The Perpetual Limbo of Literary San Diego

Excerpted from "Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana" Out Now on San Diego City Works Press - Release Event is on Saturday, May 3rd at 5pm at the Centro Cultural de la Raza!

Covers by Perry Vasquez; Painting for Sunshine Noir III by Perry Vasquez

If being Californian means forever trying to unriddle what California means “to find the ‘point’ of California, to locate some message in its history,” as [Joan Didion] says—being San Diegan means wondering why there’s no there here.

--Mark Dery, “Neither Here nor There: San Diego and the Noir of Nowhere”

In his omnibus novel Green Earth, the prophetic science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson notes that “California is a place apart” and labels our flagship university, UCSD, as “the Athena on the Pacific . . . leaping out of the tall forehead of the state” as “prominent scientists came from everywhere to start it, caught by the siren song of a new start on a Mediterranean edge to the world.” In that same section, he observes that “They founded a school and helped to invent technology: biotech, Athena’s gift to humankind. University as teacher and doctor too, owned by the people, no profit skimmed off. A public project in an ever-more-privatized world, tough and determined, benign in intent. What does it mean to give?”

And yet, despite the golden promise of the citadel of reason and progress, the news for Robinson’s near-future San Diego County is far from rosy as, amidst ongoing and catastrophic climate change, “The sea cliffs of La Jolla, Blacks, Torrey Pines, Del Mar, Solana Beach, Cardiff-by-the-Sea, Encinitas, and Leucadia were all taking a beating, and in many places the sandstone, eaten by waves from below, and saturated with rain from above began to fall into the sea.” Thus Robinson, the star pupil of the one-time UCSD Professor and preeminent Marxist literary scholar and cultural theorist, Fredric Jameson, captures the essence of San Diego’s sunshine and noir. It’s a dream and a disaster.

No matter the wealth and carefree privilege of the blessed coast dwellers, the gleaming blue ocean still threatens to swallow their utopian enclaves.

Of course, neither Jameson nor Robinson still live in San Diego, both having done their stints in our fine city before moving somewhere else, like so many others before and after them. Hence, they are not anchors of a deep-rooted literary and cultural community, because no such community exists. San Diego is a kind of literary and cultural limbo that houses puzzled new arrivals and leaves a faint stamp on jaded expatriates. Those of us who stay the course are more the exception than the rule.

While there have always been a good number of writers who live and work in San Diego and publish nationally and internationally, the region itself is rarely the focus of their work. Despite being one of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States that is home to multiple writing programs at several colleges and universities along with a rich multiethnic culture that encompasses the world’s most crossed international border, as a literary landscape, San Diego never quite seems like fertile ground.

To rephrase the famous Groucho Marx joke, “San Diego writers would rather not join a club that accepts people like them as members.” Thus, it is still true, as David Reid wrote in 2005 in the first edition of Sunshine/Noir: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana, that “Historically, it seems, San Diego cannot represent itself, and is barely represented by others.”

It’s been twenty years now since San Diego City Works Press published its first book, and we are still here despite the continued decline of the local and national literary market, a global pandemic, political turmoil, and the loss of several beloved compatriots. In the face of the trials and tribulations of running a very small, entirely volunteer, non-profit press, members of the San Diego Writers Collective and other supporters of the press have kept our beautifully useless endeavor afloat because, unfortunately, we still occupy a distinct space in San Diego’s cultural landscape as the only local press primarily dedicated to publishing books by San Diego writers. There are also folks working at places like San Diego Writers, Ink and at university journals or presses, like Poetry International or San Diego State University Press, or various conferences and reading series, and we salute them. Nonetheless, our truly local literary focus remains, sadly, unique after all these years.

And while many people may still feel that, as a disinterested literary agent once told one of our writers, “nobody cares about San Diego outside of San Diego except as a place to come and get a tan,” or, as a New York publisher told us, “San Diego is too niche,” there are still a number of us here beneath the postcard laboring away, trying to write in and/or about what artists David Avalos, Louis Hock, and Elizabeth Sisco once called “America’s Finest Tourist Plantation.”

