a broom closet mating. Celeste says very little and usually has a mouthful of pins. I’ve been going to Celeste for years and trust her implicitly. She’s a sartorial therapist, making awkward-fitting garments look and feel beautiful. This is where I get my bell bottom jeans hemmed because I’m five-foot-two, and where I have dresses or slips taken in because I’m told I’m petite. Smalls are too small. Mediums are too medium, therefore, Celeste. Thankfully, she stays out of the red like the palm and tarot readers.

On that August night, I stood against this cool wall, my back sweaty from dancing, and watched the sky. Businesses around me had been closed for hours. Venice Boulevard felt like it was entirely mine. These shops, this street, anchor me. I didn’t want to get locked out but oddly, I didn’t want to give up this moment either. I knew this dance studio was relocating and this space would become something else, soon. Streets are alive, shape-shifters and mirrors of who we are and what we value. Change always seems to happen too fast or too slow, and standing against that wall, I wanted everything to stay as it was, as if by not moving, by not going back inside, I could stop time.

Another minute or two passed and then another man came out of the entrance. He opened the door and asked if I was okay. I smiled and said I was fine. I was ready. He held the door open for me and I walked back into the darkness, the movement, the lights, the music, an entirely different energy from the shared solitude with that wall. Later, there would be a circle where all the dancers could say how they felt. Angelenos love to talk about their feelings in a way that’s different from how New Yorkers talk about their feelings. Both cities overshare, but I sometimes like this because you get to hear people’s stories and over the years, I’ve become more fluent in Angeleno, like when the woman on the yoga mat in front of me once said to her friend, “My Sagittarius moon has really been acting up,” like some kind of rash that needed immediate care. Fast forward to a few weeks ago and to a gorgeous Malibu oceanfront house party on another stunning December day where I am having an amazing time, not thinking too hard about my feelings, simply having fun, and finding myself surrounded by Angelenos talking about channeling and alignment. Malibu isn’t Venice Boulevard, but I am learning the local lingua franca. Moons and alignment matter.

I frequently miss that L.A. moment outside Dance Tribe’s old address. There will always be something going on for me on Venice Boulevard, however, I like to go back to that late summer night, locked out and alone by a beautiful wall. In no rush to go anywhere or do anything. Overwhelmed by an uncertainty I wasn’t yet ready to share with anyone. Feeling supported by orange and gray fiberglass or whatever that material is, gearing up to rejoin strangers who beautifully didn’t fit any kind of mold; who, when I re-entered the room, were dancing under flickering red and violet lights, deep in their own hopes, fears and grief.

P.S. When I think of what I listened to in 2024, it was a mix of old and new, as any good playlists should be, but a song I associate with New Year’s Eve is “Talk Tonight” by Oasis, which was played at a house party two years ago, where the host and a dear friend of mine tested me on my Britishness. Sure, I can visit London several times but do I know the B-side songs of an A-list British band? “Talk Tonight” is a gorgeous, naked acoustic song reportedly inspired by the band’s near break-up after their show went badly at Whisky A Go Go here in Los Angeles in 1994. On the way to San Francisco, lead singer Noel Gallagher met a woman who talked him off the metaphorical and perhaps literal edge. I always loved the line “All your dreams are made of strawberry lemonade,” and wish I had written it. Sad and sweet, raw and confessional, as conversations that go deep into the night are.

For New Year’s Day, the vibe slaps with something more upbeat: two songs from 2005. First, Madonna’s “Jump” from Confessions On A Dance Floor, an empowering message about taking chances set to a groove that gets the blood flowing on a cold winter’s day. Second is “1 Thing” by Amerie. This song is super sexy. GT Mustang sexy. Dance floor sexy. Downtown L.A. rooftop bar sexy. Sing loud in your shower sexy. Walk down Venice Boulevard like you own it sexy. Forward, forward, forward into 2025 sexy.

Happy New Year, readers, and thank you for joining me on this journey. Let me know when you’re in town and we’ll go dancing.

The entire movie grabbed me, but I was particularly moved by the use of palm trees, and appreciative of filmmaker Coralie Fargeat’s outsider perspective of Los Angeles. (L.A. lore is that Fargeat began writing the script at a coffee shop in Silver Lake. I would love for this to be true.) The film was shot entirely in France, but the repeated use of palm trees and capturing that bright, incessant, promising Southern California light evokes all that’s possible in Tinseltown.

Light is really important to me. As someone with seasonal affective disorder (SAD), the months of November through April were arduous when I lived in the Northeast and in the Pacific Northwest. I did all the recommended things and still felt like shit. I used a light lamp daily. I took vitamin D and fish oil. I sat outside on our front step in 20-degree weather sipping coffee trying to get direct sunlight before the cloud cover usurped the sky. I went to an acupuncturist. I regularly swam at the indoor pool to get that brain chemical boost exercise gives you. I was in a constant state of managing SAD, and despite all this effort, would still feel lethargic, randomly cry, and almost constantly want to eat carbs and sugar for any kind of energy lift.

There is a difference between managing symptoms and not thinking about them and just living your life. L.A. grants me this, like an upbeat genie in a bottle who also appreciates monotonous weather. Sunshine is literally happiness. Sunshine means more serotonin. Sunshine means getting out of bed and giving life a go. I love snow. It's moving through murky darkness for days, weeks, months, that I can’t do. Even when L.A. experiences May Gray and June Gloom, I’ll get a brief return of SAD symptoms, which feels like inhaling mud, and then the clouds here find somewhere else to go and it’s that unwavering sunny weather that I need. I really am just a house plant with a deeper emotional landscape.

Living in Los Angeles gives me freedom to focus on what I want to do, and palm trees aglow in abundant sunshine is a daily reminder of that privilege. I have taken pictures of more palm trees than I can count (as you can see here), from my early visits starting 16 years ago to just last week. I drive by palm trees on the way to work, the grocery store, the airport, the beach. I see palm trees when I take out the garbage and pick up my mail. Seeing them never becomes mundane to me. I am going into my seventh year here and still act as if I just stepped off the plane with a suitcase full of dreams and winter clothes that would later end up in the Goodwill bins.

