The Creative Life: Audio, Amigos!
David Accampo | November 21, 2009
In the summer of 1998, I moved to Los Angeles from the Northern California Bay Area. As a writer and recent college graduate, it would be a fair assumption that I moved to LA to pursue a Hollywood career. This would be inaccurate. In truth, I moved to Los Angeles because my girlfriend at the time was originally from the San Fernando Valley, and she wanted to be closer to her family again. I was a writer in need of an adventure. And, oh, I would write — but not screenplays. No, I was a fan of stories like Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. I was a poet, dammit, not a crass commercial hack. Los Angeles would be the setting for my Great American Novel Which Observes LA from an Outsider’s Perspective. It was thus that I descended upon the city of angels with all the fervor of a budding anthropologist. The denizens of Hollywood would be my Gorillas in the Mist.