Interview with Agatha French

The Los Angeles Review‘s Riley Mang interviews Agatha French, a staff writer in Books at the Los Angeles Times. French has worked as an editor for a number of literary journals and magazines, including the Los Angeles Review of Books. View her  most recent articles here.

You can also see Agatha French live at The Last Bookstore in Downtown LA on Friday, October 6. 

How did you get involved working at the LA Times?

My editor, Carolyn Kellogg, was looking for freelancers, and Dinah Lenney, who I’d freelanced for at the LA Review of Books (LARB) recommended me. I did a few pieces for Carolyn and at some point there ended up being a job opening and I applied for it.

How would you describe your job on the day-to-day?

I don’t think any two days are the same, really. I certainly spend time going to events and trying to listen to what’s going on around town, literary-wise. Going to readings or book events or book parties or launches and just keeping my ear to the ground to see what people are excited about. I read a lot, I go into the office, I write my stories, sometimes I’m driving across town to interview somebody or sometimes I’m transcribing; there’s lots of different things to do.

What would you say is the role of the book journalist in the literary scene?

I think in particular here, it’s getting people seen and heard. I’m just a conduit; I think the role is to find out what’s out there and what people care about and what people are making and amplify it. I’m not a critic, so listening to people is sort of the big one, because a lot of what I do is interviews and Q & A’s and features. Also, it’s important to keep a pulse on what matters book-wise nationally and what our place is there.

Who do you see as the industry leaders that are setting the pace and trends in writing about books?

I’m a big fan of a lot of stuff that’s on the internet right now. I am a big Lit Hub fan, I go to them constantly. I think Catapult is really great. I think Lenny is doing an amazing job with books coverage – Electric Lit, Entropy, but I also read the New Yorker and I will check up on LARB.

How do you think book journalism has changed with the internet?

I should probably admit that I have no journalism background. I was an English major and then got an MFA in creative writing, so I have never taken a journalism class. It wasn’t like I set out to do this; it was that I really, deeply, profoundly love reading and care about books and that’s the art form that I connect to most vividly. I haven’t been following books journalism my whole life. The whole online thing, I need to get way better at writing for online. I do it all the time, but there are some people who came up in the internet age. I’m a little bit older than that. I would love to be a more prominent part of that conversation, but I’m still trying to figure out how to do it, to be honest. Everything moves so fast and there’s an amazing interconnectedness with Twitter, etc. You can just follow your favorite writer and then you’re having a conversation, which is so cool, but it can also be very intimidating. It’s so much.

How does the LA Times sees its role in the literary world?

We’re trying to tell the story of literary Los Angeles, what people don’t necessarily know about or think of. I think we’re trying to shine a light on how robust and exciting the literary community is here, but also be part of a national conversation. It’s not just local coverage, although I would say that is more my job, because I’m the reporter and not, say, the critic. I’m more focused on this city.

How would you describe that literary community here in LA?

Really friendly, welcoming, and diverse. Even before I got involved with the LA Times, even before I went to grad school, I would go to readings, like at Stories for example, and people were really nice. It seems like a very welcoming community; everybody kind of knows each other and speaks kindly and with respect, from what I’ve seen.

What is something unique that LA can offer writers and literature that other cities cannot?

I think LA can offer all artists a little bit more freedom and room. LA has an idea of itself as being a place of reinvention, and every other cliché about it being the farthest place in the west; I can kind of get behind self-mythologizing like that. It’s place of so much ingenuity. For all different artists, there can be a sense here that it’s safe to try and to fail and to try something different; and I don’t see how that can be anything but good for writing. I think there’s a lot of room for improvisation here. LA isn’t devoid of literary history either, it’s not like we’re just making it all up as we go along. There’s such a rich history of writers here, but I couldn’t say in a word what unites them, or what the back bone is of what LA offers writers. I think sometimes LA can be a place where not doing all that much is more acceptable, and writing often takes a lot of percolating and secret time where it looks like nothing is happening, but stuff is going on.

