Today, Lit Reactor posted my first-ever column for the site (until this point I had mainly done author interviews). It was a trip being invited to talk about my own book on there for once, and I'm grateful for the opportunity.
What I Learned By Writing A Return to Spring
A little late to post here, but I figured it could use some further posterity.
Save the date and join us on Tuesday, December 15th at 6pm (PST) as we usher in the release of my new Palm Springs/Spring Break Riot-Noir novelette "A Return To Spring" (Mannison Press). This free live online event is brought to you by our local Space Cowboy Books and will be mediated by Jean-Paul Garnier. To attend, register at the link below:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/
I'm gracious to have something physical to show for myself at the tail end of our very un-physical 2020. My new crime-fiction novelette, "A Return To Spring" is out November 18th on Florida's Mannison Press (they also published my short story "Wrathchild's Atrophy" in their "Little Boy Lost" anthology earlier this year). It might seem out of season to release a Spring Break themed book in winter, but our tomorrows seem less and less guaranteed the way things have been going in 2020, so here we are, no regrets.
The story is a speculative stab at the Palm Springs Spring Break riots of 1986, an event that permanently changed the city as we knew it, especially in terms of tourism and demographic. In the 80s it was THE place for Spring Breakers to panther, party, and eventually cause trouble; though you only heard vague stories like a game of telephone until three years ago, when footage of the 1986 riots finally surfaced here. I'm not one to clutch my pearls, but I was terrified when I saw that footage. It left such a deep imprint on me that I spent the rest of that week calling up people like Sean Wheeler and other desert rats to ask what it was like to witness it in person. It seemed akin to an Altamont-scenario for Palm Springs, where it ushered the end of an era: from the annual season of young hyper-hetro men invading downtown to go wildin', causing the Venn diagram of masculinity to eclipse into the notoriously civilized gay community it is now. After the riots, mayor Sonny Bono ordered police to start ticketing/arresting any kids that would do so much as to step off a curb into the street, making any semblance of Spring Break unsustainable from then on.
For me, seeing the footage also brought back the bedlam of Woodstock '90, where the rapes during (an no doubt inspired by) Limp Bizkit's set further cemented my hatred for nu-metal and the industry that would gleefully promote this new soundtrack of celebrated ignorance, but that's a whole other story of pop-culture triggering.
So with this footage of Palm's Spring's low point burned into my head, I was asked to submit a story for a Palm Springs Noir anthology, though the deadline was not on my side for what I really wanted to do with it. But I wrote the story anyway, now with more time to stretch out in, to speculate what else could have happened in that melee, given the disparate cultures of the Coachella Valley like the Morongo Band of Mission Indians, and how they might have reacted to the white-bred chaos. Luckily, "A Return To Spring" ends up standing on its own little spine as part of Mannison Press "Mini-Books" series. For a crime-fiction book, this format is sort of, uh, cute as fuck - fun-sized to fit in the ass-pocket of your jeans like some cool vintage pulp contraband (just don't sit on it, man!).
Enormous gratitude to Mannison Press for being so solid to work with.
I've got a stack of signed paperbacks I'll let go for $8 apiece. PayPal mrgabrielhart@gmail.com or Venmo me at gabriel-hart-40 and don't forget your address.
