• Propelled on a Zephyr of Compressed Wind

    CR Stecyk, the Smithsonian, and the first airbrushed surfboard. Originally published in the The Surfer’s Journal. By JOE DONNELLY Stored somewhere deep in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, along with other markers of pre-collapse American life gleaned from hundreds of years of material history, is a singular surfboard […]

  • Wrecking Crews: Remembering John Albert and his lost generation

    Originally published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. By JOE DONNELLY I REMEMBER WHEN my relationship dynamic with the late writer John Albert went from being friendly acquaintances to something like the hipster Honeymooners. It was when my then-wife and I moved into a house up the street from John and his then-wife. It […]

  • The Passionate Conversationalist: On Scott Timberg’s “Boom Times for the End of the World”

    Originally published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. By JOE DONNELLY ALTHOUGH IT RIGHTFULLY should be read as a celebration of his life and work, for those who knew and loved Scott Timberg, or just appreciated what he did and stood for, there is no separating Boom Times for the End of the World […]

  • God of Sperm: Cappy Rothman’s Life in Conception

    By JOE DONNELLY with CAPPY ROTHMAN God of Sperm: Cappy Rothman’s Life in Conception is available now. “Dr. Cappy Rothman’s career is without parallel in modern medicine. Do you know any physician who actually started a brand new medical specialty, has been responsible for bringing a quarter million babies into the world to parents who […]

  • It’s here! So Cal: Dispatches from the End of the World

    So Cal: Dispatches from the End of the World is available now. The new collection is a wide-ranging survey of Southern California-centric characters, capers and aesthetics. The thing about Joe is he’s so busy championing his friends, it’s easy to forget what a great writer he is. Reading through the pieces that follow, I was […]

  • Writer Joe Donnelly works at his desk inside the backyard garage at his home in Orange on Thursday, January 6, 2022. Donnelly uses electric space heaters to help keep him warm during the cold months. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register/SCNG)

    What’s it like to be a writer? No good writer loves writing.

    Forget the supposed ‘glamour,’ says this author.

  • Messiah Wolf

    When I was a boy, my imagination was ripe for wolves…

  • Red Canary Magazine

    Sponsored by Red Canary Collective™, Red Canary Magazine is an independently staffed and executed publication launched in collaboration with award-winning journalist and writer, Joe Donnelly. We provide space for difference-making work focusing on environmental, social justice and equity issues. While the need is urgent, we endeavor to approach our mission with humor, hope and humility. […]

  • The Confirmation of Danny Kwock

    By JOE DONNELLY This piece originally appeared in the The Surfer’s Journal.  PDF available here.   Danny Kwock’s hair is long. Like, hippie long. This might surprise those who’ve leafed through the tome The Eighties at Echo Beach, or are old enough to have been there and remember when Kwock, Preston Murray, Jeff Parker, Peter […]

  • Hymns of the Apocalypse

    By JOE DONNELLY APRIL 17, 2020 This piece originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times. It’s like they knew. Of course Pearl Jam didn’t intend for its new album, “Gigaton,” to be a coronavirus hymnal. After all, it has been gestating for seven years, taking shape via a sort of long-distance, idea-sharing dynamic necessitated by the band […]

JOE DONNELLY is an award-winning journalist, writer and editor. He is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Journalism at Whittier College and the editor of Red Canary Magazine.

Read More »

Featured

Why Luke Perry’s death is so personal for many forgotten Gen Xers

This story originally appeared in the LA Times. My phone buzzed at 5:07 a.m. Monday morning with a text from a friend who was in India with his wife and son. The text read: “As Luke Perry goes, so does the world.” I was too groggy from the sleeping pill I’d taken to respond, but […]

Skylight Books’ L.A. Man Podcast

Listen here: skylightbooks.podbean.com The next best thing to having been there.

Bush’s War of Art

This essay originally appeared in riotmaterial.com I was on the phone with my father and I can’t remember exactly how we got to the part of the conversation we were destined to get to—the part of the conversation everyone was destined to get to—as we watched the unfathomable unfold on that morning of September 11, […]

Reckoning With Heath Ledger

HEATH LEDGER’S arrival in Hollywood gave little indication he would become a transformational actor whose short career would leave such an indelible impression. Tall, blond and surf-buffed, just barely out of boyhood but already a TV star at home, Ledger hitched a ride from Australia on the arm of an alluring older woman and quickly […]

Werner Herzog Loves L.A.

Originally published by the Los Angeles Times. Photos by Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times.   WERNER HERZOG is at a booth in a Sunset Boulevard restaurant, just down the hill from where he once rescued Joaquin Phoenix. The rescue happened 11 years ago when the freshly Oscar-nominated Phoenix flipped his car on a winding road […]

Coastal Elite Elegy

Originally for Los Angeles Review of Books, November 30, 2016    Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge. -Alfred North Whitehead OF THE MANY forensic narratives that have been stitched together to try and shape the potentially-nightmarish November 8 election results into some kind of cloth of understanding, one in particular […]