It is hard to imagine a bit of Americana that is more steeped in its own mythos than California and its writers. Geologically speaking, California formed gradually over tens of millions of years as one tectonic plate was subducted under another. Its mountain ranges separate the state into a series of distinct geographies, each with their own ecologies and environments. California’s hundreds of fault lines mean that earthquakes and tremors are far from rare as plates slip and slide past each other in near-constant tectonic movement. The deep time conditions for what we’ve come to know as “California” were set, literally, eons before writers, poets, and thinkers explored California’s basins and ranges, its gray bay mists, its redwoods, its deserts, its histories, its cultures, its California-ness—its esse or ‘being.’