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.
| Gary Leonard on the first day of street sales for the Los Angeles Register. Take My Picture Gary Leonard is a weekly feature of LA Observed.
| The question 'how hot is it?' once again will be answered by the landmark thermometer in the desert town of Baker.
| With the Lakers worst-ever season in Los Angeles ending this week, it's time to look ahead. What should the Lakers do next to reverse their fortunes?
| LA mayor Eric Garcetti has a narrative problem. The two stories he is telling about Los Angeles don't line up. Winning an Olympic bid could provide the deus ex machina the city needs in the absence of a heroic storyline.
It’s not easy to figure out Mayor Eric Garcetti’s grand plan for Los Angeles, or even if he has one. His state of the city speech Thursday didn’t help. "It starts with modern technology,” the mayor said, and then sort of left us hanging.
Before I lived in Echo Park, there was a tiny 1920s bungalow-cottage-standalone house on N. Occidental in Silver Lake. I...
