Not much to say about the composition of Show World … except its dramatic rescue from the Laguna Beach Fire of 1993.  I was working on my novel, and using the library at UC Irvine, some ten miles away from my apartment in Laguna. As the afternoon went on, the little brushfire that morning newscasters had described as “up in the canyon” had grown into a major conflagration bearing down on Laguna Beach, fueled by the dry Santa Ana winds.  I walked outside to join a crowd staring at a several-miles high column of black-gray smoke to the south; someone said, “Yeah, Laguna’s on fire–it’s on every channel.”  In the era before memory sticks, my novel was in my computer sitting on my desk in a town that was going up in flames.  I told the story of racing back, dodging the police barricades and retrieving my worldly goods, to Dick Gordon on his The Story With Dick Gordon (on your NPR and APR radio stations).  The interview is about 17 minutes:

Of course, I took pictures…

Laguna when it’s not on fire…

This was my nearest streetcorner, the intersection of Cedar Way and Acacia Street; note the house on the left…

This was downtown on 3rd Street, near the fire department.  When a fire department is in danger of going up in flames, that would seem to be the very definition of trouble…

Then the fire met the sunset in something out of Dante. Hundred-foot flames over on the grassy hills above the town, catching the last of the afternoon light…

I finished Show World while teaching in the MFA program at University of California, Irvine, for which I owe Geoffrey Wolff, who hired me, an immense debt.  Geez, such talented young writers…

Anyway, I semi-lived in my basement bunker in the old English Dept building (I wish the rattle-trap 1990s computer that moaned and whirred had made it into the picture better), before escaping, racing as do my Show World characters for the sunset, back each night to Laguna Beach and my 1920s-era cottage (this second, later residence far removed from the dreaded fire-prone canyon!).