Meet Gabriel Garofano | Writer & Teacher

We had the good fortune of connecting with Gabriel Garofano and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Gabriel, we’d love to hear about how you approach risk and risk-taking

Risk, at least conceptually, is such an interesting and complicated idea to try and really grasp at the edges. Because risk kind of holds within itself the distinct notion of safety against this ominous but potentially very exciting future unknown. Which, the more I think about it, is essentially an ethical, or even aesthetic, dilemma. It’s a matter of judgment and prediction. Ethical because thinking deeply about a risky choice or decision forces you to grapple with the age old elements of good and bad, right and wrong. And aesthetic in the sense of examining beauty and taste. At least for me, I have this sense of how I envision my life, and while it’s something that is a lot easier to feel than articulate, I do think it comes down to creating something of beauty that I can live inside. All of which is fun to think about, but what does it really mean? I know that when I decided to maunder off a more traditionally strategic path and focus on my writing as a career, it felt very precarious and uncertain. Yes, financially mainly, but kind of emotionally as well. I was in my late 20’s, and it felt a bit like starting over and throwing away a whole lot. Basically the definition of a risk. What I think is interesting is that while I knew it was a risk, I also didn’t see it as a choice. In other words it was a risk I had to take; the unknown of pursuing something I really wanted and cared about far outweighed that which presented itself as the safe, pragmatic choice. Likely, that’s what’s most important here. Because the feeling of taking a risk, or even just acknowledging one, is also an opportunity to reach a telescope down into yourself to see what’s going on way below the surface. You get to peek at the stuff that scares you, which is often some of the most important, and in doing so, you see what really makes you excited deep in your tummy, and how you really, almost primally, feel. 

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?

I write. I suppose I should say I’m a writer, as my passion is certainly indisputable, but there seems to be a vocational seriousness in there somewhere that I’m perhaps too shy to claim. I could also say I’m a creative editor, and I’m definitely a graduate student getting an MFA in creative writing. I guess I think a lot about the word amateur, which traces through French back to the Latin root word ‘amator’ meaning lover. The idea being that etymologically an amateur in something is simply someone doing it with no motive other than pure love and devotion. Becoming a professional is double-edged, and it forces you to negotiate a balance between personal expression and market success. There seems to be a black hole in there that can be nail-biting if not totally paralyzing. I know it’s something I have personally chewed cuticles over more than a few times. What I don’t know is if there’s an easy formula to deploy here, or that navigating a career in something you are passionate about is a bad problem to have. I also don’t know that my story is all that interesting anecdotally. Maybe if we were sitting down having a coffee together things would be different. What’s probably the most interesting and translatable thing I can impart here is that the real lesson to be learned (and relearned) remains that on any trajectory toward professionalism, the hardest part can be often be finding ways to remain, at heart, an amateur.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?

Admittedly, my relationship with LA is beautifully complicated. I was born and lived most of my life there, and the city holds for me that certain geographical nostalgia that can be as bitter as it is deeply personal. Every home town is a kind of ghost story, which in this case is not a bad thing. All of which is probably a digressive way to say that my LA itinerary has seen many iterations. I think the feeling of not dying where you grew up takes on a really interesting gradient when the place of origin has the intricacies of a city like LA. And so I sort of distanced myself from it for a while, and in truth I forgot that LA is a place that’s disguised by itself. Which is to say that reducing it to anything other than something life-sized is crude and cursory. There is a piece of flash fiction by the erudite and artful Jorge Luis Borges called ‘On Exactitude in Science’ that essentially proposes a map that is so detailed and extravagantly precise that it’s the same size as the city it depicts. A sort of living map. I often feel this way about LA; that it’s a place that refuses reduction or truncation.

I realize I still haven’t even begun answering the initial question here, but it seems necessary somehow to explain what I’m looking for when I’m in LA, what I would share with someone else, and how the very idea of LA changes with an ardent swiftness. It can’t really be captured and any suggestions I make seem to overlap in my head, and I could change my mind about a hundred times while writing this. In a way, it’s a search for inspiration while staying off the 405. I think that means starting at the Getty Center (yes you can avoid the 405 to get there, shhh…), on the second floor of the main gallery where the Cézanne painting ‘Still Life with Apples’ hangs, often flanked by Van Gogh’s Irises and a Gauguin landscape. It seems to me this a perfect microcosm of LA. It’s perhaps painfully obvious, and yet the magnitude and sheer shoulder to shoulder talent, when you really think about it, lowers mandibles to floor-level. Also, the restaurant on the upper terrace makes a pretty impressive vodka martini, which should not be overlooked. And don’t get me started on the garden. That’s a whole day if you do it right, and you should.

And so for all my talk of LA’s unreducible protean potential, but for the sake of brevity, let’s exercise impossible imagination and pretend there’s no traffic, and that you can pack a week of activity into a single day. Begin in East Hollywood, where the renowned vegan Berkeley delicatessen, The Butcher’s Son, has recently open an LA location, and where you will have to exercise incredible willpower to not eat yourself right there into a week-long coma that ruins the whole day. From there, it’s a very quick drive to the border of Los Feliz and Silverlake, where you could easily never leave, but in this case will only drop by to see the Figure 8 wall (for obvious reasons) and then hit Skylight Books (also for obvious reasons), before moving west as quickly as possible and lamenting that you should have gone to Elysion Park, at least briefly. But it’s okay, because you are going to stop at Greystone Mansion, and walk through the garden there, and it will be so simultaneously expansive and quaint you’ll forget about everything else. After that you would be remiss not to drive down to LACMA, but not before stopping at another favorite vegan spot (if you’re sensing a theme here you’re not wrong), Nic’s on Beverly, where you can exercise your right to be exhaustingly Angelinian, and sitting outside under the confetti umbra of a single patio-sized tree is not an option, and where the martinis are also nothing to laugh (a second theme). Then make your way to Culver City and two things will happen. The first is the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a very unique place with an unrivaled collection of fascinatingly weird things, and a wonderful upstairs tea room. The next is choosing your final meal. There is a place on Robertson called the Empanada Factory that does takeaway. It’s a small red building that’s easy to miss, and you can order through a window right on the street, and there is a herb infused dipping oil that is so good you could just about brush your teeth with it. Or, there is a well-kept secret sushi spot across town that I desperately want to keep unpublished, but for the sake of supporting independent businesses is called Sakura House, and the fresh water eel and the salmon skin salad, and just about everything else really, is worth writing home about, if people still wrote home. Then the coast. Here’s a fun fact. The claustrophobic and idiot-graffitied Solstice Canyon has a second loop that is easy to find and markedly steep, but is pleasantly sparse and graffitiless, and in terms of catching a postcard Southern California sunset is hard to beat.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?

Undoubtedly this list could, and very likely should, take up more space than we have here. As if I haven’t gone on and on already. So in the effort of finishing with some modest succinctness, I will simply, and with literally immeasurable appreciation and love, thank my father, who I think about every day, and every time I put a word on a page. 

Website: www.gabrielsage.com