Miller is a local author, professor at San Diego City College, and vice president for the American Federation of Teachers, Local 1931. He lives in Golden Hill.
It’s been 17 years since my first novel, “Drift,” was released in hardcover by the University of Oklahoma Press. In that book, which was just released again in paperback with a new preface, I took up the challenge of writing about a city whose carefully manufactured image seemed so averse to a noir lens as to be almost hermetically sealed against grit. Strife and struggle are alien concepts to a place that markets itself as somehow beyond alienation, a land where, as the tourist advertising campaign once put it, “happy happens.” San Diego was also a city that was and still is, for the most part, not the subject of nearly as much literature, art, music and film as our neighbors to the north in California. In sum, our city was, and still is, a nearly blank slate.
At its launch in 2007, the novel got a friendly reception in the pages of The San Diego Union-Tribune where Seth Taylor wrote that I was “the right tour guide” for a trip to our city’s dark side. “Local writer Jim Miller established himself as that guy long before now, as co-author of the book ‘Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See,’ a triptych of essays describing our fair city’s less attractive side, from corruption and graft in City Hall to continued segregation and racial strife” and “Miller has taken his ion and political sensibility into fiction with his debut novel ‘Drift,’ a bittersweet valentine to San Diego, a city he clearly still loves — and mourns. ‘Drift’ tells the story of one character’s restless wanderings … while also giving us glimpses of local eccentrics from his periphery who have their own San Diego stories to tell.”
Although “Under the Perfect Sun” came out in 2003 before “Drift,” the historical sketches and subterranean history that “Drift” maps served as a launching pad for that larger project. In fact, it was when reading an early draft of that novel that Mike Davis came up with the idea of co-authoring a radical history of San Diego with my wife Kelly Mayhew and me.
Around the time that “Drift” first appeared, I met Oakley Hall, then 86-years-old, the dean of West Coast writers and a rare San Diego literary legend, when he came to town to read from his last novel, “Love and War in California.” I had always been intrigued by Hall’s historic excavations of San Diego, his chasing of our ghosts, and was moved when, after going on a long walk Downtown before his reading at City College, he said to me, smiling ruefully, “It’s all gone. Nothing I is still there.”
This conversation still resonates because in the two decades since I began researching and writing “Drift,” which was the product of sets of meticulous notes and historical research, the hypergentrification that San Diego has undergone has erased a large portion of the urban landscape portrayed in the book. Thus, reading “Drift” today is an exercise in chasing the ghost of a city that no longer exists. “Drift” is an attempt to chart the psychogeography of San Diego that goes underneath the sunny postcard veneer of the city to uncover its subterranean noir aspects, giving voice to those excluded from the tourist paradise.
In seeking to make sense of how one can still hold on to a connection to place, to home, in a time when the financialization of real estate has transformed urban spaces across America, pricing out and/or forcibly relocating myriads of us while brutally pushing a record number of our neighbors into homelessness, “Drift” tells not just a distinctly San Diego story but a tale that many readers might recognize in cities across the United States and internationally.
Joe Blake, the protagonist in “Drift,” laments how the theme-parking of urban space erases the thereness of our cities and buries history in the service of homogenizing commerce. But, at its core, the novel asks the even more fundamental question of how we can all live together more harmoniously, justly and beautifully, rooted in place.
You can come see me read from and discuss “Drift” on Monday, at 6:30 p.m. at the San Diego Central Library and Friday at 7 p.m. at The Book Catapult in South Park. I hope to see you there.
