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Articles by John Freeman
Dispatch of Desire
We live in epic times. Even as the seasons are obliterated by carbon burning, the cycles of life—and those who boast of their power over them—are starkly felt. Not a day goes by without some leader, somewhere, promising a return to a mythic past. But whose past? And which gods are we told to worship? If you live anywhere in North America, in this season of genocide 4.0, such questions are not idle ones.
Remembering a Colossus
When it comes to parents, it is not only the father who can be a colossus. For so many of us, it is our mothers who make us. Their hands, their lives, all the things they do and all the things they couldn’t or didn’t do become a kind of inheritance, a cosmos that begs for a story, especially when that mother has lived a huge and full but, in many senses, invisible life. It is no surprise that Cherríe Moraga has given us one of the finest memoirs of a mother and daughter in American literature.
A Miraculous Spectacle
In a world of AI-driven reels, miraculous spectacles need rethinking. Once asked about the most remarkable things I’d ever seen, I am pretty sure I would have begun with scale: a redwood tree in Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve; Victor Wembanyama jogging on a treadmill next to me in a Sacramento hotel gym (true story); the Sahara as seen from above from a plane.
A Panoramic History
Just before midnight in late December 1917, the mayor of Sacramento, William D. Stephens, and his wife were startled awake by a blast in the executive mansion. An explosion powerful enough to carve a hole five-feet deep had blown out the whole rear of the mansion.
On and Off the 91 Freeway
A lot happens on California freeways. On any given weekday, a hot wind might steal through cars, around motorcycles. Across poorly packed trailers—some with people inside. Traveling down one such freeway at speed, a driver may not be entirely conscious that the land rushing by is many thousands of years old, even if strip malls now occupy it. If you’re heading toward the Inland Empire, people might call the freeway the 91, but it has had other names given by other people.
The Sharp Lip of Knowledge
A teenager is a galaxy unto themselves. Their childhood is so close they sometimes feel nearer to animals. But they’re also far enough from adulthood as to be ignored. In this way, they sometimes stand among us, watching and observing, unheeded, taking it all in: the strange bargains of adult life. The social mores people think they need to talk about to enact. The secrets.
Essay: The force behind poet Jonah Mixon-Webster's new work
Jonah Mixon-Webster’s sophomore collection of poems, Promise/Threat, signals a new approach to place-based writing. Flint, MI, where Mixon-Webster is from, informs this book’s topography, but is never named in the poems. Instead, Mixon-Webster’s poems exist as dreamscapes and irrecoverable figments. “Inchoate Chatter” exemplifies the way Mixon-Webster troubles the idea of place, set as it is at the T.S. Eliot House in Gloucester, Massachusetts and skewering the modernist poet’s casual racism.
Praise in a Fallen World
The first task, the oldest one of poetry, has been to praise. Even in a fallen world. (Maybe there’s no other kind.) The first recorded author in human kind was a woman, Enheduanna, an Akkadian priestess, daughter of King Sargon I, who ruled a region in what is now modern-day Iraq. Enheduanna was also a religious ecstatic.
My Mother’s Dinnertime Book Club
I think my mother was trying to make sure we didn’t grow up to be assholes. She had three white boys in their teens in the 1980s. We played sports, went to big schools, and lived in a world full of bad role models. Some nights, that included my father, who enjoyed winding her up at dinner—wiggling his eyebrows about sex or finishing the meal early and leaving her at the table eating dinner slowly while he turned on a Clint Eastwood movie. I’ve never met such a slow eater as my mother.
A Map of Girlhood
When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically,” Jean Rhys writes in her gimlet-eyed novel After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, the tale of what happens when a woman leaves her last older lover and goes home.
A Grand Avenue Runs Through It
A roadway runs through the heart of Greg Sarris’s Grand Avenue, but don’t let the title fool you. For while the stories assembled here form a novel set in and around Santa Rosa, specifically in the neighborhood of South Park, and we pass Grand Avenue many times in these pages, the real map of this book isn’t made of asphalt. It is made of water. The way Grand Avenue moves tales within its tales is a lot like the way a river is made of currents.
The Artist’s Child
How much time one can spend in art galleries, reading poems, watching films—especially Western ones—and see so few renderings of something quite simple. The artist’s child. Let alone the artist’s family. In the 17th century, Rembrandt painted his wife, Saskia, in The Prodigal Son in the Tavern, but it was not until 1789 that we saw a painting quite like Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s Self-Portrait with Julie.
Not Your Everyday Meet-Cute
Lisa See interviewed nearly 100 members of her family to write On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family, her sweeping memoir of their first century in America. This extraordinary act of retrieval gives birth to a new question, though. Whose story, whose life, gets to be the focal point? This book begins with her great-grandfather Fong See, who came to the United States following his father, a modest herbalist, and made a fortune as a merchant.
