“Despite hard times for the publishing trade, we saw an especially rich variety of nonfiction, fiction and poetry from Southern California writers last year,” said Tom Zoellner, editor-at-large for the Los Angeles Review of Books. “The challenge for readers is figuring out where to go without a map. There was no one ‘big book’ that everyone had to read, but we instead saw a panoply of titles representing different niches of the region and appealing to a range of tastes, from the mainstream to the weird. For those willing to plunge into different literary worlds without a lot of curation or guidance, it was a very good year.”

We here at the Southern California News Group don’t believe awards or “best of” lists tell the whole story when it comes to the broad reach — not to mention appeal — of literature. At the same time, it’s true that each year certain authors and the books they’ve published strike a chord that resonates deeply in the hearts of many readers, and impacts the culture at large in unexpected ways.

To that end, we offer “Noteworthy,” our third annual salute, as selected by our editors, to Southern California authors whose books in the past year helped shape conversations, garnered attention from critics and readers alike, made powerful statements and delivered compelling reading experiences. These authors’ influence reached beyond the region and reverberated across the nation. Their works connected us, enlightened us, provoked us, entertained and inspired us. For that, we celebrate them.

• Also see: ‘Noteworthy’ books from Southern California authors in 2021 and 2022

Justin Torres

“Blackouts”

“We the Animals” turned first-time author Justin Torres into a literary star in 2011.

Torres told our reporter Michael Schaub that he wrote his first novel while working a series of bad jobs, but everything changed after it was published — there was even a movie based on the book.

“When I was writing ‘We the Animals,’ I was broke,” he recalled. “After the book came out, I had stability. I got these fancy fellowships, and then I became a professor at UCLA, and I had time to write built into my job. So I wasn’t snatching bits of time whenever I could, but instead had it be the center of my life.”

More than a decade later, he cemented his literary reputation with “Blackouts,” which earned the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction.

The lyrical, dreamlike story follows a young, unnamed narrator tending to his dying older friend, who has dedicated his life to his pet project, based on a 1941 book, “Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns.” The innovative structure of “Blackouts” is meant to mirror the lost histories of queer folk both individually and collectively, featuring photos of textbook pages with redacted or blacked-out sentences.

Critics were enamored of the book; NPR’s Maureen Corrigan called it “Sweeping, ingenious … A kiss to build a dream on,” while Hamilton Cain with the Star Tribune described it as a “tour de force.” In addition to winning the prestigious National Book Award for Fiction, the novel also was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. The list of outlets naming it one of the year’s best books is too long to fit here but includes The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, Time and The New York Public Library. It was called a must-read by Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, Boston Herald, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Electric Literature and Publishers Weekly, among others.

And yet, here’s the catch: This work that resonated with so many wasn’t initially the one he set out to write, Torres told our reporter: “I was writing these stories about … this young man in his twenties, and I lost the manuscript. I had certain pieces that I’d emailed myself, but everything else was on a laptop that I physically lost. So some of those vestigial elements I worked into what became “Blackouts,” but pretty soon after that, I started thinking about having this book be a kind of Socratic dialogue. I was really interested in writing about intergenerational conversation and wisdom talking to youth, and I really wanted to have lots of literary allusions.”

Tod Goldberg

“Gangsters Don’t Die”

A well-known voice in the region’s lit scene and an advocate for his fellow SoCal authors, that’s Tod Goldberg. The director of UC Riverside’s low-residency MFA program and co-host of the podcast “Literary Disco,” Goldberg has published 16 books including “Living Dead Girl,” “The House of Secrets” (co-written with Brad Meltzer) and the short story collection “The Low Desert.”

But it is his noir trilogy — the novels “Gangsterland,” “Gangster Nation” and the 2023 final installment, “Gangsters Don’t Die” — that might be his most distinctive creation.As SCNG’s books editor Erik Pedersen explained in an article on Goldberg and his brother Lee, who also is a successful novelist, the trilogy follows hitman Sal Cupertine as he hides out from both the feds and the mob under the assumed identity of Rabbi David Cohen, “a man of wisdom and faith known to quote from both the Talmud and the gospel of Bruce Springsteen.” The ultimate anti-hero, Cupertine/Cohen is both an effective spiritual leader and “a stone-cold killer when he deems it necessary.”

The trilogy’s final installment, “Gangsters Don’t Die,” earned a slew of kudos, notably a Southwest Book of the Year and nomination for Reading the West Book Awards, as well as being an Amazon Best Book of the Month, and one of The Washington Post’s Most Anticipated Titles.

And in naming “Gangsters Don’t Die” a Notable Book of 2023, CrimeReads’ Dwyer Murphy said, “Goldberg’s Gangsterland series has been one of the standouts in the world of crime fiction in recent years. … Sal Cupertino, the hit man on the lam, posing as a rabbi, is one of the more original figures you’ll come across, and now he’s making one last desperate gambit to get his life back. You won’t want to miss these books, so if you haven’t already, brush up on your Goldberg.”

Diane Marie Brown

“Black Candle Women”

Long Beach-based Diane Marie Brown has had a comfortable career as a professor at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa and a public health professional for the Long Beach Health Department, respectively. In addition to degrees from UCLA, Brown earned a degree in fiction from USC’s Master of Professional Writing Program, and had work published in places like Bomb Magazine, Hear Our Voices, Scary Mommy, the Audible Blog and the Daily Bruin.

And then her first novel, “Black Candle Women,” was published.

It launched her writing career into the successful author stratosphere.

“Black Candle Women” was a Read with Jenna Book Club Pick on the “Today” show and hit bestseller lists around the country. Plus, it was named a Best Book of the Month by Shondaland, Ms. Magazine, TODAY.com, Reader’s Digest, Katie Couric Media, AARP Sisters, Goodreads and BookRiot.

The story is a family drama with a magical twist — it’s about four generations of Black women living in California, a voodoo love curse that goes back to New Orleans, and the secrets the women keep for and from each other. Expect to see it on the small screen in the coming years because it’s in production as a TV series.

And with all that, Brown still keeps her day jobs.

“You can have more than one dream, you can do more than one thing,” she said on “Today.”

But, she added, writing makes her happy, so expect to see more of Brown’s hopeful, love-filled tales. As she told UCLA’s Daily Bruin, “I want to write books that show that, despite the craziness in the world and the unpredictability of things, we can create lives that we feel are worth living and, most importantly, in our relationships with others, in our friendships and our family members.”

Edan Lepucki

“Time’s Mouth”

“Sometimes when I look at the light in L.A., or I go to Marin County, or Eureka, where it truly looks like a magical fairytale land, I think, ‘There’s something objectively about this place that is special and different,’” Edan Lepucki told us in our interview for her third novel, “Time’s Mouth.” 

The story by this quintessentially Californian writer, who first earned bestseller status over a decade ago with her debut novel titled — what else? — “California,” also takes place in the Golden State. It spans San Francisco and Santa Cruz’s redwood forests, to the shabby glamor of Melrose Avenue and the oil derricks off La Cienega Boulevard in LA. The mind-bending family saga delves into intergenerational trauma in a surprising way, beginning with a time traveler who forms a cult for pregnant women in the woods.

The novel garnered a lot of attention, from being longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize to making most-anticipated-book lists in no less than Time, Salon, Literary Hub, The Millions and Library Journal. Science Friday named it a Best Book of the Year, too. “Rich and riveting” People magazine called it when it was named Book of the Week

But the novel almost had another title, a secret she confessed to SCNG’s book editor Erik Pedersen: “The book was almost called “The Accumulators” — but that really didn’t make sense, so…”

Yunte Huang

“Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History”

Our reviewer Michael Schaub named this biography by UC Santa Barbara English professor Yunte Huang a must-read title, way before the book earned a nod as both a New York Times Notable Book of 2023 and one of its 10 Best California Books of 2023. It garnered best-book kudos from a slew of other outlets as well, including Smithsonian, BookRiot, The Atlantic and Christian Science Monitor.

L.A. native Wong was the world’s first Chinese American movie star, celebrated for her performances in “The Thief of Bagdad” and “Piccadilly.” This biography follows her from Hollywood to Berlin to Shanghai — and then to Santa Monica, where she died in 1961 at age 56.

Yunte Huang grew up in southeastern China, moving to Alabama in 1991. His previous books include the nonfiction titles “Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History” and “Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History.” Of “Daughter of the Dragon,” a New York Times reviewer called Huang “a wry and generous storyteller.”

Tananarive Due

“The Reformatory”

Very scary is the specialty of Tananarive Due, who teaches Afrofuturism and Black Horror at UCLA. The author of several novels and the short story collections “Ghost Summer: Stories” and “The Wishing Pool and Other Stories,” Due was an executive producer on “Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror.” She’s co-written the graphic novel “The Keeper” and an episode of “The Twilight Zone” with her husband, science fiction author Steven Barnes.

But with “The Reformatory” — a novel set in the Jim Crow South made all the more terrifying because of its historic resonance — Due took it up a notch: NPR’s reviewer called the novel “one of the best novels published in 2023. A superb mix of literary fiction, horror and historical fiction, ‘The Reformatory’ tells a story of inequality, ghosts, abuse and the power of love between siblings.”

The book saw critical acclaim from The Washington Post, Library Journal, Kirkus and others, earning a Notable Book of the Year nod from the New York Times, and a Best Book mention from the American Library Association.