The Substance is a body horror film that hit all the right notes regarding impossible female beauty standards, aging, and obnoxious men making all the decisions, all of which is in full view here in L.A. Yet, between all that I was lured to those shots of beautiful palm trees like a moth to a flame. Sucked in every time. Seduced. Sold. This post is a valentine to Fargeat’s strategic use of palm trees, which did not go unnoticed by this viewer. I can’t explain why their ubiquity hasn’t dulled their impact on me. I bike along the beach and gush at the scenery. Sunday night, I stood on the upper level of the parking garage here admiring the full moon and the palm tree silhouettes around me. Yes, let’s talk about Demi Moore’s stellar, nuanced performance in The Substance, but also let’s have a brief Lorax moment and give a shout out to the trees!

Maybe this is the love story that was always waiting for me, an unabashed love for a complicated, parched, sprawled out city surrounded by mountains and fault lines, filled with smog, traffic, and clusters of people living in delipidated tents wherever there’s room, lined by beaches with too-high bacteria levels, sparkling with glittering marquees, a city with far too many astrologers and probably not enough taco trucks, donut shops, and boba tea hangouts. All the filth and flowers. All the tarot card readers and skateboarders. All the palm trees, always still, watching and waiting to see what this crazy city will do next.

And you hold your coffee midway, maybe it’s a cappuccino with real dairy because real dairy is making a comeback in Los Angeles (a local barista told me this). Oats are out. Cows are back. (For now; L.A. loves food trends, so this could change because the weather here never changes so something needs to fluctuate.) Your cup is at that point where you’re about to take a sip but you need a moment to consider my question. The Pacific glistens. Surfers ride waves. Kites fly. Dogs catch frisbees. Hot girls roller skate past us. Hot guys ride bikes without needing the handlebars. Venice Beach is busy being Venice Beach. Ambiance washes over us.

And then you say to me, “But Katrina, who would we be without hope?”

And then I pause with my coffee cup and we sit in quiet contemplation, neither one of us with an answer. It’s a gorgeous L.A. winter day, the kind of weather Angelenos take for granted and East Coasters and Midwesterners fantasize about. We sit outside at this Venice Beach cafe wearing nothing heavier than a thrifted chunky sweater that cost less than a fancy kale salad, holding our coffee cups as if we need the warmth even though we don’t because it’s 70 degrees out. A perfect December day on the beach.

The winter holidays are all about hope, about finding light in darkness. As we approach the winter solstice, I find myself leaning harder on hope and for all the wonderful things we hope for as one year ends and another begins.

That’s a cyclical kind of hope but there’s also collective hope that inspires hope at the individual level. The poster boy for collective AND individual hope is kinda hot and kinda my hero. His name is Barack Obama. Maybe you read his book “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream,” his 2006 bestseller. And if hope looks like this, who wouldn’t want some? Plus, Obama says uplifting remarks like: “Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for and to fight for it.”

Well, fuck yeah. Sign me up for some hope! Hope is brave. Hope is sexy. Hope is momentum.

Right???

Maybe hope looks like Obama: confident, poised, ready to face the odds. Maybe hope looks like a sunny day at Venice Beach: expansive, sunshine, possibilities. Maybe hope is more immediate: your reflection in the bathroom mirror. Your kids hugging you hello. Good news in your inbox. Someone you don’t know doing something nice for you because, well, not everyone sucks.

Hope is seductive, and I am addicted to it. That’s the allure of L.A. Hope is on the billboards looming over every boulevard. Hope is the monotonous sunny weather, like someone smiling at you ALL THE TIME. Hope is seeing two old people walking the beach and holding hands. Hope is overhearing someone’s first date at the table behind you going really, really well, and you don’t know them but you are rooting for them.

If I’m addicted to hope, which is better than being addicted to many other vices out there, and if addiction is something that is supposed to be cured given how L.A.--and America–talks about addiction, then what is the alternative to hope? Hopelessness? That sounds awful. Hopelessness makes me want even more hope. So is it okay for hope to be: habit-forming, compulsive, an indulgence, perhaps even necessary? (Cue Carrie Bradshaw voiceover question as she types away facing her window overlooking the Upper East Side - but actually appears to be the West Village.)

Elizabeth Gilbert talks about being “a victim of my own optimism” in her bestseller “Eat, Pray, Love,” a book I never had an interest in reading. But her insight here looms over me. When should I be more realistic? When should I be pessimistic? When should hope go out the fucking window and be replaced by some protective cynicism? A fascist returns to the White House in the new year. This is a fucked up country with fucked up policies, and every day, the United States operates more like an oligarchy and less like a democracy (that’s right, I went there). Doom scrolling isn’t really doom scrolling anymore–it’s just scrolling. There’s a lot to be worried about. Who in their right mind would cling to hope in the face of all this?

And yet.

Maybe it’s not about hope delivering an outcome or some kind of luxurious buffer against cold, harsh truths but providing the stamina to not give up. America is such a metrics-driven nation but maybe hope should be viewed as a process that helps us set goals rather than the goal itself. Psychologists talk about the empowerment hope offers. Dr. Jacqueline Mattis, a clinical psychologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, makes this distinction: “The difference between optimism and hope is that while optimism is that expectation that things will work out, hope comes with that expectation plus a plan.”

To hope is to plan, to not just sit there and wait for things to come together.

Do I expect things to work out? I’m capable of nuanced gray thinking framed by hope. This is Tinseltown, after all, and despite the 24/7 faux shimmer, it’s a very tough place to succeed. In the thick of disappointments, setbacks, and failures, how does anyone maintain hope? Maybe because I was born a week after the spring equinox, I’ve always had an innate spring flower energy and can’t wallow in cynicism. Yes, I’ve spiraled into some dark places, but for whatever reason, I can’t stay in those claustrophobic dark places. It’s like being underwater too long; I seek the expansion that breaking the surface offers. I need to hope.

