The Story Behind "The Art of Oblivion"
This short story is set up and down California's coast--where did it come from?
When I was a young woman in my twenties, I attended the University of California at Santa Cruz. It was an amazing time of my life spent in one of the most beautiful places in the world.
“The UC Santa Cruz campus is unconventional. Nestled between the Santa Cruz Mountains and Pacific Ocean, it lacks a large, central plaza, iconic gate, football stadium, and vaulted reading room. Instead, UC Santa Cruz has ancient redwoods and gnarled oak trees; long, wooden bridges spanning deep canyons; benches with views of Monterey Bay; and pedestrian paths that wind through groves and glades. Some days, I see more deer, turkeys, coyotes, bobcats, and hawks than people.”
—Catherine Sue Ramirez, Ph.D., chair of the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz, from the “My UCSC” section of her photography portfolio on her website. Some truly beautiful photographs of the UC Santa Cruz campus.
I transferred to UC Santa Cruz from Hartnell Community College in Salinas. At Hartnell, I was mentored in English Literature by Dr. Lucindi Mooney—she made me fall in love with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick despite my trying hard to hate it. At UC Santa Cruz, I reveled in being finished with general education courses. I immersed myself in English and French Literature. I took classes on Shakespeare and Romantic-era Poetry and Women’s Literature and African American Literature and The Literature of the New Testament. All the literature, please.
I had a little crush on my Literature 101 professor—it seems cliche to think of it now, but here was this tall, dark, and handsome man who loved books and reading as much as I did, who knew so much more than I did, and who asked if he could use one of my papers as an example of a good paper. He introduced me to Wuthering Heights and King Lear, and he wrote on my Lit 101 evaluation that I was “already a first-rate student of literature and potentially a critic to watch.” I imagined myself following in his and Dr. Mooney’s footsteps—writing novels and teaching English literature.
I fell in love with Santa Cruz, too. I loved my studies, but some of my favorite memories are of hiking through redwood forests to get to my next class, or ditching class altogether to spend the day on the warm sand below the boardwalk. (I only did that last thing once, I promise.)
Is it any wonder, then, that when I decided to write a story about a woman who ran away to California, I chose Santa Cruz for her destination? In the story, the protagonist had spent some time in Santa Cruz as a child, and when she decided to run away from home as a teenager, she ran away to this place she remembered and loved.
“Santa Cruz suited Lydia—that’s why she’d come back. The funky beach town of Santa Cruz proper abutted a steel gray ocean, but the county of Santa Cruz stretched itself up into the mountains and through thick redwood forests, like fingers weaving their way through tangled hair. The towns became more untamed and more anonymous the higher they reached—Pasatiempo, Zayante, Bonny Doon, Ben Lomond. Old logging camps, mining towns, sawmill operations. Janis Joplin and her band used to jam up in Lompico, and Jerry Garcia once lost a finger chopping wood there. San Francisco’s backyard neighbor. Home.”
—Leanne Phillips, “The Art of Oblivion”
(from The Amber Waves of Autumn beach noir anthology)
I didn’t finish school at UC Santa Cruz. Life happened, and I dropped out, and I didn’t finish my English Literature degree until 30 years later. When I did, it was at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. But for 30 years, I’d harbored a hope that, someday, someway, somehow, I’d find my way back to UC Santa Cruz to finish my literature studies. It was a dream I was reluctant to let go of, but I knew that finishing my degree was more important than where I finished it.
Still, I’ve always longed to go back. In fact, I had plans to go ziplining through the Santa Cruz redwoods for my 60th birthday, but four months before my birthday, the pandemic sidelined my plans.
It wasn’t until I sat down to write this that it dawned on me—I did go back to Santa Cruz. Through writing this story, through Lydia, I was able to return. I’ve written before that there is always some little piece of me in every story I write. I guess this is true even when I don’t realize it. Thank you, Lydia, for letting me run away, back to Santa Cruz, vicariously, through you.
