THOMAS LARSON

(Assay April 1, 2024)

1 / My partner and I have seen many therapists over the years of our longtime commitment. We know such tune-ups are critical for our relational health; she’s a therapist herself, and I’m always willing. During sessions, we are reminded to practice what’s called “looping”—listening to the other and then repeating what was said. “I hear her saying that she’s sick to death of my grumpy moods in the morning and, what’s more, she’d like to have one day a week where we get out of the ‘damn house’ and do something fun.”

(Zero Readers March 31, 2024)

I’ve been on a journey the past five years that some writers who come tantalizingly close to publication know all too well. From 2018-2022, I worked on a novel, paid thousands to a professional editor, another thousand for a lawyer’s opinion of my legal liability, and landed a big-time agent whose name will be familiar to most authors in Southern California. As I went, I cut a seven-hundred-page monster down to four-hundred with solid guidance from the New York editor and the all-star agent. They read long drafts, suggested sizeable changes, pushed me to drop characters and deepen scenes, and commended my rewrites. I treasured the agent’s encouragement and tenacity, in particular.

(Ilford Review March 22, 2024)

1 / It took listening into my seventh decade as a musician and a critic, my life’s crossover passions, to arrive at the purest listening experience of classical music I have ever had; highlights of Sergei Prokofiev’s Suite from Romeo and Juliet (1938) and, in full, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony (1937), performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and led by the Czech conductor, Jakub Hrůša, at the Konzerthaus in Vienna. Surely I am not the first to have been so moved by these twentieth-century Russians in Vienna’s music halls, I thought. That feeling had previously alluded me as an American whose seated anticipation in stateside venues had seldom measured up to what I hoped it would.

(Times of San Diego March 3, 2024)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how public spaces (trolleys, airports, music venues) no longer feel public, but temporarily accommodate people (us) who isolate and seem wholly removed from even looking at others—a club whose members are linked via their disconnection. Weird, I know. As if bus riders and plane passengers are hiding some secret (drug runners or deadbeat dads) or else feel guilty for a cultural misstep they’ll be canceled for.

(San Diego Reader February 14, 2024)

Many fathers, including myself, know the feeling: a strange and heady mix of joy, wonder, and fear, brought on by the first meeting with our progeny. We went into the hospital as supportive partners for our laboring women. We emerged as parents. We drove mother and baby home and helped get kiddo settled: cuddled, kissed, swaddled, and tucked into the crib. Then we surveyed the scene, marveled at our handiwork, took a deep breath, and said — possibly out loud, but to no one in particular — what the fuck do I do now?

Justin Lantzman is the 39-year-old president of a Sorrento Valley lending company. He knows the feeling; he can still recall the sudden joy and discomfort of the birth-day, six years ago. As we sit in his spacious, windowed office, he recounts that he and his wife — five years younger and an equestrian — were “resigned” never to have kids. (By design, all spouses and children will go unnamed here.) A semi-posh life, no money woes, but then, upon retiring from sport, she — they — suddenly wanted to get pregnant. There was fear involved with a later, riskier pregnancy, but that abated with a doctor’s OK. “We got into the pregnancy,” Lantzman says. “We had a good time.”

(AWP Writer's Chronicle February 1, 2024)

1 /

Since the 1990s, most memoirists have made the subjects of their books and essays relational—the interdependency between the author and a parent, a child, a place, a career, a disorder, a failure. Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes was a grand tour of his miserable Irish childhood and family. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, was a search for culinary, spiritual, and sexual contentment on three continents. Every writer is tightly joined to these ineluctable pairings; she need not travel far to dig into what she knows for what she doesn’t know. The relationship, confrontive and companionable, is key to the author’s self-discovery

(Quilette January 24, 2024)

On January 23rd, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that Cord Jefferson’s debut film, American Fiction, has been nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Jefferson’s film certainly merits the acclaim—American Fiction is a cinematic treasure, scarily original in its depth and chutzpah. But if the race-conscious Academy decides to reward the film’s black cast and writer-director in the name of diversity, it will be a satisfying irony—one of the film’s many pleasures is the intelligence and wit with which it injects its impudence into our culture’s prevailing racial sensibilities.