L.A. is filled with billboards and murals and ads of beautiful people with perfectly arched eyebrows looking edgy and serious, people who at some point hoped to make it “big” and now their faces are the biggest sites along La Cienega Boulevard. Their hope–and stamina–paid off. At night, this city glitters with hope, big marquees with names in big letters that maybe didn’t mean anything to you a year or two ago and now mean everything. During the day, L.A. is bathed in hope, sunshine and flowers and convertibles in every direction, the 405 and Pacific Coast Highway choking with possibility. I never felt the daily intensity of hope anywhere else more so than in Los Angeles. Sure, New York City has edge and grit and bright marquees with big names, too, but it’s also gray, cold, smells like dog pee and nothing blooms there for nearly half the year. In L.A., there are orange groves bulbous with fruit while snow falls on the mountains, and calla lilies and roses sprouting out of nowhere. The weather is so goddamn glorious all the time, that hope isn’t just aspirational, it’s sensible.

Which means I don’t want to be relieved of this addiction. I’m too in love with hope. And as you and I sit by the ocean with our coffees, I admit I’m hooked on hope and okay with that, relieved to unburden myself of this, as if I confessed some big secret. And I tell you that if hope means risking heartbreak and shit going sideways, so be it because I’d rather hope than sit on the sidelines of life. You nod to this, satisfied with my reply, take a sip of coffee, and ask me what I think about Sandra Bullock’s cheekbones.

P.S. I just saw Thee Sacred Souls at The Wiltern two nights ago, and wow! So much fun! First, I want to thank this band for making high-waisted pants cool again. Katharine Hepburn would’ve loved these guys. There’s nothing cool about butts and guts hanging out of low-cut pants or the whale tail thong thing. Keep a little mystery going and put a belt on! I mean, just look at Alex Garcia and Sal Samano flanking Josh Lane in that link above–boss energy with their belts practically above the belly button. Covered confidence is sexy.

This was my first visit to the Wiltern. I’ve belonged to the L.A. Conservancy since moving here in 2018, and have truly enjoyed learning about the city’s historic theaters (their theater tours are great!). The Wiltern is a stunning Art Deco landmark building that opened in 1931 as the Warner Brothers Western Theater, and then was renamed the Wiltern because it’s on Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue. Like many L.A. gems, the Wiltern was almost demolished in the 1970s–apparently to create a parking garage according to a concert goer sitting next to me. I love L.A.’s old theaters so much that I recently wrote an essay about them for the London-based literary journal Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, as part of an ongoing column about my life in L.A. I’m thrilled to share that my editor nominated this essay for a Pushcart Prize. Winners are announced next spring, so fingers crossed!

Sacred Soul’s groovy soul sound vibed perfectly with The Wiltern, and as we close out 2024 and inch towards 2025, a quarter of a century into this new century, the songs played that evening felt like I had stepped back in time. (My favorite song of theirs is “Will I See You Again?”) I hope to go to the Wiltern again and again and again. I love living here, and I’m excited to share L.A. with you. Thank you for joining me on this Substack journey, and see you on the other side of New Year’s as this climb continues.

Indeed. Picture us sitting at a cozy bar with tasteful, vintage paneling, nothing too loud, nothing too sticky, and me telling you this story.

The bar was The Prince in Koreatown, where a few episodes of Mad Men were filmed. Everything was red, gorgeous, stunning. I wore a red pashmina and felt like I belonged. I sipped a very well-crafted, red-dusted margarita while the man who had invited me to this exquisite bar performed his resume in between lecturing me on, well, everything. It was barely a conversation and after a while, I gave up and admired the decor, especially the miniature Beefeater statue lamps and the stained glass. Thankfully, the bartender was kinda hot though kinda married, which is a challenge given the City of Angels is also the City of Vice and the City of Polyamory, so I can never accurately gauge people’s level of commitment. I’ll probably never know, and that’s okay.

I endured. 

Mark Mason wrote this essay I like to periodically go back to, which explores a foundational question that isn’t asked often enough: “what are you willing to struggle for?” Happiness, Mason reminds us, requires struggle: bad dates, long hours at the office, sweating it out at the gym, delayed gratification to save money, weathering rejection both personal or professional. All the things. Which means you have a choice in the struggle that you decide is worth your time, focus, sweat, heartbreak, emotional bandwidth. If you want to build wealth, then you’re not buying the latest shiny thing from Apple or Amazon. If you want to get ahead in your career, then you’re not taking long lunches or punching out early. If you want muscle and tone, the physique that allows you to fit into that dress or pair of jeans that you love, then you’re not inhaling a bag of Doritos and chasing it with Coke.

All that being said, endurance doesn’t guarantee an outcome. Endurance simply means you haven’t quit. Endurance means: grit, capacity, stamina, perseverance, courage, drive, durability, longevity. These are powerful words. These are words worth creating space for and carrying. I hang on to these words every day.

The publishing industry has tested my endurance, though based on what I’ve read here on Substack and what I’ve heard over coffees, lunches, drinks with writer friends, this fickle industry has tested everyone’s endurance. No one seems to be having a good time, even the folks who work in it. It’s grueling, and I applaud those who are in the thick of trying to navigate this bizarre maze. I’m a lift-all-boats kinda gal, and I want everyone’s everything to go everywhere (okay, not Trump voters—gonna put that C.Y.A. out into the universe that I didn’t and don’t want THAT shitshow to go everywhere).

The election results are testing the endurance of many. I won’t echo the echo chamber that’s already made the rounds all over the Internet but just know I was screaming into my pillow, too. 

Capitalism is definitely testing my endurance. I take the lowest dose of klonopin to fall asleep. Insomnia has been an ongoing problem for years. I don’t mind the world knowing this (and now you do). About two years ago, my primary care physician was retiring. I never liked him and was about to shop around for a new doctor when I learned he was almost out the door so I stuck it out for one last visit. We did a Zoom appointment to refill my klonopin because California requires physician re-evaluation of benzodiazepine use every three months. Never mind that a physician prescribed this medication years ago, and that’s how benzodiazepine dependence began. My soon-to-be-retired physician nudged at this “dependence” during our online office visit. I looked straight at my computer screen and said to him, “When the boot of capitalism is off my neck, that’s when I’ll go off klonopin.” My three-month refill was refilled, and the two of us moved on with our lives without further discussion. Considering what the rest of L.A. takes, I look at my minimal dose of klonopin as pretty small potatoes. I don’t even drink diet soda or sweetened drinks. I don’t smoke. I can’t eat gluten. You get the idea.

