Now That We Are Here We Have to Decide What to Do

Thanks to Alta journal, one of our best boosters of the art, writing, culture and political life of California, which printed a shorter version of this exchange between OC novelist Victoria Patterson (This Vacant Paradise, Drift) and Citric Acid founder Andrew Tonkovich, lately curator of a show featuring the art, writing, and activism of Peter Carr at the Cerritos College Art Gallery, October 28-December 20. We share the longer version below, and include images referenced by Tonkovich. Consider subscribing to Alta, an essential and award-winning bimonthly magazine which has featured so many extraordinary writers including OC writers and Citric Acid pals Patterson, Gustavo Arellano, Tom Zoellner, Samantha Dunn, Sarah Rafael Garcia, and Elaine Lewinnek. 

I lived in Newport Beach, California during my formative teen and early adult years, and much of my fiction takes place here. I often characterize my relationship with Orange County as one of ambivalence, a love-hate elixir that I grapple with in my work.

Andrew Tonkovich’s connection to the OC fuels his work as well. Andrew and his partner, Lisa Alvarez, published the first-ever literary appreciation anthology of Orange County, which is where I was introduced to Peter Carr via his howling anthem of a prose poem, Aliso Creek. Carr was an outsider artist who also struggled, celebrated, and engaged with Orange County.

Andrew’s generosity is well known whether through his stewardship of the national literary arts journal the Santa Monica Review, his writing, his activism, his teaching, or his tireless commitment to promoting art and literature. He’s witty, cantankerous, sharp-eyed, compassionate, political, and ethical–somehow all at once. His genius unfurls in winding, ruminative, and keen observations. He’s that rare person who backs the talk with action.

I’ve come to find out that Andrew was largely influenced by Peter Carr, who was his mentor. In fact, Andrew’s life continues to be impacted by Carr’s, and their legacies are interwoven in deep and indefinable ways.

Andrew owns Carr’s surviving work. It’s on his home’s walls and in his family’s self-storage locker.

Lately, Andrew curated a show from October to December at Cerritos College Art Gallery. The representative sample of Carr’s paintings, portraits, posters, manuscripts, and self-published writings are an artistic, poetic, and political record of SoCal life in the 1970s, focusing on the natural world, Laguna Beach, grassroots activism, indigenous culture, solidarity, and anti-war movements. 

The show is a singular moment. At almost 64, and having survived a health scare, Andrew’s determined to honor his indefatigable mentor, and to secure Carr’s place in Southern California’s cultural history. 

Andrew agreed to answer questions about his link with Carr:

You were Carr’s student at Cal State Long Beach. In 1981, Carr died of a heart attack. How did you inherit his work? How long did you know him? Why did he have such a commanding impact?

After feeling cheated, and of course heartbroken at his sudden death, I got only luckier and luckier. His influence helped me graduate with a degree in Comp Lit and led me into community organizing myself, in the anti-nuke and peace movement. Peter was even more than a young person actively looking for a charismatic, radical mentor could have asked for. I found him, and he made me the person I am, but I probably actually knew him for all of eighteen months. I doubt that at age twenty I even understood his influence. A decade later, when Lisa and I moved to Orange County for grad school, I got close to his partner Jeanie in South Laguna. I asked, and she allowed me to start sorting, cataloging, and writing about the work, which was buried in the garage, stacked behind the washer dryer, stuffed in banker’s boxes. I was redeemed, surprised, energized. I think Jeanie was herself unable to confront the overwhelming physical evidence of his absence, and both pleased and sort of amused at my interest. She told me stories about Peter, often ending in rueful laughter or tears. At her death, I asked her kids, who had no idea what to do with the work. Neither did I, but I offered to take it, and pledged to them and myself that I would take care of it. That was thirteen years ago. 

Knowing him briefly was only a sort of movie trailer or preview of living with his legacy. It's perhaps a cliche, but his work --- unshy, provocative, celebratory --- and its themes impact me, inform me, direct me as I consider his writing and painting, and especially with this deep dive required to curate the show.  

