María Amparo Escandón on L.A. Weather

María Amparo Escandón is a New York Times best-selling bilingual author. Her third novel, L.A. Weather is a Reese’s Book Club pick and is featured on Oprah Quarterly as well as a Best Book of the Month in Barnes & Noble, People, CNN, E! News, and more. Her first novel, Esperanza’s Box of Saints and its Spanish version, Santitos, has been the number one best seller in the Los Angeles Times Best Sellers List. It has 21 foreign editions and has been read in over 86 countries. Her books have been chosen as the annual book selection for several Community Reads public library-funded projects, like One City One Book, A Novel Idea. Many of her short stories have been published in journals and magazines, both in English and Spanish, and she has taught numerous Creative Writing courses and workshops at UCLA Extension since 1994. In LA Weather, Los Angeles is parched, dry as a bone, and all Oscar, the weather-obsessed patriarch of the Alvarado family, desperately wants is a little rain. He’s harboring a costly secret that distracts him from everything else. His wife, Keila, desperate for a life with a little more intimacy and a little less Weather Channel, feels she has no choice but to end their marriage. Their three daughters―Claudia, a television chef with a hard-hearted attitude; Olivia, a successful architect who suffers from gentrification guilt; and Patricia, a social media wizard who has an uncanny knack for connecting with audiences but not with her lovers―are blindsided and left questioning everything they know. Each will have to take a critical look at her own relationships and make some tough decisions along the way. With quick wit and humor, Maria Amparo Escandón follows the Alvarado family as they wrestle with impending evacuations, secrets, deception, and betrayal, and their toughest decision yet: whether to stick together or burn it all down.

Om Podcasten

All writing is a tightrope walk from where the idea originates to the moment a book, movie, or TV episode emerges in the world. In The Write Process, Charles Jensen, director of the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, asks writing instructors and students who’ve walked the tightrope and come out the other side to talk about their process. Each episode tells the story of how one writer took one project from concept to completion, showcasing the various—and varied—paths we take when we follow one good idea all the way home.