Eight books on a San Diego reading list

Patrick Coleman makes things from words, sounds, and occasional pictures. His debut collection of poems, Fire Season, was written after the birth of his first child by speaking aloud into a digital audio recorder on the long commute between the art museum where he worked and his home in a rural neighborhood that burned in the Witch Creek Fire of 2007. It won the 2015 Berkshire Prize and was released by Tupelo Press on December 1, 2018. His short-form prose has appeared in Hobart, ZYZZYVA, Zócalo Public Square, the Writer's Chronicle, the Black Warrior Review, Juked, and the Utne Reader, among others. The Art of Music, an exhibition catalogue on the relationship between visual arts and music that he edited and contributed to, was co-published by Yale University Press and the San Diego Museum of Art. Coleman earned an MFA from Indiana University and a BA from the University of California Irvine. He lives in Ramona, California, with his wife and two daughters, and is the Assistant Director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego.

Coleman's new book, his first novel, is The Churchgoer.

One of the author's top eight San Diego books:

Julia Dixon Evans, How to Set Yourself on Fire

This frank and compelling portrait of Sheila, a thirty-something woman adrift, the box of love letters she inherits from her grandmother, and the grief-stricken neighbor girl she befriends is as cuttingly funny as it is moving. There’s a powerful tension in her secrets, compulsive lying, and ambivalence, a kind of suspended anticipation of the other shoe dropping. The San Diego fire season is the backdrop to the story from the first line and sets the tone: “It’s the third morning of a wildfire to the east and everyone’s used to the smell by now.” It’s a time of year when many of us San Diegans go through the day with our hearts in our throats, waiting for that signal: smoke on the horizon, the sounds of a CalFire plane or helicopter. With climate change, fire season is stretching out—some years into what feels like the entire year—and that feeling, which this book evokes so well and connects with the lives of its characters in complex ways, is only going to be more and more a part of our experience.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue