On Being A Literary Citizen

I am so happy to be here at the first-ever Laguna Beach Literary Festival. I am grateful to the smart people who had the vision to make this happen. Thanks to organizers Theresa Keegan, Amy Dechary, and the Third Street Writers and all the - literary citizens – to remind you of the title of my talk - who have labored to bring this festival into being.

Just a few more words to explain how I came to stand before you today, how I know Laguna Beach – and Orange County - and why I value its writers, its stories, its history – and why I am an advocate of good citizenship, literary and all others.

I first came to Orange County in 1989 as a graduate student in UCI’s MFA fiction program. Then, for twelve lucky years I lived near Laguna Beach, in a little trailer in what was then called El Morro and is now Crystal Cove State Park. I experienced my first wildfire and evacuation there in 1993 which, thank you very much, prepared me for all those to come. And yes, I can now go picnic where I once lived – which I often do. A resident of Modjeska Canyon for the last 22 years, I am always looking for a reason to return to Laguna, so thank you for this terrific one.

But Laguna has also inspired the pens of writers and poets, including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon (check out his still-resonant story “Ocean Avenue,” set down the street from here at the Zinc Café and available in the online archive of The New Yorker), many poets including Garrett Hongo, Charles Wright, Peter Carr, and, one of my all-time favorites prose writers, the acclaimed M.F.K. Fisher, a pioneer in writing about food (and so much more).  As a child, Fisher summered here with her family and her first published essay, “Pacific Village” in 1934 in Westways profiled this town. She describes Laguna this way: “A coastal village, beautifully located. Artists and pseudo-artists flock to it, and people in hurrying autos go more slowly along the smooth state highway past its hills sloped up behind and the coves and curving beaches along its edge.”  It’s a beautiful essay, still resonant, and also profiles the artists and yes, the writers. I recommend it to you!

Fisher’s essay appears in the 2017 anthology I co-edited, Orange County: A Literary Field Guide – a project that taught me about writers who made this place home and those who passed through but found the county and its people worthy subjects. I didn’t I know so much about where I ended up spending my adult life.

Some writers were known to me (and perhaps you): Gustavo Arellano, Philip K. Dick, Joan Didion, E.L. Doctorow, Steve Martin, Kem Nunn, Victor Villasenor, Mitsuye Yamada, but many fabulous ones unknown to me... after all, over 60 writers appear in the volume – and there are so many others we could not include. (I think it’s time for another edition!)

You, me, all of us, are part of this rich local literary history or should at least want to be part of it. We should as readers, boosters, book buyers, public library proselytizers, writers, as good literary citizens, claim, draw upon, and sustain – and with our own work and words - contribute to this legacy. After all, a citizenry that does not know its history can find it challenging to defend its institutions and traditions.

As everyone’s favorite Spanish philosopher once observed: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Even perhaps worse than not remembering is never knowing it in the first place.

But before I digress further, to define my topic: What is a literary citizen? Here I offer a caveat which might be obvious at our particular political moment. (It is a particular political moment, is it not? And to ignore that is our peril.)

So, I choose to engage the term citizenship as widely as possible.

Virginia Woolf, the novelist, essayist and, yes, co-publisher of the very independent Hogarth Press (more later about this ur-indy, DIY, enterprise) - and yes, a big hero of mine – declared in her essay Three Guineas, that she was “a citizen of the world.” Intersectionality, decades before it became a thing, if you will.

In 1938 Woolf was concerned with the onset of fascism, which she witnessed when she traveled to Germany and Italy. Cue the Spanish philosopher.

But Woolf also recognized, as she did throughout her life, the role the social contract when vigorously observed plays in the health of a community or a society. Take, for example, Woolf’s own literary community, the famous Bloomsbury Group, a version, if you will, of the Third Street Writers or any other literary community.

Please insert your favorite workshop or conference in here. For me, my enduring relationship with the Community of Writers up in Olympic Valley or, for three wonderful years, Richard Bausch’s community workshop at Chapman University or my colleagues and students at Irvine Valley College, some of whom are here today. For you it might be your book club, your low-residency writers workshop, your circle of friends, the Third Street Writers...

The acknowledgements sections of books are where you can reliably find such groups credited. For example, in the acknowledgments of her terrific book California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline, Rosanna Xia, who will be on the lunchtime panel, Telling the California Story, gives a shout-out (“forever indebted” she says) to her nonfiction workshop (hosted virtually by Orion magazine during the pandemic) and to her book club.