But as she told editor Erik Pedersen in The Book Pages newsletter, she nearly abandoned “The Reformatory”:

“I almost stopped writing “The Reformatory” when I heard that “The Nickel Boys” would be published. Colson Whitehead is one of my favorite writers, I knew it would be impactful (it won a Pulitzer!) and I didn’t think there would be room left for another novel fictionalizing the Dozier school. Luckily, my family and my agent encouraged me to keep writing.”

Héctor Tobar

“Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino’”

Pulitzer Prize-winning-journalist-turned-bestselling author Héctor Tobar is known for writing impactful prose. His two novels are “The Tattooed Soldier,” which follows a Guatemalan immigrant to LA during the 1992 riots, and “The Barbarian Nurseries,” about a Mexican woman working as a live-in maid in Orange County who must care for two young boys when their parents disappear. His book “Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle That Set Them Free,” was a bestseller that was adapted into the film “The 33.”

In 2023, Tobar, now a professor of English and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine, came out with the powerful nonfiction release, “Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino.’” The work expertly blends memoir, reportage, and cultural criticism to explore the essence of Latino identity. Critics raved: It won the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, was named one of Notable Books of 2023 by both Time and the New York Times, and was a Top 10 Book of 2023 at Chicago Public Library.

The book begins with a prologue addressed to his students at UCI. Tobar told our reviewer that he “felt the need to do something like what James Baldwin does in the beginning of ‘The Fire Next Time,’ or Ta-Nehisi Coates does in ‘Between the World and Me,’ addressing this younger generation.”

Henry Hoke

“Open Throat”

Writer Henry Hoke, who went to graduate school and later taught at the California Institute of the Arts, turned his fascination with the wild mountain lion known as P-22 into a slim but captivating novel inspired by the big cat: “Open Throat” follows a queer mountain lion as it lives in drought-devastated Los Angeles. and tries to understand the city’s humans.

The weird and haunting tale captured the imagination of critics far and wide, earning it a finalist spot for the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize and longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award. It was one of the Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Fiction and also one of The New York Times’ 10 Best California Books of 2023. Vanity Fair’s reviewer said, “This lyrical story of loneliness and kinship in Los Angeles is, by turns, delightful and melancholy — and inventive throughout.”

But perhaps the strangest part of the story is how the book got its title, as Hoke explained to our writer in The Book Pages newsletter: “Anthony Bourdain came to me in a dream and gave me my title. I was leaving a restaurant on Sullivan Street in Manhattan and he was leaning against a wall finishing a cigarette. He dropped it, stamped it out and said ‘By the way, your book’s called ‘Open Throat.’”

Ruth Madievsky

“All-Night Pharmacy”

A Los Angeles-based writer and graduate of USC’s pharmacy program, Ruth Madievsky had an idea for her debut novel. “I kind of thought I was writing a feminist ‘Jesus’ Son’ of the opioid epidemic,” said Madievsky. “That was the first thought that I had in 2014 when I was just out of undergrad, and like everyone else who took fiction classes, I wanted to write a Denis Johnson knockoff.”

But what she ended up with was a unique and propulsive tale about substance abuse and recovery and pain passed down through generations that became a nationwide bestseller — and won the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction. It also racked up other kudos, including a Shondaland Best Book of the Summer, a Best Debut of the Year by Chicago Review of Books and Goodreads’ Buzziest Debut Novel of the Year.

She told our reporter Liz Ohanesian that her day job as an HIV and primary care clinical pharmacist, where she spends a lot of time talking to people to try to help them find the right medication, ended up informing the novel in surprising ways: “That work to figure out people’s desires and what they need to live meaningfully, I think that was pretty helpful with constructing characters for the novel too.”

Mona Gable

“Searching for Savanna: The Murder of One Native American Woman and the Violence Against the Many”

Publishers Weekly called LA-based journalist Mona Gable’s nonfiction title a “shocking true crime saga” that draws attention to the widespread violence against Native American women by zeroing in on a single, gruesome case of it.

For that alone, this thoroughly researched and compellingly written work was notable to us.

The statistics are gut-wrenching, as we detailed in our coverage of Gable’s book: On some reservations, Native American women are murdered at more than 10 times the national average. Nearly one in three Native American and Alaska Native women will experience rape or attempted rape in their lifetime.

Gable — whose articles have been published in The Atlantic, Vogue and The Daily Beast, among others — has long reported on violence against women, but with “Searching for Savannah,” about the bizarre, unexplained disappearance of Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, a 22-year-old Indigenous woman in North Dakota who was eight months pregnant, the writer delved into the troubling problem of unsolved cases involving missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

“Once I really found out how widespread this violence is and how long it had been going on against Native American women, I really wanted that to be a central theme of the book rather than just, ‘Oh, look at this horrific murder,’” said Gable, whose paternal grandmother was a member of the Chickasaw Nation. “What really motivated me was trying to not just tell Savanna’s story but the larger story of other women and girls, and what Native American advocates are doing — and have been doing — to try and draw attention to this problem.”

That’s just what the Los Angeles Public Library, a storied institution in Southern California for more than 150 years, has taken on. The library system manages 73 branches in the Los Angeles area and is home to more than eight million books. And, as of December 2023, the library also became a publisher of them when it acquired Angel City Press.

After 30 years of ownership, Angel City Press co-founders Paddy Calistro and Scott McAuley announced their retirement and approached the library with an offer to donate the publishing operation to them. The library accepted, and Angel City Press at the Los Angeles Public Library was born.

City librarian John F. Szabo says Angel City Press’ tradition of highlighting the rich culture of Los Angeles will carry on under the library’s management.

“Angel City Press has been a local publisher of wonderful, high-quality, award-winning nonfiction books focused on the art, architecture, history and personalities of L.A. and Southern California since 1992,” says Szabo. “We recognize that their mission is a natural extension of our own: to amplify the voices of authors, celebrate their work and preserve their stories.”

This acquisition has been well received throughout publishing, Szabo says.

“Really, the response by the publishing world, as well as the literary world, the library world and Angelenos, has been great,” he adds. “People are especially excited that the Los Angeles Public Library will not only be a place where people can check out books, but a place where new books will be written, shared and celebrated.”

As a publisher, they intend to stand out among presses of similar size, Szabo says.

“Our plan is to remain true to our core strengths: to spotlight L.A.’s diverse tapestry of people, places, art, history and trends that have captivated the world. We’re committed to preserving L.A. history, and we get excited about telling untold stories of L.A., too. Angel City Press at the Los Angeles Public Library will continue to do that through books that help shape our understanding of Los Angeles. We want readers to experience L.A. through the eyes of others.”

They have big plans for their upcoming lineup of books, says editorial director Terri Accomazzo, who retains her position under the library’s new management of the press.

Several new releases are on its 2024 schedule: a book about the lost communities of Terminal Island; a history of the Santa Monica Pier; a book about California’s heritage landscapes; an essay collection of California writers; books about the New Wave community and the Vietnamese Diaspora; and a look at the art and style of mid-century American bowling culture.

More information on its offerings is available at Angel City Press.

Since leaving a successful career in finance, the Encinitas-based Reich has penned 15 novels and is no stranger to the New York Times bestseller list. His newest release, “Matterhorn,” hit the shelves April 1. We had the chance to catch up with him for a Q and A about his latest release, some of his past work and his writing process.

Q: Many writers in the thriller genre tend to “stay in their lane,” following the old Mark Twain adage “write what you know.” Some stick to the spy and espionage thriller, the legal thriller, or cop/law enforcement characters. You come from a background in banking and finance, a common thread in many of your books. However, you often veer from your lane with characters that range from doctor to former thief. What inspires you to come up with such diverse characters, and what research do you engage in to realistically portray these characters? 

A: I agree with Mark Twain. My first novel, “Numbered Account,” was a financial thriller based on my time working at the Union Bank of Switzerland, in Geneva and Zurich. But I quickly discovered that, for me, the most enjoyable part of writing is the research involved, the chance to learn about other professions, other ways of life. After all, how many stories can you tell with a Swiss banker as the hero?

One of my heroes, Jonathan Ransom, is a physician working for Doctors Without Borders, an organization I’ve always admired. Right off the bat, he fulfills a lot of the requirements for a fictional hero — smart, accomplished, responsible, with a specific skill set. Simon Riske, another of my characters, is an expert mechanic restoring and selling vintage Ferraris for a small fortune. Again, he is really good at something. He’s capable, he’s independent and he commands respect.

For both of these guys, the fun part was digging deep to teach myself as well as I could in two to three months all about their jobs. I visited the Doctors Without Borders headquarters in Geneva. I visited their field hospitals. For Riske, I spent time with Joe Macari, one of the world’s leading Ferrari experts, in London. That’s the juice. You need that excitement when you sit down for nine months to actually write the book!

Q: In your upcoming stand-alone release “Matterhorn,” we see an aging former CIA operative living a secluded life as a dairy farmer in Switzerland. Much of your youth was spent in Switzerland, and as the title suggests we see aspects of mountaineering woven into the plot. How did your past experiences inform the new book?

A: I spent much of my youth in Switzerland. I’m a Swiss citizen. My father, Willy Reich, was from Zurich and emigrated to the States in 1956. After earning my degree, I worked in Zurich and Neuchatel — first in banking, then in the watch industry — for eight years. Nearly every weekend, I’d take the train into the Alps to hike or to try my skills on some of the lesser peaks.