Back to Mark Mason’s question about struggle and the no pain-no gain mentality. He notes, “What determines your success isn’t ‘What do you want to enjoy?’ The question is ‘What pain do you want to sustain?’” Break this down further and it’s really a question about risk. What are you willing to risk? Instability? Safety? Rejection? Uncertainty? All of the above? 

Based on the past almost two years, it appears that I am a risk-taking type. Unless you’re a white dude, risk is scary for most of us. There’s far more at stake and the climb takes longer. Still. Staying safe behind a cubicle and doing what was expected was never for me. I am curious. Fortune favors the bold, or so I keep reminding myself. About three years ago, a neighbor said to me, “I think you enjoy the precipice,” which shocked me because it felt true, yet no one had ever said that to me before. The truth—when spoken out loud—feels different than the everyday banal stuff people say. It hits the gut in a specific way that reverberates throughout the body. That’s how you know.

Full transparency: I’m a bit weary being too far from a cubicle and too close to a precipice but am still going. I’m enduring in that gasping-catch-my-breath kinda way, not in a sexy, don’t-fuck-with-me way. I’m enduring in that are-we-almost-there way, not in a hell-yeah-gimme-more way. This is not how Hollywood depicts enduring. There is no heroic Wonder Woman pose here. If I’m romanticizing this because I do live in Tinsel Town, which has industrialized fantasy, I could say I am being forged, but nothing about this journey to “Success” has been romantic so really, it’s simply another zigzag journey of the human experience, ugly, awkward and lacking shimmer. No cool Wonder Woman regalia. Nothing new to see here. Maybe a happy ending or a happy something will happen eventually but right now, we’re in the endurance stretch of the story, the Act Two, the murky middle. I write this Substack to remind myself and to share with you that, flabby and frustrated, I’m still trying. Hopefully you are, too. There are plenty of Substacks that share how so-and-so succeeded at such-and-such, and looked really good doing it. This isn’t yet one of those. The cliché is true: turns out the struggle is really real. If that’s what you seek to read about, a newsletter mean girl algorithms will likely ignore, then you’re in the right place with L.A. Woman. Welcome subscribers. We’re in this together.

So belly up to a beautiful bar with a hot bartender, order something that riles the juices of your jaw and maybe burns a little bit on the inside, and raise your glass to endurance. Obnoxious dates. Missed opportunities. Awkward timing. Editor rejections. Cellulite. Mercury in Sagittarius. Pluto in Aquarius. Gas prices rising. Whatever your beliefs, whatever the roadblocks, whatever the things, you’re not alone. As glossy as the Internet pretends to be, we’re all on our road figuring out a way forward. If you’re in LA LA Land, let’s hang out at The Prince, have a genuine, two-way conversation and unpack what’s ahead.

P.S. When I first moved to L.A., a tarot card reader told me I had “Stevie Nicks energy.” I was always a fan of her voice and her style, how she was both intensely grounded to the action on stage while floating and flying above the mayhem at the same time. If any rock star were to become her own constellation, it would be her. Lately, I’ve had a particular version of “Gold Dust Woman” on replay, the one performed live in August 1977 at The Forum in Inglewood, California, which is around the corner from me. A few weeks ago, a woman told me something surprising. I drove to my dance studio, got there early, and sat in my car listening to this version while watching the L.A. sky turn orange to indigo, palm tree silhouettes high in the horizon. I had to sit quietly and digest this news, alone in my car, and I had to do it to this song. My daughter also inscribed lyrics from “Gold Dust Woman” onto the bottom of a ceramic bowl she made for me this past summer, one in which she glazed turquoise flecked with gold. It’s now one of my favorite pieces from her (and there are many), and sits on the center of my kitchen table usually filled with fresh lemons. A week ago, I drove out to Desert Hot Springs to visit friends and played this song over and over, the brown-gold of the expansive California desert everywhere. A daughter of the American Southwest, Stevie Nicks’ voice belongs with the beauty of this mystical and magical landscape, a dusty gold testament to resilience. If I can maintain Stevie Nicks energy while enduring, then I’m gonna be okay.

My daughter and I lived on the east coast at the time, this was perhaps our third or fourth trip to Los Angeles, and I admit I knew nothing about Olvera Street during that initial, accidental visit. I am grateful that I didn’t research this historic landmark beforehand, that I stumbled into it, this wonderful surprise that completely changed our day and our experience of this remarkable city. 

Recently, I returned to Olvera Street by way of Union Station and while browsing a shop, had the pleasure of meeting Nancy Madrid Ally, 72, who was by the cash register chatting with customers. I had a sense from the easy way that she interacted with people and how she carried herself that where she stood wasn’t just a job, it was home. Turns out, I guessed right, and learned from her that Olvera Street had been a bedrock in her family for three generations, since shortly after the community was under threat of demolition and ultimately “reopened” in 1930 as a site of Mexican culture and a birthplace of Los Angeles. 

Late October into November is Nancy’s busiest time of year, when Olvera Street celebrates Día de los Muertos, a multi-day celebration combining Indigenous Mexican traditions as well as Catholic rituals to honor those who have passed on, and to recognize that death is always present in life. We talked about Día de los Muertos, grief, changing communities, and contributing to L.A.’s history. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Me: As I ask every L.A. Woman, what brought you to Los Angeles?

Nancy: I was born at the Queen of the Angels Hospital in downtown L.A., and I’ve always lived in L.A. When I was four years old, my parents moved us to West Covina, and I still live in the house my parents bought in 1956. My grandmother opened a store on Olvera Street in the 1930s, and then in 1986, my sisters and I took over the Olvera Candle Shop so we now have two stores in the family, Rudy’s Gift Imports and the Candle Shop. I graduated from Loyola Marymount University, taught elementary school in Playa Vista before returning to the family business here on Olvera Street. My grandparents on both sides were born in Mexico—Mexico City and Mazatlan—and my parents were born in California. My siblings and I basically grew up here on Olvera Street, helping out at my grandparents’ shop. The store owners pass down their businesses to their kids, grandkids, great-grandkids. We know everybody. We’ve been to their weddings, their baptisms, the kids’ birthday parties.

