Shithole Cities
On making a writing life in a place that's not New York
The oldest building in Oakland, California is at 301 Broadway, a squat and unassuming white plaster thing you’d miss if you hadn’t Googled it. Built in 1857 by a woman with the incredible name of Theophilide St. Germain and her husband, a French count, it was originally a wine shop that catered to wealthy Gold Rush customers.
It’s on a corner near Jack London Square, named for the city’s most famous writer, who’s been reassessed more than once recently and found wanting for the usual reasons: racism, mainly, ironic in a city that splits almost equally into four demographic quadrants, only one of which is white. A block up from 301 Broadway is a freeway overpass under which tents full of unhoused people are clustered; on the other side of that same overpass is the city jail.
When you Google Oakland, the first suggestion you get is “is Oakland safe.” Safe, I wonder, from what? I was born here (technically, right on the border of Oakland and Berkeley at Alta Bates hospital, a crumbling building named for its founder, a woman nurse), and with a couple of short out of state stints, I’ve lived here pretty much continuously for over fifty years.
The biggest changes have been racial. The Oakland of my childhood was over 50% Black, my classmates the grandkids of parents who’d moved west during WWII to work in California’s shipyards. Today, it’s only about 25% Black. But any city that’s historically Black or has ever had a Black majority is always going to be viewed as “problematic.” Are you from Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans? You get it. There’s a story going around that Kamala Devi Harris grew up here, but while she was born here, as a child she lived in West Berkeley, a neighborhood that also had a historically high Black population, where her grad student parents lived, with the wealthy white Cal boomer faculty who taught them perched up in the hills. I don’t know what she’d make of Oakland today. Her friend and former boss Gavin Newsom recently announced he’d be sweeping the homeless encampments of California away, which led to the question of where, exactly, these already displaced people are supposed to go.
Right now, many homeless people live in Oakland, but the median home price here is close to a million dollars, rent is exorbitant, and yes, crime is a problem, but we also have a police force so corrupt it was placed under federal oversight, and a mayor whose home was recently raided by the FBI. Three professional sports teams have abandoned the city in quick succession, and the airport recently rebranded as San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport. Even the goddamned airport is embarrassed to be here. Is Oakland safe? Not from gentrification, disorganization, or political incompetence. But it’s also a place of heartbreaking beauty, incredible cultural history, a thriving queer community, profoundly tough people, an activist heart, and a deep faith in its own capacity for survival.
But if you’re a writer, it’s Not New York. Even after Covid reminded us that it doesn’t actually matter where you live, the idea persists that the “real” writers move to New York. This is so entrenched in our collective imagination that my most ambitious creative writing students still pack their bags as soon as they graduate, fleeing California for internships where they get paid pennies to read slush piles for exhausted literary agents and live with 17 roommates while struggling to make their student loans.
Image via FreshFotography.
There’s nothing wrong with that kind of life in your twenties or thirties. But at some point in your forties or fifties, you realize that meeting another writer in a bar or seeing someone reading at a bookstore or being able to smugly put “New York” in your bio isn’t really worth it when you can live somewhere you actually like. New York is fine and I’m not trying to start a fight here, but I am saying that writers in New York do have some advantages, mostly of networking. But, again, at some point in your forties or fifties you don’t want your life as a writer to be about networking. Networking is soul-deadening. At some point you want your writing life to be about writing.
Recently I was listening to an episode of the podcast You’re Wrong About. The host, Sara Marshall, lives in Portland, and the week’s co-host, Harmony Coangelo, is from Cleveland. The episode was about Balloonfest 1986, a time when the maligned city of Cleveland decided to do something bold to get the world’s attention, so they released 1.5 million balloons. You can probably imagine all of the ways in which this went wrong, and it sure did go wrong in all of those ways. But while the episode was ostensibly about all the things balloons can do to cause catastrophes, it was really about Marshall and Coangelo talking about being from “lesser” cities.
By this I don’t mean cities that aren’t interesting. I’ve been to Cleveland, and it’s pretty cool, with great architecture and interesting history. The great comic book artist Harvey Pekar was from Cleveland! And my sister lives in Portland, so I’ve also been there quite a lot, and while it’s twee and annoying in ways Portlandia was not wrong about, it’s also quite beautiful and of course has the greatest bookstore in North America. But these are lesser cities especially for writers because no matter how many great writers come out of them, they’re still Not New York.
Some years ago I was in a conversation with a New York book editor about things I wanted to write, and when I said I wanted to write a book about Oakland she paused for a long time and said, “that’s nice… but very regional.” I don’t know why we still think this way, but even in California Oakland is Not San Francisco and Ventura is Not Los Angeles, Fresno is Not the Bay Area, Santa Cruz is Not Monterrey. It’s a game people play because they want to believe that cultural supremacy can be geographically pinpointed, and it’s exhausting, and it’s also bullshit. Maybe New York has more writers per capita than, say, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Tampa, Ann Arbor, or any other city that is Not New York, but living surrounded by so many writers sounds, to me at least, profoundly exhausting. I like the novelty of being in Wikipedia’s Writers from Oakland category, and I like being able to wave my arms around once in a while when I’m walking, something you aren’t able to do in New York, because you’ll probably accidentally slap another writer.
West Oakland, photo by Shutterbugs87
When I meet another writer from Oakland, it’s more like a delightful coincidence than a moment when I can think “what can this person do for me?” or they can think the same thing about me. No, not every writer in New York is like that, but when I’ve been to New York to do readings or be on panels there is very much that kind of transactional vibe, and it’s persistent and depressing. But, on the other hand, when a wave of my own friends left Oakland to go to New York and “make it,” they all returned. And they kept writing, here, where it’s Not San Francisco, which nobody can afford anyway, and which has been sandblasted of most of its literary culture by Big Tech, which is slowly encroaching on Oakland too, but “is Oakland safe?” keeps the worst of Big Tech at bay, at least for now.
Oakland never released 1.5 million balloons, but it, too, has had more than its fair share of catastrophes that have grabbed national headlines. But writers, we’re catastrophic ourselves, and maybe we really belong in catastrophic places, interesting places, out of the way places, “lesser” places. That’s where we can make a contribution, find a community, be present to the work, instead of being crushed by the weight of expectations about “making it” somewhere where you actually don’t have much chance of making it, and where making it fits very narrow and antiquated ideas about writerly success. Those “lesser” cities are the places we can deeply know, and love because we root for them, so hard, we root for them because we love them, and we love them so hard.