Hearing alternative voices

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Left to right: Shelley Jackson, Steve Erickson, David Ulin, Zachary Lazar, Nina Revoyr

Big ideas -- reinventing myth, writing (or rewriting) Los Angeles and the relationship between history and fiction -- were tackled by the Festival of Books panel ‘Fiction: Alternative Visions’ on Sunday afternoon.

In a cool, modern auditorium in UCLA’s business school, Zachary Lazar (‘Sway’) and Nina Revoyr (‘The Age of Dreaming’) talked about the challenges presented by writing historical figures in a fictional way. Revoyr -- whose book is based loosely on the life of Japanese silent film actor Sessue Hayakawa -- said she started with factual history but quickly departed from it to serve her fiction. Lazar, on the other hand, said he stuck to bizarre real-life events as closely as possible to bring the smaller human moments to life: His book is set in the late ‘60s and includes Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, a Manson family member and filmmaker Kenneth Anger.

Steve Erickson’s work occasionally includes historical figures (‘Tours of the Black Clock,’ ‘Zeroville’), but he takes imaginative leaps to create impossible universes; Shelley Jackson, too, creates fictions of pure imagination. Both of these authors also talked about playing with conventional narrative form -- which Erickson did recently in ‘Our Ecstatic Days’ -- to such an extent that he pulled back from that for ‘Zeroville,’ his latest. Jackson’s projects include the 2006 novel ‘Half Life’ and ‘Skin,’ a short story tattooed on volunteers, one word at a time.

Sitting in on these conversations was a little like eavesdropping on a smart dinner party, and the audience, which asked astute questions, seemed to appreciate the level of discourse. The best moment, however, came when Lazar returned to something Jackson had said in passing, that an observation from her past was a terrible idea for a novel but that it then became a part of ‘Half Life.’ Lazar pointed out that he was listening to the Rolling Stones when the idea to write about the band came to him, but initially he too thought this was a terrible basis for a novel. He went ahead and wrote ‘Sway.’

‘Here’s advice for you aspiring writers out there,’ moderator (and L.A. Times Book Review editor) David L. Ulin said. ‘That terrible idea? Run with it.’

-- Carolyn Kellogg