Looking Through These Clippings Was Really Comforting at First: A Conversation with Ashton Politanoff

Liza St. James talks with Ashton Politanoff about his new book “You’ll Like It Here.”

By Liza St. JamesNovember 5, 2022

• Fiction

ONE SATURDAY in May 2020, I received a message with a subject line reading, “Politanoff gold mine, please attend!” The attached manuscript, sent by Diane Williams to the senior editors of the literary annual NOON, included early versions of many of the texts that became Los Angeles author Ashton Politanoff’s debut book You’ll Like It Here (published by Dalkey Archive Press in September). A selection of these texts was featured in the 2021 edition of NOON.  

Composed of articles adapted and arranged from the Redondo Reflex and other local newspapers in the wake of the 1918 flu pandemic and the Great Depression, You’ll Like It Here recounts the early days of the Los Angeles seaside community Redondo Beach. On one page, you might find a remedy for scalding that involves the application of a “scraped potato,” on another, one for earache: “Milk the cow and drop a little into your ear canal while the milk is still warm.” We hear about lobster traps found destroyed “after being kodaked.” Horses wash ashore and seagulls fly into smokestacks. Avian tuberculosis strikes ranches on the mesa. A “new motor tricycle” carries “the resuscitating machine for the bath house.” Death notices abound. Suicide pacts are made and, on occasion, broken. In this feat of narrative compression, one encounters many lives and many ways of living — an uncanny view into what was deemed newsworthy in ways that illuminate aspects of our own times. 

I met Politanoff in 2018 when he came to New York to read at NOON’s annual launch event, and we’ve corresponded regularly over the years since, often about the books we’re reading. In the spirit of his novel’s use of coastal library archives, I spoke with him from the Rockland Public Library in Maine.

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LIZA ST. JAMES: Can you tell me about the origins of this project?

ASHTON POLITANOFF: When my mom passed away, I had this obsession with the past, even when it didn’t relate to my mom — this sense of nostalgia. I was surfing a lot and buying surfboards that used the designs from an earlier era, like the 1950s and ’60s, and something about traveling back really appealed to me. There’s a rich history in the South Bay of surfboard shaping in the ’50s and ’60s. This is one of the places it started, in Hermosa Beach. And you had the PV Surf Club, a group of guys who surfed pre–World War II in Palos Verdes, at the Cove. So, I became really interested in looking through old photographs, a lot of which involved surfing in the community. 

And those photographs led you to the Redondo Beach Library archives? 

The Redondo Library had their digital archive up and I was looking through old photographs there in 2014 or 2015, and looking at the newspaper clippings. At the actual library, they have a cool section, a wall of books dedicated to local history and local authors, that I glimpsed years ago. And then I found a clipping — a man faking his own death, his own drowning, and his wife looking at a body and saying, “Oh yeah, that’s him.” And then years later, he’s found, alive and well, in Chicago, living a new life. And I couldn’t find that clipping again.

I tried to remember what the date was, I think it was 1921 or ’22, so I poked around a bit more, and I came across all these other news clippings where the language was so interesting, and the objects, and I got really excited. I saw that they were workable — that if I could just mess with them, I could turn them into something. A lot of that had to do with what I’ve learned working with NOON and Diane Williams and you all. I saw so much potential. And it became compulsive. I would wake up super early every day and find four or five news clippings and play with them until I was happy with them. Then when I had 10 or 15, I wondered if I could turn this into a longer narrative, and COVID-19 was happening, and I was coming across a lot of things that resonated.

Looking through these clippings was really comforting at first. I found an innocence, an idyllic place in time where life was simpler. It was a good distraction for me. But then I saw something much darker as I progressed. 

So, the darker stuff came later? You have a three-part structure — how much shaping did you do to arrive at that?

A lot of the darker stuff did seem to come later. Especially with World War I, the Spanish flu, even some of the suicides — that structure seemed to already be in place. And in the editing process, we saw some of the themes that come up — industrialization, disease, plague — and tried to amplify those. That’s when I went into city-adjacent newspapers to see if I could find other clippings that might help.

