California Calling

Abstract

California Calling is a literary memoir that traces the narrator’s story of crossing over into California from Canada at sixteen and her desire to assimilate into both a place and herself. By asking what it means to be possessed by an American state and a by state of longing, the story is both a yielding to and a challenging of the power that personal and cultural myths hold over us. Chapter and section titles draw upon the language of police investigations and other authoritative structures of questioning and construct intimate and sometimes intrusive examinations of the narrator’s troubled history with interrogation, both ancestral and personal. California Calling is an interrogation into the silencing of girlhood, and an attempt to navigate out of that silencing.