Join us for another installment of our Heyday Presents conversation series, featuring John Freeman and Tommy Orange, discussing Freeman’s California Rewritten and the new literature of California. This event is in partnership with Clio’s Books in Oakland, CA.

Heyday Members get free tickets to all Heyday Presents events, as well a host of other perks (including a copy of California Rewritten). Click here to learn more.

Groundbreaking authors John Freeman and Tommy Orange have both worked to expand and renew the idea of “Californian Literature.” Freeman’s new book CALIFORNIA REWRITTEN is a collection of essays on recent generations of writers from the Golden State and how their work—across novels, poetry, bookselling, and beyond—speaks to an enlargement of the kind of voices that are discussed as canonical. Orange’s bestselling novels, THERE, THERE (2018) and WANDERING STARS (2024), explore a cast of Indigenous characters living in Oakland as they contend, or refuse to, with the brutal histories of of settlement, displacement, and genocide that have led up to the present day.

The title of Orange’s first book responds to the infamous quote by Gertrude Stein, who upon returning to her hometown of Oakland wrote “There is no there there.” Both Freeman and Orange are engaged with the work of place-making, asserting the presence of voices and traditions that are otherwise erased, dismissed, or improperly credited. How might we uplift these voices? What do we mean when we talk about “California” when it comes to art and literature?

In this Heyday Presents event at Clio’s Books, Freeman and Orange explore themes of resiliency, canonization, and art as one step among many in the needful work of speaking back to history and asserting there has always been a there there.