Moving the ‘I’ Aside
During her tenure as United States poet laureate, Ada Limón spoke about the necessary role poetry plays in the public spirit. In interviews, she said that poetry has the power to carry the weight of public crises. Griefs. That it addresses itself to us as to a suffering human race, a species with emotions. She often said that one poem, on a single page, could make it possible for us to carry on. What a very good description of Limón’s own work this set of beliefs charts.
‘Train Dreams’ Review
Two voices hold director Clint Bentley’s together like a duet, and you hear the first before the film has even begun. It’s the forest itself. As the credits roll, wind ruffles through trees, there’s birdsong, the drum and pock of a woodpecker. Then Will Patton’s voice begins with its oaken intimacies, speaking low. He plays a nameless narrator, maybe God. “There were once passageways to the old world, strange trails, hidden paths.
Book Club Picks for October 2025 Original
Alta Journal’s California Book Club The book: California Rewritten by John Freeman Our reviewer says: “Knopf executive editor Freeman delivers a wide-ranging if occasionally head-scratching critical survey of contemporary California literature.” Read more. Audacious Book Club The book: The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy Our reviewer says: “The stimulating sophomore effort from National Book Award finalist Flournoy follows five Black women over two decades of soul-searching and turmoil....
Numerical Studies of an Inverse Pinch Device
Abstract The inverse pinch configuration has been recognized as a possible means of producing stable, repeatable shock waves in a plasma for laboratory investigation. The simple geometry permits investigation of cases with or without an initial transverse magnetic field in an un-ionized or pre-ionized medium. Previous analytic work for this geometry has been restricted to a snowplow model, sometimes including coupling with the external circuitry.
Poetry: ‘Transit’
getty images This morning in Sacramento I learned that an email has a smaller footprint than a postcard, unless the email carries a large attachment like a feature-length film or a high-resolution map of the world with all the cities and mountains and seas colored in, the green trenches which plunge miles down swallowing light where creatures move blindly, as we used to move before we lit the world and burnt coal to heat rooms and power trains and cut down all the old-growth forests to build...
Sea Change
Maybe in the future they will be seen for what they were—those postwar decades out of which grew a vast and powerful vision of California coastal life. All those dreamy songs. Bungalows built right on the beach. Homes constructed right up over the sea, as if the sea were a calm presence, or a force humans could control. But it was a brief and unusual period of relative calm, those years, on a coast made by tectonic violence and constant change.
Scars of Fires Past
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship,” Susan Sontag wrote in her influential, critical work Illness As Metaphor. “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” Though it’s perhaps less apparent now, Illness As Metaphor was an act of rescue.
Enter Desert: ‘Gold Fame Citrus’
The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one,” John Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley. “It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.” By the time Steinbeck wrote this, man had long since gotten to California: The clue is in the desert’s name. Mojave Indians, who also go by the name Aha Macav, had been in the desert for thousands of years.
A Chaotic and Dangerous Present
Imagine if you strolled into a bookstore today and picked up a novel in which the action revolved around a detective investigating the spread of a virus called Jes Grew, a pandemic making people dance and move and become susceptible to Black culture.
John Freeman on the Books That Built California’s Identity
It could have been called so many more accurate things. A number of these possible names lurk in our cities and rivers or perch atop mountains and beaches. Take Malibu, where the Chumash people lived as far back as possibly 7,000 BCE, the name coming perhaps from their word Humaliwo, which means “where the surf sounds loudly.” Or Milpitas, whose name comes from the Mexican Spanish for “cornfield.” Perhaps a place as big as the Golden State shouldn’t have been given one name but many?
Quantum Physics of Fiction
One of the most boring things in the world is listening to an athlete be interviewed. This is not because athletes lack intelligence or personality. It’s because what makes athletes great is their ability to spend countless hours repeating actions so frequently that when their body has to perform them, they do not have to think, Take the shot, curl into a flip turn, stay at this pace. Feint left, hook right. They simply do them, beautifully.
The Unburied Contradictions of Sacramento Noir
Noir is a form I came to love when I began living in New York City, but it’s a feeling I first felt in Sacramento. I grew up in the suburbs east of Sacramento in the 1980s and my father worked downtown. We’d take the bus into the city, so fragrant with its million trees, so empty of pedestrians in many places; it was a regular Saturday event, when my dad would go in to work on weekends, writing grants for the family service agency he ran. The stony silence around the capital. The dry soft air.