Me: Olvera Street is such a huge part of Los Angeles’ history. Having grown up here and being so connected to the community as both an entrepreneur and as part of the families here, how has Olvera Street changed over the years?

Nancy: Well, Olvera Street is the oldest part of downtown Los Angeles. People might not realize that when they think ‘downtown.’ When I was a kid, they would have Christmas parties at the Adobe House, which is a historic building (Avila Adobe was built in 1818), and they’d have a Santa who would pass out gifts to the kids. We’d have tamales and concha or chilindrinas or other types of Mexican bread. Decades ago, the general manager of Olvera Street was part of the community, someone we all knew. Now, Olvera Street is managed by the city, so everything became more business-like, less personal. 

Me: And then, COVID. How did that affect the community here?

Nancy: COVID, and I would add Amazon and online shopping, which really took off during COVID. We’ve all seen how COVID hurts small businesses. Ours here was closed for almost six months. Everybody became so used to being at home, buying things on Amazon, and it took its toll on the Olvera Street merchants. Some families didn’t come back after COVID. It’s so sad. You walk on Olvera Street now and there are empty holes where stores are now permanently closed. Business isn’t back to pre-COVID levels. This year is even a bit less than last year. I really do think buying online has affected things. I have customers in the store walk in and say “Oh, that’s really cute, maybe I can get it on Amazon,” and I’m thinking “Hey, support a small business!  Amazon doesn’t need your money.”  The restaurants were very hard hit during COVID, and they are anchors for your business because they create the foot traffic. Restaurants could no longer afford to stay open, and the bigger restaurants couldn’t afford to keep a big crew, so it affected everybody. Also, the homeless have really affected us. No one wants to come downtown anymore. 

Me: Where do you find the items for your store?

Nancy: My sisters, who run the stores with me, we all like to shop and find things you won’t find anywhere else. We have a few people in Mexico who bring up merchandise, pieces from Oaxaca, like these beautiful handmade straw flowers from Oaxaca that we have in maroon, pink, and yellow. These are dried flowers with hearts and crosses on them so they’re pretty and I’ve never seen them here. One sister went to a farmers market and found really cool mugs from a family-run business in Mexico, so we’ll connect with artisans and entrepreneurs that way and they start whole-selling to us. We’re always on the lookout for new and unique things. We have these beautiful talavera mugs made in Puebla, a particular type of clay and style that’s very striking. We also have beautiful black clay products from Oaxaca. A challenge we’re having is that the older generations in Mexico are passing away and the younger generations, their kids, aren’t interested in learning their grandparents’ crafts and art. The item dies out. The younger generations aren’t interested in artistic traditions so some things are being lost. It depends on the family, but sometimes we no longer carry certain items because no one in the family makes it anymore. 

Me: What does Día de los Muertos mean to you?

Nancy: Well, that’s our busy season so it’s long hours at the stores. We have our altars at home and we honor our loved ones who have passed away. Our mom passed away at age 94 in 2023, so she has been added to the altar, and my husband passed away in 2018, so he is also on the altar. We usually have photos of our loved ones, white candles, marigolds, the Virgin Guadalupe, and any favorite foods our loved ones liked, and you also put water out so your loved ones have something to drink. Altars usually have three tiers with a white cloth covering, so it’s the traditional combined with the personal. You can write a loved one’s name on a sugar skull. We also keep our store altar up year-round, so that is never taken down. That's not just for Día de los Muertos. It’s become this community altar that now brings customers and strangers and tourists together. At first, we started it out as ours and suddenly it was December, we hadn’t taken it down yet and customers started asking if they could add to it so we said “yes.” Regular customers began leaving photos of their deceased loved ones, and it grew to hundreds of photos. One lady left a Heineken and a pack of cigarettes because those were her brother’s favorite things. One mother lost her only son when he was 18, so she left behind his photo and a golden rosary and some crystals, and she comes back to visit the altar every few months. It’s really grown. Sometimes, we’ll have someone leave a photo, and years later someone else will come in and recognize the photo on the altar, say, “Oh, my God, that’s my Uncle Joe, how did he get here?” and then they’re making phone calls to relatives to find out who left a photo of their relative on this community altar of ours. It’s pretty cool.

Me: How do you feel about Día de los Muertos becoming this event in L.A.?

Nancy: Olvera Street has been doing this event for many, many years, and while there are other events happening in the city, ours is more of a religious event.  We have a funeral procession every evening. The first procession was on October 25th. We have women who do cleansing rituals for the public. It’s our way of remembering family and friends who have passed away and helping other people participate. Not everyone has to be Mexican to celebrate. It’s a way of sharing grief, sharing experiences in this beautiful community. 

Me: You’ve had a front row seat to L.A. history over the years. How has it changed and what do you think people don’t realize about L.A.?

Nancy: People outside of L.A. may think L.A. is Hollywood Boulevard or Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Olvera Street is the birthplace of L.A. We’re where everything started. People from far away come there because of that, and people who are from Mexico, maybe they moved here and they come to Olvera Street because it reminds them of home. The little neighborhoods matter. L.A. is so spread out, our public system is okay but it’s not as great as other big cities. When you come downtown, it’s Olvera Street, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, maybe City Hall, maybe the Disney Center. I can see where people think L.A. is this concrete jungle, where everyone is skinny, everyone drives a Mercedes. L.A. is about family, maybe because we were raised with these family businesses. All of our kids worked at the family stores, and they went on to college and then onto their jobs. L.A. is really a lot of cool little neighborhoods but it’s just so spread out. There are fun neighborhoods like the Echo Park area or Silverlake but they’re so spread apart. Let’s face it, L.A. goes from downtown to the beach. Over the years, I think people have changed, too. There’s less warmth. You run into people who don’t really care about the people around them, which I think is sad. Customer service in a lot of places is awful. You ask for help and they can’t be bothered. I don’t like saying that, it’s sad. When people see downtown, they think “Oh it’s the courthouse or oh, it’s central jail.” L.A. is more than that. We’re very family-oriented, where everyone gets together every holiday, and that’s how Olvera Street is. We know each other’s families, and everyone is welcomed here.