Yes, we are often told that writing is a solitary act and, yes, we are told writers are private folks often found toiling away in their towers or book-lined offices or favorite coffee shops or, in my case and perhaps yours, at their kitchen table. I have access to two desks, but somehow the dining table is more perfect! However, that romantic and fetishized version of the solitary writer is incomplete, misleading and, I believe, does not serve the writer and the writing.

Yes, we write physically alone – of course – but unless we are writing only for ourselves, at some point, we take that writing to the world. We look for other writers, who also must be readers, right? Those are the people who help us see if what we have done on the page can matter, can reach, and move readers who are not us. And, of course, in the very process of writing, we are imagining all along, readers, anticipating an assembly, hearing voices, a necessary expectation of a community. Even famously accomplished as well as famously reclusive writers have readers, rely on community.

I have come to know a few of those famous folks and though I will resist dropping names, I can tell you that I was heartened to learn that even after you are nominated for the Booker Prize, you bring the first chapter of your next book back to your writing group which meets in the community center at your local park. Even when you’ve won the Pulitzer, you sit down next to your spouse and read aloud the draft of the next novel, editing pencil in hand. Even when you’ve written a first book which has never gone out of print and followed it with many others, each remarkably successful, you still run your early drafts by that very first reader who was able to tell you what you needed to hear all those years ago at a summer writing conference, when you were a participant and she the teacher.

Perhaps, as a writer ready for communing with community, you register for a one-day literary festival and get up early on a Saturday in January, bringing all your good ideas with you to see what you might learn in the company of other poets and writers.

Virginia Woolf sustained her own singular literary community, partly through the Hogarth Press which published the work of her friends and others, including herself, writers whose stories, novels and essays were not always welcome at mainstream presses. Consider that. Virginia Woolf, a writer who was published on what today we might call a small or hybrid press. Very small runs, limited circulation, niche audience by which we mean tiny – and absolutely beautiful, powerful books, designed with care and attention. Books today which remain in print, in demand.

Think about that and do consider how such small presses and literary journals and their editors – good literary citizens! - promote and sustain a vibrant literary community. Some of you will be learning about the role independent publishing plays with Holly Kammier of co-founder and acquisitions editor of Acorn Publishing, the largest publishing imprint in San Diego and one of California’s leading hybrid publishers and Barbara Pronin, a successful author who will discuss her publishing journey along with her latest book, Winter’s End, a historical novel about women in the Dutch resistance at the end of WWII.

This ethos is also known as mutual aid, a theme addressed in the work of one of today’s featured authors, Margaret Elysia Garcia. At lunchtime today she will discuss her book, Red Flag Warning: Mutual Aid and Survival in California’s Fire Country.

Note the connection in the title between mutual aid and survival – critical yes, in California’s fire country which is, as far as I can tell, now the entire state – but also critical for the survival of writers. Indeed, literary citizenship expects, demands, anticipates responsibility beyond the individual – for the good of the community.

I first learned the lessons of citizenship as a child, and in particular as a Girl Scout. There is no proper way to tell you just how meaningful scouting was to me as one of five daughters of a single mother, often dependent on welfare and public housing, growing up in 1960s Los Angeles. Scouting, like the fine education I received in California’s public schools, showed me a larger world, hinted at the possibilities, gave me tools to achieve my goals and I am grateful. Indeed, one of those possibilities is me here today, speaking to you as a published author and a professor - me, the daughter of a single mother, a first-generation college student, the granddaughter of undocumented immigrants.

Indeed, my green Girl Scout sash hangs in my college office next to my diplomas. Among the prized badges I earned were writer, reader, and citizen. Each embroidered badge featured an icon: a scroll, a stack of books, a white capitol dome. To earn those badges, a scout had to complete certain tasks. As I recall, this was all done with considerable solemnity. On my honor, I will try to do my duty to God and my country, to help other people at all times and to obey the Girl Scout law. You have no idea how seriously we took this oath, this badge earning, unless, of course, you do. And please note that Girl Scouts do not swear to Thin Mints or any other cookie.

Today, I offer you the metaphorical opportunity to earn a similar badge, the badge of literary citizenship, available here for the first time, at the Laguna Literary Festival 2026. Even now, as I speak, my imaginary Girl Scout troop is embroidering away at these badges.

Imagine this newly minted literary citizenship badge looks like those three Girl Scout badges combined: the scroll, the stack of books, the capitol dome – and perhaps the elegant silhouette of Virginia Woolf herself. You all want one. I know I do.

