Featured Writing
Two Strategies for Working with Reticent Characters, CRAFT
“I’m drawn to characters who don’t easily express themselves. If they won’t share how they’re feeling, their emotions often manifest in behavior that can set a story in motion. But how do you reveal an avoidant character? You need to tease out the underlying emotional truth and find ways to say what’s unsaid.”
Cathedral Rock, Valparaiso Fiction Review
”While he sits at a picnic table at a riverside campsite, Noll tells his younger brother about the day he swam the town rapids alone.”
A Walking Tour of V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street, Los Angeles Review of Books
”Today, Luis Street has no outward signs of having inspired Naipaul's novel Miguel Street. This is, I would guess, how Naipaul would want it.”
Books & Literary Journals
L.A. Exile; A Guide to Los Angeles Writing, 1932-1998
Calbi is the co-editor of an anthology about Los Angeles from the perspective of writers and poets born elsewhere. From the book cover: “There are cities writers have sought as inspiration; Paris in the ‘20s, or New York or San Francisco in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Then there is Los Angeles, a place poets and writers have avoided or at least never expected to end up in. Once arrived, many found themselves remarkably productive, intrigued with the city and a life that often struggles to be heroically elsewhere. L.A. Exile is a guide to the literature, the writers and the physical spaces that have made for what composer Igor Stravinsky called “splendid isolation.”
Eudice Shapiro, A Life in Music
He is the author of a commemorative book about celebrated violinist Eudice Shapiro, the first female concertmaster of a Hollywood orchestra.
Rhizome; A Language You Can Think In
He co-founded a literary journal that featured the work of emerging writers as well as established names like Amiri Baraka, Barbara Guest, Adriano Spatola, and others.