When you shared some of the original clippings with us at NOON, I noticed you’d changed many of the names. 

I changed all the names, for the most part. I kept Dr. Butt because I thought that was a funny name for a doctor. I spoke with Michael Hixon, a journalist for the Daily Breeze and a third- or fourth-generation Redondo Beach resident, and it turned out his mom knew Dr. Butt. His mom and possibly her mom had gone to him. His was one of the few names I retained.

I thought Dr. Harmel was a good name too. I remember you mentioning that you were searching through the census for those years. I also noticed you changed the events in a clipping from Wharf 1 to Wharf 2. And a lot of stuff goes down at Wharf 2! What kinds of responsibility did you feel to the people behind the articles? Did you have concerns about keeping names?

A lot of it was acoustically driven. Even changing from Wharf 1 to Wharf 2. It’s interesting that you point that out. A lot of stuff does go down at Wharf 2! That was all for sound. I went through databases of old names and tried to find ones that appealed to my eye and ear, and that I hoped would work with the text or a given clipping. Especially with some of the darker clippings, it just felt right to change them. And because I was fictionalizing others and reorganizing, it felt like fiction, so it felt appropriate to change the names.

Can you speak to the relationship between titles and text? I’m especially curious about the pages that are just titles, without text: “Boy Rescued with Lasso and Dip Net”; “Onion Syrup Good for Children.”

“Boy Rescued with Lasso and Dip Net” was one of the first ones where I was like, I’m going to make it a title and have no text. And that gave me permission to take more creative liberties — it became more of a creative project then. I learned the value of titles through NOON. I also read Jon Fosse’s story collection Scenes from a Childhood (2018), and I really loved what he was doing with his titles. I found humor in it. Varying the rhythm between the pages, and the page lengths, keeps the reader — including myself, as I was working on it — off-guard a little bit.

There’s a feminist thread running through some of these texts. Was that something you worked to excavate?

There was definitely an undercurrent against the patriarchal vibe of the clippings themselves. In terms of adding that first-person voice, in my eyes that’s a woman speaking, or several women, and that was something that we fleshed out in the second revision. Mainly to have a different register in there, and I think that gave me some more creative freedom too.

Did the first-person texts begin as third-person clippings? 

Some of those first-person clippings I wrote. For example, “A Watched Pot Never Boils,” I wrote. Hopalong Cassidy was a popular book, the Hercules shirt was something I found in an old Sears and Roebuck catalog, and since I was playing around with this sort of patriarchal voice — not every “I” voice was a woman, this one’s a man — I liked that acquiescence, that vulnerability. And the bath that’s made for the man might have been an amalgamation of several remedies I found in Mother’s Remedies.

There are so many amazing historical details throughout the book. They make masks out of peach stones! I found myself looking up some of the details and place names. How deep into the history did you go?

I used to live on Emerald Street, which is one of the oldest streets in Redondo. I lived in a little beach bungalow there, an older house. And the street just felt wider there, it felt different. The way I would step outside and feel the breeze. Emerald Street was mentioned a few times, in several clippings. That really excited me — finding out what life was like in a community I grew up in and still live in and love. There’s a train track under the Hermosa or Manhattan Pier right now, and apparently a significant swell from a certain direction creates a really good wave. I had heard about that, I think it’s called Trolleycars, that’s the name of the surf spot, and things like that I found fascinating. 

Have you ever surfed Trolleycars? 

Some surfers I know claim that spot isn’t real. And others claim it is. And I don’t even know where it is. Some claim it’s off the Manhattan Pier; others claim it’s off the Hermosa Pier. I might have surfed it and not even known. So, when I was reading about trains running through the city, it excited me partly because of that.

I loved the mentions of the Los Angeles Pacific Railroad. What about the “flower stones” referenced in “Sea Gold”? Were those moonstones?

Yeah, someone texted me from San Luis Obispo — a moonstone from Redondo Beach was in a store there. I’m not even sure where Moonstone Beach is — where it used to be — but I’m curious about that too.

Has this project changed the way you see your neighborhood?

