Co-editor, Kelly Mayhew, reads from the introduction of Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana at the San Diego City College release event in spring 2025.
Co-editors Kelly Mayhew and Jim Miller introduce Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in the spring of 2025.
Come join us if you can!
Drift Reading at the Downtown San Diego Central Library, March 2024
On Drift:
"San Diego is not the picture postcard city it used to be. My book explores the transformation"
On Paradise and Other Lost Places:
"Climate dread and wonder in paradise and other lost places"
"Paradise and Other Lost Places: Anthropocene Blues and the Radiance of Everything That Is"
Paradise and Other Lost Places and Into the Bardo Reading at San Diego City College, November 2024
On Into the Bardo:
"Enter the Bardo: A Poetic Autobiography of Trauma, Redemption, and Persistence"
"Living Through Madness, Of Coming Back: A review of Jim Miller's poetry collection, Into the Bardo"
"I wrote my way through trauma to gratitude. Here's how."
Reading and Discussion of Into the Bardo at The Dharma Bum Temple in San Diego
Into the Bardo Reading and Discussion at The Dharma Bum Temple in San Diego, November 2024
On Monday, September 30th, 2024, I was invited to do a Zoom reading for Professors Hector Martinez and Paul Lopez and their literature and creative writing classes at San Diego City College. I'm excited to share the link here!
I am excited to announce the publication of my two latest books, Into the Bardo and Paradise and Other Lost Places, both of which are poetry collections.
Into the Bardo (available here) chronicles my series of near-death experiences that I experienced last year. These poems were written in real time from before my diagnosis to the precipice of death and back. All of them were composed in the midst of my health crisis, some in hospital beds, others during my recovery. It is my book of the damned and my journal of redemption.
"Jim Miller's Into the Bardo reminds us that everything is 'tentative and precious.' After experiencing a harrowing summer of several near-death experiences, it was poetry that Miller summoned, to bear witness to what he learned on this journey. In these poems, readers navigate the sometimes-precarious waters between wakefulness and sleep, life and death, treading in the liminal spaces of uncertainty. In fact, it was the great Roman poets, Virgil and Ovid, who taught us, Somnus, the god of sleep, was indeed the brother of Death. It is in this nexus where we find Miller revisiting memories of family and friends, the marvels of travel, the percipience of the arts, and ultimately, his musings on the 'interconnectedness of all,' especially as he beckons us to confront the economic and health care disparities that so many still endure. Miller reexamines a life lived while all along urging us to 'feel the multi-grained texture of life / as it flows on ceaselessly / past even death.' Into the Bardo is full of wonder and wisdom."
-Manuel Paul López, Nerve Curriculum
Whereas Into the Bardo, is a chronicle of my recent dance with death, Paradise and Other Lost Places (available here) is the product of the subsequent recovery period when I had the time to revise and edit a large selection of work on Maui before and after the catastrophic fires there, a selection of recent poems, and a batch of pieces that cover the last forty years of my life as a poet and writer.
While it is true that poetry in general has a much smaller market than nonfiction and fiction, getting this book into the world when I was not sure I would even live to see it come into print is deeply meaningful. Somewhere still inside is my younger self who started writing poems by hand in a tattered notebook, dreaming of being a poet without giving a thought to anything but the idea of the transformational power of the unhindered imagination and the notion that life itself is a kind of art.
Thanks to my good fried Perry Vasquez for his gorgeous cover art on both books and Kendra Lee for this fine blurb as well as comrades in verse Alys Masek, Hector Martinez, and Manuel Paul López for their close reading, editing, and evaluation of this project.
"Philosophical, lush and gritty, this collection answers a central question: How much pain and sweetness can fit into one man's life? This is life on the knife's edge where the deep well of grief…gives birth to joy. Miller, gimlet-eyed, turns his lens to city streets, motels, cemeteries, union workers, histories of oppression. Climate change, Lahaina burned. But also: the deep green jungle, the cerulean sea, a flock of hens, a gospel choir. An On The Road travelogue to Maui, Tijuana, Toledo, Chicago, Montana, the Salton Sea, Detroit, L.A. and more, each place a bittersweet cocktail of love and loss. These poems are world-weary and world-loving: 'The world is burning faster and more furiously/than even our love can repair…but also know that/we are always becoming,/like the newly formed shoots/on the scorched banyan tree.' Miller says it best: 'There is no describing the vast love that wells up in you when you find yourself in rapture with the stunning, naked radiance of the world.'"
--Kendra Tanacea, author of The Alchemy of Us
I'll be doing readings both live and virtual in the coming weeks.
