California Is an Earthquake
Coming in fall 2027 from Sibylline Press: California Is an Earthquake, a novel-in-collected stories by Leanne Phillips
“California Is an Earthquake opens like a puzzle box.” —anonymous contest judge
A murder in 1870s Los Angeles forces two women to work together to save a life. The women’s actions send aftershocks through the generations that follow, aftershocks that eventually reach Lydia and her daughter Rae more than one hundred years later.
Lydia’s ideas of motherhood are often problematic, but that’s no wonder considering the lives of the mothers and daughters that came before her. “I’m a shit mother,” she acknowledges, “and that’s an inescapable fact. It’s in my bones, passed down in my family over hundreds of years, like other families pass down their sourdough starters.”
In stories set in contemporary California, as well as against the backdrop of California’s own turbulent history, things get worse before they get better, until Lydia and Rae realize they must confront their family’s past if they want any hope of a future.
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Chapter 1 of California Is an Earthquake was published by The Coachella Review as a standalone short story, “The Big South.”
California Is an Earthquake will be available for preorder soon.
Accolades for California Is an Earthquake and its stories:
California Is an Earthquake: Book Prize Winner, 6th Annual Launch Pad Prose Competition
California Is an Earthquake: Mentorship Prize Winner, 6th Annual Launch Pad Prose Competition
“Trees”: Grand Prize Winner, ScreenCraft’s 2023 Cinematic Short Story Competition
“Time to Flagstaff”: Finalist, ScreenCraft’s 2022 Cinematic Short Story Competition
“The Jetty”: Nominated, 2021 Best of the Net
The Stories Behind the Stories:
The Story Behind ‘The Big South’
The Story Behind ‘The Art of Oblivion’
Resources:
The Ghost of the Hotel Del Coronado: What happened to Kate Morgan in November 1892?
Crossing the Border: Flipping the false rhetoric about undocumented immigrants on its head
The California Housing Crisis: Spoiler alert: undocumented immigrants aren’t to blame
When a White Woman Writes a Brown Character
Links:
“The Big South” (The Coachella Review)
“The Art of Oblivion” (The Amber Waves of Autumn)
“The Jetty” (Kelp Journal)
“Trees” (New American Studies Journal)