Your California lit guide

A shiny new CaliforniaAuthors.com debuted this week with a fresh design and an easy-to-navigate new site.

Kate Cohen and I first launched CaliforniaAuthors in 2002 and we’ve built some nice resources for exploring the Golden State. You’ll find a growing and varied library of book excerpts and essays by California writers; a directory of California novelists, nonfiction writers and poets; and listings pointing to independent bookstores, West Coast Publishers, literary events, book festivals, and more. CaliforniaAuthors also teamed up with Angel City Press to create the remarkable My California anthology, which benefits the California Arts Council and writing programs for children throughout the state. Browse here.

Goodbye Travel Rut — My New Book is Here

When my husband and I plotted a monthlong trip to Europe, I spent weeks researching every detail. I amassed a bedside mountain of travel books. I quizzed friends about their adventures in the French countryside, scoured travel websites, and rented movies set in our intended destinations (I watched American Dreamer so many times I felt like a regular at Paris’ swanky Hôtel de Crillon). By the time we left, we had an adventurous, offbeat itinerary filled with cool new restaurants to try and treks to out-of-the-way corners I’d missed on previous trips abroad.

But for getaways close to home, I’ve always tended to go for the easy and familiar. Over and over. It’s just so effortless to say, let’s go to Palm Springs, which invariably means checking into the same desert resort my family always visits, with its comfortable, airy rooms and twisting water slide that keeps the kids entertained. Enjoyable, yes. But after the umpteenth trip, hardly exciting.

Then last year I was asked to write a travel book of great weekend getaways in Southern California.

Goodbye travel rut.

Suddenly I began looking at Southern California through fresh eyes. A travel writer’s eyes. Nearly every week I went someplace different: Date nights. Day trips. Weekend treks to my favorite spots and to places I’d always meant to visit, like Cold Springs Tavern near Santa Barbara.

My husband and two children often came along and they had a blast kayaking, horseback riding, swimming, snorkeling, hand-feeding emus, and roaming luscious nature spots from San Diego to the Central Coast. Other times I set out on the road (or train) alone with California writers such as Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Kem Nunn, Gidget, and the Steinbecks (John and son Thomas) as my guides.

I sampled my way through two wine countries, played blackjack in the afternoon, cooked alongside a great chef, savored amazing farmers’ markets and ethnic groceries all over, swam with schools of bright, teeming fish, and strapped on water-skis for the first time in years.

I recently wrote about five of my favorite SoCal road trips for the Los Angeles Times and I wanted to share these quick getaways as summer approaches. The story, and this handy Google map, offer a taste of the adventures in my new book, Great Escapes: Southern California, which is being released on Monday.

From Tibet to Temecula

World traveler Robert Helgeson shares this photo from his home library. My new book, Great Escapes: Southern California, is the fourth book from the right. “As you can see it occupies space along with all of our other treasured guide books,” he says.

Thank you, Robert. I’m honored!

Booked in Westwood

Next weekend is the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, a sprawling outdoor affair that regularly draws 100,000 book lovers to the UCLA campus every spring. (Who says people in LA don’t read?!)

The festival is great fun. You’ll see throngs of people lined up in the sunshine outside lecture halls, waiting — and obviously excited — to join conversations about current events, current fiction, and the latest offerings from sci-fi masters and chick-lit queens. Poets give impassioned readings under the big tent outside Powell Library. Open-air stages feature celebrated chefs and celebrities touting their children’s books. I love to browse the dozens of booksellers, publishers, museums, non-profit foundations, and retailers who set up shop along UCLA’s grassy plazas.

More than 400 authors appear on Saturday and Sunday (tickets to daytime events are free), so you’ll find plenty of great choices. A festival map is here.

I’ll be at the Festival of Books on Sunday, April 27, signing copies of My California: Journeys by Great Writers from 1 to 2 pm with Edward Humes and Veronique de Turenne. Please be sure to stop by the Angel City Press Booth (#332, near Royce Hall) and say hello.

Soul of the City

Thumbing through a map book one day, Los Angeles painter J. Michael Walker noticed just how many of the city’s streets are named for saints. Santa Monica Boulevard. Santa Rita Street. San Ysidro Drive. San Vicente Boulevard. San Julian Place. San Remo Way. He eventually chronicled 103 saintly streets in all.

“Walker had a brilliant idea: he found all the L.A. streets named for saints, retrieved their stories and illustrated them in works that draw from Goya and folk art and 1920s real estate ads,” says Peter Fish, an editor at Sunset Magazine. “…each saint street tells a story, tragic, hopeful, beautiful, violent, that together form a remarkably powerful panorama of L.A. You’ll never look at your Thomas Brothers guide in the same way.”

Heyday Books has just published Walker’s book, All the Saints of the City of the Angels: Seeking the Soul of L.A. on its Streets. The Autry National Center at Griffith Park has a companion art exhibit that runs through September 7.

“The saints’ names are common enough, we drive them every day,” Walker says in an interview with The New York Times. “But we see them without looking, without thinking of the resonance of names.”

Welcome to my travel blog

Southern California is the heart and the home of the California Dream, and part of experiencing it lies in exploring all that we expect from it: the broad, warm beaches, the cachet of the Hollywood studios, the glitz of Rodeo Drive, the crack of bat and ball at one of the best classic ballparks in America, Dodger Stadium.

But it’s the unexpected that really makes SoCal so cool. There’s no other place like it in the world. Within two hours’ drive, just about any landscape or adventure or culture you can imagine is, quite literally, in reach—if you take a bit of time to explore.

Which is where Great Escapes: Southern California comes in.

My new book is a collection of exceptional Southern California road trips, from San Diego to the Gaviota Coast, from Catalina Island to the Mojave Desert. Weekend getaways. Nature hideaways. One-day wonders, too. You’ll find places to relax and reinvigorate your creative spirit, even if—especially if—you don’t have time to take a two-week vacation.

Great Escapes: Southern California is divided into five (somewhat arbitrary) sections: Surf, Summits, Sand, Sidewalks, and Splashes. Each section features a different set of getaways offering a broad range of experiences for different times of year, with one important common feature: All the destinations are a reasonably short distance (within two hours or so) from Los Angeles. The book skews toward wild spaces where you can escape the daily grind, even for a few hours, though there are numerous urban retreats and sanctuaries in some unexpected places.

Highlights include great California books to take on the road, as well as travel tips and first-person passages from Pico Iyer, Judith Freeman, Trina Turk, T. Jefferson Parker, Robert Smaus, D.J. Waldie, Veronique de Turenne, Val Cohen and other terrific guides who graciously shared their expertise.

My book is being released in May by Countryman Press/Norton Publishing and already is available for pre-orders online. I’m launching this blog as an online companion where I can post travel news and tidbits, upcoming events, occasional excerpts and a SoCal Road Trip calendar for 2008.

Thanks for dropping by. And stay tuned.