JB Kennedy is a poet in the ancient sense — he doesn’t publish books (though he owned several bookstores locally over the last 40 years) and he isn’t writing poems for academic purposes. Rather, he writes poems for the community he lives in; he is the South Bay’s decidedly unofficial poet laureate. In the cover story “In the River of Lions” — which includes spectacular portraits by photographer Tom Sanders — David Horacio Rosales Rojas, a talented young poet from Colombia, reports on Kennedy and his steadfast practice of poetry.
JB Kennedy made the acquaintance of another young poet a year ago, and as she took off traveling to points unknown, he distilled a lifetime’s worth of hard-earned writerly wisdom into “Letter to a Young Poet.”
That poet, Jennifer Passaro, responded from the mountains of Idaho with “Letter to JB Kennedy from Wood River Valley.”
The poet JD Armstrong, aka Raindog, wrote three poems regarding Bukowski.
David Horacio Rosales Rojas’ very first published poem in the U.S. : “The Dogs of Desire.”
Writer Ron Arias, in a career that began with a glass of wine with Ernest Hemingway and included a National Book Award nomination for fiction, spent three decades a “parachute journalist” dropped into some of the world’s most difficult situations — wars, earthquakes, hostages, and shipwrecks were his beat for People magazine (back when that publication did journalism). In his upcoming book, “My Life as a Pencil,” he tells the stories behind the stories. Excerpts here include a run with El Salvador’s Daniel Ortega, a gun-strewn relief mission to Somalia, and how to get the scoop from a shipwreck survivor.
Reporter Esther Kang visits Arias’ home, a 1920s California Craftsman in Hermosa Beach that is the perfect writer’s refuge. Beautifully photographed .
Photographer Jim McKinniss journeys to Venice for Carnival every year. The photograph that result, which are being accumulated for a book, are sepia-toned visual poems unto themselves. Bondo Wyszpolski investigates this remarkable photographer.
Hermosa Beach based author James Westhoff’s “Smoke Monkey International” possesses some of the writerly verve lost when David Foster Wallace left world too young. Alyssa Morin talks with Westhoff about fiction, babies, and a geological genius with a flare for illegal drug proliferation.
An excerpt from Smoke Monkey International echoes at least one of those themes.
Food writer Richard Foss is perhaps best known locally for chronicling the restaurant scene, but he is also a nationally published food historian who has written a book on the history of rum and is working on another on the history of food in flight. Foss ruminates on both topics in the Easy Reader cover story, “Yo Ho Ho (And a Bottle of Rum): Reflections on food, culture, the history of rum, and a meal of bananas and beef at 30,000 feet.”
Kevin Cody reviews “One Eyed Jacks, by Christopher Lynch [Book Review]“, a riveting tale by a local writer.
Cody also reviews the new biography on Bill and Bob Meistrell, the twins from Missouri who helped create Southern California’s beach culture.
Finally, Cody talks to Jeff “Peff” Eick, a former Huey gunship pilot in Vietnam who this year released an astonishingly moving song, “Sons and Daughters”, and an accompanying video that pays deep tribute to war veterans.
Join many of these writers as well as other locally-based writers and musicians for a night of words and music at Beach magazine’s Live at the Lounge event on Nov. 17. Doors open at 5:30, show begins at 6:30. 1018 Hermosa Ave., Hermosa Beach. It’s free.
