In her latest collection of stories, the associate professor of English explores a wide range of experiences unique to the City of Angels.
via USC Dornsife
By Lynell George
Here in Los Angeles, you learn early and often: Screen magic trumps real life.
Here in Los Angeles, you learn early and often: Screen magic trumps real life.
Writer and professor Dana Johnson was reminded of that prickly coexistence on a recent afternoon. Wandering into Union Station, she found it a-swarm. Not teeming with commuting Bunker Hill suits nor the downtown Arts District’s new guard, but rather the entire lounge space swallowed up by a buzzing film crew: cables, lights, scrims and steel barricades. “You can sit,” a disembodied voice rebuffed all in approach, “but don’t move.”
She made a beeline, into the courtyards at the edges of the station. Stashed in a hidden corner, Johnson happened upon a small bronze plaque commemorating the terminal’s 50-year anniversary in 1989: “Through the portals of this historic edifice have passed the great and near-great.”
Johnson’s fiction has long examined those edges — animating the “near great”; the L.A. that isn’t in the foreground, the one that is too often asked to sit, but don’t move. That’s the L.A. she moves through every day on foot.
“I get a notion. An image. A line of dialogue,” she said. “Or maybe it’s just a feeling I want to explore.”
To read more about Dana Johnson’s story collection click here
Image via USC|Dornsife
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