More specifically, I’ve always been fascinated by the Matterhorn. It is the most iconic, most recognizable peak in the world. I visited Zermatt for the first time when I was a teenager.  I’ll never forget my first sighting of the Matterhorn. It looms over the valley. It has a presence of its own, sometimes benevolent, sometimes threatening. Either way, it is captivating. It is a force of nature staring down at you. I think even then I imagined writing a story centering around this majestic peak.

Q: You have two series with recurring characters, Jonathan Ransom and Simon Riske, along with eight stand-alone novels. When you began the two series, did you write them knowing they would be a series or initially as a stand-alone that evolved into a series?

A: I began both books thinking with an eye toward creating a series. Readers enjoy revisiting their favorite characters year after year. I loved the Tom Clancy novels starring Jack Ryan, and more recently, Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon novels. As a writer, it’s fun to build out these characters’ universe, to create a new alternate reality.

Q: Matterhorn’s main character, Mac Dekker, has a daughter who seems to have followed in his footsteps in the world of the CIA. Is there a future for Mac’s daughter in your writing? Could another series be developing?

A: Absolutely. Mac’s daughter, Jane, is a chip off the old block. She’s a climber. She’s a spy. And she’s tough as nails. She’ll be back in my second Mac Dekker novel, “The Tourists,” in a big way. This one starts at the Michelin-starred restaurant Le Jules Verne in the Eiffel Tower … and then all hell breaks loose.

Q: All of your books have a diverse range of locations. This question is a sort of “chicken or the egg” question: Do you start with a location because of your past familiarity or do you come up with a location and then travel there to become familiar?

A: I always have a familiarity with a locale that inspires me to build a book around it. In “Matterhorn,” it’s the mountain itself. I’ve traveled to Zermatt many times and trained to climb it. My first attempt was interrupted by a freak snowstorm in July that closed the mountain for days. I’m going back this summer to take care of my unfinished business. Anyhow, I always thought that I had to tell a story that started and ended on the face of the Matterhorn. It’s just so damn thrilling up there.

These days, elite climbers can go up and down in two hours — without any ropes. Of course, one mistake and they will fall to their deaths. Imagine two spies, both world-class climbers, chasing each other up that mountain with guns in hand! My palms are already sweating!

Q: Let’s do the “If you were stranded on a desert island” final question — or, in your case, snowed in for the winter in a small cabin in the Alps. You can only have one book, one movie, one record and one bottle, what would they be?

Book: “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” by John Le Carre.

Movie: “The Bourne Supremacy.” It’s the gold standard.

Record: Beethoven’s “Emperor Piano Sonata.” It’s the soundtrack to all my novels!

Bottle: Passugger mineral water, from Switzerland, of course!

Christopher Reich will be speaking about “Matterhorn” on Thursday, April 18, at 6 p.m. at the Orange County Public Library Cypress Branch. The event is free and open to the public.

“Don’t waste any more time.”

Finding and developing material for major Hollywood movies, securing talent to tell the stories, and shepherding the creative process is a highly collaborative endeavor that Denise Di Novi is spectacularly familiar with. She’s produced more than 40 movies, including such screen gems as “Edward Scissorhands,” “Little Women,” “Batman Returns” and “Message In A Bottle.”

In contrast, the painting she has been creating is solitary work, perhaps sometimes only viewed by an audience of one, and not a venture in which millions of dollars are at stake.

Di Novi has been making art pieces for about four years, first picking up a magic marker when her husband died in March 2020.

“Creating art was the only time I felt OK,” she says, adding, “when people say ‘oh wow, you started out of nowhere,’ they’re missing something. I’ve been a filmmaker for over 30 years and it’s a visual art and I’m a creative producer. I could never work in a field that wasn’t creative; it’s the breath of life to me. So whatever form creativity takes, it’s what gives me fulfillment.”

Coinciding with her personal loss was the start of the Covid lockdowns. Her business life slowed, but working on canvas began to increasingly help with her grief. “So, I figured that maybe painting would help even more so. I got a bunch of paints and canvas and became obsessed. Painting after painting. No stopping. It saved my life.”

She wants people who aspire to creative expression to know that they don’t necessarily have to give up what they’re already doing. “There are ways to pivot without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I get up at 5 a.m. and paint, or do it at night instead of going out,” she says. “There are slower days I may have with my ‘regular’ work, so I’ll paint then or on weekends. Doing something new can give you your life back.”

As she delves ever deeper into her own work, her advice is this: “Do whatever you feel you’re going to regret if you don’t do it. Don’t waste any more time. And, whatever you do, don’t think it will be great unless you’re doing it for yourself first and it will have purity of intention and an authenticity that will attract other people.”

She recently switched from working with acrylics to combining them with oil paints and new, multilayered works are in the offing. “I am going to have a show, and share my story, not because I want to be a famous artist — though that would be nice — but because it could be helpful to people.”

Her latest screen venture, a TV spy thriller series called “The Veil,” starring Elizabeth Moss, will start airing soon on F/X. “I painted in my hotel room during the six months we were on location filming it.”

HELENKAY DIMON

“Before you make the jump, make sure you have a support system.”

Becoming a writer wasn’t a childhood dream for Helenkay Dimon. She wanted to be secretary of State. Instead, she became a divorce lawyer in Washington DC — and might have remained one if not for a cohort who advised that dealing with couples battling over custody and finances was not a career to expect happy endings from.

“He handed me three romance novels and they literally changed my life,” she says. “I started toying with writing romance novels because bringing people together sounded so much more appealing.”

She put divorce wars behind her in 2007. “Doing so gave me an opportunity to craft happy endings.” She cites those she’s crafted as the most fulfilling aspect of work that’s produced more than 40 books and novellas. “Creating a world in my head is something I really enjoy doing.”

Leaving her practice to immerse herself in what’s usually a financially unstable profession was less of a worry for her than it is for so many who undertake such a challenge.

“It wasn’t easy to walk away from a career that I had built; I had made partner before I left. But it was easy, in some ways, because my husband has a job with benefits and a steady income, so I didn’t have to worry about such questions as ‘how am I going to pay for insurance, how am I going to put food on the table?’ Before you make the jump, make sure you have a support system.”

Still, she didn’t leave the courtroom for a writing desk in one clean break. “I wrote my first three novels while still at the law firm,” she says, “writing from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.”

When her husband got a job offer in San Diego, prompting them to move from the East Coast, she didn’t take the California bar exam and that threw her, she recalls, “into the deep end of ‘I have an opportunity to try something new that’s really scary.’ Had I taken the bar, I probably would have continued to both lawyer and write and made sure I felt secure. After all, nobody tells you that after you get your publisher’s advance, you may have to wait 700 years before getting royalty checks.”

For those considering switching careers from the stable to one full of creative promise but also of high anxiety, she offers some practical advice. “Sometimes, with these career pivots, some of us who have made them are not as good as we should be about telling people that they have to be practical. Writing is a hard gig whether it’s screenwriting, writing a book, writing magazine articles. It’s constantly moving to get things out there. Nobody is waiting for your work.”

Dimon excels in getting things out. Fans can look to two new titles in 2025: one a rom-com written under her given name, the other a thriller using her nom de plume of Darby Kane. The screen adaptation of her first Kane title, “Pretty Little Wife,” is currently in development at Amazon Studios.

W. BRUCE CAMERON

“The secret to my success is failure.”

He’s not a psychic, but when author W. Bruce Cameron sits down to write he already knows the last word he’s going to spell out. He meticulously outlines and sets up every story he tells. But Cameron’s writing career, which includes more than 38 published books, did not start out so well-planned.

He spent 15 post-college years climbing up the corporate ladder of General Motors. “I quit GM to go off on an entrepreneurial streak, burning and blowing up about seven companies just learning how different life is when you’re not working for the world’s largest corporation but rather for yourself.”

There were partner issues. Of course, no such problems were in his way when, as a middle-aged man, he went to work for himself, putting pen to paper.

It’s not that writing was new for him. As a kid, reading popular books, he announced he would write a New York Times best-seller one day. That utterance was prophetic, but the prophecy would not materialize for decades. “I wrote my first book in college, but I knew it was going to be terrible.” That didn’t stop him nor, during his GM years, did writing eight books that went unpublished. “The secret to my success,” he says, “is failure.”

He became a newspaper columnist after finishing another unpublished book and deciding that no one was ever going to publish him. “I was trying to come up with whatever would sell, and nothing would. Then I decided I would just write for myself; it turned out that I was funny.”

A sample of his humor made it to an editor of The Rocky Mountain News, and it became syndicated as “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter.” Its success led to development as a TV series which prompted his move to Los Angeles to work on the show.

His 13th book, “A Dog’s Purpose,” spawned a trilogy that reached best-selling status and two movies. A cascade of other books (adult, young adult, and children’s books) followed.

For those considering leaving their corporate (or other “regular” jobs) to become full-time writers, Cameron has some advice. “Throttle back so you don’t work from 9 to 5, give yourself space to breathe, and then recognize you may never make a dime doing it.”

Fulfillment, he ponders, may well take motivation not reliant on success but on one’s own healthy ego. “If you can find satisfaction and stand back from your work and be able to say I don’t care if anyone buys it, I’m really happy with it — then there you go, that’s the fulfillment. I am forcing myself to recognize that fulfillment comes from having finished a project that I really enjoyed writing.”

