In November 2018, Claire McEachern was living in Malibu on a horse ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains when the Woolsey Fire breached Highway 101 and surrounded her home.
Fortunately, her family was prepared with an emergency evacuation plan, which helped them preserve their home and escape safely. Soon after, McEachern felt a need to write about living in this wild terrain.
“It all had been percolating in my head for some time,” said the UCLA English professor, a specialist in 16th- and 17th-century British literature. “Then, everything came to a head and was sort of unleashed by that fire.”
McEachern wrote about the experience in an essay called “The Fire Files,” which was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2019. But her urge to document life amid Malibu’s rugged topography persisted.
Over the next few years, McEachern produced 20 essays inspired by the unique environment in which she lived. Those reflections are collected in a new book, “Coyotes and Culture: Essays from Old Malibu,” which was published in September by University of Nevada Press.
Beyond exploring the abundant but precarious natural wonder of Malibu, the collection also dispels some of its myths — including that the town is teeming with surfers and celebrities. McEachern writes about her own experience living among the residents of what she calls “old Malibu.”
