Culver City Captivates

Culver City Book Fair Hosts Eaton Fire Poets 

Michael Sedano

Spring arrives in Southern California bringing warm, brilliant light everywhere, and an outdoor book fair in Culver City. Readers shuffle shoulder to shoulder along the twin paths of the constrained garden space behind the Wende Museum. It's the third year for the festival.

It’s somber inside the auditorium where survivors of both the Palisades fire and the Eaton fire come to hear a panel of poets laureate reflect on the Eaton fire in Altadena, California. 

"Altadena's Fire Survivors: A Conversation with Authors and Residents" with Lester Graves Lennon, and Elline Lipkin, moderated by Thelma T. Reyna arrives with raw emotions. “Too soon,” laments Lipkin, whose home was evaporated in the Eaton conflagration. Lennon lets himself remember the relief seeing house stands but chokes up describing his neighbor’s flattened, charred land.

Panel organizer and moderator, Thelma T. Reyna, Poet Laureate of Altadena 2014 to 2016, holds the panel to the adjusted time. When a delay cuts short the planned time, Reyna quickly modifies her plan. Learning one of the three panelists fails to sign-in, Reyna’s resilience keeps her calmly in control to give the audience a worthwhile experience. These are things that happen outside audience knowledge but could be catastrophic without Reyna's competence keeping various crises in the background.

Elline Lipkin, Altadena Poet Laureate in 2016 through 2018 chose to focus on the fire consuming Lipkin’s library. An academic and Ph.D., Lipkin’s collection extended from her girlhood to her degrees and life in education and writing. The books, Lipkin says with a note of bitterness, are not just things to be replaced. Each book is irreplaceable, each lived with its own memories, some written by the poet’s friends, many autographed by the proud author.  

Lester Graves Lennon remembers every detail of driving through the wasteland of his neighborhood, turning a corner and seeing his house standing where surrounding homes have been incinerated. The empty space across the street demands Lennon relive those hours of joy and amistad in the house no longer across the street. For Lennon, it’s not too soon to call back indelible memories like the “little free library” standing uncharred at the curb with a smoldering lot in the background. Lennon is the current co-Laureate of Altadena.

Addressing life beyond the disaster, Lipkin describes a program where people can list highly loved books and others can replace the title. Lennon, and his co-Laureate Sebha Sarwar, have extended the call for poems to the upcoming Altadena Poetry Journal Anthology. The updated due date--mid-March--is to allow poets to write about the fire.

While the panel featured substantive knowledge and painful empathy, it is a book festival and one audience member wants to get her autographed copy of Elline Lipkin's work.