For the many writers living in Altadena when the Eaton fire erupted last January, the flames took their houses, their places of refuge and inspiration, their community gathering centers and their archives. Homes of real writers and of fictional characters perished. The place where author Naomi Hiraharagrew up on McNally Avenue, where her amateur sleuth Mas Arai also lived, is gone. Michelle Huneven’s character in her novel “Blame” would’ve lost her home on Concha, but the Samuelson family in her latest novel, “Bug Hollow,” lived in a home far west enough in Altadena to remain. Huneven’s two houses burned down, along with the home of her next-door neighbor and close friend, the Altadena historian Michele Zack. The neighborhoods where Octavia E. Butler lived, as well as her characters Dana and Kevin from her novel “Kindred,” were deeply affected. Out of five members of Alta Writers, a group of women who gathered each month at writer Désirée Zamorano’s house on Mount Curve for a potluck and a writing prompt, only Zamorano’s house is still standing.
The year 2025 now holds two significant points in time: life before the fire, and after it. A year after the devastation, most are still displaced. Some have found a groove again, writing in their temporary homes, while others have yet to return to their practice, consumed by the logistics of loss and relocation and out of step with their routines.
We talked with a handful of local writers about what they loved about Altadena, what they miss, and how their writing has been affected by this profound event and life in its wake.
Bonnie S. Kaplan
For nine years before the fire, poet and educator Bonnie S. Kaplan had lived in a rented courtyard bungalow on Maiden Lane, walking distance from Eliot Middle School, where she taught poetry through Red Hen Press. Kaplan, who has a background in performance art and comedy, was in the process of digitizing her video work from graduate school but didn’t finish in time. Now it’s all lost to time along with everything, including the rest of her work — photographs, writings and the journals of her partner, Sylvia Sukop, who was storing them in Kaplan’s garage. Kaplan lost cherished personal collections, some of which she’s been curating since childhood: 45s from the ’60s in mint condition that she started collecting near the Ashby BART in Berkeley in the ’80s, valuable comic books that she had bought off the rack as a kid and vintage skateboards.
For 48 years, Kaplan rode a fiberglass skateboard. “Nothing like you see today,” she says. “For sidewalk surfing — it’s almost like dance for me. Altadena, where I lived, east of Lake, had the most buttery streets for skateboarding. I miss that. I miss the trees and the history there.”
On Jan. 23, she posted on a Facebook group for collectors of 1970s skateboards to see if anyone could connect her to a mid-’70s Bahne with Road Rider wheels and Bennett trucks.
The Facebook group ended up buying her the same board she’d lost. “They so came through for me,” she says through tears. “These were strangers.”
Years ago, Kaplan and Sukop lived on Ganesha Avenue in east Altadena, where Kaplan lovingly tended a garden of show roses that had been planted by the previous tenant, a recording secretary for the local rosarian society. The Eaton fire got as far as the garage of the house on Ganesha, but the roses, surrounded by asphalt, survived. Recently the current tenants called Kaplan to let her know that the owners plan to tear out the rose garden to make room for their new garage.
Days after the fire, Kaplan started writing a stand-up routine. Nearly a year later, she still continues it when it comes to her. “It’s exclusively about the fire and loss and resilience,” she says over coffee at Cindy’s coffee shop in Eagle Rock. One of the diner windows is painted in memoriam to its sibling restaurant, Fox’s, on North Lake Avenue, with a large red heart and the words “Altadena In Our Hearts Forever, Fox’s 1955–2025.” “The comedy is unexpected and very me. It’s how I survive. Humor has always been a survival mechanism for Jewish people but also me. This I wrote right away.”
Things I’m glad were destroyed when the Eaton Fire burned everything I own
Thirty pounds of dirty laundry old love letters insisting that I am too much tax returns I didn’t need to save the container of adaptors, chargers, and cords for nothing I currently owned materials from conferences I slept through unused hair gel, mousse, and glitter nail polish my late mother’s dentures a cracked window my landlord never fixed long-expired kibble my cats refused to eat an uncanceled Hitler postage stamp from my Jewish grandfather’s stamp album.
