With before. Its something that millions grapple with every day. I want to communicate to people what it feels like or for them to understand that theres a cost to policing. The one did you push the button . [laughter] host is a show airs on msnbc at 1 00 p. M. The macbook tvs live coverage of the los angeles festival of books continues were here on the campus of Southern California another beautiful california day about 150,000 people are due here this weekend. Attend the festival. Will go back inside and this is an author panel on california and some of that california issues that are currently being faced. Again, if if you want to see our full schedule of coverage go to tv. Org. Welcome to this panel which has four terrific people on it. My name is miriam and i will be moderating. Hopefully will be facilitating a conversation on housekeeping manners, turn turn cell phones off, please. Most important thing is after the panel all the authors will be signing books in assigning area one. This is a really Interesting Group of the books that all were put together by the folks who put together the festival because there really, all four authors are in search of what the title is lost the stories and will delve more into what that means. Ill be very brief with my introduction. Everyone has a website if youre interested in more background on anybody. Googled them they all have great material on their website that refers to the work theyve done and their bios. Tim hernandez, starting on the end, a true a true renaissance man from fresno and teaching in texas. Splitting his time back and forth. Tim is a poet, novelist, mural painter and an author of the most recently terrific book called, all they will call you which he calls documentary fiction. Well talk about what that means and we can also talk about. [inaudible] tim has great experience. Kimball taylor is the author of three books. Most recently, the the coyotes bicycle. Hes a san diego resident and has done a lot of stories about surfing and working for server magazine. Migrated into oceanography into a remarkable story about an impoverished teenager who built an empire smuggling migrants across the border on bicycles. Christine pelisek is a Crime Reporter with a canadian transplant from los angeles and is covered now working for people magazine. Did some really remarkable work connecting the past crimes of the serial murderer who became known as she and his editors coin frame, the grim sleeper because of the big gap between his two murder sprees. Gabriel thompson is a writer, journalist, social activist, occasional Community Organizer who has written for lots of publications and National Media and has done three books . Right . His most recent one which is called chasing the hardest which will talk about today is oral history of farmworkers throughout california. He builds on a terrific build book which he did about a quart hundred Community Organizer which i urge you to read that as well. Look up fred roth his legacy is well known today. Well have a conversation and keep things brisk and moving and leave time for questions for you all in last 15 minutes or so. Ill start unconventionally by asking tell us one thing thats not in your official biography that you think would be fun or useful for readers to know about you. Gabriel. I got turned on to reading books and writing the year after i barely graduated from high school. I was working as a pizza delivery guy for roundtable in san jose and my shift started at 10 00 a. M. And people dont buy pizzas at ten am, although, with more legalized marijuana they might start doing that more often. [laughter] i would show up at roundtable and there was a period where i was sucking down cokes, now i i do diet cokes or coffee but back then it was pure carbonated soda. As i waited for the first delivery order, my dad had grown up in north dakota and he was a student radical at what point and got tossed out of an event and i found that extremely exciting. He sort of dropped a bunch of books that he had in his basement in north dakota about the student movement, history and i spent a couple hours a day waiting for the first pizza delivery to be ordered, you know, getting hyped up on caffeine and reading these books. That was was the first time i thought books were cool. Its not a lesson i learned in high school. That was the start that, i think, think, led me down this path i never wanted to write a book. [laughter] it just kind of fell in my lap in a way back so youre an accidental writer . Yes. Kimball . Hearing my biography i realize how disjointed it is. If theres one thread its someone who becomes obsessed with certain things and thats how this book came about. I walked into a pile of bicycles, abandoned bicycles, in an odd place at an odd time and i became intrigued and obsessed and followed it through. Thats the result here, is this bookfor me, the last two books was about my search for a woman. [inaudible] this book all i will call you is about the surviving family members of 32 unknown passengers that happen in 1948. They go man, tim, youre such youre such a good researcher. I say, i actually have a secret weapon that helps me do all the research and the one who was my mother. Lydia hernandez was here in the front row. [applause] tim, that leads me into my first question for you. You were on this multi year quest to identify, people who know the song, all them will call you which is a guthrie song popularized. You spent years on this sort of quest to name the people who were anonymous people and raise money to put a plaque on the graves. What drove you to do that to spend so much time. Like christine said. That story like my previous book as well, i accidentally happen. One of those things where you cant go searching for that subject. One day, you find that with material and think someone should do something for me, this mystery was guthrie song about friends who were scattered by dry leaves. My thing was who are these rents . I wanted to know who they were. Because i come from a background of migrant farmworkers from the San Joaquin Valley where to place, there was the sort of inherent investment in