And then I quickly said, “I’m a writer, too,” as if clarification was needed, which it wasn’t to anyone but me.

Writers don’t typically get 8,000 unplanned steps a day by 4 p.m.

About a month ago, I began a long-term substitute teaching assignment where I guide students through a writing project; many are first-generation English speakers in their households. To help them understand dialogue, I recently performed different verbs. I edit their papers. And sometimes we get to sit together, not write a word and make paper marigolds. A paycheck appears like clockwork every two weeks, and someone else now pays for my health insurance. As a teacher, it’s okay to not be 25 and obsessed with social media. In fact, experience is valued. Gray hair is acceptable.

Years ago, when I didn’t have gray hair, I was told I would make a good teacher, that I had a passionate way of speaking. I was in my twenties and brushed off this compliment. Back then, I didn’t want to be confined to a classroom. I wanted to write, travel, “be in the field,” as I told anyone and everyone, and that’s what I did. I became a stringer for Newsweek, not the website but the actual printed magazine that appeared on newsstands. This opportunity landed in my lap one day when a copy editor at the dot-com job where I worked in downtown Seattle overheard me pitch a story, took me aside and said, “You have a good eye. I know the west coast editor for Newsweek and she needs a stringer.” 

I was 26. Newsweek sent me “in the field,” exactly where I wanted to be. I would work my 9-to-5 dot-com job as a staff writer and then go wherever Newsweek wanted me to go, covering whatever they needed covering. One of my most “in-the-field” moments came in late 1999 during the World Trade Organization protests that shut down Seattle as people took the streets over global trade. “The Battle of Seattle,” as it was known. An estimated 40,000 protesters filled downtown. The New York desk and my west coast editor gave no specific direction other than to walk around, take copious notes, and report back everything I saw, which I did. I chronicled the event and walked past the front window of my bank, Washington Mutual, which had been smashed to pieces. I lived 10 minutes from the protests.

I stepped over broken glass and trash, maneuvered between protestors, avoided rubber bullets, and interviewed people about their motivation to get quotes. The weather was cold and the tension was hot. The governor called in the National Guard. I wrote down everything I could and submitted it to the New York desk. My coverage was used, and I received a contributing tagline to Newsweek’s WTO multi-page story. Next month marks the 25th anniversary of The Battle of Seattle.

I’m 51 now. I probably would go back out in the field if a magazine asked me to (several magazines I’ve written for have since folded though happy to see Newsweek still going). There’s a thrill to it. I loved it. It is a privilege to witness life being lived in real time, the possibility and the turmoil, the push for change, advocacy in motion. Now that I’ve got 20 years of motherhood under my belt, shaping young minds feels equally thrilling. Teaching is also advocacy in motion. I would not have been this kind of teacher at age 26. I needed to attend protests and hear the crunch of broken bank windows under my shoes. I needed to be in the thick of the action, if only briefly, to experience as much of the world as possible.

Fast forward almost twenty years, and I’m back on the west coast, a new resident to L.A. A month after unpacking boxes in a new apartment, I signed up to volunteer at the Los Angeles Mission located in downtown’s Skid Row, and I chose to work in the kitchen chopping vegetables and preparing lunch for women who were recently homeless or out of prison and in the Mission’s recovery program. 

On my first day, I was slicing onions and carrots and the only other person in the kitchen—a petite woman with long dark hair and many tattoos—asked me how long I had been out of prison. Not if I had spent time in prison, but how long. I paused and felt law-abidingly boring. I told her I hadn’t been in prison, that I was a writer new to L.A. and this was my first day as a volunteer. The conversation didn’t go much farther, but when the head cook there, a rotund man named Carlos (who later died when COVID first swept through in early 2020) learned that I was a writer, he took me aside. “You could help the ladies,” he said. “Help them with their trauma. Teach them how to write about their trauma. The journaling, it helps.”

I was moved by his empathy for these women that he cooked for. I could tell he knew their stories.

I’ll never forget that day, or Carlos. He had the best immigrant story I ever heard. In that cramped kitchen, on another day prepping another lunch, he told me, “I was born in Mexico City, and then one day, my parents said we were going to Disneyland, and we never left!” and he would laugh a full minute about this. I miss him.

Carlos is the reason I became a teacher. This isn’t hyperbole. After his suggestion, I submitted a proposal to the Mission leadership about a creative writing workshop, how it would be structured, what would be taught, my experience as a writer. I had zero teaching experience at the time. My proposal was accepted. The administration seemed excited. In January 2019, I launched a monthly creative writing workshop for the women, helping them write poetry and journal their ideas and experiences, as Carlos had suggested. 

The workshop became so popular, the administration asked me to teach the same class to the men, bulky ex-cons who had served prison sentences along with waifish, pallid men who were pulled from the streets and now in the Mission’s detox program. I read them poetry and taught them the same writing prompts that I had shared with the women. The men would read their poems and cry. The women would read their poems and get angry. The men wrote about broken hearts, the loneliness of addiction, missing their children, longing for home. The women wrote about broken hearts, the loneliness of addiction, missing their children, longing for home.

My writing class became this safe space for self expression. Several students allowed me to keep their poems. I taught at the Los Angeles Mission until October 2022, when I then left for Asia and to finish a novel. I sometimes missed the classroom environment, seeing students get excited about ideas and their writing.

The energies to teach and write could not be more different. Teaching is outward engagement. Writing is solitary, as inward as one can get. I am an extroverted writer, apparently a rarity I’ve learned at all the writing workshops and conferences I’ve attended over the years. Most writers prefer to be left alone, yet I’m okay recharging alone and okay recharging among diverse groups of people. There might be maybe five or six extroverted writers out there, we’re not a big bunch. Perhaps there’s a Facebook group, but I wouldn’t know since I am not on Facebook. Nevertheless, I am an in-person people-person who sometimes needs to be alone in her head, so teaching and writing strike this balance.

Every industry weathers challenges and changes, including teaching, however in my 28-year career as a writer, I have witnessed the various publishing industries nearly self-destruct several times over, print nearly disappearing as the Internet revolutionized our lives, authors suing OpenAI over copyright infringement. Writing can be a punitive environment, the goal line always moving, the technology rapidly evolving. AI programs are fed literature, not abstracts. A recent New York Times article reported how AI can write decent poetry but still struggles with math, something I apparently have in common with our expanding artificial intelligence.

