7/15/19 @9:30am pst - One Day on the Gold Line A Memoir in Essays By Carla Rachel Sameth

Beautifully written, with incredible candor, on race, class, drugs, sexuality, and quite literally having the fire underneath you drive your deepest desires into reality. Carla Rachel Sameth is both brave and relatable in her struggles, and ultimately, a guest who will leave you feeling like we can overcome adversity to both give and receive love. While escaping from a burning boat, Carla realizes that if she died, her one regret would be not having children. She overcomes miscarriages to finally give birth to a son. Motherhood’s usual struggles are then complicated by identity, community, and the challenges of creating a blended family. The overarching theme of these loosely woven reflective tales is the storyteller’s dream of the “perfect” family, the pursuit of which hurls her from one crisis to the next, ultimately meeting its greatest challenge in the form of her teenage son’s struggle with drug addiction. Through essays on race, culture, and family, One Day on the Gold Line (July, 2019) tells the story of a lesbian Jewish single mother raising a black son in Los Angeles. A memoir-in-essays, it examines life’s surprising changes that come through choice or circumstance, often seemingly out of nowhere, and sometimes darkly humorous—even as the situations are dire. Carla Rachel Sameth has taught creative writing to incarcerated youth through WriteGirl and teaches at the Los Angeles Writing Project at California State University Los Angeles and with Southern New Hampshire University. Carla's writing has appeared in various anthologies and publications including Brain, Brevity blog, Child; Narratively; Longreads; The Nervous Breakdown, and MUTHA. Carla has an MFA from Queens University in Charlotte, and is a member of the Pasadena Rose Poets. Carla was selected to be a 2019 Pride Poet with the City of West Hollywood and was a 2016 PEN in The Community Teaching Artist. Carla lives in Southern California with her wife.--