VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

ZOBELL: Once I was reading an excerpt from my novel that included some characters called the Terrace Rats, boys who grew up in Del Mar Terrace, the south end by the slough before Interstate 805 had gone through. I’d done some extra research about the gang and the area because The Reader wanted a more historic version of it for a cover story. I tracked down the leader of the Terrace Rats all those years later, and he had so much fun talking about the old days—how the Rats had made makeshift rafts to float through the slough and had wars with the inland boys about who got to play on the earthmovers in the evening when the freeway builders had gone home for the day. As cool a customer as this character was, one night I called him right back to ask him one last thing, and his wife told me that the minute we’d hung up, he’d immediately dashed to the attic to try to find an old picture of the Terrace Rats that I’d asked for. I let him know I’d be reading from the story nearby, so he turned up proud as could be, wearing a big pair of overalls like he was still in the old gang. After my reading, people wanted me to sign the book. The Terrace Rat set up camp right next to me and signed all the books right after I did. He didn’t even need to be asked!

Bonnie ZoBell’s new connected collection, What Happened Here, a novella and stories from Press 53 centered on the site PSA Flight 182 crashed in the North Park area of San Diego is being pre-launched this very moment. Her fiction chapbook, The Whack-Job Girls, was published in 2013. She has won a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in fiction, the Capricorn Novel Award, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, and others.