Life in the Pyrocene: The West in the Era of Climate Change
Aftermath of Eaton Fire, Altadena [photo: Gary Leonard]
PEN World Voices Festival, May 3, 2025
with Xitlalic Guijosa; Ruben Martinez; D.J. Waldie; Daniela Naomi Molnar
The Huntington
Sometimes you don’t see the San Gabriels until the streets stop and the mountains start. The veil suddenly thins, and there they are, in height and magnitude overwhelming. You plunge into a canyon flanked with soaring slopes before you realize you are out of town. The San Gabriel Mountains are as rugged as any terrain in America, and their extraordinary proximity to the city, the abruptness of the transition from the one milieu to the other, cannot be exaggerated.
John McPhee, Los Angeles Against the Mountains
Should an ember ignite the canyon one day, what would I want to save, what would be too painful to lose?
Ruben Martinez, A Political Ecology of Fire in Los Angeles
It’s the concluding event of the four-day PEN World Voices Festival. We gather in a horseshoe configuration on the green lawn of the Huntington, all of us facing east towards the San Gabriels. The San Gabriels, however, are not to be seen. The mountains are often shrouded with those “persistent vapors,” as McPhee noted, “which is why the early Spaniards called our basin ‘the Bay of Smokes.’” We gather with memories and grief from the Eaton and Palisades wildfires still fresh in our minds, our hearts, our communities.
What follows are excerpts from the readings by four wonderful writers—poets, essayists—whose spoken words that chilly afternoon created a useful collective narrative: about how we are shaped by place; about vulnerability and loss on this warming combustible planet (and region) about the necessity of sharing stories, excavating memory, grieving loss collectively as a way to move forward, towards action.
Though the towering San Gabriels preferred on this day not to reveal themselves, they suggested a listening presence.
Youth Poet, Xitlalic Guijosa a poet, writer, printmaker and community organizer from Southeast Los Angeles read her poem, Donde se da la Malva/ Where the Malva Grows,” in which we meet her resourceful grandmother teaching her granddaughter to recognize the medicinal plants growing wild in the midst of urban Maywood. Here, an excerpt:
My grandmother had her ways
and understood reciprocity was important.
So she exchanged conversation
and love for gardens and its medicine.
She taught me that plantitas will heal you, nourish you and abundantly love you.
Plants, the earth, water, fire, wind will heal you.
So she had me looking for Malvas
And taught me about the gardens around Maywood and the knowledge that person had.
A library of medicine and food down 61st street.
Each walk a lesson calling out the plant name.
Seeing the sunflowers outgrow the milk carton.
The nopales that give tunas/ prickly pears.
County avocado trees.
Xitlalic Guijosa reading [photo: Randy Shropshire]
Ruben Martinez, author, journalist, professor, and performer, read from his essay, “A Political Ecology of Fire in Los Angeles.” Excerpts:
The only question about one’s view of the mountains in L.A. is one’s distance from them. Regard them from the foothills in Altadena, where Rodney King grew up, or from the Rose Bowl, close to where I used to visit Mike Davis when he lived in the area in the early 1990s, or in Fontana, where he was born and spent his first years. All these places are in the rural-urban interface – black bears jumping into swimming pools, mountain lions slinking down the avenues at night.
The mountains: their monumental scale unavoidable as geological fact, as eco-spiritual trope, as climatological key to the region: rain shadow for the Mojave desert, buffer against desert heat for the basin, but also the accelerator of Santa Ana winds when high pressure gradients over the Great Basin turn onshore flow to offshore and prime the land for burning.
*
On the morning of January 8, after a singularly terrifying night of fire in Los Angeles, people miles away from Altadena or Pacific Palisades discovered more than ash in their backyards. The pages of books, some almost entirely blackened and illegible, others serrated and singed by flame from which fragments of text emerged, had been ripped, I imagine, out of peoples’ burning homes by hurricane-force gusts. These were the remains of intimate archives, the runes of lives scattered by fiery winds.
An old African proverb holds that when an elder dies, a library burns. As our city burns, we lose bundles of essential letters of all kinds. The singed pages fall to earth; we breathe in the ash of our stories. Recovering and rebuilding will mean many things in the months and years to come. Remembering especially that which we never realized had been forgotten should be the foundation of any meaningful return.
Ruben Martinez [photo: Randy Shropshire]
D.J. Waldie, author and historian of Los Angeles, read “Burning is what We Do: A Reading from Elements of Los Angeles.” Excerpts:
The touch of fire tumbles all elements into chaos, searches out and renders into smoke and ash your unproduced screenplays, your love letters, your family photos, your house, and even the lives of those to whom fire comes suddenly, as it did in the first days of January in the worst siege of windstorm and wildfire in Los Angeles County history.
An arc of fire burned from the coast at Malibu and the suburban neighborhoods of Pacific Palisades through the Santa Monica Mountains to the foothill community of Altadena and the slopes of Castaic Lake in the Sierra Pelona Mountains of northwestern Los Angeles County. Initially driven by winds up to eighty miles an hour, the fires burned more than fifty thousand acres and destroyed or damaged more than eighteen thousand structures. The fires forced from their homes as many as 200,000 Los Angeles County residents and resulted in twenty-eight deaths. Collectively, this was one of the most destructive natural disasters in the history of Los Angeles County.