Because San Diego is a place where so many people are from someplace else and/or want to believe our city’s self-marketing as the locale where only “happy happens,” it’s easy to forget there is a history here. As we noted in the first edition of Sunshine/Noir, in 1896, Theosophist Katherine Tingley had a dream of “a white city in a golden land by the sundown sea,” which she came to associate with the gleaming coast of San Diego, California. Tingley's visionary imagination was a nice complement to the inflated mythology penned by the city's boosters, but not all observers fell in line with the sun-drenched utopianism of the Anglo elite.

Indeed, in the thirties, Edmund Wilson derided San Diego as a dead-end of false hope in “The Jumping-Off Place” where he writes:

Here this people, so long told to “go West” to escape from poverty, ill health, maladjustment, industrialism and oppression, discover that, having come West, their problems and diseases still remain and that there is no further to go. Among the sand-colored power plants and hotels, the naval outfitters and waterside cafes, the old spread-roofed California houses with their fine close grain of gray or yellow clapboards—they come to the end of their resources in the empty California sun.

San Diego’s most prodigious writer of the period, Max Miller, author of twenty-eight books including The Man on the Barge, A Stranger Came to Port, and his best-known work, I Cover the Waterfront, spoke of alienation and unease underneath our perfect sun. In an insightful San Diego Reader piece, “Who Was Max Miller?”, long-time San Diego journalist Don Bauder describes the last work as “a book of vignettes about San Diego’s waterfront — an area of seedy saloons, brothels, hard-toiling fishermen, hard-drinking dock workers, hard-bitten con men, and hard-up sailors that the preachers wanted to sanitize, and city fathers wanted to keep hidden.”

Despite this noir edge, Bauder observes that Miller was a conservative who, as opposed to the upstart young journalist Neil Morgan, bristled against urban change in San Diego: “Morgan portrayed a postwar community beginning to experience big-city life. Miller wanted to keep San Diego small. He railed against tourism and tract homes.”

Following the thirties, San Diego was virtually absent from the world of serious literature, seemingly existing only as a unique setting for the occasional mystery or pulp novel, with the significant exceptions of the work of Jim Thompson and Oakley Hall. In 1942, the narrator of Jim Thompson’s seminal noir account of San Diego, Now and On Earth observed that:

San Diego, prior to the establishment of the aircraft factories, was not inappropriately dubbed the “City of the Living Dead.” There were no industries, there was no construction; the town’s one asset was its climate. If you were young and wanted excitement and had a living to make, why, the town wouldn’t want you and you wouldn’t want it. If you were old and had a small income or pension, you couldn’t have found a more attractive place to live (or die) in.

Matt Bokovoy’s “Ghosts of the San Diego Rialto” in the first Sunshine/Noir notes that, “Now and On Earth, a wartime novel of socialist realism, captures the bleak landscape of downtown San Diego under racial violence, anti-communism, wartime housing shortages, and social dislocation.” This marks it as one of the most important novels in San Diego’s spare literary history.

And, of course, San Diego native, the late (and great) Oakley Hall, author of over two-dozen books, dished up some noir of his own in So Many Doors, Mardios Beach, and others. While The Corpus of Joe Bailey has been praised for its mixture of “dread and wonder,” his last book, Love and War in California, looks back at San Diego during World War II with precisely the kind of noir perspective Mike Davis came to embody in much of his work.

The novel’s protagonist, Payton Daltrey, an aspiring writer struggling to find his way in the world, develops a profound sense of outrage at the exploitation of the weak by the strong, works for a time as a reporter, and comes to an epiphany: “I thought I could be a writer from the outside looking in spectatorly on the bourgeois bullshit of Amurrucun life. But I would have to write about the bullshit from inside Social Reality, condemned to being just what I had hoped to rebel against.”

Ultimately, Hall’s work saw the hard edges of San Diego and the border region while maintaining a yearning for some kind of justice that persevered, warts and all, in the city where you see the Hotel del Coronado “sparkling and gleaming in the oncoming darkness like the Emerald City of Oz.”

