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.
| Take My Picture Gary Leonard is a regular Thursday feature of LA Observed. Gary's archive....
| Humor comes to our downtown stages in two shows brimming with imagination: a "Magic Flute" that breaks the antique Mozartian mold and Matthew Bourne's hip "Sleeping Beauty" powered by a testosteronic high.
| Despite a meciocre record at Washington, Steve Sarkisian has been hired as USC's head coach. It may work out, but Phil Wallace says it wasn't his first choice. Interestingly, this move could lead to Jim Mora, Jr's departure from UCLA.
| "Wherever you go, there you are," says Buckaroo Banzai. Jon Christensen reads the new book "Trees in Paradise: A California History" on the long flight from LAX to Melbourne and reflects on what we can learn from history in a cosmopolitan era in which local diversity--biological and cultural--may be increasing rapidly, while the differences between places continue to shrink.
| Martinez riffs on the aromas of Thanksgiving and is thankful that a woman might be headed for the White House. You might not have noticed, he writes, but the upraised fist of today's political revolution is wearing nail polish.
| Take My Picture Gary Leonard is a regular weekly feature at LA Observed.
I went out to Hollywood Park Sunday for one of the last horse racing days before it is torn down. If the developers’ dreams come true, the famous race track will be replaced with about 3,000 homes, more than 600,000 square feet of retail and a 300-room hotel.
Before I lived in Echo Park, there was a tiny 1920s bungalow-cottage-standalone house on N. Occidental in Silver Lake. I...
