A Writer’s World and Welcome to It

Notes on “Beginning Anywhere: Views from the Treehouse” by James P. Blaylock

Memoir is the story your memory tells you.

An essay is like taking an idea out for a walk.

The “plot” of a personal narrative arises from watching the movement of the writer’s consciousness.

These are things I’ve told my students throughout the decades I’ve been teaching creative nonfiction, aphorisms about the writing life I’ve collected like colorful rocks along a shoreline. But can I tell you the truth? As the years have accumulated, I’ve repeated them to the point of rote, dulling their luster, making me wonder if they are just dead weight.

And then I cracked the spine of James P. Blaylock’s wise and warm collection of personal essays, “Beginning Anywhere: Views from the Treehouse,” and they all proved their enduring truth. Each page is like spending time listening to a charming old friend talk about the ideas he’s turning over in his mind, or reminisce about the way-back-when of the neighborhood – if that charming old friend just happens to be a brilliant writer of near mythic reputation, whose work holds a unique distinction in the canon of American Letters. In this collection, Blaylock, himself a longtime professor of writing at Chapman University, is not seeking to explain or define; he’s inviting the reader to accompany him as he interrogates his own remembrance of things past.

“Writing essays is often an adventure in discovering what one knows but doesn’t know one knows, and in trying to figure out the difference between knowing and understanding,” Blaylock says in the book’s first essay, “What We Find in the Sea.” “Understanding, I’ve come to believe, is overrated. There’s a lot to be said for mystery.”

But let me back up, because there might be a few among us who don’t know the legend of Blaylock. He might not be a household name among fantasy/sci-fi readers quite the way of a, say, Octavia Butler or Ursula K. Le Guin, but he, along with Tim Powers and K. W. Jeter, is part of the Cal State Fullerton trifecta, just three local OC kids studying at the nearby university who went on to become the authors who invented what became known as steampunk. 

This collection seems to be his personal record of all that happened before and in between.

“When I wrote my first steampunk story, ‘The Ape-box Affair,’ back in my mid-twenties, I was still occasionally asked to haul out identification when I ordered a drink in a restaurant,” he tells in “Reading and Writing,” one of the essays reprinted in the collection that I was lucky enough to publish in Coast Magazine when I was editor of that now-defunct regional magazine.

He goes on:

“A couple of months ago the same thing happened, except that there was no drink involved: I was hoping to get the senior discount at the local movie theater. The phenomenon was instantly amusing. But it came into my mind, as it had 40 years earlier, that youth isn't the only thing that is fleeting; everything is fleeting, and that there is an absolute family resemblance between a mirror and the clock on the wall, both of which are reminders of our own mortality.”

This collection was published in February, but it hardly matters when you find it; like any good book, its relevance is timeless, its resonance vibrating on different levels depending on where you are in your own life. I mention this because the majority of the pieces in Beginning Anywhere have been previously published, many in this very journal. All to say, even if you have read a few of these before, they’ll strike you anew, because Blaylock’s quiet observations, generous heart and wry wit are like facets of a gem, refracting off each other, new angles revealing themselves according to the light. 

As I luxuriated in this collection, one thing that occurred to me, which I had never considered before, was all that Blaylock absorbed growing up in Orange County and where he has spent most of his life. His world was at once rural, with its vast orchards and farms and wild ocean beaches; industrial with its warehouses, aerospace and electronics; and a factory of fantasy as the home of Disneyland, Knotts – for some reason I’m also thinking of Lion Country Safari. 

Somehow, in reading this, I grokked in a way I hadn’t before how a dreamy kid’s imagination might from this corner of California start to spin a retro-futuristic universe with a Victorian aesthetic, weird science, and hidden histories. And I came to appreciate, perhaps for the first time, how our county cultivates the eccentric and the quirky, a landscape as capable of growing literary talent as any New York Greenwich Village, as any Parisian Cafe Deux Magots, as any palm-lined stretch of the Sunset Strip. 

Of course, Blaylock himself might not make such a claim. His way is to observe, consider, and present you with the evidence for you to delight in your own conclusions. The work suggests Blaylock, by temperament, might have more in common with that other writer with whom he’s often linked, Philip K. Dick. 

As he writes, “Relatively often I read that Phil was a ‘mentor’ to me … but in fact he was the last person to presume to be teaching people anything about anything. He was far too humble for that, and far too funny, often in a self-deprecating way.”

Samantha Dunn is a senior editor at the Southern California News Group and an author whose works include the memoirs Not By Accident and Faith in Carlos Gomez, and the novel Failing Paris. She teaches at Chapman University, the literary nonprofit Writing by Writers, and offers a private workshop.