Even though the city is now home to a number of prominent writers, the idea of a serious literary culture still seems like an alien and improbable notion to many San Diegans. Perhaps the suffocating banality of official San Diego’s pious “America’s Finest City” mantra has led even those who know better to think that nothing is possible here other than the affectless pleasure that comes from drifting back and forth between the beach and the shops. Or maybe we are too preoccupied by daydreams of tech bros taking over the now-defunct Horton Plaza mall downtown, buying up luxury condos and ushering out the unpleasant hordes of the dispossessed, to think beyond our own marketing. Nonetheless, underneath San Diego’s superficial postcard sunshine, writers have found both grit and genuine transcendence.

Perhaps the city is best captured by the incongruous juxtaposition of the evanescent beauty of the gleaming coast with the muted gray façade of America’s multi-billion dollar killing machine. San Diego is also the sex oozing from the teeming Pacific Beach boardwalk in mid-summer and the lonely deaths of migrants in the unforgiving winter desert. It is a city of lurid scandal and right-wing vigilantism as well as a home for increasingly creative, diverse and progressive communities. San Diego is neither beyond alienation, nor devoid of ecstasy.

San Diego is the Anglo Mission fantasy that evolved from the days of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and the place where Henry James wrote, “the sense of the shining social and human inane is utter.” San Diego is where Henry Miller was converted to free love and radicalism by famous anarchist Emma Goldman on the way to a Tijuana brothel, and the place where right-wing vigilantes tortured and murdered Wobblies for speaking on soapboxes at the corner of 5^th and E. America’s eighth largest city has produced a minor noir tradition and a sizable canon of gay sailor pulp novels. Thomas and Anna Fitch blew San Diego up in Better Days: Or, the Millionaire of To-morrow in the nineteenth century, and Raymond Chandler drank himself to death here in the twentieth.

Carey McWilliams chronicled the free speech fight in the first part of the twentieth century, and, from the 1960s to the 1980s, journalist Harold Keen was the most insightful observer of San Diego, deftly portraying the racial turmoil, political corruption, and labor unrest that simmered underneath the glossy “America's Finest City” veneer. Jack Kerouac bemoaned, “San Diego rich, dull, full of old men, traffic, the sea-smell—Up the bus goes thru gorgeous seaside wealthy homes of all colors of the rainbow on the blue sea—cream clouds—red flower—dry sweet atmosphere—very rich, new cars, 50 miles of it incredibly, an American Monte Carlo,” but as David Reid unearthed in the first edition of Sunshine/Noir, loved Jacumba “the sleepy border street of shacks and trees and backyard dumps.” Even Bruce Springsteen got in the act in the nineties, adding “Balboa Park,” his Guthrie-esque story of the lives of homeless child prostitutes, to his album The Ghost of Tom Joad.

In the 1960s, an aging Herbert Marcuse was strolling the local beaches and musing about One Dimensional Man while the youthful Cameron Crowe was cranking out rock journalism for Rolling Stone. The local countercultural papers during that period, The Door, the OB Rag, and the San Diego Free Press, were busy afflicting the city’s power elite and some of the same folks, like Doug Porter, still are. San Diego is described in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland as the home of the mythical “College of the Surf” and its neighboring countercultural enclave:

Against the somber military blankness at its back, here was a lively beachhead of drugs, sex, and rock n’ roll, the strains of subversive music day and night, accompanied by tambourines and harmonicas, reaching like fog through the fence, up the dry gulches and past the sentinel antennas, the white dishes and masts, the steel equipment sheds, finding the ears of sentries attenuated but ominous, like hostile-native sounds in movies about white men fighting savage tribes.

While the halcyon days of the late sixties counterculture may be long gone, those who yearn for a home-grown culture not dominated by a narrative written by real estate developers and public relations specialists might still feel a bit like the savages on the outside of the military industrial complex/theme park that the city’s old guard insists defines San Diego. That and the highly trumpeted virtue of “not being Los Angeles” have sufficed for so many years as the city’s primary markers of identity that the cultural imagination of San Diego sometimes seems ossified. San Diego has produced everything from The Wizard of Oz to cyberpunk novels about biotechnology and the late Harold Jaffe’s guerilla writing, but it still has a hard time imagining itself as the diverse, complex, and, at times, absurd comedy and tragedy that it is. We insist upon the sunshine while ignoring the noir, like a politician sticking to his talking points.

