Nancy Rommelmann's work appears is the LA Weekly, Reason, City Arts Magazine, Bon Appetit, the Oregonian and other publications. She recently received the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies 2008 award for Best Arts Feature and the 2008 Los Angeles Press Club award for Best Entertainment Arts Feature for "No Exit Plan," the story of Laura Albert's 10-year con writing as teenage JT LeRoy. Rommelmann is currently working on the nonfiction book, "On the Bridge, a Meditation on Murder and the Case of Amanda Jo Stott-Smith." She lives in Portland, Oregon. Website Email
I think about what I nearly lost today, and what I was given, and how much I need both.
Most writers have someone to whom they show their works in progress. Mine is Victoria, the lady that works the cash register at the donut shop.
Thirty years after they went to private school together, Gordon called asking for $2,500.
On deciding to not stick with a story
At 6:55 this morning, still dark here in Portland, there was a knock at my front door. My husband had...
I received an email this morning alerting me to the murder of Lily Burk, 17. I thought, Lily, Greg's daughter?...
This past Saturday morning, at around 1 AM, Amanda Jo Stott-Smith, 31, apparently threw or otherwise caused her two children...
I was cruising around online last Friday when I came across Dan Baum's narrative of his firing as a staff...
I updated my status yesterday on Facebook to include a trip I am planning to Panama. Within hours, I had...
When I moved from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon four years ago, it was with the sense I was going...
This is one time I think the candidate should step down to spend more time with her family. A cursory...
A few months back, the Atlantic Monthly ran an essay by Lori Gottlieb entitled, “Marry Him! The case for settling...
Today is the one-year anniversary of the death of Cathy Seipp. Cathy and I knew each other as colleagues, as friends. As mothers. We both had daughters born in 1989, and before I met my husband in 1997, had for the most part raised them ourselves, on what we earned as freelancers. We didn't need to beat this point, but a point it was.
To editors in New York, black foster mothers in South Central are, naturally, called Big Mom. Little girls who’ve been sexually abused show up with blood on their panties. So Margaret Seltzer goes unquestioned.
I didn’t know who X was, but they’d just released "Under the Big Black Sun," and I knew, as I watched and listened to Doe and Exene Cervenka mesh those harmonies that should not have worked but did that they were ripping up old ground and making something new, and letting us walk around on it. Cool.
| Artist Lauren Bon has won approval from the LA City Council to build an enormous water wheel on the LA River near downtown. Bon will be discussing the project in a public conversation on March 22, World Water Day, in Lincoln Heights.
| Misty Copeland, the only black female soloist dancing with the American Ballet Theater, will be back home in Los Angeles this week talking about her new memoir. The book explores her rise from a vagabond childhood to stature in the ballet world, where she found a surrogate family.
| Dr. Frank Jobe saved the careers of hundreds of pitchers, but many top arms continue to break down. It's not good for baseball, and MLB needs to look into better injury prevention mechanisms.
| Wooster Group definitely has its fans and followers and many were in the Redcat audience--at least until intermission.
| Take My Picture Gary Leonard is a regular Thursday feature of LA Observed.
Many great memories of my boss and friend, the former Los Angeles Times editor William F. Thomas.
Before I lived in Echo Park, there was a tiny 1920s bungalow-cottage-standalone house on N. Occidental in Silver Lake. I...
The only good thing about Daylight Saving Time is that the True Detective finale airs an hour earlier....