His prodigious output is not about to slow down. There’s a new title coming out in August, and another in October. He’s recently finished yet another book, about zombies, and is well on the way to doing something his agent isn’t advising: “I am trying to reinvent the monster genre for YA readers.”

MARY CAMARILLO

“Be an energetic networker.”

With her high school years marked by writing poetry, editing the school’s literary magazine and contemplating publishing an underground newspaper, one might think that Huntington Beach’s Mary Camarillo would have gone off to college with pencils sharpened, a bit of a revolutionary’s fire in her heart, and the dream of a writing career firmly affixed in her mind. “But I was more concerned about security at the time,” she says.

She waited decades, until she retired at 60, before dedicating herself to fiction writing.

The author of two novels — 2021’s “The Lockhart Women” and “Those People Behind Us,” which was published this past October — went to work at the post office instead of going to college. “I didn’t plan on making a career there, but I stayed for many reasons. The benefits are generous, there were 10 paid holidays and, eventually, five weeks of vacation.”

She married a coworker, went to night school, got a degree in business administration, a CPA license, and a certificate in Internal Auditing while moving up the ladder at the mail service’s Office of the Inspector General.

“I did a lot of writing and editing of audit reports, and that weirdly gave me the idea to try my hand at fiction. I noticed similarities. Audit reports concern a problem and require identifying cause and effect, as in why the bad thing happened and who the heck cares?”

Camarillo is currently at work on her third novel, with about 40,000 words written so far. Realizing that a lot of them will get cut, she says, “I can’t add much more about it yet other than it will be about people who have a problem. The fiction I like to read and write is about people who make bad decisions and have problems.”

Considering what brings her fulfillment, Camarillo harks back to her childhood which is when she realized she was in awe of creative people. “Actors, poets, designers, people who make things that are beautiful, especially people who make music. So, discovering that I can write stories makes me feel that I am at least a tiny part of a bigger world. And that is very fulfilling; it’s thrilling to me.”

For those looking to switch careers that will take them from the steadfastness of a secure job to what sometimes feels like the freefall (or ascent) that is the writer’s life, Camarillo advises to be “a good literary citizen. And what I mean by that is you need to read, you need to write reviews, show up at readings, support your local bookstore, be a champion for your library, start a book club. Be an energetic networker.”

All of that has worked for her in terms of the business of writing. As for what advice she can offer about what’s needed to write a book, “It’s all about perseverance. And stubbornness. When I get stuck, I go for a walk. It always seems to help.”

MONICA EDWARDS

“You’ve got to try it, or you’ll never know.”

This summer, when Monica Edwards gets into the driver’s seat of her Sprinter van, she’ll truly be taking destiny into her own hands. Customized into a mobile art studio, it will be headed around the country on a trip that gives deep meaning to the term “joy ride.” When her hands are not on the steering wheel, they’ll be grasping paints and wielding brushes as she gazes out of the parked van’s slid-back door, taking in the color and light which this much-honored plein air (outdoor) painter thrives on.

Edwards, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer about a year and a half ago, is not fixated on her illness but is excited to embark on an ultimate road trip. “My days always start with meditation and a prayer,” she says. And then they’re spent in a fervor of inspiration and creativity.

Segueing from a 14-year career in info-graphic design with the Orange County Register to that of a full-time artist included some unusual stops. The advent of the internet changed the nature of her newspaper job, prompting her to get as far from computers as she could. Follow-up work included animal caretaking at Disneyland, goat wrangling at the OC Zoo, tour guiding in Alaska and even, briefly, that of a flight attendant. “But I finally made it back to my first love, art.”

Commercial art had been her calling. While pursuing a BFA at Cal State Long Beach, she supported herself with freelance medical filmstrip, children’s book, and courtroom graphics gigs as well as a job at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium. Her passion for plein air painting began in 2000, when after leaving her newspaper job, a friend gifted her with an easel and a book about the genre.

“I dabbled. I loved it, but to get good, you really need to dedicate time. About six years ago, I decided I would give myself 100% to this passion. In the past few years, I’ve had the pleasure of many noteworthy ‘wins’ and exhibitions, and the passion for painting only increases every day.”

The question of what constitutes fulfillment for her turns her cheerily philosophical. The artist, whose work has been seen at Laguna Beach’s Art-A-Fair and Festival of the Arts, and is currently exhibited at Studio 7 in Laguna Beach and Costa Mesa’s Randy Higbee Gallery, says “that just putting two colors together makes my head spin in a way that makes me giddy. It can be the simplest aesthetic values that bring me complete joy. And what’s to say that that has lesser value than trying to express some conceptual, real truism?”

She advises those considering making art a full-time pursuit to get their overhead down.

“Know why you want to do it; is it going to serve you in the long run or is it just a whim. On the other hand, you’ve got to try it, or you’ll never know. Give yourself a deadline, perhaps. And if you like living indoors, you better have a Plan B,” she says with a mischievous but sweet laugh.

I never met Strand, though I saw him read back in 1999. That was the year I spent making deliriously bad poetry. I didn’t realize how bad it was at the time. I only knew that prose had become an insufficient vehicle for my genius; this was why my short stories kept getting rejected.

I was depressed and lonely, scrambling between adjunct teaching gigs driving a pale green Tercel with a rusted undercarriage that would eventually shed a wheel in traffic. Every Thursday, I drove to a hipster bar and abused the open mic. I haunted local readings, vibrating with angst and stabbing insights onto a napkin because I couldn’t be bothered to buy a notebook.

That was when I was feeling ambitious. Mostly, I got stoned and watched movies at the second-run theater in Davis Square. I’d coat my arteries in Milk Duds, then walk outside into the silence of who I was.

How wretched was my poetry, really?

Owed to Water

It is said the ocean forgets everything

forgets the lash of lightning and the stones

it grinds to sand and the planks it swallows

without joy or renunciation

OK?

I wasn’t ready to write about what was actually happening in my life. So I ravaged Roget’s Thesaurus and bound the resulting dreck into a manuscript titled, unpretentiously, “Seven Essential Dreams.”

My dad suggested therapy. I hated him for it, then went to see a psychiatrist who reminded me, a little, of my mother (also a psychiatrist) and who informed me, after our first session, that she didn’t have room for me in her schedule. I staggered onto the sidewalk and burst into tears. As if in a dream, or a bad poem, one of my students appeared. We both had to pretend it wasn’t happening, that she would not now race back to campus to inform the rest of the class.

Around this time, my mother flew to Boston for a series of interviews that represented the final exam of her psychoanalytic training. At dinner one night, I mentioned that I’d been writing poetry. “I once dated a poet,” she murmured. “A million years ago, at Antioch. Do you know Mark Strand?”

“Mark Strand,” I said. “Oh my God! Are you serious? I just saw him read.” And so on.

I had long since renounced the practice of showing her my pain. For years, I’d been playing the role of her charming youngest son, the one trying to be a writer across the country. But having her in town, right across the table, awakened an ancient desperation. I wanted her to comfort me. My brain has spared me a reliable memory of that meal. I remember only that I started to cry.

“I’m sorry you’re struggling, Stevie,” she said. “But I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

I hate telling you this. I hate that it happened. My mother was the person I loved most in the world. She was the person whose devotion to literature had become my own. She was also tired of caring for needy, self-absorbed men. The point isn’t that she was a bad mom. The point is that we had no idea, in that particular moment of torment, how to reach each other. We were lost in private orbits of doubt.

**

That’s my central feeling when I begin writing: doubt. I haven’t quite worked out what the story is about. I have, at most, a few stray associations, a fragment of dialogue, the faint outlines of a plot.

Even as I learn more about my characters, as their dreams and fears begin to coalesce, I often conceal this data from the reader because I experience this withholding as a form of authority.

A reader mired in doubt, after all, is in no position to judge me.

There are, of course, other reasons that I foist doubt upon the reader. I forget that the reader isn’t me, doesn’t have access to my memories, hasn’t been along for the journey of discovery. I’m wary of the pain I might encounter and concerned about exposing my private tribulations, or those of my beloveds. Whatever the reasons, the result is the same: I mire the reader in my confusion, rather than that of my characters.

I’m not the only one making this category error. As the fiction editor of a literary magazine, I rejected 90 percent of our submissions for the simple reason that they were needlessly confusing.

To be clear: the stories we tell (if they are honest) should be full of doubt. We, as a species, are full of doubt. In fact, our deepest stories arise from our bewilderment. They represent a productive engagement with that bewilderment — a creative struggle to understand and make meaning from our destructive impulses, our disappointments and delusions, our unresolved traumas, the vaults of mayhem we calmly drag around.

**

In ninth grade, my English teacher, a brilliant ham by the name of Jim Farrell, read us the first chapter of “The Catcher in the Rye.” I was hypnotized by the voice of Holden Caulfield, at once sly and bereft.

Mostly, I loved how honest Holden was about his own confusion. He wasn’t on some epic quest to process his nervous breakdown. He was simply having it, on the page, hurtling through his lost weekend in New York City, offending the phonies, fretting over the ducks in Central Park, sobbing before his little sister.

To write so openly about doubt struck me as a revolutionary act. I had spent years hiding my own, mistaking uncertainty for weakness.

