Not everyone in Skid Row will wander out to the desert, but there is a certain person who lives off the grid who comes in from the desert and takes advantages of services on Skid Row.īoth those places, and Red Hook in Brooklyn, New York, where your last novel, Visitation Street, was set, have this sort of "making your own laws" quality.
So that's why there's the back-and-forth between them I realized that there is a certain overlap. So those two places became inextricably linked in my head. They live off the grid, live an alternative lifestyle. Suddenly, I realized that both Skid Row and the desert are places where people really live outside the rules of conventional society. I was writing about Skid Row and sitting in the desert, and suddenly the two ideas just collided in my head. I teach a creative writing workshop in Skid Row, and one of the women in my workshop told me a story about growing up on a goat farm and how her brother had shot this hawk that their father made him eat. I rented a house out there for six weeks and was writing out there, and I remembered. But when I started the book, I'd written one chapter that took place in Skid Row, and I had been out to the desert many times, and I was absolutely in love with it. I never intended to write about the desert. Did you know you wanted to write about these two areas? This novel has an incredibly strong sense of places, as it shifts between the desert near Joshua Tree National Park in California and Los Angeles, specifically in the city's Skid Row area. Recently, I spoke with Pochoda about the book, her own experience (or lack of) with commune living, and about the dangers of ultra-charismatic leaders. It's a fascinating character study, and one of the most beautifully rendered examples of the spectrum of human vulnerability that I've read in some time. In fact, getting lost and then getting found is a through-line in Wonder Valley, which poses questions about our desire to live off the grid, and reveals the dangers of not only doing so but also of staying too firmly within the grid's constraining boxes. Ivy Pochoda's third novel, Wonder Valley, skips back-and-forth through time and space and takes the points of view of a handful of wildly disparate characters, all of whom are connected in one way or another, and all of whom are looking for some way to escape.
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