Dorian Gossy '81

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I graduated from UCLA in 1981. At the time, despite her pride, my anxious mom kept saying, "that's great, honey, but what will you do with an English major?"

As I’ve told countless college freshmen in the intervening years, I majored in English and I’ve never been out of work. Twenty-four years later, I have a rich résumé that includes stints in editing, professional writing, teaching and academic advising. But there was always something missing. I longed to be a writer, a real writer, of stories and novels. I would read Margaret Atwood and F. Scott Fitzgerald and wish I could cast spells with my words they way they can.

In my late 20s, I went to graduate school for a degree in creative writing, which meant leaving California for the Midwest. Not only did I learn a lot in graduate school, but in leaving the state where I was born, raised and educated, I also discovered that where I’m from would guide my writing forever. Apparently Hemingway wrote his best work about America in Parisian cafés; in the Midwest and later in New York, I found myself writing deeply, almost obsessively, about Los Angeles, setting most of my stories there. Writing about the great city is like going home to it again and again, and with every journey back, I feel the road to becoming that "real writer" I’ve always dreamed about growing firmer and wider.

This April I will finally have something to show Mom and the world about my real work: my first book of short stories, entitled Household Lies, will be published by Winnow Press, an independent literary press in Austin, Tex.

Remember how everything is always moving in Los Angeles, always changing? Well, the cover of Household Lies pictures an actual house on wheels. This image echoes one of the stories, "The House on Figueroa," in which the neighborhood of West 18th Street, in the shadow of the Santa Monica Freeway, is transformed forever when its flagship Victorian house is sold and moved away on wheels. In another story, called "Flight," an old man living in Los Angeles grows too deaf to drive. I think most everyone in car-dependent Los Angeles will understand that his grief at this new immobility makes him wild for a time. And then there’s the story "Physics of Suspension," in which a Los Angeles woman suddenly dies, and ironically the roar of the city where she’d spent her life soothes her husband and adult daughter as they get reacquainted with each other in her absence.

In these days of profit-driven publishing conglomerates, small literary presses such as Winnow Press devote themselves almost exclusively to short fiction and poetry, and spend their resources and time on high quality books and personal interactions with authors. Corinne Lee, the publisher of Winnow Press, consults with me regularly as my book moves through the production process, and her unflagging enthusiasm buoys my confidence daily.

Americans are sometimes decried as rootless and restless, and I suppose I’m no exception, having lived at some point in my life in every American time zone. But even though Los Angeles has changed enormously since my childhood and youth there, it will always command my hometown loyalty. Perhaps it’s the city’s very dynamism that keeps me coming back and the spark alive in my fiction.