So, the first step of three toward earning your badge is this: Support the Institutions which Support Writers

Caring for institutions, organizations and communities that support writers and artists is care for our own work and our own craft – and the tradition of free speech and expression. Now more than ever, as good literary citizens, we must support the outlets and platforms that support writers and the free exchange of ideas. Literary journals, newspapers, magazines those institutions that support our writing: This is where our books begin. Whether you are a poet, memoirist, short story writer, novelist, journalist or writing for the stage - these are the pages and platforms where your portfolio of publications take form. Where readers – and, yes, literary agents and editors -- discover you and your writing. Where credentials help earn you residencies, retreats, awards and yes, more publication opportunities. Where new books are reviewed and advertised.

Today, you’ll learn more about this from Kristen Skjonsby who edits The Ear, a literary journal founded in 1982 by Laguna resident Elaine Rubenstein and Andrew Tonkovich, editor (the last time I counted) of three different lit journals, including OC’s very own Citric Acid. And also, Norberto Santana Jr., founder of Voice of O.C.

Some questions you might ask yourself before you submit to a magazine or journal or newspaper: Do you regularly read that journal? Do you share or mention pieces you’ve read there, perhaps even reach out to the authors and editors to tell them how much you enjoyed a particular piece? Do you subscribe to – or otherwise support - the journals and magazines and newspapers to which you submit?

No, this is not a “pay to play” scheme, especially considering how little pay is involved, and how underfunded are most literary and cultural arts outfits. It is, indeed, all about paying it forward. Remember that being a citizen is something different and holier than being only a consumer or a commodity.

Lisa Ampelman, editor at the Cincinnati Review, in a recent issue of Poets and Writers lamented, “On social media, I see even well-established writers lament when a specific literary magazine has turned down their work. I wish for them that the rejection could seem more like a business sales pitch that didn’t land than a dismissal of them as a writer.”

And when I hear complaints from students and fellow writers about rejection, I often follow up, asking, quietly, carefully Do you subscribe to ...... Do you read ..... (fill in the blank)?

Sometimes I get a yes, but much more often a “No,” followed by a version of:  Not until they publish me...

See the problem there? That attitude exemplifies political economy of estrangement, the transactional attitude, the consumerist ethos. That’s not citizenship or mutual aid. Without our support, will these journals, these magazines, these platforms and outlets, these publishing houses still be around when we need them to promote our ready work?

Finally, independent bookstores also need our support. Yes, the convenience of cheap prices and fast delivery is attractive but at what cost? What cost Amazon? The threat is existential, my friends.

On Amazon, my book Some Final Beauty and Other Stories is currently 5,111 in Short Stories, 14,380 in Literary Fiction and 390,612 in Books (I really do try NOT to look) but when I walk into Santa Ana’s LibroMobile, my book is front and center on its local writers wall along with Mary Camarillo and Gustavo Hernandez and so many other local writers. When I visit Arvida Books in Tustin, my book is there right next to Barbara DeMarco-Barrett and Richard Bausch. Independent bookstores are like that. So, take that extra step and support the independent bookstores that will support you, that will KNOW you and promote your work.

If you do need online shopping convenience, take another extra easy step and set up an account at Bookshop.org – BOOKSHOP.ORG - that platform allows for online book purchases that supports local independent bookstores. All it takes is a slight change of habit and it makes a difference.

STEP 2: Support Your Fellow Writers

So many of the writers on staff today do just that. And I am sure they would tell you that doing so enriches them as people and yes, as writers. Indeed, consider how the staff chosen with care for today’s programming embodies the ethos of literary citizenship, each building around them a readership, a community:

I am thinking of OC Poet Laureate Gustavo Hernandez who hosts free monthly office hours as poet laureate through LibroMobile the independent bookstore in Santa Ana. You can drop in in person or visit via Zoom as I once did. I shared a poem that I had almost given up on – and Gus helped! The poem lives! Or consider the novelist Mary Camarillo, who serves on the board of two literary nonprofits – LibroMobile and Critic Acid – two! - and probably does other good works of which I am unaware. I am aware of her monthly newsletter which usually features free giveaways of books and journals. And her vigorous social media presence which promotes the OC lit scene.

So many of the festival’s staff writers are teachers in their daily lives, another way of supporting writers and sustaining community, of being good literary citizens: Barbara de Marco Barrett, Marni Freedman, Christine Fugate, Dorothy Randall Gray, Heather Tyson  - I am sure they will tell you that teaching enriches their own creative work as well.

