Olympic Valley played significant role in revival of imperiled state scene

In late 1969, California’s literary scene was in trouble.

John Steinbeck, Robinson Jeffers, Jack Kerouac, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett had died in the past decade. The San Francisco Review had recently folded, and Rolling Stone magazine would eventually move its headquarters from the Bay Area to the publishing industry’s brain trust in New York. San Francisco’s theater scene was also dormant, mostly because the nation’s best playwrights were flocking to other creative hubs.

The Golden State’s place in American letters had started strong, launching the careers of Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce, inspiring the work of Jack London and elevating nature writing through the pen of John Muir. Yet, as the manperms and gold medallions of the 1970s loomed, there were questions of whether California’s influence on the written word was ending.

Two couples living in the High Sierra helped ensure that didn’t happen.

Now, the retreat they were contemplating in 1969 celebrates a halfcentury of discovering new writers from the West. And it hasn’t just bolstered esteemed careers; its mountainous vistas have been a kind of fortress of solitude that has guarded the state’s literary identity. That achievement is being marked with “Why to These Rocks,” a new collection of poems born from the power of community and lasting inspiration of an unspoiled alpine hideaway.

“Why to These Rocks” comes out Saturday, April 13, through Heyday Books, a Berkeley publisher that has specialized in California history and ecology for 47 years. A prelaunch virtual event featured readings by poets Sharon Olds, Robert Hass and others.

Last summer was the first time in 50 years Diana Fuller didn’t go to that place she calls “the valley.” The director of the Community of Writers' screenwriting program, she got her first taste of it when she was 19, working

Courtesy Diana Fuller PulitzerPrize winning poet Galway Kinnell reads at a Community of Writers event in 1989. He created a program to produce new poems written in Olympic Valley.