We’re all the same way. We present to the world a version of ourselves brimming with assurance, free of anguish, in control. We know it’s a lie, but we see everyone else participating in that lie; the result is a vast and insoluble loneliness.

As writers, we have to allow our characters to stumble, to fail, to wander off the trail and into bewilderment. We have to stop regarding our own misspent years as personal failures.

Yes, we were drinking too much, ruining friendships, hurling our bodies before our hearts. Yes, we were unable to get out of bed. Yes, we got fired, got dumped, got arrested, got hospitalized. Yes, we needed help. But we were also, in the midst of all that, deeply alive. Pathetic as we might have seemed from the outside, we were working to change, to grow, to forgive.

I see that now: all the work I was doing during my year of bad poetry. I was sad and isolated and creatively confused. But I wrote every day.

Years later, I would convert some of my bad poems into extremely short stories, which they had been, all along. Hiding behind even the worst of my poems was a true story I wasn’t ready to tell yet, usually a story about how confused I was, how ashamed, how lost.

We always turn away from unbearable feelings. We want to feel sure of ourselves. We want to skip the part of the story where the hero falls apart. But that’s the story the reader wants to hear, the one only another human being in pain can tell them.

Excerpt from “Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories,” by Steve Almond. Copyright @2024 by Steven Almond. Used by permission of Zando, zandoprojects.com. All rights reserved.

“A lot of people think of it as a highbrow occupation,” says Cati Porter, executive director for Inlandia Institute, which serves the Inland Empire with a bounty of writing workshops and literary events. But, she adds, reading and writing are essential skills, and we all do a lot more of it than we realize.

It’s also quite possible that there’s a story in your head that needs to exist on paper. You may have dreams of it being on the bestseller list — or publishing may not be your goal, but your family and friends might cherish your stories. You might even want to re-read yourself someday.

Yet as anyone who’s tried it knows, the act of writing down what’s on your mind isn’t as easy a task as it seems. That’s where writing groups can come in handy. You can connect with more experienced writers who understand what can be a frustrating, if not rewarding process. You also work alongside a group of people who can hold you accountable to meet goals, like “this week, I will write 2,000 words.”

Within a group of writers, you can find support that can help when you’re working on your own.

“Writing is such a solitary endeavor,” says mystery author Maddie Margarita. “So much is going out onto the page that, for me, I need to look for something that fills me back up. No matter how many times I hear different writers talk on the same topic, I always hear something that I can take and use on my writing to improve my writing.”

Margarita also is president of the Orange County chapter of Sisters in Crime and vice president of Southern California Writers Association. “I get a lot of satisfaction helping other writers, particularly newer writers or writers who may or may not have the confidence to publish,” she says.

If you think the bar for entry into a writing circle is that you must already be a published author or in an academic program, you’re wrong. Many organizations throughout Southern California offer programming for writers of all levels. These include creative literacy workshops for youth and adults, specialized sessions for writers looking to finish specific projects and talks led by noteworthy authors.

Depending on the organization, programs might be free or low cost. Below, we’ve highlighted five literary organizations with a range of events. If these groups don’t fit your needs, check with your local library, which may offer writing workshops as well, or with a local bookstore.

Beyond Baroque

Beyond Baroque began as an experimental literary magazine. Today, though, it is perhaps Los Angeles’ best-known hub for poets and writers. Exene Cervenka and John Doe of the now-iconic punk band X met there. Amanda Gorman, the United States’ first National Youth Poet Laureate, is an alumni of the Student Poets’ Program and now the namesake of Beyond Baroque’s Future Poetry Prize. Wanda Coleman, the late “unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles,” took part in the Wednesday night poetry workshop, which celebrates its 55th anniversary this year.

And those are just a few of the many noted writers to come through the doors. For as star-studded as the history of Beyond Baroque is — the Venice venue has welcomed everyone from Allen Ginsberg to Patti Smith to Viggo Mortensen — it is remarkably accessible.

There are two weekly workshops. In addition to the famed Wednesday night poetry workshop, there’s one on Monday nights dedicated to fiction led by Raquel Baker. Facilitators for the Wednesday night workshop rotate every four months. Anyone can attend these sessions.

“You can be a seasoned, published poet or you could be very green and just learning about poetry,” says Jimmy Vega, associate director of Beyond Baroque. These “community-focused” sessions are also free.

Since the pandemic, that community has expanded geographically. Both weekly workshops are still held on Zoom. “When we were offering the workshop in ’21 and leading into ’22, we used to have folks from all over the country, really, attend,” says Vega. Not only that, he recalls seeing participants from France and the Philippines as well.

“I think keeping it online was something that we wanted to do because it allowed a wider net of folks to participate,” Vega says of keeping the workshops online even after the Venice location reopened. “We wanted to have that stability for some of the writers in those workshops to still participate online and also give them opportunities to come back to the Venice workshops to take part in master classes.”

Intensives typically take place on weekends, focus on specific subjects and range in price. Beyond Baroque has a calendar filled with special events, from book launches to performances to art exhibits in the Mike Kelly Gallery. They’re also home to a bookstore, which boasts the largest selection of poetry in the city.

Beyond Baroque, 681 N. Venice Blvd., Venice; 310-822-3006; info@beyondbaroque.org.

C.A.S.A. Zamora

Inside El Monte’s Zamora Park, a new hub for art, history and community is taking shape. C.A.S.A. (Culture, Archive, Solidarity, Action) Zamora is a project from the South El Monte Arts Posse and co-directed by historian Romeo Guzman and author Carribean Fragoza that highlights local history and literature while encouraging people to create.

The house itself is home to exhibit spaces, plus rooms where their resident artists and writers can work. There’s an archive that came together as Guzman and Fragoza were working on the book “East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte,” plus tools people can use to build their own archives. Additionally, C.A.S.A. Zamora has a lending library that spotlights a cross-genre selection of works by writers from El Monte. “It’s curated to highlight the knowledge and stories that we think are important to tell,” says librarian Pedro Mariano Gonzalez.

As for programming, workshops for youth and adults tap into writing in all its forms. The space opened in late 2023 with a youth filmmaking workshop. Theater and comics workshops are likely in the future. This April, Fragoza — the 2023 winner of the Whiting Literary Award and whose short story collection “Eat the Mouth That Feeds You” was a PEN Award finalist — will be leading a bilingual, all-ages writing workshop.

For events like writing workshops, they’re planning to have activities prepared for children of the participants. “Something that we’re very cognizant of is trying to create opportunities for parents, particularly mothers, to be able to do the workshops without having to worry about childcare or what their kids are going to do while they’re attending this workshop,” says Guzman.

In a twist on the usual workshop format, C.A.S.A. Zamora is planning soccer events where people can engage in talk about subjects beyond sports, including the arts. It’s a way of making the tools and support for storytelling accessible to everyone in the neighborhood.

“I think the project, at its core … comes from the fact that [Fragoza] is a fiction writer. I’m a historian,” says Guzman. “Our biggest engagement with this community has been writing a history of it.”

He adds that the C.A.S.A. approach of focusing on literature is “centering the stories of people, really centering a collective ownership to a place that’s not based on capitalism or property, that’s based on stories and attachment to place.”

C.A.S.A. Zamora, Zamora Park, 3820 Penn Mar Ave., El Monte; 3820pennmar@gmail.com; instagram.com/semartsposse

Inlandia Institute

“The Inland Empire has a lot of people who have an interesting story to tell and they just need a little guidance and that mutual support,” says Porter, executive director of the Inlandia Institute.

Back in 2006, the anthology “Inlandia: A Literary Journey Through California’s Inland Empire” sparked enough excitement to lead to the founding of Inlandia Institute the following year. Today, the organization boasts programming for writers of all ages, from Creative Literacy for Children to a variety of events for adults that includes workshops at senior centers.

“We want to nurture writers of all levels. It starts when you’re young, but it never ends,” says Porter. “Everybody has a story and we encourage everyone to write their story and think about who their audience might be, even if it’s just family.”

With workshops available for all levels of writers, you don’t need to be considering a career pivot to sign up for one of them. “Not everybody wants to write and become a published author,” says Porter. “Some people just want to write because it feels good to express ourselves. It helped a lot of people during the COVID years.”

For those who do want to publish their work, Inlandia has the annual Hillary Gravendyk Prize for poetry books and the Eliud Martínez Prize for books of fiction or creative nonfiction by Hispanic, Latino/a/x or Chicano/a/x writers. The organization also has an online literary journal and its own book publishing imprint.

“There really is a thriving literary community here and we have worked to develop that, to give people a home so that they don’t have to drive all the way to L.A. for an author talk,” says Porter. “There weren’t very many writing workshops before Inlandia came into existence in this area.”

The Inland Empire is also a physically large region, diverse in both geography and population. Inlandia also tries to address this diversity in their programming. Although headquartered in Riverside, Inlandia includes workshop leaders who are based in cities like Landers and Rancho Mirage. “Because of the nature of Zoom, we’re able to offer these workshops with these kinds of writers to anybody with an internet connection,” says Porter.

All this is to help bring forth the stories of the region. “We encourage people to share their stories because we can learn from each other, and that’s one of our main goals is to learn from each other,” says Porter.

If you want to get involved with Inlandia, follow them on your preferred social media channel or head over to their website for more information.