that gabriel, your your book which was oral history and a departure for you in a different kind of writing, you had complete, unlike tim who tried to figure out the work, you got to pick the characters that you wrote about. Why did you pick the people that you did . Its an interesting collection and what was the guiding theme for you . What do you want people to come away from the book with so, there were certain people one way to say this is that i studied. I evaluated which people would be more interesting and usually it was someone gave me a phone number to go see a woman in stockton who was working in tomatoes and i drove out knowing nothing about her except the one thing i thought i knew was incorrect, she harvested why am graves in napa and the narrators i reached out to advocacy organizations in california and he gave me a list and sometimes i wanted to find people who illustrated a big crisis in california farming. For example, sexual sexual harassment, Sexual Assault against female farmworkers is a big problem. I went and found someone who had been raised on the job and then complained after six months of debating whether or not she should go forward or worried that she would be fired, may be deported, did it anyways. Was fired. Was deported. There were certain pieces i wanted to touch. What was interesting for me i also, the book is 17 narrators and the vast majority are current or former farmworkers but i also want to look more at the farm worker ecosystem. The people that make it all possible, in some ways. Their social service providers. Theres an elementary teacher in east salinas and grew up as a migrant farmworker families and now teaches migrant families. A couple growers or farmers are in the book as well. I want to paint a picture like i said, the ecosystem of farm work was in california. One thing i really appreciated about this book versus other more journalism or history books and approaching interviews is that we all have to listen so we get to listen to people stories all the time and we generally try to go to towards the directions theyre telling us about. We also have these constraints where we have these assignments and if im writing about weight theft in the valley, ill be asking questions about their experiences with weight developed in Central Valley and thats a part of their life and theres what youll see constantly and farmworkers in california about them being oppressed and economically disadvantaged and fearful of being deported and theyre all real but theyre all. [inaudible] what i really loved about this oral history experience with getting down and letting the conversation really go in ways they determined. Often in the first couple minutes when i met with someone and they didnt quite know what i was up to and i didnt know what i was up to that point, they would have a three or four sentence summary of their life. They came here to help their parents. And i would say im more interested in lets go broader and i would ask options like, what was was the first time you really enjoyed being with your mom in your village in mexico . Those kind of questions we both realize this is a different kind of experience. Hes not looking for me to prove a point as much as learn about their lives in ways that capture not just the hardships but also what emerges from the stories, i think, is a sense of joy and pride in the work. The ways in which you spend working on a crew often with family members and friends that theres a kind of culture and solidarity in helping each other out and enjoy sometimes in the work. Thats one of the things im ensuring this book is presenting farmworkers as people who have much more, get a relationships to the work they do then as its presented. Anyone here, if you are, you probably have a pretty complicated relationship to the work you do. You know . I was excited about that part. So, you use use the individual narratives to get into that oral and bring that effectively into the world of farmworkers. Kimball, you going to this netherworld of smuggling and border life through bicycles. Youre a surfer writing about this sort of underworld of smugglers on the border. How did you make that transition . How did you talk about how you use the michaels and had bicycles to get into that world . There were a couple of things going on. My initial strategy was to talking to border people, people on the border. The thing about a bicycle is that it is fungible, even though they have serial numbers, with a bicycle leaves your hands it joins the sea of bicycles and just the way a dollar it leaves her hands it joins the idea of a dollar. The only way i could track of the bicycles where they had come from, where they were going was to talk to the people that handed them one to the next. Another author said about bicycles said, theres three things to the underground economy, drugs and bicycles. [laughter] its true. Bicycles travel through our economy in ways that in the book i describe it as the die in the plumbing. If you follow a bicycle youre going to meet a thief, policeman, casual joy writer and all these are very interesting people but another aspect of the bicycle is that it connects to this part of our childhood and its our First Experience with free mobility. At one point its our gateway to travel in the world. I dont think that leaves people subconscious very easily so that when i started tracking bicycles that went to very dangerous world and when i first started asking about bicycles it wasnt as though i was asking about a drug tunnel or some other kind of smuggling technique. People whats left their leg and say aha, the bicycles bicycles. They would open up to the extent that i started to learn things that i didnt want to know at one point. [laughter] thats a great answer. Christine, you are navigating a world that is much more familiar to you. You open the book talking about how frequently the you went to the Coroners Office and that was your beat. Who are the new dead people this week, kind of. Yes, this story has to make you in a way thats very very different and as you said, earlier, led you to feel that it should be a book. Theres a part of