….
None of us escaped. We breathed the volatile remains: the holiday decorations waiting to be taken down, the children’s drawings and the walls on which they had hung, and the asbestos, the hydrogen cyanide, the toxins that burning bedroom mattresses, living room couches, and luxury automobiles offered up to the air. I wish I could feel more, but I don't. I haven't the words to tell myself what I feel. When the landscape of your life is violently and randomly changed, you wonder, what will become of this place, and what will become of us? Questions that Angelenosface in a hotter and drier Los Angeles.
But we’ve faced them before. Some areas of the Santa Monica Mountains (mostly between Topanga Canyon and Point Dume) have burned as many as ten times since 1900. The names of our fires have a terrible poetry: the Woolsey Fire … the Creek Fire … the Sayre Fire … the Corral Fire… the Curve Fire … the Copper Fire … the Kinneloa Fire … the Kanan/Dume fires… and fires called Ventu Park, Potrero, Ravenna, Las Flores, and Temescal.
*
The wildfires of January 2025 had not yet grown cold and dark as I wrote these reflections on fire and Los Angeles. The fires’ glow split the time before from the time now, the commonplace from the dreadful, the indifference of 2024 from the urgently felt 2025. We may wish it otherwise, but the basin of Los Angeles is also a crucible in which the refiner’s fire is at work. And we do not know yet what this gash in our sense of place will render from us.
As much as the dun-colored foothills of August and the kabalistic winds of September and October, fire is our landscape. Burning is what we do.
DJ Waldie reading [photo: by Randy Shropshire]
Daniela Naomi Molnar, a poet, artist and writer who works with color, water, language and place read her essay, “How to Build a Kite,” written after fires in the Pacific NW. Some excerpts:
It’s late August 2020. I’m poised and ready to flee, almost eager, shot through with adrenaline. My car is packed. My house is a tinderbox surrounded by flames.
I snap a photo of myself at my desk, gas mask on. The air is so thick with ash I can’t see across the street. The end-of-summer heat has gone clammy and cold in the dense gray air. The gas mask allows me to breathe through the ash but won’t filter out the deadly, invisible pandemic that also lives in the air. Air itself, gone poison. Air, that most elemental of connectors.
Birds fly into windows, confused. A coyote sits on the curb outside my house one morning, seeming to stare at me through my windows, bewildered.
*
As a culture, we believe that following a trauma or a loss, closure is both possible and desirable. Psychotherapist Pauline Boss challenges this myth of closure. Boss believes that what is often experienced isn’t closure but ambiguous loss. An ambiguous loss is a loss that occurs without closure —a type of ongoing relationship in which presence and absence coincide, unresolved. In ambiguous loss, “Mystery persists … sometimes forever—and even across generations.”
One type of ambiguous loss is solastalgia, the longing for home that can be experienced while one is still physically in a home-place. We feel solastalgia when our biospheric homes come to seem so different, so impoverished compared to our memories. I used to wake to the sound of birds; now I wake to the sound of traffic. I used to see tapestries of stars; now I see an artificial orange glow. I used to drink from my river; now the water is poison.
Throughout our lifetimes, our planet has been dramatically and violently reshaped by socioecological disasters. In the last forty years alone, we have seen the loss of most of the world’s life forms. This is ambiguous loss writ large, across species. As a culture, we have barely begun to acknowledge the depth of this loss, which begins by acknowledging that the loss is ambiguous and will be ongoing.
This reality hurts like hell. It makes sense for us to want to look the other way. But the loss and its pain is a story we’re all compelled to live, and, like all stories, it demands to be shared. Stories are cultural glue, a way to be alive together. There is an urgent personal and cultural need to share this ongoing loss, image by image, word by word. Because when we share our stories, a transformation occurs—we do not simply reiterate the brokenness. To tell the story, we go deep into the brokenness and it’s there that we find the love that lives at the core of all grief. As a culture, we are beginning to understand this vital truth. A heart doesn’t break like a machine, which stops working. A heart breaks like a seed, revealing an ecology of potential made of open questions. Breaking binds us to life: to each other and to the living earth.
Daniela Naomi Molnar [photo: Randy Shropshire]
In answer to Ruben Martinez’ question, “what would I want to save, what would be too painful to lose?”… from my own recent panic experience during the fires, the first object that came to mind was the silver kiddush cup my grandmother Rebecca brought with her from Ukraine. I sought it out, clasped it in my hand, seeking that ancestral connection, the memories of her stories, as the skies turned red/black.
Thank you to all the writers who participated in the vibrant PEN World Voices Festival in NYC and Los Angeles and to our Festival partners and funders. Thank you to the Festival team on both coasts!
LS persuading the San Gabriels to reveal themselves, with encouragement from Ruben Martinez. [photo: Randy Shropshire]
Allison Lee doing a yeowoman’s job as Managing Director of PEN America in LA! [photo: Randy Shropshire]