A favorite author who I never met but who taught me so much was California’s wonderful Carolyn See. I am not sure if she was a Girl Scout, but I know she was a literary citizen in excellent standing. I first read her book reviews in newspapers. Book reviewing is another way to support other writers because it calls attention to what they’ve done. Carolyn See did that with smarts and heart. Her reviews were an education for me. By the way, book reviewing is something you can do informally on your own social media platform or Substack – or formally, submitting your reviews for publication.

Best known for her novels Golden Days and The Handy Man - and also for being the mother of novelist Lisa See – she also wrote a gorgeous, honest, memoir, Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America.

In her 2002 book, Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers, which is a little dated in some ways but timeless in others, See explains a writing exercise she assigned her UCLA creative writing students, one that she herself practiced: The writing of what she calls “charming notes” which was a daily practice for her.

What is a “charming note”? She describes it as “a salute to a writer or editor that says “your work is good and admirable! You are not laboring in a vacuum! There are people out in the world who know what you do and respect it.”

As See writes “these notes also place you in the same world as the admired writer. These charming notes say that you exist.”

That’s all.

They are just notes after all, as she explains:

“You don’t want to burden some poor wretch with the entire story of your life. You absolutely don’t want to ask them for a favor, as in “Hello. I really like your work. Enclosed please find my 800-page manuscript on giant lizards who live under the earth – and throw massive lizard conventions! in the state of Arizona.” Don’t offer to go and live with them. Remember what your mother taught you about thank-you notes (if she bothered). Be gracious. You’re entering into an emotional and spiritual courtship with the literary world that will last the rest of your life.”

Of course, her students are doubtful about these notes. Students are often doubtful about so much. But what happens? The writers write back! They do! Jane Smiley! Anne Lamott! Michael Crichton!

So, find your way to support other writers, the ones close to us today and the ones faraway. Write a “charming note” every day or every week. Lift up another writer. Reach out. It is easier to do that today than it was twenty or thirty years ago. Start local and work up from there.

Join a class. Start a writing group. A book club that reads local writers. Write a book review. Show up for readings! Certainly, if you know the author, but also, maybe especially if you don’t. Be a writer who gives to other writers.

(Final) STEP 3: Esteem Other Writers: Acknowledge Them, Read Them, Celebrate Them

This last step is easy! And it returns to where I began...our literary history.

One of the first responsibilities of being a good literary citizen is recognizing one’s own influences and welcoming comparison or even, if you are un-shy and maybe have a sense of humor, just plain reminding people of those influences. In fact, this is a question that I have heard one editor ask of emerging writers when conferencing about their manuscripts:  To whom would you like to be compared?

Indeed, this is useful and not unusual exercise. Before he gave me a blurb for my book, the PEN award-winning writer Dagoberto Gilb asked me – actually Dago doesn’t ever ask, he demanded that I tell him who I would like my work compared to...what a question!

But he made me think. Grace Paley, Raymond Carver, Dagoberto Gilb, Edward P. Jones, Manuel Munoz, Michael Jaime Becerra, Lucia Berlin, and OC’s own Edith Wharton, Victoria Patterson. You can see I am aiming high here. I think we should all aim high. Why not?

So, ask this obvious and ambitious question of yourself and answer it and keep answering it by reading more and widely and going back to your own writing projects smarter and stronger.

For you can’t, finally, or shouldn’t compare yourself to yourself, after all. There is no shelf in a democratic library or bookstore with only one single book on it by one single or singular author. Unless, of course, you have wandered into the clutches of a cult, state power or pathological narcissist gangster, tech billionaire, self-help guru, or con man president.

Vigorous literary citizenship involves esteeming excellent literary citizens – with the goal of course, of becoming one.

The poet Walt Whitman once said that good writers need good readers. Whitman, like Woolf, was a self-published author who also – get this - wrote anonymously published glowing reviews of his own book, somehow simultaneously inventing the best possible audience, of readers very much like himself. Yet his main gesture was that he still gave most of his books away.

Did Whitman need good readers? Yes, and so he helped create them. He did the hard work of getting his work literally into the hands of readers. Indeed, if Walt were alive today and living in Laguna - where he would fit right in - he might have a table at this afternoon’s book fair. That’s where you can support those local writers who have joined us today as teaching staff and supporters – and, yes, esteem them by purchasing their books.

Finally, Third Street Writers has already shown us how to esteem writers with their inspired choice of Richard Bausch as the first Laguna Literary Leader recipient.