Your life and work mirrors Carr’s. There are many uncanny parallels. For instance, Carr’s self-proclaimed “soul mate” was the activist Jeanie Bernstein, with whom he cofounded the OC chapter of the Alliance for Survival. Your lifelong partner, writer, activist, and educator Lisa Alvarez is a force, and your partnership has reaped similar rewards. Like Carr, you’re prolific, generous, impossibly energetic, and active; your anger seems to inform a joyful resistance; and your vision of Orange County–from the freeways to the malls, the mega-churches, the architecture, the light–is despairing, yet persistently hopeful. Can you explain this?

Again, I've been lucky. And I see now, especially when I consider how much Peter did --- as a teacher, artist, writer, activist --- that my own life has been defined by, yes, a kind of creative anger or energy, and love and a search for solidarity. Orange County is the last place Lisa and I expected to end up. But to crib from Peter, who played with the idea of the "discovery" --- or more pointedly, rediscovery --- of this place, we sought out revisionist and alternative history, and political comrades.  We found it. We found them! Ironically or hopefully, we celebrated the literary history of this county in our anthology, Orange County: A Literary Field Guide, connecting gorgeous writing to a thoughtful, even appreciative consideration of place. You can't make it up: Orange County, I mean. And my own story of loving Peter in absentia. In fact, the storage unit where I keep what I call the Peter Carr Storage of Self, Bespoke Art Gallery and Impossible Reliquary sits right under the horrible toll road. It's got the Santa Ana Mountains on one side and the rightwing evangelical mega-church and suburban sprawl on the other, with a view of what's left of chaparral and sycamores and sage. It's not hard to see the irony. He would have hated it. He would have loved it. He would have painted it. In fact, he did! 

Do you have a favorite Carr art piece? Or several? Can you describe what they mean to you?

Part of my self-appointed job --- I was a teacher, after all --- is to place him in a tradition, or at least try to. His self-published book Aliso Creek is a cri de coer, an autobiography, a warning. It's a retelling of the history of Orange County and Southern California by way of what he calls a "holy" place. He produced dozens of posters, in service to the Alliance for Survival and the weekly Laguna Beach Peace Vigil and the Seal Beach Nuclear Action Group.

His painting suggests German Expressionism with its political caricature and social critique. Also, bigtime, Kenneth Patchen, the poet who drew creatures and embedded poems and slogans in his art. Peter admired, and knew, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  I see so much reference to mythos, the Beats, and Whitman. Here's a tiny drawing which I found in one of hundreds of notebooks. It captures Peter's dialectic, his artistic and narrative play. It's a couple in a bus or a tram, maybe an aerial tramway.  One of them says, "Look honey, nature." Sure, it makes fun of the everyday alienation of tourists or commuters from the natural world but it's also a kind of invitation or reminder. To them and to the viewer. So, a combination of sarcasm and sincere invitation. Here's the challenge, suggests Peter. Now what are we gonna do about it?

He loved people, and community.  That question or polemic or provocation about the need for collective action couldn't be more available than in a piece where a group is assembled, in both strength and vulnerability with somebody, maybe Peter reminding, demanding, "Now that we are here we have to decide what to do." It's important, always, that "we" are asking, wondering, experiencing. So many of his paintings and drawings purposefully assemble people, whether in protest or refuge or spiritual reverence, always together as if biological cells in a membrane. In and with and alienated from or integrated with Nature.

Among many expressing this sentiment, this mantra, this Whitmanic insistence, there's a manifesto meets flight of fancy, an intricate piece in which the natural world and the human merge or are merged. As, of course, they must be. Pure Peter: “I fancied there were other creatures there besides me."  And, yes, beside me, beside him, beside and with and among all of us.

The author of three novels and two story collections, Victoria Patterson lives with her family in South Pasadena and teaches fiction in Antioch University’s master of fine arts program.