the end of the book where the murderer is convicted and the brother of one of the victims comes to you and in the emotional moment says, you cared. Tell us about that and how much you cared and what that meant to the people and why you felt the responsibility to tell their story. Well, the book is the grim sleeper and the murderer started back in the 80s and so a lot of the families, their daughters died in the 80s and they felt that the police werent doing anything about their cases. For 20 years they knew nothing about it. They didnt know that their daughters were killed by a serial killer. I ended up finding out about it in 2006. I went to the Coroners Office ands office and looked at the list of women that were found dead in la county, 38 women were on this list and some of them were shot, some were strangled and the la county thought that these women could possibly be victims of a serial killer. I actually got this list from the Coroners Office and some of the women had died from Natural Causes but there were two women on the list and one was a 15 yearold runaway and another 35 yearold prostitute. I found out that those two cases were linked to a series of murders that happened in the 80s. Back in the 80s, there were six activists serial killers killing at the same time. There was a lot going on in the 80s, crack epidemic there was driveby shootings, a lot of stuff that was going on. A lot of Police Resources were going into driveby shootings in dealing with gangs, drug dealers and so there were all these bodies of women that were all over South Los Angeles and there wasnt a lot be done about them. The women were all black women, all of them had drug addictions and their bodies were tossed in alleys and some of them are shot, stabbed, the grim sleeper his victims were shot in the test. Test. The families of the victims lived in South Los Angeles and had no idea. They first spoke to the cops once or twice and that was it. When i started doing the story i ended up going to the egg Alexander Family and she was talking about Danielle Kania i went to their house until then them their daughter was a victim of a serial killer. They hadnt spoke to the police or anything. From that moment on, i had a relationship with them. Finally, with with a number of the family members and in 2010, the man who is the grim sleeper was caught through familiar dna testing and it took for 60 years for it to go to trial. The families would go every two weeks, they show up and be there hoping that justice would be served and i go to the hearings and we were almost like a family. You know . So, at the very end he got convicted and a lot of us went out in the hall and you see the Police Detective and they started the task force finally in 2007 when the last victim was murdered, they they started a task force to look into it. When i went out into the hall as the detectives were hugging victims family members and the prosecutors were hugging the police and then daniel came up to me and hugged me and thanked me for my role. I end up writing a story about it because the police kept it hidden. It wasnt until my story came out that the Community Found out that there was a serial killer and so, he was thanking me for constantly writing about it and keeping it open. I should have mentioned, im sorry, her book will be out in june. Its not for sale today but you can order it online in advance. I want to ship to talk about how you guys wrote these books and decided what should be how you evaluate the material that you collect from your sources, both documents and people and i mentioned earlier that tim holt was booked a documentary novel and i would like you to read a passage from the introduction where you talk about what is truth, a topical issue today. While the telling itself is true, its loyalty is not to people of fact but rather to people a memory. This is all of us. In this way its inevitable that some memories will contradict other membranes. Several people witnessed the same tragedy and offer opposing accounts, whose version is most accurate . In this case, perception is truth. And how reliable is fact anyway . When the quote official documents themselves have been incorrect. Beginning with the names of these passengers. Officials have this inconsistencies. To stumble upon a stumble upon a plane stumble upon a fragmented and broken shards of stories. And to have faith that from these clues our own glaring humanity offers enough right to fill in the unknown. The facts of what occurred on the day are not, nor have they ever been the purpose of this book. This telling is not interested in the calculus details but rather the testimony themselves for the people whose lives were touched directly and incalculable ways. Can you expand on that a little bit . That was eloquent, articulation of your approach to telling the full story. You did a lot of research for this, you did a lot of on the Ground Research and you try to find the facts and find the people and get their stories. You also got oral history and a tape recorder. Youre a novelist and a journalist. How do you reconcile those and how did you make some of the decisions about what to include in his stories to tell . Sure. Its a daunting task and there were 32 families and and i didnt know what the story would be about. I know that i wanted it to be more than mere data or information that youre getting about who the people were or what happened in the plane crash but what i wanted for the reader to be any physical, threedimensional space, with these people so they got a sense that you lived with them, knew, knew they were. To do that, after getting when i found the initial research about the progress the documents that were out there, i realized there were so many errors within these themselves that i thought what the truth and im after . What is that . When i found first family, the ramirez Family Living in fresno, and they began to talk with me about who their family members were and share their pictures and the last letter he wrote to his wife and all of these things became real to me in a way that if im going to write the book it has to be grounded in their oral hist