Oakland

How The West Was Wrung

by Robin Lapid | Jan 29, 2024 4:53 pm

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Posted to: Media

Alta Journal Issue 26 Party
Clio’s Bookstore and Bar
Oakland
Jan. 24, 2024

In the bowels of what feels like the coziest Manhattan bookstore not in Manhattan, I thumbed through the latest issue of Alta Journal as well-heeled types milled about with drinks in hand, made at a little bar that sits in the middle of the establishment. The recent rains having just soaked the city, Clio’s wood-paneled bookshelves and reading tables for one felt like a shrine to the East Bay literati. And it felt like the perfect East Coast-meets-West Coast sensibility for the launch of the journal’s latest issue on Baja, or what publisher Will Hearst calls ​“the lower California.”

Founded in 2017, Alta Journal is California’s answer to the New York Review of Books or The Paris Review —West Village sensibility baked under the eternal sunshine of the Left Coast. So it’s no wonder that literary explorers like Joan Didion and Dave Eggers have been profiled within its pages, but with large-scale, glossy photo essays and one-page features on topics like celebrity tequilas.

But how do you get away with this kind of magazine in California? 

According to Hearst, you aim for it to be ​“small, unimportant, and underfunded.” With no expectations, you can shoot for the stars.

The quarterly magazine focuses on arts and culture in the broader sense, with long-form writing, beautifully-shot pictorials of California landscapes, and Hearst’s directive that the West ​“is more a sensibility than a geography.“ This is second nature to Californians. 

But having lived in both northern and southern California, I can tell you that there’s sometimes an intellectual disconnect as wide as the seemingly endless swaths connected by the 5. I moved away from San Francisco just after the first dot-com bust and just before the turn of the century, when you could still overhear conversations on politics and the arts more so than about start-ups and IPOs. In L.A., I’d find myself having coffee on the front patio of The Alcove while running into Mandy Moore and overhearing conversations about agents and scripts. It may have been the same state, but it absolutely felt like different worlds.

Alta Journal has the fractious sensibilities of both. For the issue release, I was more dressed for the downtown Oakland vibe and the ​“Cardi Spelling Bee” that I was about to check out than for Clio’s literary set, clad mostly in black, with Old Fashioneds in hand. The evening’s agenda highlighted some of the latest issue’s most intriguing stories: writer Joy Lanzendorfer’s feature on John Steinbeck’s trip to Baja; Kate McQueen on her cowritten piece with incarcerated journalist Joe Garcia, on the arrival of former Manson family member Bruce Davis at San Quentin State Prison; and portrait photographer Judy Dater, speaking on her photos of Bay Area gun owners. (You might be surprised at the demographic represented in the photos. I was.)

I loved that Alta Journal dives deeper into the people and stories of the West with the rigor and recognition it deserves, and with West Coast writers and editors from the Bay Area and beyond. Heading outside along Lake Merritt on my way downtown, I felt some relief to be able to read through the latest issue on my own. No Old Fashioned for me, but there was the promise of a soju shot and friendlier vibes at my next destination.

Tags: writing , journalism , literature , literary readings , Arts