In 1996 when I began writing professionally, a master’s degree in journalism didn’t matter; what mattered was having a portfolio of clips, which I have. Now, no one really cares about a portfolio, they want to know how many followers you have. To teach journalism at a community college, you don’t need a portfolio, you need a master’s degree. My first paid writing job was at a small daily newspaper in New Hampshire. The Digital Age wiped out many local newspapers and completely changed how we define “news.” Between 2005 and 2020, two thousand newspapers closed. Not surprisingly, more people get their information off social media. 

Last year, I regularly participated in the Writers Guild of America strike, more commonly known as the “Hollywood Strike” or the “Netflix Strike” because writers were fighting against the current streaming model that had devalued their work. I wore a blue WGA shirt and picketed. What followed after the strike turned out to be one of the biggest contractions in showbiz, with fewer shows being greenlit, and established screenwriters struggling alongside newbies.

I needed to be in these tumultuous spaces before going through the requirements of getting approved by the State of California to become a substitute teacher in public schools. Eventually I will earn single subject credentials. I went out into the world, and now feel ready and excited to share what I’ve learned with a roomful of middle and high schoolers, some who seem interested in what I have to say.

Careers require flexibility. Like anything in life, being nimble means not breaking when shit hits the fan or an industry you love hits a rust belt stretch. Nothing about my career has been a straight line. At times it’s been exciting, like reporting from the frontlines of the WTO protests. At times my writing career has been glamorous, like the press trip I was invited to in 2017, where I spent 10 stunning all-expenses-paid days going all over Australia, eating a five-star pressed wallaby dish one night, followed by a sunrise camel ride in the desert, followed by a hike and a helicopter ride to view The Twelve Apostles along the Southern Coast, followed by many other amazing globetrotting experiences. At other times my writing career has been discouraging, like months of no freelance work or invoices being lost in editors’ inboxes or checks disappearing in the mail. And at times, it’s been simultaneously boring and interesting, like sitting through multiple U.S. Senate hearings covering tortoise momentum Capitol Hill legislation when I lived in Washington, D.C.

My writing career didn’t provide predictability, but it wasn’t dull and I regret none of it. This is the beginning of my teaching career, I hope, and so far, whether it’s with the formerly incarcerated or a roomful of tweens or teens, the level of engagement has been a genuine thrill. I’m asked all kinds of questions. A kid asked me about snow because L.A. kids don’t know real, brutally cold, roadblocking snow. Another kid asked me about 9/11. A woman who had spent a fair amount of time in prison asked me about haiku structure. A 24-year-old homeless man who wrote poems in his tent and who struggled with addiction asked me to read his notebook. He wanted to know if I thought his poems were “any good.” They weren’t just good, they were brilliant. He had talent. I never saw him again.

Writing and teaching are both advocacy, but I value serving others more now at middle age than as a young adult so eager to go everywhere and see everything. Chasing the dream involves supporting others in their efforts to succeed, whether it’s students having a light bulb moment or fellow writers signing with a publisher. I am a firm believer that we all win when we all win. I want to win as much as I want you to win. My journey to the classroom may be unconventional, another “late bloomer” moment, but I arrived when I needed to arrive. I got paid to explain Maya Angelou’s repetition in “And Still I Rise.” I got paid to explain the placement of conflict in story structure. I got paid to cut paper marigolds. Last week, a student left an apple on my desk next to one of the marigolds, and that’s when I knew I was exactly where I needed to be.

P.S. The members of Fleet Foxes were in middle school when I lived in Seattle covering the WTO protests, and now I can’t even get tickets to their upcoming show. Still. I can’t gush enough about the intelligence and insight in Robin Pecknold’s lyrics, a 2022 The New Yorker article citing this band’s “Whitmanesque impulses,” high praise for any indie folk band. Pecknold (who almost shares a birthday with me!) is doing a solo show this December at The Lodge here in L.A., and already both nights are sold out. The City of Angels knows how to put on a show, and really knows how to do live music. I have not experienced enough of this yet, and will readily snatch up Pecknold tickets if any become available. Concerts are expensive, but wow, they’re fun! There’s no other energy like dozens or hundreds or thousands of strangers sharing space and enjoying the same song together. I saw Greta Van Fleet perform at The Greek Theatre in 2021 and at The Forum in 2023, and still need to get to The Wiltern. The Lodge is also top of my list in case any Pecknold tickets suddenly become available.

I’ve had Fleet Foxes’ song Mykonos on repeat. There’s a gossamer quality to this song that few can pull off as masterfully as Pecknold. It’s haunting. It’s beautiful. It’s got drive and at the same time, it’s delicate. There is a simultaneous gratitude for and acknowledgement of the pain of memory. This song somehow achieves a remarkable balance of every complicated feeling you could ever have without losing its structure and succumbing to cliche. Pecknold’s songwriting is pure poetry. The same could be said for another favorite, Tiger Mountain Peasant Song, part confession, part prayer, part plea, part wish; another example of a deceptively complicated series of notes and words achieving multiple things at once. Whatever your musical leanings, if you’re not yet a Fleet Foxes fan, become one. Their music is thoughtful, and thoughtful is refreshing.

A sixth-generation Angeleno who now lives in Malibu, Bridget was born in Oxnard, California, and grew up in Ventura County until age 7 when her mother, who was from East L.A., followed her love for the Teton Mountains and moved the family to Wyoming. Here, the Snake River offered a surprising renewal. Through river exploration, Bridget moved towards recovery and away from trauma, abuse and poverty, developing a strength that helped her endure and navigate the sexism of the male-dominated outdoor adventure industry. She would go on to spend much of her career empowering women and sharing the lessons she continues to learn from the rivers she travels.

