IN THESE TRYING times, with more and more writers churning out dreck for the Oprah-saturated populace, Lynn Rogers publishes novels riddled with a beautifully incongruous post-Beat hodgepodge of suburban societal fragments.
Even better, her books occasionally take place in San Jose. A longtime Cambrian Park denizen, Rogers was born in Berkeley, grew up in Menlo Park, survived the flower-power ’60s and now has 12 books to her credit. Most of them are available on Inkling Press, an independent outfit in Menlo Park (www.inklingpress.com).
This Saturday, she will operate her own table at the Paul F. Byrd Annual Book Festival at the Divine Science Community Center in Willow Glen. She will answer any questions about her books, which often incorporate aspects of goddess worship combined with ignored Bay Area landscapes.
For example, her now-sold-out Born in Berkeley romps through the late ’60s, from Northern California to Mexico, and includes the usual suspects: Neal Cassady, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg and those who straddled the Beat/hippie axis of perceived evil. It is a feminine coming-of-age tale set amid the scenic backdrops of Big Sur, Esalen and a few suburban tract-house wastelands. The Rainbow’s Daughter traces post-’60s decompression in Palo Alto, with former flower children knee-deep in ’70s self-transformational slop like Werner Erhard’s EST movement.
In 2008, Rogers unleashed A Valley of Ashes: Homeless in a Nuclear Warehouse, perhaps her seminal work, rejoicing in the splendor of tossed-away industrial wastelands like the former GE plant at Curtner and Monterey Highway in San Jose. In the book, a disenfranchised goth hottie runs away from home and hides out in the abandoned buildings. Unfortunately, thanks to real-estate greed and political indifference, that area is now converted into a demoralizing big-box retail monstrosity that will probably damage children for generations to come.
But I digress. Rogers’ newest work, Side Roads, is perhaps her most “San Jose” novel to date. Set in a back house behind a decrepit Victorian on Jackson Street in Japantown, the story unfolds around James, a beleaguered single dad and county social worker who dates a string of immigrant Asian women. Caroline Ryder, a character from a previous Rogers book, is now renamed “Lara” by a drunk at the Empire Laundry on 13th Street. She’s caught in a love triangle with a Silicon Valley executive who still lives with his estranged wife in Willow Glen.
I met Rogers in Japantown in order to explore a few locales in the book, including the shack behind the house on Jackson Street. It was like getting a tour of Cairo from the Nobel-winning author Naguib Mahfouz, who painted the streets of that city in more than 50 books.
“I walked all night when I did this book,” Rogers said. “I went all over Japantown, all night, everywhere, to write this book. I felt very alive when writing it.”
The real-life man whom the fictional character James is loosely based on even joined us, since he owns the house on Jackson. Also present was Dave Hickey, a local connoisseur of San Jose underbelly, who wrote the introduction for Side Roads. “Many of Lynn’s books, especially this one, really give you a sense of San Jose,” Hickey told me. “And a sense of place. And San Jose’s culture and diversity and a slant of life.”
Rogers added that the book, above all else, is based on real situations and events: “Lara determines to live wholly in the moment, on the edge of a post-Beat gestalt. They seek spiritual answers from an African American minister at Fourth and Gish, and from a charismatic blue-collar bad boy minister at a church on the Alviso border.”
The Paul F. Byrd Book Festival features thousands of new and used books for sale, with all proceeds going to the Paul F. Byrd Math Scholarship. Byrd taught at SJSU for 30 years. Inkling Press debuted exactly 20 years ago, when Will Radcliffe started his own publishing company after working at Sunset magazine during the ’80s. An avid supporter of the independent press, he still runs Inkling to this day. “He’s a homegrown, do-it-yourself, suburban wasteland kinda guy,” said Rogers.
Paul F. Byrd Book Festival
Saturday, 10am–5pm
Divine Science Community Center, San Jose