–Bonnie S. Kaplan
Michelle Huneven
Altadena-born novelist Michelle Huneven and her husband, Jim Potter, lost the two homes they owned to the Eaton fire, just a few months before Huneven’s latest novel, “Bug Hollow,” about a family in Altadena, was released. They’ve settled temporarily in Echo Park while in the process of rebuilding their homes. “There’s just so much to do,” says Huneven over tea on Lincoln Avenue after a hike in the Arroyo Seco with her friend and neighbor, the Altadena historian and author of “Altadena: Between Wilderness and City,” Michele Zack.
Zack and Huneven met on the first day of ninth grade at John Muir High School and have been neighbors in west Altadena for the last 24 years, where they had hiking, walking and tea rituals together. “One of the things I miss most is Michele has this surprise laugh that I could hear from my house,” says Huneven.
Along with the home office where she wrote four books, Huneven lost all of her journals, her library and old computers with files and photos that weren’t anywhere else. After the fire, she stopped writing because she had so much on her plate. “I was getting really depressed and was having PTSD where I’d remember a pair of shoes, burned up! Remembered a pan, burned up! And each time I’d just flash on the fire and it was just really getting bad and I was really depressed. And then I broke my foot. And the second I broke my foot, I cheered up. Sometimes you get a shock and it changes you, but also I had time to write because I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t move, so I wrote a couple of short stories, started a new novel, and I cheered right up.”
Back at her property, the yard between her two houses is mostly intact, including a Hachiya persimmon tree, which in December was heavy with fruit, comforting lanterns in the charred landscape, signaling season. “With everything erased we have a view of the mountains that we never had,” she says. “And there’s lots of coyote scat — they’re just marauding around. The lizards are back and some of my roses survived.”
Sakae Manning
Storyteller Sakae Manning was familiar with Altadena before she and her husband moved there 35 years ago — his family had history in west Altadena and his maternal grandmother had lived there for a while. They bought their home on West Terrace Street, which was supposed to be a starter home, raised their children there, and never left. “I just immediately fell in love with my community and my neighborhood,” she says. “The fact that we lived right at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains — for a writer, for a creative person, it was magical to be able to look at the mountains every day. My first short story was set in Altadena and based on the Santa Ana winds and a woman and a change in her life.”
Manning’s home had a native garden — she wanted her yard to reflect what was in the mountains just beyond her house — and she believes that those plants helped handle the fire. “The plants in my yard burned but they didn’t catch my house on fire. Palm fronds caught on fire and exploded and caught houses on fire. There’s a bush we have that held the wall of my son’s room in place. The live oaks saved people’s homes and acted like a canopy of fire retardant. They are native to this land and have a purpose.” The night of the Eaton fire, Manning was drying ceremonial sage on her porch. “My grandfather was Choctaw and he always taught us to live with nature. If we’d learn to listen and look and feel instead of trying to control, more of our houses would still be here.”
Manning’s neighborhood was devastated by the fire. Half a block from her house, Anthony Mitchell Sr. and his son Justin died waiting for first responders to help them evacuate. “There’s a lot of people in my area — you can go block by block — who died,” she says.
Manning is Nisei and Choctaw and her husband, Antonio, is African American, and she found Altadena to reflect the community she wanted to be a part of. “We’ve had multiracial relationships in our family for eons,” she says. “I wanted to live in a community where my kids would grow up and see people who looked like them. Our community was composed of people who did everything from being a handyperson to a teacher or an artist. I live across the street from my own plumber and he grew up on this street with my kids. My neighbor is an engineer and I can talk to him about astronomy and he helps me with understanding the sky. The woman who cut my hair lived across the street and she’d sometimes cut my hair in her house.”
Manning made relationships with other writers through Women Who Submit, a community of women and nonbinary writers, and is part of Alta Writers, a group of women who gathered monthly to write and socialize at the home of novelist Désirée Zamorano. Manning loved writing on her porch in Altadena or at nearby Cafe de Leche.