Living in the Wedge of Light and Darkness: ‘The Consequences’
The word consequence does not appear in the King James Bible. Oh, there are punishments reaped and fates that are sowed—but consequences, that very behavioral term, are not to be found. Perhaps a consequence, coming to us from the late Middle English, from Old French, as in “to follow closely,” is not a word for the New World. A world tipped toward the present and away from the past, even if all the effects born from the past are evident to be seen.
Crucible Comic Press
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Defying the Scripts of Empire
Empires have roles for all of us to play, whether we want them or not. Soldier. Barbarian. Refugee. Grateful immigrant. Suffering victim. Innocent taxpayer. Savior. Revolutionary. Terrorist. Villain. Politics is not the only theater in which these roles get cast: Memory, and all the cultural forces that keep it alive, is the other. Watch the news closely enough and you can see figures change roles as time and fortune turn.
The Joy and Pathos of Caring for a Parent in ‘Goodbye, Vitamin’
I once had a friend who measured his life in dogs. Winding down a long meal, he often said things like, I’m five dogs into a seven-dog life. He wasn’t alone. Recently, another friend, upon hearing of an elderly family member’s dachshund’s passing, replied with knowing despair: Oh, she said, poor thing, she’s on her last dog. People measure time in all kinds of ways: children and trees. Houses or jobs. Some take a step back and call it history. Others move one closer and name it love.
‘Violent Spring’: A Long Wait for Justice in Los Angeles
Time isn’t necessarily the agent of justice. One hopes it will be, but so often with time come other things. While some mourn, other forces regroup. Protect their power. Produce new distractions. How Americans live in time, and who is asked to wait—and for how long—for justice, for comfort, for life and happiness, is one of the great untold stories of this country.
“The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee” offers fascinating take on ...
Home Christopher Lee “The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee” offers fascinating take on ... Read more
Green Years in ‘This Boy’s Life’
Years ago, when I first moved to England, I pitied the English for their lack of a West. When it was late afternoon or last call at a pub and I felt one of my colleagues turning chippy in a way that reminded me of high school—I forgave them the hostility because I thought, You have nowhere to go to start over. There’s no elsewhere here, no California: there’s just Bristol, and I would tune out whatever negativity, real or imagined, that was being piped into the conversation.
On Pornography Part 2 (Counseling Talk, Ep. 10)
What you retreat to for refreshment turns into love. For some Christians, that’s pornography. In this episode of Counseling Talk, Deepak Reju, Hayley Satrom, and Garrett Kell share some of the practical tools that can be useful in helping someone fight this difficult battle.
Source of Strength
Every other country’s caste system always seems more absurd than one’s own. At home, where we are steeped in a culture that transmutes its codes, the directives of caste can feel so ubiquitous that they can be mistaken for logic. Elsewhere, it’s simply absurd.
Questions of the Spirit
One of the most powerful things Cesar Chavez is credited with saying wasn’t authored by him alone but alongside playwright Luis Valdez. It comes from “El Plan de Delano,” the manifesto written and read on the occasion of the United Farm Workers peregrinación from Delano some 300 miles up to Sacramento. The goal was to get California grape growers to recognize their union. “Our sweat and our blood have fallen on this land to make other men rich,” Chavez and Valdez wrote.
Deflective Shimmer: ‘Dead in Long Beach, California’
Reality has been a fiction ever since we left the cave, but it has felt especially fictitious of late, and that is reflected in quite a lot of books that call themselves realistic. Even though most people live multiple lives now—digitally, professionally, internally—a lot of fiction assures us that thoughts typically come one at a time. That our selves are coherent, predictable vehicles that we have control over. That the internet interrupts our lives about as often as background noise.
North to ‘La USA:' Javier Zamora's 'Solito' and 'Unaccompanied'
When extraordinary journeys are rendered normal—or even invisible so that abstract feelings like safety or security or greatness can reframe public debate—writers have work to do. Roque Dalton knew this. The revolutionary Salvadoran poet was constantly reframing resistance in the context of love and life, and life in the terms of political upheaval. This led to a peripatetic existence, not unlike the lives of the magonistas, who resisted the reign of Porfirio Díaz.
The Shock of Its Necessity
In 1977, a few years after he’d won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection of poems Turtle Island, Gary Snyder passed through New York City. The colossal World Trade towers had been inaugurated. The city was mired in a deep depression, one that would culminate later that summer in the July blackout. It must have felt like a far cry from California. While on that trip, Snyder conducted an interview with Peter Barry Chowka, who was editing the East West Journal.