While I was working on it, I would often go hiking in Palos Verdes as an escape from the news and everything, and it’s weird because a lot of people in the community back then would do the same thing. Whether it was for hunting — it was a lot wilder then, there was nothing there — or just nature. A lot of stuff is gone, and has disappeared, and I’m sure it’ll continue. There is one of the original wharves at Redondo that they’re renovating right now. It’s fenced off. And the Redondo Pier itself has a section of flooring from the original pier. 

And we still have strange hazes. I remember you texting me about an algae bloom at one point when you were going surfing.

There was a crazy algae bloom around a year and a half ago. But I missed it. Red tide happens more often than phosphorescence, and I’ve definitely seen that too. Maybe you’ve seen it at Ocean Beach?

I haven’t seen a red tide but was just reading warnings of it in the Bay and Lake Merritt! I’ve seen bioluminescence here in Maine, which was really stunning and not easy to capture on camera. Your dad’s work in film and TV initially brought your family to Los Angeles. You’ve worked in TV too, and your wife works in movies. Do you see aesthetic differences between writing for the page and writing for the screen?

I studied fiction in college and had really great instructors — Chris Kraus, Sarah Bynum, Rae Armantrout. Eileen Myles was at UCSD when I was there. I remember writing very traditional short stories, and then I was taking a class with Anna Joy Springer, and I did these mashup methods where I got a bunch of books on a similar theme and I would pull a sentence from my story and then one from each of the books, kind of a Kathy Acker/William Burroughs cut-up method. And when I turned it in for workshop, Anna Joy was like, “This is for a certain audience, and it’s not a big audience, but if you continue to write this way you will have an audience.”

Then I got pushed into screenwriting and I worked in TV and film for a while. I was writing these spec film scripts and talking to agents, and it was very commercial-minded. I was trying to write ideas I thought would sell. But there was that element of concision, being very economical, very precise with your writing, getting the most out of every page. And when I started reading prose again — NOON, NY Tyrant — it really spoke to me, and led me on a different path. 

I came to NOON in 2016, after your first story there, “Salesman,” in 2014. Can you tell me about that story and your first experiences with NOON?

Katie and I were looking for apartments in Redondo. We were living in the Valley, and we came across an apartment right across the street from an electrical substation, and the price was high for rent, and I remember seeing a homeless man not far from the studio I was working at, at a gas station. He looked like a regular businessman, in a polo shirt, nice haircut, but slightly disheveled, and I felt really sad when I saw him. Through that process of trying to move to an area that’s expensive, and seeing that, and the mood I was in, I wrote that story, and imagined someone like him looking for an apartment for his family. I think he even had a sign up about his family, so that’s where it came from.

A few weeks go by, and I sort of forgot about it, and there’s a piece of mail, which I assume is a rejection, but then I open it up and it’s a nice note from Diane Williams. I have it here somewhere, and it said something along the lines of, “You have a great last line, but the story needs some work.” And I looked through it, and I see a bunch of x’s after the first two pages, and then the last few sentences still existed. And she said, “Let’s work on this some more if you want.” “Salesman” might have been the original title. And I learned a lot from that. I was like, this achieves so much more with fewer words. 

Can you share some of your influences as a writer or while working on this?

I can’t stop thinking about William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow (1979) — how he blends nonfiction with fiction, and what fiction means to him. He edited John Cheever and got on the train with him after he rejected a Cheever story for The New Yorker and talked him down. A really interesting person. I wonder who James Salter had in mind in his last book, All That Is (2013), when he wrote about an editor. I like Michael Ondaatje’s early work, Coming Through Slaughter (1976). I love noir too, and detectives, how other writers have interpreted that. I read The Savage Detectives (1998) after college, and I couldn’t put it down — what Roberto Bolaño did with the novel. Diane talked about Kirsty Gunn’s Rain (1994) in her interview with Lara Pawson, and I loved that too. I really like the novella, the short novel, because to me it’s analogous to a feature film that’s under two hours — the sheer impact of it, the impact of a great novella.

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Liza St. James is a writer from San Francisco. She is a contributing editor at BOMB and a senior editor of the literary annual NOON.