Nonetheless, there have still been a good number of more contemporary efforts to reflect the reality of living in the San Diego/Tijuana region such as The Gangster We Are All Looking For by Thi Diem Thuy Le, Matt De La Peña’s portrait of National City in Mexican WhiteBoy, Marisa Silver’s compelling story of underclass life by the Salton Sea in God of War, and William Vollmann’s sprawling magnum opus, Imperial. In addition to these works we have Brit Bennett’s Oceanside in The Mothers, a South Bay’s complex and expansive family in The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea, Julia Dixon Evans’s offbeat San Diego in How to Set Yourself on Fire, as well as Patrick Coleman’s chilling use of San Diego’s underbelly in The Churchgoer. There are also my own humble efforts to represent San Diego life, city space, and history in my novels Drift, Flash, and Last Days in Ocean Beach, and Kelly Mayhew’s and my muckraking enterprise with Mike Davis, Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See.

The region has also been home to award-winning poets such as Sandra Alcosser and Marilyn Chin, both of whom have appeared in previous editions of Sunshine/Noir, along with many others. More recently, The Far East Project: Everything Just as It Is, did a fine job of representing the unrepresented in San Diego’s east county, but was met by a hostile, defensive response in some quarters of the local booster media. Another anthology, San Diego Noir, drew less vitriol precisely because it mostly failed to move beyond tourist stereotypes.

Another noteworthy aspect of the San Diego/Tijuana region is its Latinx and border writing scene. This literary movement is reflected in a diverse array of projects from the now-legendary performances of The Taco Shop Poets and the Voz Alta Project to the works of more than fifty border region poets in the Baja California anthology Across the Line/Al Otro Ladoedited by Harry Polkinhorn and Mark Weiss, as well as the complex and transcendent poetry of Sonia Gutierrez and Manuel Paul López. Barrio Logan was also home to Juan Felipe Herrera, the 21^st Poet Laureate of the United States.

Contemporary San Diego maintains its paradoxical sunshine and noir identity, but as the city has grown, it has become increasingly difficult for the boosters to conceal its grittier corners. An old bumper sticker used to express beach chauvinism by proclaiming: “There is no life east of I-5.” In 2025, however, the life east of Interstate 5 (the highway that cordons off the beach communities and downtown from the rest of the inland areas) and south of Interstate 8 (which encompasses the southern areas of the county) has made itself known and has changed the face of the city, even more so today than when the first volume of Sunshine/Noir was published twenty years ago.

San Diego is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the United States. It also has one of the largest gaps between the rich and poor in California, a growing unhoused population, and juxtaposes a carefree postcard reality with a massive military industrial complex and a heavily fortified international border. San Diego County goes from the desert to the sea, contains mountains, wild spaces, and the sprawling suburbs which threaten them. In many ways, it is a region on the cutting edge of the Pacific Rim.

Still, no major literary culture has evolved despite the large numbers of novelists, poets, and nonfiction writers who live and work in the area. The work of writers such as those listed above appear, but almost never seem to do more than ripple our placid waters. It feels at times that we are trapped in our own hall of mirrors. In sum, despite a few noble efforts, San Diego is still a city in need of an established literary voice, a cultural identity that goes beyond the packaged tourist spectacles like the Zoo, Sea World, Balboa Park, Legoland, and the beach. With Sunshine/Noir III we persist in our romantic, perhaps Sisyphean, effort to address this need and expose the true face of “the other San Diego.”

Like the first two editions of Sunshine/Noir this anthology presents the reader with a wide range of contemporary San Diego writers of fiction and nonfiction alike as well as poets, artists, and photographers. It explores San Diego and Tijuana’s border culture; the city’s multiple identities and lost history; the region’s natural beauty and endangered ecologies; its role as a center of the culture of war; and San Diego and Tijuana writers’ attempts to explore the meaning of place.