Inlandia Institute 951-790-2458; inlandia@inlandiainstitute.org

Sisters in Crime

Although it began as a group to uplift women crime writers, Sisters in Crime is open to all who love telling, or even just reading, mysteries and thrillers. Author Maddie Margarita joined the Orange County chapter of the national organization six years ago and now serves as president. The group meets on the fourth Sunday of the month at Book Carnival in Orange where they’ll hear from guest speakers on various subjects related to writing and publishing in the genre. Past guests include Naomi Hirahara, Wendall Thomas and Matt Coyle.

“Coming to the meetings is aspirational as well as inspirational,” says Margarita. “I’ve seen readers who are interested in just loving mysteries and reading them be tempted and inspired to start writing and publish their own work. That’s rewarding.”

For those who have stories they would like to release into the world, Sisters in Crime is there to support writers as they submit to publishers. They are also able to provide resources for those looking to self-publish, whether writers need info on how to format their books or are learning how to build a brand.

For members, there are more resources available through the Sisters in Crime network online, including an archive of webinars, forums, online events and book clubs.

Before you join, Margarita suggests checking out a meeting or two. “Not every group is for every person,” she notes. Plus, she adds, the meetings at Book Carnival are free to attend.

Sisters in Crime Orange County, P.O. Box 2102 Newport Beach, CA 92659; sistersincrimeoc@gmail.com.

Southern California Writers Association

Southern California Writers Association is open to writers of all levels; its members tend to come from Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego. They meet in person in Orange County, on the third Saturday of every month from 9:30 a.m. until 1:30 p.m.

“People talk about their books and challenges,” says Margarita, who serves as vice president of the Southern California chapter.

Meetings also include guest speakers from across genres of writing. Past guests have included horror and fantasy author Jonathan Mayberry, crime writer Rachel Howzell Hall and screenwriter/novelist Dete Meserve. Members of Southern California Writers Association also have access to online chat groups and workshops.

The response was overwhelming, and even though the Getty eventually compiled its favorite entries into a book, winning the challenge was never the point. The point was to show the therapeutic benefits of art.

Four years later, getting a regular dose of creativity could still be the ticket for improving your mental health.

“Coming out of the pandemic now, I think we’re all still recovering,” says Orange County-based art therapist Erica Curtis, who also is the author of several books on the benefits of art therapy, particularly for parents and children.

“Even though we’re not in the same state of crisis, there are still a lot of reverberations,” Curtis adds. “It’s still a time to pay attention to our mental health, our emotional health, and our social health. Creativity is a really accessible and non-stigmatized way we can do all that, regardless of age.”

Art therapy vs. therapeutic art

Curtis stresses that “therapeutic art” and “art therapy” are not interchangeable terms.

Art therapy is a specialized branch of psychology, and art therapists are trained and board certified. Their training is quite specific, Curtis explains, noting that she is not certified to provide all forms of art therapy.

In fact, art therapy first became known as a professional discipline in the 1940s. Artist Adrian Hill coined the term in England in 1942. Psychologist Margaret Naumburg helped establish the field in the United States, leading many to call her the “mother of art therapy.”

Naumburg had previously worked with pioneering educators Maria Montessori and John Dewey.

The early 1940s, with WWII raging, were also marked by crisis. So it may not be surprising that people started turning to the emotional solace of the arts. In intervening years, art therapy has become a staple treatment for improving mental health in populations that for various reasons get isolated from larger society, such as people with cognitive and mobile disabilities in care facilities, or people in prison.

But that doesn’t mean society at large can’t benefit, and during COVID, we all got to experience what it was like to be shut out of the world, and what a relief it was to connect with others. Making and sharing art can be a rewarding way to make that connection.

Keeping the momentum going is the challenge, Curtis says.

Area offerings

Apart from accessing the services of the many certified therapists operating in Southern California (to find one, the American Art Therapy Association can help, at arttherapy.org) several groups across Southern California are offering therapeutic art programs to the public, and many are free.

In Santa Monica, The Arts and Healing Initiative has organized everything from drumming circles to creative writing seminars to painting classes, both in person and online.

“It’s about making art without judgment, without the expectation of mastery,” said founder and director Ping Ho. She’s also co-author with Curtis on “The Innovative Parent: Raising Connected, Happy, Successful Kids through Art.”

The Initiative started in 2004, and, along with offering classes and events to the public, it also gives individuals, often educators, the opportunity to start their own therapeutic art programs by offering access to professional development training.

“Our approach is to empower people to do this in their own community,” Ho said, adding that the Initiative has worked with several school districts, including Long Beach and Santa Monica-Malibu, and has not only encouraged teachers there to embrace therapeutic art, but also students, who she said have blossomed as a result.

The Initiative has also worked with area museums, such as LACMA and the Getty, to develop interactive programs that make art more immersive and personal. A recent project is “Mood Journeys” offered by the Getty, which lets attendees tailor their visit by taking guided tours that feature art that corresponds to feelings, including “Calm and Serene” and “Melancholy and Wistful.”

Back to the Initiative’s therapeutic art classes, offerings are still online, but Ho hopes this will change soon. She said she is a particular fan of the drumming classes, and while the online versions are perfectly acceptable, there is something about the energy and connection of being in the same room, the power of the sound, “and the laughter.”

People 60 and older in Orange County can feel that personal connection all this year, thanks to the Council on Aging, which is offering a series of in-person classes in various cities, on everything from quilting to painting to flower arranging.

The program — called “My Colors. My Mind. My Life.” — was first launched in 2020, said Sara Kim, a licensed social worker and the clinical manager of the Council’s Behavioral Health and Wellness Department, and was an attempt to help seniors improve their mental health through art.

Unfortunately, the in-person classes had to stop when the lockdowns started, but were soon offered online instead.

The Council renewed its grant this year (spurred by department director Carolina Gutierrez-Richau, who also wrote the 2020 grant). Classes have already begun, and are not just offered in English, but also in Spanish, Vietnamese and Korean, since seniors in those populations may have a harder time accessing services due to the language barrier and cultural beliefs about mental health.

“The focus is to reduce the stigma,” Kim said. “Art classes are a safe space, a form of expression.”

In May, the Council will be displaying selected works from classes on bus shelters across the county, like they previously did in 2020.

“It’s specifically in May,” Kim said, adding that that month is not just Mental Health Awareness Month, but also Older Americans Month. The bus shelter displays will include information about how to access the program. In the meantime, those interested in taking a class should call the Council at 714-352-8820.

For those younger than 60 who need art, not just in OC but all over Southern California, there are plenty of free and lower-cost options available.

Many museums have free admission all the time, or on specific days of the month. In Los Angeles County, discoverlosangeles.com offers a list of times and days for everything from the Los Angeles Arboretum to the Museum of Latin American Art to LACMA. Socalmuseums.org offers information for museums in the region.

As for classes and events, a number of places in Los Angeles County — including the Armory Arts Center in Pasadena, LACMA and the LA Department of Parks and Recreation — have options. Those looking in Orange County should check out artsoc.org, while Riverside area residents should look at riversideca.gov.

There is, of course, still the online option. Free art classes abound on YouTube and other streaming services, from local museums, and also ones abroad, with many featuring virtual tours.

Credit for this goes to Google, which during the pandemic years partnered with several thousand art institutions to offer the Google Arts and Culture program. Some famous venues, including the Louvre Museum in Paris, also struck out on their own.

“I thought, during the pandemic, the museums really stepped up, the museums came into our homes,” said Karen North, a social and clinical psychologist, and the creator of the University of Southern California Annenberg’s master’s in Digital Social Media program.

An expert on social media, North said social media was a platform for artists to share their work with the public long before COVID-19. While she is not prepared to say that the pandemic, aided by social media, has increased the public’s interest in therapeutic art (no formal studies have been done on the topic), she acknowledged that many individuals on Instagram, TikTok and other platforms have increased awareness about the importance of mental health.

“Personally, I give credit to the influencers,” North said. “Influencers were talking about how stressed they were. Influencers become thought leaders. We’re all online, and we’re all struggling. There’s been a real movement.”

So yes, while getting out of the house to experience, or make, some art is great for your mental health, getting on the Internet should not be discounted as a viable tool for doing the same.

“There’s so much criticism of the digital world,” North said, adding that much of that criticism is fair. “The thing I find so heartening about the digital world is we’re now in a world where, if you have an interest, the digital world provides you an interest. We now have a way to connect.”

And, at the end of the day, isn’t connection the point of art?

Whatever mental image you have of a death doula, Alua Arthur, a 45-year-old Ghanaian-American with long locs and an infectious, megawatt smile is not that. Her very presence—commanding, confident, ebullient—feels like a celebration of being.

In her engaging new book “Briefly Perfectly Human,” which hits bookstores on April 14, Arthur, who lives in Los Angeles, explains why ignoring death ultimately deprives us of an essential understanding of life.  “…[T]he idea of death is a seed. When that seed is carefully tended, life grows like wildflowers in its place.  The only thing that is in our control is how we choose to engage with our mortality once we become aware of it.”

What is a death doula, and why would somebody need one?

A death doula is someone who provides holistic non-medical care and support of the dying person and the circle of support through the process. The time of dying is such a complex and painful time where one has to manage not only their emotions around the death, but also a lot of practicalities beyond the physical needs of the dying person. Having someone who is kind, compassionate, and knowledgeable to journey with you can be tremendously supportive.

Was there a particular event or series of events in your life that inspired you to become a death doula?