Roxane Gay & Everand Originals Presents: Good Girl by Elaine Castillo, Roxane Gay (Audiobook) - Read free for 30 days
Audiobook3 hours Written by and Narrated by and Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars 4.5/5 () About this audiobook The fourth installment in the series from Everand and Roxane Gay, the beloved bestselling author of Hunger, Bad Feminist, and Opinions. Award-winning novelist and essayist Elaine Castillo details her life spent rescuing and training dogs, a story that reveals just as much about modern society and culture as it does our relationship with humankind’s first domesticated animal.
Riding the Wave of ‘The Gangster of Love’
Deep into Jessica Hagedorn’s boisterous 1996 masterpiece, The Gangster of Love, our heroine, Rocky Rivera, has moved to New York to make a go at the rock and roll life. It’s the late 1970s, the peak years of CBGB. Rocky’s band, which gives the book its title, gigs a lot but doesn’t earn much. One night, Rocky jumps in a taxi to head back down to the Lower East Side. It’s late; the cabby gives her the eye in his rearview mirror. Rocky knows it’s wise to be deferential.
This Week's downthetubes Catch Up
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Accidents of the Heart
In roughly the time it’ll take you to read this essay, someone in the state of California will be injured in a hit-and-run accident. Nearly nine people an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, are injured, according to the most recent data (2018–2020) from California Highway Patrol. It’s an extraordinary fact. Add to this about one hit-and-run fatality per day and it looks like the Golden State has an epidemic in coexistence.
“Humanity is Not an Abstract Concept.” Lana Bastašić on Palestine Solidarity, Dubravka Ugrešić, and More
John Freeman talks to Lana Bastašić, the Bosnian Serb author of Catch the Rabbit, about Palestine solidarity, missing Dubravka Ugrešić, and rejecting the “White Christian zookeepers.” * John Freeman: We first met in Sarajevo, when you were reading in Bosnian and all I could do was nod, but it sounded good. Our mutual friend Aleksandar Hemon then put us in touch and I read a story translated into English and my instinct was right. I loved your stories.
Interview with John H. Freeman Transcript
Home > TMC Library > MHC > TMC History > Historical A/V > TMC Historical Resources > 1 AVV-IC084-050_051-trans This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License. Freeman, John Henry (1886-1980), "Interview with John H. Freeman Transcript" (1973). Texas Medical Center Historical Resources Project Records. 1. https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/tmc_hist_resources/1 DOWNLOADS COinS
Conductor of Time
Being made of myth and materials, the suburbs are a hard place about which to tell stories. In the last century of American literature, only a handful of good novels unfold there. Even fewer plays and poems. Shaped by restrictions, built on erasure, the suburbs seem tailor-made for horror films.
The Velvety Relief of Contagion Plots
Everybody going to be dead one day,” Neil Gaiman once wrote. “Just give them time.” Considering our shared fate, how strange that American literature does not feature more gothic fiction. The accoutrements of death define landscape. The slaughterhouses, the prisons. Weapons manufacturers and the euphemisms of war. Doctors who do not listen. The poisons. The dead themselves, surely they walk among us asking to be heard?
John Freeman at Harvard Book Store
presenting Freeman's: Conclusions in conversation with ALLEGRA GOODMAN, CLAIRE MESSUD, HITOMI YOSHIO, and JOSHUA BENNETT Location Harvard Book Store 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138 Tickets This event is free; no tickets are required. Harvard Book Store welcomes JOHN FREEMAN—editor of Freeman's—to celbrate the release of Freeman's: Conclusions. He will be joined in conversation by ALLEGRA GOODMAN, CLAIRE MESSUD, HITOMI YOSHIO, and JOSHUA BENNETT.
Adania Shibli: „Die LiBeraturpreis-Affäre war nur eine Ablenkung, nichts weiter“
Palästina-Israel Zum ersten Mal seit der Absage der Verleihung des LiBeraturpreises auf der Frankfurter Buchmesse äußert sich die palästinensische Autorin. Seit dem 7.
Multiple Sources of Beauty
Every story is a kind of model. To function, it must have a shape, it has to have scale, and it has to have participants. A frame becomes so much more interesting once a person enters it, Kurt Vonnegut once said. I didn’t appreciate the power of models until I moved to Sacramento in the mid-1980s—enthralled with a story that California pipes out across the country so regularly that it’s hard to tell where it’s coming from.
The Audacious Roundup
Our October book club selection is The Land of Milk & Honey by C. Pam Zhang. We will be in conversation with C. Pam on October 25th, and registration is open. If you’re looking for a nice notebook, check out my Draft Writing Journal from Baron Fig. It’s pretty swank if I do say so myself. To accompany my Draft Writing Journal, there is now a pen! It’s beautiful and satisfying to hold. And if you’re looking for some writing instruction, you might want to check out my Masterclass.
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