Do you have any ideas about why people don’t consider LA’s rich literary history?

I think it’s changing. I don’t know if people really feel that way anymore, but maybe they think that there’s only room for one industry. People think of LA and they think of Hollywood and there’s no denying that it’s an industry town. But I do wonder if that is changing. I think about how in the 60’s and 70’s there was an incredible visual arts scene in LA with the whole light space movement, but that didn’t get recognized by New York until like, last year.

What are some exciting projects you are working on that you can tell us about?

I’ve been working at the LA Times books section fulltime for about seven months now and so much of that has been learning how to do my job. I want to work on finding more stories that are going to surprise people; like, what’s going on that is so cool that we just don’t know about? Literary communities that aren’t being recognized, maybe there are journals that I don’t know about; there are always new writers to discover. I’m focused on unearthing what is already happening that we’re going to get to watch emerge.

How do you go about looking for those hidden gems?

I think you have to go and talk to people. You go to an event and maybe you don’t write about it but you hear about something there, or you meet someone. I think a lot of it is making connections and just showing up. For example, a friend I initially met at Stories was on a panel at a conference called the Gathering of Latina Writers, so I wrote an article about that. That was such a cool event. One of the questions asked was, “Is it important to have Latina-only spaces?” so I made sure that was something I covered in my article. I don’t know how to find everything yet but I’m determined to get better at it.

On the flip side of going to events, I will say I always want to come back to the page. We are talking about people who write books here, and the experience of being with a book is a private experience. In order to tell stories about people, you have to be with people, but I think it’s equally important to take the time to really be with their work and read deeply and read widely.

Are there particular things you look for in the books or authors you write about?

I like things that surprise me. That’s always nice. You know, when a book does something different, or maybe it doesn’t do something different but it does something just so well. I really admire that.

What do you like to write on your free time?

I got an MFA in fiction, but I have not had much time for that lately. It’s been really important for me to get better and better at this new job so my writing time has been devoted to that. In my free time I’m thinking about writing some books-related essays. I don’t know if they’re going to be something that the paper can use, but I’ve had an inkling lately that I might like to write something a little bit different sometime soon.

What do you see as the role of the book review?

I don’t review for the LA Times right now, but book reviews are so important. I love reading book reviews; I think of them as an art form in and of themselves, like all criticism. I have written reviews before, that is one of the closest ways of being in conversation with a book that I know of. The work that it takes to write a book review that is informed, considerate, and smart is tremendous, but it brings you so close to that book in such a profound way. You really get in the guts of a book when you write a review, when you do it right, because you’re contextualizing it in the writer’s career, you’re contextualizing it in literature; you’re contextualizing it within its craft, and on the sentence level. You’re just really getting in there.

What advice do you have for new writers?

My path to this job was so untraditional that I feel funny giving advice. But if you want a job where you write about books, either as a critic or a journalist, your first order of business is to read a lot, and that’s probably true for a writer of any kind.

Go meet people. Submit. If you want to write for magazines and newspapers, come up with ideas and pitch them. That’s really the only way: write to editors with your ideas. That works. Even if you get rejected, you build up a thicker skin as time goes by. If you want to write about books you probably already really love reading, so the nice thing about that is you’ve already done a lot of the work. You didn’t know it, but you were doing a lot of the preparation for your job just spending your Saturday super enthralled in a book and then talking about it. If you’re writing about writing, you’ve been studying the craft of it. Even if it’s journalism, you’re telling a story and you’ve already been studying stories. For writers in LA, we’re lucky in that it feels like a really supportive, open literary community. Introduce yourself to people and find out where you can read your work. There are like five readings every night.

What are you reading right now?

I had a cold last week and I picked up the first Ferrante Neapolitan novel. I never read the Ferrante books, and a traditional novel sounded comforting, so I got the first Ferrante book, and I tore through it. The next day I went to the library and picked up the second one. I get it now everybody – I’m so on board. She does what she does so well.