What to tell you about Kate Braverman, poet, author, teacher, muse — at one time a force in the literary life of Los Angeles?
Please forgive my hesitation. It’s important to get this right. If you had known her, you would know about the unpardonable sin of using a cliché or of just writing a boring sentence. You would have heard her condemn most writing as “a crime against the page.” Before starting her writing workshops, she’d often make us students stand, hold hands, bow our heads and make a pledge to be against all things mediocre. Minimalism, to her, was a failure of imagination. You were to “write to the pain.” If you weren’t standing on the edge of a cliff, what were you even doing?
By way of introduction: From the late 1979 into the 2010s, Kate published poetry (“Milk Run,” “Hurricane Warnings,” “Lullaby for Sinners”) and fiction, including “Lithium for Medea” (Joan Didion called it “a deeply felt piece of work by a very gifted young writer”), “Palm Latitudes,” “The Incantation of Frida K” and “Wonders of the West.” Although most of her work was deeply rooted in autobiography, her works labeled as memoirs were “Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles” in 2006 and “A Good Day for Seppaku” in 2018, the year before her death in October 2019.
But it was her short story collection, “Squandering the Blue,” that garnered the most critical attention, and contained the O. Henry Award-winning piece, “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta,” which has been widely anthologized. In many ways, that story, about a Beverly Hills woman shaky in her sobriety who is stalked by a violent, charismatic criminal and then succumbs to her own self-destructive tendencies, is the quintessential Braverman narrative.
When the collection was first published in 1990, New York Times reviewer Sarah Ferguson wrote, “If, as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it stands to reason that horror, too, lurks deep within the optic nerve. How else to explain the lushly menacing imagery in the poet and novelist Kate Braverman’s latest book? Never have the gaudy tropical flora of Los Angeles and Hawaii produced such gorgeously poisonous fruit.”
As of July 14, “Squandering the Blue” is getting a reissue that includes a fresh introduction by novelist Marisa Silver. It’s part of Doubleday’s launch of its new paperback imprint, Outsider Editions. A release by the publisher says the imprint “will be a reissue series dedicated to bringing attention to significant literary works — novels, stories, history, memoir, essays — that have been neglected or underappreciated.”
I imagine that Kate would both hate that her work would be considered “neglected and underappreciated,” while at the same time relishing her outsider status and the confirmation that her (often self-described) genius has indeed been overlooked. In the Los Angeles literary scene, she was a contemporary of Eve Babitz and Wanda Coleman. She came up alongside punk rock icon Exene Cervenka at Beyond Baroque. But outside of the literary fiction world, Kate never achieved their wider recognition.
“For my students” is the first dedication in “Squandering the Blue,” and it was in teaching writing that Braverman’s legacy was truly cemented. In the late ’80s through the mid-’90s, Kate ran by-invitation-only workshops out of her apartment on a jacaranda-lined street in the flats of Beverly Hills. The morning group was for well-heeled women who brought danishes; the afternoon group was not for the faint of heart. She told those of us in the afternoon group we were “the real writers,” and she ran it like Emperor Nero, as if we were gladiators in the Colosseum.
The first time I heard her name was in 1991. On a weekday morning, I was driving the Ventura Freeway to a crummy job at a trade magazine publishing company in Van Nuys.
I switched on the radio and out of the speakers came this growling-whispering voice of a woman talking about writing in a way I didn’t even know was possible. It was like the first time I heard Patti Smith singing “Gloria.” The interviewer asked her the trite “what are your influences” question, and instead of rattling off the usual literary touchstones, she said “the pulse of rock and roll…”. It was the first time I’d ever heard anyone put Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop on the same pedestal as Anton Chekhov and Saul Bellow.
That was it for me. Wherever this woman was, I had to go. The interview mentioned that she taught at UCLA Extension, so when I got to the office, I found a phone book (that’s how long ago it was), called UCLA and enrolled in the next weekend class she offered.
Little did I know that she used that class as a hunting ground from which to poach talent for her private workshop. I spent three years in that afternoon group before she shuttered it to move to Alfred, New York, to try married life with a professor (domestication would prove not to be her thing). In the workshop, I wrote most of what would be my first novel, but more than that, I forged deep friendships with fellow writers that would become the core of my life. They remain to this day. Many of us went on to publish, including Janet Fitch, Maria Amparo Escandon, Mary Rakow, Cristina Garcia, Joshua Miller, Donald Rawley and Les Plesko.
What she imprinted on us was a fierce craving for language used beautifully and for stories that feel necessary and dangerous to tell, the stuff she was famous for. What she bestowed on me personally was permission to be a woman who didn’t have to be accommodating all the time – or in her case, ever.
Which brings us back to the 12 interconnected stories that make up “Squandering the Blue.” Don’t expect any traditional notion of plot – as in cause and effect, actions that lead to other actions, that then lead to some kind of resolution. She’s having none of that. Abandon logic and literal sense-making. If she were a painter, she would have been a Fauvist, all bold color and impressionistic images. In story after story, she serves up addiction, cancer, suicide, abandonment, disappointment. She refuses the possibility of happy endings; for her, there are only moments of reprieve.
So why read it?
To be moved emotionally. You can’t find the incantatory magic of her prose by diagraming her sentences. Trust only that her unconventional use of simile and metaphor, of dark humor and rawness, will take you somewhere you have never been.