Los Angeles taught me how to be alive.
In 2020 I left thinking it was a done chapter. I had no idea how much of me had been formed there, or how desperately I would miss the city.
I kept writing down what I remembered. The wonder and the disgrace. The sunshine and the bravado. The magic, mayhem and grit.
For me, the contradiction is the beauty.
- @ginger fiasco
- @ginger fiasco
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how the poem began
I’d been recording what I saw long before any of this had a name. The first time I watched it land somewhere other than my own head was when I wrote a love letter to a city that had been my home and wouldn’t get out of my heart – a poem simply called Los Angeles.
It began as fragments in my Notes app: the city as I remembered it, and as it had recorded itself in me.
Then KCRW, Los Angeles’ public radio station, put out a call for love letters to the city.
This was the first time I cared about the words so much that I wanted to design them, not just write them.
Font. Color. Story.
That was the golden triangle.
I sent it in. It went straight onto their website.
A red umbrella ascends the hills in a rare
moment of vulnerability from the sky.
The photograph from the Los Feliz hills – with Hollywood Blvd stretching into the distance – that found its way into the poem.