Before Richard arrived in Orange County to teach at Chapman University in 2012, he was already renowned as a short story writer and novelist, the recipient of impressive fellowships, prizes and awards including – I’m just picking my own favorites here – NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Story Excellence and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and many, many others.

But Richard is also a master teacher whose generosity in the classroom and in the larger literary community is legendary. While his students and friends will tell you that Richard has a story about nearly every leading writer in the country, entertaining and instructive stories -- writers across the county and country --- all have stories about Richard.

Stories of his support, his wisdom, his generosity, acts of kindness that they remember years later – as well as of course, his jokes, his pranks, his poetic recitations, and his songs.

So, Richard Bausch is a beloved figure not only for his achievement on the page, but he is also beloved for his spirit toward fellow writers and students. A true literary citizen of the highest order.

Another example: As a condition of his employment at Chapman, Richard continued his tradition of offering a free weekly semester-long fiction workshop for community members. What a gift! I know of no other writer of his stature who does this. Most want to teach less, not more!

Through the years, I recommended Richard’s community workshop to my students and was delighted when many were accepted. I watched as they and others did what writing students under the guidance of a master teacher do – read more, write more, publish. Richard’s contribution to the literary legacy of Orange County can be measured in those students, those publications, those books, those workshop communities – no small feat for 13 years.

In 2020, I was delighted when I was accepted into that fabled workshop which meets on the second floor of Smith Hall. You see, I recognized that at that time in my writing life, at (ahem) age 60, I needed community to make progress toward what I hoped would finally, finally become a book. Richard and that weekly workshop gave me just that – and more. Yes, our 2020 Spring workshop was interrupted by the pandemic, but Richard allowed us in that fated cohort to return for two more semesters.

And that’s how my collection – Some Final Beauty and Other Stories – came together. Not by writing alone, but by writing and reading and working together. In his workshop, Richard reads the workshop stories aloud, a technique that makes writers excruciatingly aware of words, sentences, character, scene, pacing, dialogue. As we should be. I can still hear his voice when I read my work. I expect I always will. What a gift. We can all look forward to honoring him at today’s festivities.

Of course, the lessons for a healthy and vibrant literary community and its dependence on us fulfilling the responsibilities of literary citizenship echo our own responsibilities to the republic in which we reside and pledge allegiance.

Our republic has never needed its people’s deep engagement more - at least in my lifetime - than at this very moment.

We cannot rest as writers and artists, nor as citizens, in the broad Greek definition of that term, as people with rights, yes, but also duties – duties that protect those rights. We cannot wait until it is uswhose rights are taken, whose jobs are lost, whose family members or neighbors are kidnapped - or killed - until we take action that is inconvenient or uncomfortable. By then it will be too late. It nearly is.

This moment presents an auspicious beginning for this literary festival, for this urgent new year before us. There is so much good work, necessary work to do both on the page and in our communities and our country.

The latest Threepenny Review includes the remarks by Carol Phillips which were delivered at last year’s annual ceremonial gathering of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The title of Phillips’ talk was “Why Read?” and Threepenny reprinted it because they recognized its relevance. People are not, obviously, reading.

At his conclusion, Phillips offers an image of a child curled up on a chair or in bed with a flashlight and a book – reading, reading deeply, “lost,” he writes, “in an imaginative world with other people.” Phillips says “lost,” but of course he also means “found.”

Like Walt Whitman and perhaps Virginia Woolf, Phillips embraces a poetic irony and oxymoron for all of you English majors or perhaps those working on their Virginia Woolf Girl Scout badge.

How can one be both lost in an imaginative world but also be with other people? I like to imagine I have answered or at least asked that question. So today, at the Laguna Beach Literary Festival, let’s get lost together. Let’s read. Let’s write. Let’s find each other, good literary citizens.

Lisa Alvarez’s poetry and prose have appeared in journals including About Place Journal, Air/Light, Anacapa Review, Citric Acid, Huizache, Santa Monica Review, and in anthologies such as Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America (Norton) and most recently, Rumors, Secrets and Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice (Anhinga Press) and Women in a Golden State (Gunpowder Press.) A professor of English at Irvine Valley College, in the summers, she co-directs the writers workshops at the Community of Writers in California's High Sierra. Her debut collection, Some Final Beauty and other stories, was published in August 2025 by the University of Nevada Press’s New Oeste imprint. She delivered this keynote address at the inaugural Laguna LitFest 2026 in January.