By using a multiethnic, multidisciplinary, pan-artistic approach, this anthology offers the reader a fresh look at a city yet to be explored in such a fashion. Sunshine/Noir III is not comprehensive, but rather stands only as a place marker in the continuing exploration of literary San Diego that leaves many borders yet to be crossed. This anthology includes acclaimed and award-winning poets and writers as well as emerging authors. While most of the authors and artists anthologized here are from San Diego and Tijuana, a few are not, though we welcome them as good hosts. All in all, we think we have assembled yet another gorgeous hybrid monster. Enter at your own risk.

As we noted above, Sunshine/Noir III marks the twenty-year anniversary of San Diego City Works Press, a project of the San Diego Writers Collective. The San Diego Writers Collective is a group of writers, poets, artists, and patrons dedicated to the publication and promotion of the work of San Diego area artists of all sorts. Our specific interests include local, ethnic, and border writing as well as formal innovation and progressive politics. The Collective’s main focus is local, but we have engaged in occasional collaborations with writers from around the world. San Diego City Works Press is a non-profit press, funded by local writers and friends of the arts, committed to the publication of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and art by members of the San Diego City College community and the community at large.

Over its first ten years, San Diego City Works Press published novels, collections of poetry, creative nonfiction, and anthologies by a wide range of authors, including: Sunshine/Noir: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana edited by Jim Miller; The Commuters by Cheryl Klein; Gods of Rapture: Poems in the Erotic Mood by Steve Kowit; The Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives and The Encyclopedia of Rebels by Mel Freilicher; Atacama Poems by Adrian Arancibia; Rita and Julia by Jimmy Santiago Baca; Peeping Tom Tom Girl by Marisela Norte; Hunger and Thirst: Food Literature edited by Nancy Cary, Alys Masek, Ella deCastro Baron, Trissy McGhee, and June Cressy; Dynamite and Dreams by Robert V. Hine; Lavanderia: A Mixed Load of Women, Wash, and Words edited by Donna J. Watson, Michelle Sierra, and Lucia Gbaya-Kanga; Itchy Brown Girl Seeks Employment by Ella deCastro Baron; Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting edited by Alys Masek and Kelly Mayhew; Vanishing Acts by Forrest Hylton; Wounded Border/Frontera Herida edited by Justin Akers Chacon and Enrique Davalos; Lantern Tree: Four Books of Poems by Chris Baron, Heather Eudy, Cali Linfor, and Sabrina Youmans; and Not Far From Normal by Tamara Johnson.

In the last ten years we have published Sunshine/Noir II: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana edited by Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew; Reclaiming Our Stories: Narratives of Identity, Resilience and Empowerment edited by Manuel Paul López, Mona Alsoraimi-Espiritu, and Roberta Alexander; American Cream by Mel Freilicher; Last Days in Ocean Beach by Jim Miller, illustrated by Perry Vasquez; The Scorpion’s Mineral Eye by J. Medina; Endless Blue Sky by Josh Turner; Reclaiming Our Stories 2 edited by Khalid (Paul) Alexander, Manuel Paul López, Darius Spearman, and Ebony Tyree; Reclaiming Our Stories in the Time of Covid and Uprising Khalid (Paul) Alexander, Manuel Paul López, Darius Spearman, and Ebony Tyree; San Diego Stories edited by Lindsay Hood; Privilege and Passion: The Novel by Mel Freilicher; Subo and Baon: a Memoir in Bites by Ella deCastro Baron; Paradise and Other Lost Places by Jim Miller, and the present volume.

It’s been a good twenty years. The future remains to be written.

Please join the editors and contributors at the Sunshine/Noir III release event and City Works Press anniversary celebration on Saturday, May 3rd at 5pm at the Centro Cultural de la Raza (2004 Park Blvd in Balboa Park) and at the Hugh C. Hyde Living Writers Series on Wednesday, May 7th at 7pm in Room 430 in Love Library at San Diego State University.

To buy Sunshine/Noir III, go here.