DARK SOIL

A mixed-genre approach to geography, blending literature, legend, and history.

The core of this collection is a set of stories by avant-garde writer Yamashita, author of Tropic of Orange and I Hotel, who looks at Santa Cruz, California, from its edges: cemeteries, long-gone mom-and-pop grocery stores, parking lots. “Santa Cruz is someone’s paradise”—the paradise of surfer dudes and hippies, of conquistadors and whalers, of those looking for the mythical Amazon queen for whom the Spanish named the mystical land of California. It can be a “dark paradise,” one haunted by dreams, history, failure, and disappointment. In one of her stories, an Easterner heads west to the gold fields with family in tow, only to die of cholera during the journey, his widow left to watch as other children die of measles and other maladies. Yamashita’s stories embrace actual points on the map, including tire stores, lumberyards, and many other ugly places that foreclose the possibility of paradise. Since even in paradise death can be found, as the Latin tag has it, Yamashita’s stories also embrace lockdown, chemotherapy, and dementia. Accompanying her stories are short works by eight writers, including Sesshu Foster and Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint. In one of the most interesting essays, Brandon Shimoda announces his project of visiting sites of Japanese internment in World War II with a particular eye to “sites in which no trace of the past remains, or in which the past is propagated, at most, by traces, which have to be manifestations of missing—but missing what?” The answers are various, whether concerning the missing Indigenous people of the desert, kept from moving through their homelands through aggressive Border Patrol actions, or places absent from any map but still very real.

A centrifugal, suggestive way of looking at place through the lens of story.