Author: Caroline Olsen-Van Stone
Award-winning Los Angeles fiction writer Nina Revoyr visited Occidental College on Tuesday, March 4 to share excerpts from her new book Age of Dreaming and her work-in-progress, Wingshooters.
The appearance was not Revoyr’s first at Occidental. Several students have read Revoyr’s book, The Southland, for courses, as it places an emphasis on racial equality and Los Angeles plays a central role. Revoyr also taught an introduction to creative writing and poetry class in the ECLS department last spring , which filled almost instantly during registration. Before Occidental, she taught at Antioch and Cornell Universities.
She began by reading from Age of Dreaming, a novel about a Japanese former silent film star living in Hollywood. The book’s opening provided loose clues about the abrupt ending of his career, unexplained death and “the social mores he is expected not to violate,” Revoyr said. The first scene is set at the main character’s humble apartment, which is later juxtaposed by the luxurious environments and plush parties he used to attend at the peak of his career.
Throughout the book, she captures the racist, orientalist attitudes of the 1920’s through silent movie reviews like: “the beautiful brutal man of the forbidden race,” and how he was treated when seen on a date with European American film star Elizabeth Banks.
Revoyr said she drew inspiration for the story from the building she works in, and her struggle to get Southland published. She worked for a non-profit organization that is housed in a building where a Japanese silent film star once lived, though the star did not die in as much obscurity as Revoyr’s character Joon does. She also channeled her experience of being turned down by about 22 publishers for the publication of Southland to write the tragic and abrupt ending of Joon’s silent film career. “I thought: what would it be like to never write another book? That was my way into Joon,” she said.
When she began writing Age of Dreaming, she knew nothing about silent films, but began writing anyway, as she wants her work to be “character and story-driven,” she said. Revoyr said sometimes she has to rewrite sections to make them historically correct. “Then I go back and research,” she said.
She is currently working on a novel called Wingshooter, set in Deerfield, a small town in central Wisconsin. Her new work still includes the themes that she says she cannot stop engaging with: “identity, community and family.” This combination of themes is important to Revoyr because she constantly struggles with people categorizing her racially. She is Japanese and European American, but has been mislabeled as Asian, Native American, White, etc. She faced this growing up in every place she lived as a child: Tokyo, Wisconsin and Culver City (in West Los Angeles).
She described the content of Wingshooter simply as “family, race, different races in the same family, dogs, hunting and baseball.” The story tells of how the residents of a mostly Polish- and German-descent town interact with a family with a Japanese wife and half-Japanese child.
Revoyr drew a flattering comparison between the donor who funded her visit, Charles Jensvold, and the grandfather in her work-in-progress Wingshooter, saying that both are “strong, quiet, mordantly funny men.” She added that the grandfather has an “open happy face” and is playful and roguish.
Revoyr revealed that she always writes her first draft in a notebook “in longhand,” she said, pulling a notebook out. She wrote her first three books about Los Angeles while staying in a barn in Ithaca. Her books often include her fascination for Los Angeles, and she said she has to get away from it to discover what she loves about it. “It’s hard to write a love letter [to someone] when you’re in the room with them,” she said.
She described her younger self as “dreamy” and an “obnoxious student” who loved reading and writing. “I wrote a lot of bad journal entries when I was seven,” she said. She explained that part of her love for writing comes from enjoying her imagination. “My real life is pretty boring. What could be more fun than creating an alternate existence [through writing]?” she said.
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