Two Pieces of Fiction

A literary magazine in California, Kelp Journal, asked me for a piece of short fiction in 2019, and I handed them 2 linked stories. Both are about racism in my fictional town of Calaveras Beach, and both are based on real events. Bronzeville Beach and Supper Club deals with the first known black surfer in America, Nick Gabaldón, and gives us the town’s reaction to an African-American community expanding near a segregated strip of sand. Lighthouse Scene for Miles gives us the reaction of the town to a young Miles Davis, who really did play the beachside Lighthouse Café in 1953.

Michael Scott Moore is a journalist and a novelist, author of a comic novel about L.A., Too Much of Nothing, as well as a travel book about surfing, Sweetness and Blood, which was named a best book of 2010 by The Economist. He’s won Fulbright, Logan, and Pulitzer Center grants for his nonfiction, as well as a Silver Nautilus Award in Journalism and Investigative Reporting; and Yaddo, MacDowell, and DeWitt Wallace–Reader’s Digest fellowships for his fiction.

He’s been a visiting professor at the Columbia School of the Arts and UC Riverside. He worked for several years as an editor and writer at Spiegel Online in Berlin. Michael was kidnapped in early 2012 on a reporting trip to Somalia and held hostage by pirates for 32 months. The Desert and the Sea, a memoir about that ordeal, became an international bestseller.

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