These were the first words spoken into the microphone sitting on my table by Will Alexander when we met to record an interview in the West Los Angeles apartment I shared with my wife, Anna Everett. In 1993, we had recently moved to L.A., where Anna was in graduate school. I was still on the faculty of San Jose State University, but had secured a life-saving year-long fellowship at the UCLA Center for Afro-American Studies (later renamed for Ralph Bunche). I was still producing a weekly literary radio show for KSJS FM, a station broadcasting to the greater South Bay region, and I would drive back to San Jose once a month to turn my interview and reading tapes into broadcast productions to be transmitted in my absence to an audience of thousands. Prior to departing for Los Angeles, I had gotten in touch with Nathaniel Mackey, a previous guest on the show who was then still teaching at UC Santa Cruz, to get phone numbers for some of the Southern California writers I wanted to feature in upcoming programs. Will Alexander was the first to answer the call, and he drove over from Pasadena to meet at our apartment, just off the highway that had figured in the infamous slow car chase after O.J. Simpson. The location of our first meeting seemed a paradigmatic Los Angeles site and suitably surreal.