And what a journey it has been. Bridget, married with two teen children, is a contributing author to Lonely Planet guidebooks and the outdoor clothing company, Patagonia, and her writing has appeared in National Geographic Adventure, Trail Runner, Paddler, and Outside. She co-leads whitewater adventure wellness retreats across the globe, and has an upcoming retreat  to the Pacuare River in Costa Rica that will combine writing, Ayurveda, whitewater rafting, zip-lining and hiking. Bridget’s debut book, the forthcoming memoir titled The River’s Daughter, will be published on June 3, 2025, by Spiegel & Grau, and is now available for pre-sale orders. It’s a story Bridget has worked on for 22 years, and has twists and turns as serpentine as the rivers that became her teachers. 

I met Bridget through a mutual friend, and it was a real pleasure to sit with her, hear her story, truly feel her compassion for advocating for women and for valuing nature, and to feel inspired by a very courageous journey of healing. We recently sat down near her home in Malibu. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. The photo was provided by the Bridget Crocker Collection, and the video was provided by Martin Zitzelberger of Pegasus Studios.

Me: As I ask every L.A. Woman, what brought you to Los Angeles?

Bridget: My parents met and were married in L.A., then moved to Oxnard where I was born. After they divorced, my mother, stepdad and I moved to Jackson Hole and my father remained in Ventura County. I would visit my father three times a year, always flying into LAX. I loved all the beautiful grid lights twinkling. I developed a sense that anything can happen in L.A. After guiding internationally throughout my 20s, I settled in Ventura County when I was 30 to work for Patagonia, and moved to Malibu at age 37, after marrying my lifeguard husband, who grew up in Topanga as a third generation Angeleno.

Me: Describe your first encounter with a river. What was that like for you?

Bridget: I grew up in a trailer park south of Jackson Hole that was beautifully situated on the banks of the Snake River, and I spent most of my free time playing in the cottonwood forest there. It was the place where I went to be consoled. My mother forbade me to play in the Snake, so I built forts and fooled around, catching frogs and whatnot. Many times, I’d hear the voice of the Snake River speaking to me, and I felt the river was alive—a sentient, animate being. When I was nine, I fell into the fast, downstream current in a significant event that changed the way I related to the river. That experience developed into a visceral and spiritual connection for me.

Me: How did you get started as a river guide?

Bridget: When I was 17, I dated a river guide who opened up this world to me and I was like, ‘Wow, I can make a career out of being on the river!’ which was my safe place, and where I felt most at home. I was one of three women attending my week-long guide school on the Snake River in the early nineties. One dropped out and two of us ended up getting hired out of that school, along with some super huge dudes, one was a college quarterback. There was a lot of male energy. There weren’t many women river guides back then to learn from, so I leaned into my relationship with the Snake. I started to really develop my ability to communicate with the river. That worked so well, I was pulled out of the guide school early to begin guiding commercial trips. From the Snake River, I was hired to work a canoe trip on the Lower Zambezi in Zambia. I was 20 years-old then. I also trained on the section called the Boiling Pot, which is below Victoria Falls. It's Class V and one of the highest volume commercially run rivers in the world. At high water, the Snake River flows at about 30,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). The Zambezi’s highest flow was recorded at 300,000 cfs. The river god of the Zambezi River is Nyaminyami, who is half crocodile, half serpent. When I first got to the Zambezi, I thought ‘I'm just going to carry over this lovely little relationship I have with the Snake.’ It became clear early on that Nyaminyami had an anger management problem, and he certainly didn’t give two shits about a white girl on the Zambezi. He reminded me exactly of my father, who had almost the same temperament. One of the themes of my book is the exploration of my relationship with my father and the reconciliation and healing that happened as a result of what I learned through my relationship with Nyaminyami.

Me: What did connecting and communicating with the river teach you? How did the river shape your healing?

Bridget: There’s a non-attachment that leads to being more comfortable with an unknown outcome. Rather than trying to cling to shore, while all the energy is going downstream, you have to surrender to the flow. If you cling to shore, that's not the way forward, and it will get you injured. The way forward is to have the courage to let go and trust that you’ll survive it. The river has helped me learn to have faith and also to believe in myself. I had a real self-esteem problem for a long time. My choices and behaviors weren’t always about my best interest, but about survival. I can see that at 53, but it took me a heck of a long time to get here. I know now that I can chart my own path, independent of other people's opinions of me or my perceptions of other people's opinions of me. There's just the rapid ahead, a freedom to it. I have the courage to drop in, recognizing that the feeling I have is not necessarily fear, but adrenaline. Adrenaline feels like fear in the body, but adrenaline is a tool to help you do superhuman things.

Me: What did the river teach you about being a woman and working in a very male-dominated field?

Bridget: The Kern River, like I said in the video, taught me everything I needed to know about being a woman: that you can be playful and beautiful and strong all at once. The first time I ran the Kern, I was 18 and visiting my boyfriend who was guiding there for the season. On the Kern, I met a river guide named Melissa, she was our trip leader, in charge of the entire trip. All the other guides on the trip were guys and she was telling them what to do and doing the safety talk, leading all of that. She was incredibly self-possessed, owning her sensuality and feminine attributes and still a boss in a bikini. She wasn't leading with her sexuality, but with her experience and knowledge. She had confidence in her ability, which she backed up with solid river skills. I'd never seen anything like that in my life. It blew my mind. She was like the human manifestation of the Kern River herself, which is definitely female. I decided that was the kind of woman I would be. 

Me: Water has played a huge role in your personal and professional lives, and in your healing. Now you live by the ocean, married to a lifeguard. How is living by the ocean different or similar to having grown up by and pursuing a career navigating rivers?

Bridget: There is such a camaraderie and sense of family amongst lifeguards that is very similar to the river family I was adopted into, and marrying into the lifeguard community has felt like home to me. I'm not as comfortable in the ocean as I am on the river, and I admire my husband and my kids for their tremendous ocean skills. I remember one of my kids swam into a riptide when she was 9 years-old and I was on shore. I tried to flag her down and finally I swam out there next to her, and said, ‘You're caught in a rip,’ and she rolled her eyes. She was like, 'Mom, don't you think I know that? I’m trying to see how far out it will take me.’ I love that all the rivers go into the ocean, and the ocean is the place where it's universal, where all water gathers, so I have a spiritual connection in that way to the ocean. The water brings people together in a way that is meaningful on a deep soul level and it's wonderful for our family to have such a strong sense of belonging in both the river and ocean worlds.