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 runs weekly at LA Observed. Click on the photo to view bigger. Gary's archive....
| Hermosa Beach residents have 10 more days to contemplate the future of their beach town and the Santa Monica Bay. Whatever they decide it may feel like déjà vu all over again. The question is which version of the past do they want to see come back?
“The time to act is now,” said the LA 2020 Commission in its report last year urging big changes for Los Angeles city government. Not so fast, said City Council President Herb Wesson, who created the commission.
Before I lived in Echo Park, there was a tiny 1920s bungalow-cottage-standalone house on N. Occidental in Silver Lake. I...
Continuing with the post-rain, pretty sky, silhouetted tree theme, here's the sunset Monday night....