She says one of her favorite things about Altadena was the privacy it provided. “When we moved there, to everyone who said, where is that?, I said, it’s a place you’re going, it’s the destination. You’re not passing through. People know how to give each other privacy but still be community.”
“You might wave to someone from their porch, but I didn’t necessarily go up and talk to them, because people do want their privacy and we respect that. But we also help each other. When someone dies, people bring food. We didn’t have each other’s phone numbers because we would just walk outside and talk to them.”
Manning has only recently started to write again since losing her home. She has a clear perspective of what she’s going to write about, which isn’t necessarily about the fire, she says, but how she views life differently. “I can write because I feel more settled now and can see the mountains.”
Ashton Cynthia Clarke
Writer and storyteller Ashton Cynthia Clarke remembers the first time she visited Altadena.
“My ex-husband and I had visited a friend of his, who happened to live in Altadena, and I had never heard of the community before that, but we were standing in the street at the top of Lake Avenue, and from there, we could see down into the city. I swear we could see all the way over to the beach. And I asked my husband, ‘Where are we?’ And he said, ‘Altadena.’”
A few years later, in 1999, they bought a house there. “It was an incredibly beautiful environment,” she recalls. “I could see the mountains clearly, standing in the middle of the street, from my kitchen windows, from my backyard.”
Clarke is currently living in Bunker Hill and says she misses hiking the most. A New York City native, Clarke had no experience hiking before moving to west Altadena, where she could walk to the Gabrielino Trail. “It was a beautiful hike. It passed through a campground, it passed through little streams. And I remember seeing Black kids and brown kids hiking and camping and I realized those weren’t exclusively white activities. It just really struck me. I used that example in a storytell that I did later, when I talked about coming from New York and never having camped before. I remembered a quote from Mae Jemison, who was our first Black female astronaut, and she was also a physician, and she had spoken once about the environment and how it was a Black issue as well and how many children she had seen that had asthma and related issues. And seeing those kids out there, more or less in the wild and enjoying the environment, really spoke to me.”
Désirée Zamorano
Writer and educator Désirée Zamorano recalls the intensity of the time surrounding the Eaton fire last year, bookended by political stress, which hasn’t ceased. Her second novel, “Dispossessed,” based on the Mexican repatriation program of the 1930s, was published a few months before the fire and the ramping up of mass deportations of immigrants from the United States.
“It was a triple whammy, you know, the election, the fire and then the inauguration. And even during the election, once the election was called, it’s like, OK, I’m going to enjoy life every day. And then the fire happens and it’s like, holy s—, I am going to enjoy life every day.”
The house Zamorano and her husband purchased in 1998 is one of the few still standing on her street a block away from Farnsworth Park. After the fires they landed in a long-term rental in Long Beach to be closer to her teaching job at Cal State Long Beach.
“I miss Altadena. It’s a very hard thing to balance,” she says. “I feel like I should be grateful because my house is standing and I have a safe place. When you live somewhere for 26 years and you leave, not by choice, it’s very hard. For years my husband would say, ‘We need to downsize; and I would say, ‘You’re gonna have to drag me kicking and screaming out of this house.’ Well, that’s what happened.”
Zamorano was enmeshed in the community of Altadena, both as an educator and as a writer. When she and her husband moved there, she was teaching at Jefferson Elementary. She was part of a writer’s group that met at the Coffee Gallery on Lake Avenue, a beloved coffee shop with a concert venue behind, where she had many friends.
“My big takeaway from the fire was people are better than you think they are. Really and truly. Of my writer’s group in Altadena, four of the five, their homes are gone … and the support everyone received was just beautiful, and I remember going up three weeks after the fire… I drove down Lake and this woman is holding up a sign saying Free Food World’s Food Kitchen and I’m like, oh my God, look at her, she’s just holding up that sign for all of us.”
Zamorano’s writing group still meets informally. “That’s the other thing with this fire,” she says. “It’s a diaspora, you know, people have flung to different parts. I’m in Long Beach. My friends are in Studio City or Burbank or Downey. That is not Altadena.”
Wrightson is a writer, editor and oral historian who has spent the majority of her life living on the Altadena border.
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