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07/31/2004 Westwords: Sunday's Los Angeles Times Book Review features a beautiful review by Jonathan Kirsch of My California: Journeys by Great Writers. Here are a few morsels:

We've been offered several roughly comparable collections in recent years, including Writing Los Angeles, edited by David L. Ulin, and The Misread City, edited by (Dana) Gioia and Scott Timberg. My California is both more and less ambitious at once: The book considers all of California rather than just Los Angeles but presents itself as a travelogue rather than a work of scholarship and criticism. Still, it is full of reflective and illuminating moments, and each of the contributors manages to transcend the thoroughly respectable genre of travel writing to achieve something more exalted.

And:

The image that graces the cover of "My California," a lively new anthology of writing about the Golden State, is David Hockney's now-iconic "Pearblossom Hwy., 11-18th April 1986 (Second Version)." It's a wholly appropriate choice — the photo-collage consists of hundreds of snapshots of an otherwise unremarkable California back road that have been scissored apart and reassembled in a way that may strike the eye as a kaleidoscopic delight, a seismic horror or both.

The same fracturing of vision is at play in "My California," which presents itself as a collection of travel writing but offers much more than a series of quaint and colorful scenes. Thus, Carolyn See contributes a reverie about the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine on Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades that ultimately becomes an elegy to her departed life partner, John Espey — a piece full of her characteristic blend of sass, savvy and grace.

"Every day, I'd swing over to the Lake Shrine, and make the first circle, swearing, muttering oaths and imprecations, sneering at whoever got in my way," she writes in "Waters of Tranquility" about Espey's final illness. "By the second time around, I'd remembered why I was there, how I was losing the man I loved most in the world. I'd lean against trees and weep, sit on those benches and sob. The third time around, I'd hear myself asking for courage, steadfastness, compassion!"

The 27 California writers who contributed to "My California" represent an appropriately mixed bag of backgrounds, styles and sensibilities. Los Angeles Times reporter Mark Arax, coauthor of "The King of California," opens the collection with "The Big Valley," an appreciation of California's often-overlooked heartland. Somewhere in the middle, memoirist and urban historian D.J. Waldie ponders the 957-square-foot tract house where he grew up and still lives. And it closes with poet and critic Dana Gioia's credo "On Being a California Poet," previously anthologized. Where else will we find, within a single volume, a paean to the blue-collar community of Hawthorne, where Gioia grew up, or a celebration of the compact suburb of Lakewood, Waldie's hometown, and a celebration of the stretch of Highway 99 between Fresno and Tulare in Arax's piece?"

Read more of Kirsch's review (registration required).