The Jumping-Off Place: Labor, Politics, Culture, San Diego
Mission Statement
The Jumping Off-Place: Politics, Labor, Culture, San Diego takes its name from Edmund Wilson's famous essay about San Diego in the early 1930s that gave our fair city that moniker in noting its high suicide rate and observing that:
"Here this people, so long told to "go West" to escape from poverty, ill health, maladjustment, industrialism and oppression, discover that, having come West, their problems and diseases still remain and that there is no further to go. Among the sand-colored power plants and hotels, the naval outfitters and waterside cafes, the old spread-roofed California houses with their fine close grain of gray or yellow clapboards—they come to the end of their resources in the empty California sun."
What we share with Wilson is both his attention to the harsher realities beneath the Chamber of Commerce boosterism that built San Diego and continues to dominate our city's official version of itself, and his sympathy for those suffering from the deep inequities of American life, made harsher by the broken promise of "the empty California sun." In that spirit, this space will seek to "comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable," as the journalist Finley Peter Dunne put it.
Our goal is to feature voices intent on challenging the local and national hegemony during a time when market forces are destroying news outlets across the country and here in San Diego. Our politics are generally left, but not driven by sectarian or Democratic Party pieties. We see ourselves as committed to playing a small part in building a more progressive San Diego by supporting the labor, environmental, and other social justice movements of all stripes rather than elected politicians.
We are also interested in featuring the arts at a time when there are fewer venues that promote creative work than ever before. Thus, we aspire to regularly publish short fiction, poetry, book reviews, and writing about all the arts as much as possible and preferably with a San Diego/California focus.
The Jumping Off-Place is an all-volunteer effort that does not claim to play the role of a news outlet but hopes to fill some of the gaps left by the unfortunate decline of our major newspaper and other weekly print outlets. The voices published here are unpaid as are the editors, so whatever money we make from this endeavor will go to continuing to improve and expand our outlet.
Who We Are…
Jim Miller is the author of the novels Last Days in Ocean Beach (City Works Press, 2018), Flash (AK Press, 2010), and Drift (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007, 2024). He is also co-author of a history of San Diego, Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See (with Mike Davis and Kelly Mayhew on The New Press, 2003 and 2005) and a cultural studies book on working class sports fandom, Better to Reign in Hell: Inside the Raiders Fan Empire (with Kelly Mayhew on The New Press, 2005).
Jim is also the editor of Sunshine/Noir: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (City Works Press, 2005), Sunshine/Noir II: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (with Kelly Mayhew on City Works Press, 2015), and Democracy in Education; Education for Democracy (AFT 1931, 2007).
He has published poetry, fiction, and non-fiction in a wide range of journals and other publications, and has a weekly column in Words and Deeds (Doug Porter's Substack), a monthly column in the San Diego Union-Tribune's "Community Voices Project," and previously wrote for the San Diego Free Press and the OB Rag.
Jim is a professor of English, Humanities, and Labor Studies at San Diego City College and is the Political Action and Community Outreach Vice President for the American Federation of Teachers Guild, Local 1931.
Kelly Mayhew is the co-author with Mike Davis and Jim Miller of Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See (The New Press) as well as co-author with Jim Miller of Better to Reign in Hell: Inside the Raiders Fan Empire (The New Press), and is co-editor with Alys Masek of Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting (City Works Press), co-editor with Paula S. Rothenberg of Race, Class, and Gender in the United States 9th edition (Worth Publishers), and co-editor with Jim Miller of Sunshine/Noir II: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (City Works Press).
She is also a founding member of the San Diego Writers Collective, which created City Works Press (a progressive, all-volunteer non-profit publishing project that is housed at City College) in 2005, for which she serves as Managing Editor.
Kelly is a professor of English, Humanities, Gender Studies, and Labor Studies at San Diego City College where she also serves as a Vice President for the American Federation of Teachers, Local 1931.
Doug Porter was active in the early days of the alternative press in San Diego, contributing to the OB Liberator, the print version of the OB Rag, the San Diego Door, and the San Diego Street Journal.
He left San Diego in 1974 to become editor of CounterSpy, an anti-establishment publication that constantly probed the undersides of US security practices.
And then, he went away for a few decades, popping up as a restaurateur in the mountains of Virginia and finding his way to the Caribbean. In 2008, he returned to San Diego, once again smitten by the reporting bug. An online version of the San Diego Free Press started up in 2012, and he's written five days a week for most of the past dozen years, pondering issues both local and national.
He won nine awards from the Society of Professional Journalists for his daily columns in the San Diego Free Press over a six year period. When that publication folded, he started Words & Deeds.
Doug is a four time cancer survivor (sans vocal chords) and lives in North Park.
You can find The Jumping-Off Place here!
I'm pleased to announce, two upcoming Drift paperback release events on March 18th at 6:30 PM at the downtown San Diego Central Library and on March 22nd at 7:00 PM at The Book Catapult in South Park. Hope to see you there!