I practiced law for almost a decade at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. During that time, I became clinically depressed and took a leave of absence from work. During that leave, I traveled to Cuba, where I met a young woman on the bus with uterine cancer. She was a fellow traveler who wanted to see her top six places in the world before she died — Cuba was one of them. we spent a good portion of our 14-hour journey together talking about death — mine and hers. She had not been able to express a lot of her concerns around her dying before because when she would mention it, the people in her life would ask her to focus on hope instead. They made no space for her concerns about her death as though it wasn’t going to happen one day, even if not from this disease. It seemed like a form of existential gaslighting. Sitting in our shared mortality on the bus, the world opened up for me.  I thought about my death and began to reconcile that the life that I had was not the one I wanted by virtue of considering my death.

Six months after I came back from Cuba, my brother-in-law became ill. Four months later, the doctors could not treat for his illness anymore. I got to support him through the last two months of his life and it changed me. I witnessed firsthand what I had glimpsed on the bus with my friend in Cuba. I saw how lonely it was to be dying and also felt how lonely it was to be somebody in the circle of support. I understood instinctively that this was happening to thousands of people across the globe, but it felt like we were the only ones. I would have given anything to have someone there to answer questions, to bear witness, to let us know when we were doing it right, and to offer suggestions for when we weren’t. Someone to support us thru the practicalities so I could focus on my grief. And since I didn’t have the support when I wanted it, I decided to offer it to other people.

How can we, collectively as a culture, change our relationship with death?

Acknowledging that it happens helps! Creating space for us to talk about it, and to talk about our fears of death without shunning these big conversations is a great way for us to begin moving the needle toward societal death acceptance. We also need to not hide things that we fear or the conversations that make us uncomfortable. Most of the people I know have a fear of death. By virtue of the work I do, it creates space for people to discuss it. But if not for this work, it generally isn’t a space ripe enough for people to share what’s on their hearts. I know I never did. Just because we don’t talk about it doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen. It just means that we will be ill prepared when the time comes. We need to get away from this idea of emotions as good or bad and right and wrong, but rather give ourselves the freedom to experience the breadth of the human experience — which, for some includes a fear of death. And that’s OK! It’s not something to have to get over or to fix, but rather to acknowledge, and to find ways to learn from our fear of death, to see what it has to teach us about our lives.

We also need to change our relationship to and adoration of youth. This means societally, we tend to shun getting older which makes aging, and thus death as the enemy. It is not the enemy. Aging is a gift.

How do you process the loss and grief at the end of each journey you take with a client?

I notice that I eat a lot of Kettle potato chips! Something about the fat, salt, and crunch soothes me. It also reminds me to stay in my body— that’s where grief lives. And that’s where it begins. From there I can allow whatever is coming up to come up and not push any of the big feelings away. I do my best to give myself grace for the process because grief looks like a whole lot of things, not just sadness and tears. Sometimes it is anger or irritability, and sometimes it’s experiencing gratitude for being alive and instant guilt that I’m not sad at that moment.  I grieve with my clients, but I also grieve for them. Often, by the time they are dying, I have gotten to know them quite well, and it hurts when they die. I also feel grateful to have sat and honor at the end of their lives.

Is there a final wish or regret that you’ve heard often in the course of your experiences as a death doula?

Without a doubt, the biggest regret people seem to have at the end of their lives is about how they spent the time that they had. So many people spend their lives bowing to societal expectations and ideas other people have of who they are and what they should do with their lives. And then they reach the end wishing that they had done something else or had stayed more true to themselves. We can do ourselves a favor now, spending our time in ways that satisfy us. You must live your own life because you will die your own death.

What lessons, if any, about life have you learned from your work with people who are approaching death?

That we are still here!

In a voice vulnerable and sincere, a person identified only as @SeekingPlumb describes her journey from growing up hyper-religious to making her way into a strange, illusive community in Los Angeles, how she met her first and forbidden love, and how she learned who she really was, despite the “weird culty stuff.”

“Hey, I’m also really fascinated by this. It could be a memoir or a movie…” @garyplaysbone replies in a smooth, curious tone, sparking a lively and intimate conversation.

This conversation is among thousands happening right now on Swell, a new-ish social media app designed specifically for people who want to share personal stories, and for those who want to listen.

Designed as a voice-to-voice platform — no dancing videos, no viral memes — Swell is set up for people to find niche communities via short audio recordings, none longer than five minutes. When you sign up for the free app, you’re given what they call a “Swellcast” to begin recording and discussing whatever you want.

“Swell is designed to give space and time to regular people to have their voices heard,” explains co-founder Arish Ali. “There are no memes to forward, no ad-driven algorithms running wild, no beauty filters to apply. You simply use your voice to tell a story, voice an opinion, or ask a question, and let the world hear it and respond. It is uncomplicated. It is unpretentious. It is the un-social media platform.”

Swell works like your smartphone’s voice notes on steroids — storytelling condensed into bite-size bits. Unlike a podcast, users don’t need microphones or a hosting site to be heard by others, it is just your voice talking into your phone.

“We know that podcasting has erupted because people feel intimate when someone’s in their ear,” says Deborah Pardes, Swell’s vice president. “What podcasting lacks is the two-way conversation, and also as podcasters you have to invest a lot of time and money upfront and then hope that people will tune in.”

Another voice-driven social media platform that launched in 2020, Clubhouse, has already peaked and crashed. Its chatrooms became a cacophony of arguments and self-promotion. Swell aspires to be something else, leaning into the natural human curiosity of being drawn to confessions. Lurking around people’s conversations at a coffee shop, overhearing a conversation coming from the next aisle at the store, or hearing a glimpse of something authentically personal are thrills we can’t help but seek.

Given that there are more than a few bad actors in the social media landscape, the app does moderate for abusive and threatening content “ranging from post deletion to user suspension, in line with our Terms of Service,” according to a statement from the company. “We empower Swellcasters with moderation tools, enabling them to control interactions on their posts. They can turn off replies, delete responses, block users, and report offensive content.”

Ali and Sudha KV began the company in 2019 initially to create a repository for health stories.

“Google searches for stomach aches rarely yield anecdotes about more traditional approaches that Grandma used to take. Pharma has the biggest megaphone for that,” Pardes says. “We started to imagine a community telling stories about health.”

But with all the social and cultural changes in 2020, Swell widened its lens and pointed it toward conversations on topics beyond health.

“The focus shifted because we saw that people needed to talk about a lot of things; there was a crossover between health and wellness and politics and life,” Pardes says. “We looked at the podcast world as a one-way communication platform that had no flow back from the listeners. Swell is designed to nurture listening and talking; storytelling at its best — where the start of an idea told through a great story may spark other stories and ideas and connections.”

Pardes highlights the platform’s easy user interface and intimate, person-to-person feel. The app offers users daily prompts to encourage conversation. There are “Swellcasts” centered around topics — books, politics, sports, meditation, cooking and more.

“The currency on Swell is different from other platforms, meaning that when you’re on TikTok, or Instagram or Facebook, you tend to be obsessed with numbers. ‘I want hundreds of likes and thousands of followers.’ It’s very different on Swell because when one voice responds to you, that’s like a complete atomic network,” says Pardes.

For those who do want to use this app as part of a social media strategy, users can share links to their content and cross-promote themselves on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and TikTok.

In this age of the professional social media influencer, how to monetize content is the question. Pardes says that although the app is free to use, content creators can “upgrade” to a “Premium Swellcast,” which charges subscribers if they want to listen to your content for 99 cents, $1.99 or $4.99 a month.

Pardes says Swell makes money through revenue-sharing of subscription fees. She declined to disclose the number of users on the platform, saying only that they have “several thousand active daily users.”

Users, called “Swellcasters,” can have all their recordings public or can have private conversations. Some content can be free and other content can be subscription-based. A Swellcaster can conduct interviews or have one-on-one discussions with guests through the platform, invite others to a conversation, or create group Swells.

The lack of filters, reels, video and any long-form content could be a bonus to those looking for simple content creation online. But the lack of these features may keep away a more advanced content creator (and their following) who may find the five-minute recording max limiting to their creativity, or not what their existing audience is accustomed to.

The reality is, for Swell to become a real player in the social media space, it will need to attract some big names (celebrities, influencers, authors), invest in collaborations and sign up a lot more users.

Current published estimates put Facebook at 3.05 billion monthly users, 2.4 billion on Instagram, 1.4 billion on TikTok and 933 million on YouTube. To be a serious alternative to these wildly popular platforms, Swell needs to find its people, one conversation at a time.

Here’s a thought experiment: What if old age actually meant having enhanced potential for change — but since few realized it, it remained a kind of secret?

Unleashing this secret could go a long way toward liberating souls, if people would realize that change is not only possible, but within reach.

Instead, the great majority of people believe, consciously or unconsciously, that change in old age is not possible.

But that turns out not to be true.

Granted, this claim goes against conventional wisdom, but let me explain how I, as a physician who specializes in adult and geriatric psychiatry, know that aging actually enhances our capacity for change. And, full disclosure, I am 72 years old myself, so you could say I speak from a certain bias.

Also worth knowing is that older adults are the fastest-growing segment of our population, and older individuals are more diverse than any other age group. So beware of attempts (by me or anyone else) to talk about older adults as monolithic.

Too late for therapy?

Meditation, coaching, clergy and family connections are all well-known ways to help facilitate personal growth. Yet, often it’s assumed that past a certain age, there’s no point in trying talk therapy, otherwise known as psychotherapy.

It is still not clear what type of therapy works best for whom. What is clear, though, is that there are some crucial factors common to all therapies. For any therapy to go well, it generally requires a well-motivated patient who has the ability to connect with the therapist, as well as the ability to think about one’s behavior and one’s life. So, three key factors:

• Ability to reflect
• Be motivated
• Form a well-functioning therapeutic relationship

A moment of reflection

It turns out that older adults have a natural tendency to reflect. And reflecting and reminiscing is a normal, healthy developmental aspect of aging.

Robert Butler, the physician who started the field of geriatrics in the U.S., described the natural tendency to reminisce as “life review.” Over the last decades, life review, or reminiscence therapy, has been used to facilitate this process in older adults, leading to rich discussions and realizations about how one has lived life.

Erik Erikson, the pioneering psychologist who described the psychological development of a person’s sense of identity over the life cycle, identified the stage in late life when the individual, by virtue of life review, comes to terms with their life, and clarifies the themes, meaning and purpose of that life.

Feeling motivated

It makes sense intuitively, and is borne out in practice, that therapy works best when the patient is motivated. Older adults tend to be motivated because they are keenly aware they’re not going to live forever, and have a sense that it’s now or never.

At the same time, people are living longer than they ever have, and there is a lot of life left to live when you’re, say, 65 or 70 years old. People who are in unhappy marriages, for example, are more likely these days to get divorced in order to make the most of their remaining years. In fact, they’re driving a so-called “gray divorce” demographic trend.

The realization that time is marching on and that there is usually still enough time to make it worthwhile to change makes the motivation to change doubly strong in older people.

There’s even a theory, called the socioemotional selectivity theory (developed by Stanford psychologist Laura L. Carstensen), that posits that older adults become increasingly selective about how they spend their time and other resources as they age. And what they tend to focus on are emotionally meaningful goals and activities.

Building relationships

Talk therapy is one way to identify and pursue emotionally important goals. Therapy works via a relationship, the so-called therapeutic relationship. Exploring a therapeutic relationship often provides rich insight into yourself that might otherwise be difficult to achieve.

Most therapies benefit from a relationship, so the patient’s capacity to relate to others is extremely important.

Once again, older adults, having honed their relationship skills over a lifetime and tending to value relationships over material objects, are generally good at forming a relationship that then facilitates change. As the long-term Harvard Study of Adult Development found, the most important characteristic associated with successful aging is not intelligence or money, it’s the quality of relationships.

Memory serves

Memory, and other cognitive processes — such as how we think, how we process information, and how we make decisions — are important to consider when thinking about a person’s capacity for growth and change.

As usual in our society, we associate age with loss: Age is associated with a slowing of processes, whether it’s running the 100-yard dash or solving math problems. It’s also common for older adults to have difficulty recalling names, words and even recent events.

The truth is, while this short-term memory impairment is frustrating, it’s usually not a significant problem. And long-term memory is usually well preserved, even in individuals who have some type of diagnosable memory impairment.

In therapy, especially the type of therapy that involves reflecting on one’s life and connecting the dots from one’s earliest memories, long-term memory is key. There’s even a “reminiscence bump” in which older adults recall early life events especially well. So short-term memory impairment, though frustrating, is not necessarily a non-starter for therapy.

While older adults may have slower processing speed, they’re usually better than younger adults at organizing and synthesizing information. An important type of intelligence, called “crystallized intelligence,” emerges in midlife and grows. It’s based on experience, and helps older adults to identify and prioritize what’s important, and to make good judgments and good decisions.

It’s involved in what is called wisdom, which is the ability to use knowledge and experience to achieve a deeper understanding of human nature, inner lives, and what makes people tick. It also helps the wise person to understand what motivates people, to have what is called a “theory of mind” about humans.

Some of the intangibles that enhance the ability to change include wisdom, perspective, being more comfortable with who we are, and less afraid of saying what’s really on our minds.

Older adults also seem to be better at what’s called emotional regulation, which is the ability to respond to situations with a range of emotions, and to not over-respond or respond too quickly. It involves conscious as well as unconscious thinking, and is considered an important part of well-being and mental health. Psychotherapy is one good way to improve one’s emotional regulation, which improves one’s quality of life.

Research on personality has shown that older adults can still change. Biological research has identified “neuroplasticity” in older adults, meaning the older brain is still capable of change. (Remember the line from the film “The Graduate” about plastics? “There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?” That guy knew something.)

The barrier: Ageism

For more than a century, case reports and scholarly overviews have reported positive experiences for older adults in talk therapy, showing them as good candidates.

So, with all the things going for us, why don’t older adults utilize therapy to change and improve the quality of our lives? The answer: We are brainwashed into thinking we can’t do it.

It’s called ageism. The term was coined by the same Robert Butler who started the field of geriatrics in the U.S. and who identified life review as a normal part of aging.

Almost all of us who were raised in typical Western culture, myself included, are bombarded with the message that old people are stuck in their ways, and too cognitively impaired to partake of change-making. The general message is that old equals bad, and it’s so much a part of our zeitgeist that we rarely question it.

For example, almost everyone is pleased to hear that they look young for their age. What if someone said to an older adult: “You look great, so old!” I’ve tried it, and I can attest to the fact that it doesn’t go over very well!

Ageism can be relatively subtle, such as the patronizing appreciation of “cuteness” in old people, or giving dumb-downed explanations to older adults, as if the older adult were a child. Most of us have felt what it’s like to be invisible in a grocery or retail store. Even sympathetic authors encourage older adults to think of themselves as “elders” and not elderly or old. An entire anti-aging industry is built around “turning back the clock.”

More pernicious are the effects of having lowered expectations for older adults. Remember when President George W. Bush talked about the “soft bigotry of low expectations” in the context of racism? That same dynamic can easily be applied to older adults, and perpetuates a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in which people don’t reach for things they feel incapable of achieving. If you don’t think you can do something, you are less likely to even try.

So it’s no surprise that older adults are less likely to seek or obtain mental health services compared to other age groups. With ageism in mind, it is easy to see how this comes about. Looking at the Covid pandemic, with its emphasis on the isolation experienced by younger populations, and some smoldering attitudes about prioritizing younger adults over older ones, provides fresh evidence.

Win for losing

By owning our own feelings, we reclaim important parts of ourselves, and actually liberate ourselves to pursue our better selves. Instead of spending psychic energy on self-criticism, we can think about more realistic alternatives, and make sure we are doing the best we can, which is usually comforting.

Getting back to the emphasis on loss, it has been observed by many therapists, poets, writers, musicians and philosophers that loss is associated with personal growth. Seen from this vantage point, old age presents a wealth of growth opportunities.

Losses come in many forms: there are relationship losses such as the loss of a spouse, medical losses such as loss of energy or even loss of a limb due to a stroke, and losses of independence. The latter is especially important in our country, with its emphasis on being “strong” and independent. Shameful feelings about dependency often connect directly to one’s own upbringing, past relationships, and cultural context.

One of my patients, whom I’ll call G.D., is a retired, successful businessman in his 80s. He immigrated to the U.S. at a young age, lived the American dream, and has a close-knit family of kids, grandkids and great-grandkids. He came to therapy for help with depression and burnout caused by caring for his wife with dementia. We identified and acknowledged his losses: the loss of his wife as he knew her, and also the loss of a part of himself that is confident, able to master difficult challenges, able to experience joy with a sense of humor.

He realized that he was responding to his stressful situation by trying to control and manage the care for his wife, similar to what he had done all his life. It left him feeling sad, guilty and frustrated. In therapy, he was able to see how his coping mechanisms that had served him well in his life now brought him despair. In therapy, he was able to let go of some of his heroic efforts, to accept his circumstances, and to know that he was doing the best he could. This left him feeling “sadder but wiser” (per the song from “Music Man”), and considerably more at peace with himself.

Another patient, S.U., a woman in her 70s, struggled with guilt, anger and sadness connected to the on-and-off relationship with her adopted daughter. In therapy, she was able to add a level of understanding and acceptance that was previously not possible. Her usual attitude was a harsh, blaming one, related to her feelings of regret and remorse over what she had done, and not done, with her daughter.

In therapy, she was able to develop newer, softer and more nuanced attitudes that take into account her own background and upbringing. She came to understand and appreciate the complex psychological contributions behind her actions, leaving her with more compassion and comforting thoughts about herself.

Importantly, she realized that she could not excise the old harsh attitude, but she could relegate it to a less influential place in her psyche, with the more mature and adaptive parts of herself assuming a more prominent place.

How to find help

Perhaps older adults are “designed” to be adaptable because so much happens to them!

While I hope this leads to greater opportunities for older adults, I realize that the supply of experienced therapists who have advanced training in working with older adults is woefully inadequate. I hope those few of us who have the expertise will inspire and train a new generation of therapists.

Meanwhile, the best plan is to ask your primary care physician to make a referral. Many psychotherapists work well with older adults, even if they don’t have formal training in geriatrics.

Also, most (general adult) psychotherapists have older adults in their practices. And since older adults make up the largest percent of most primary care physician practices, the physician will likely have faced this challenge before, and will be able to make a good referral.

Daniel A. Plotkin is a physician who specializes in adult and geriatric psychiatry.