University City massacre done by developer family donor They are the crème de crème of San Diego business and political society, giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to both Democrats and Republicans, and in turn ...
March 20, 2023
Journalist, critic, and memoirist, Thomas Larson is the author of three books: The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease, The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings," and The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative. He has been a staff writer for the San Diego Reader since 1999. He teaches in the MFA Program at Ashland University, Ashland, Ohio, where he also is the Book Reviews editor for River Teeth. He lectures on the craft of nonfiction writing, the memoir, music subjects, and his heart disease, and he facilitates writing workshops as well. His website is thomaslarson.com.
Articles by Thomas Larson
Poolside shooting near UTC involving Selis and Wilf clans
San Diego State math guy, South Bay realtor, North Coast Rep actor, UCSD cognitive scientist
The first thing you realize once you start investigating “intelligence” is that it seems like no two people — people whose personalities, abilities, capacities, and traits are as different as their DNA — use the ...
February 8, 2023
Nathanael West killed near El Centro
Almost Beautiful: the death in El Centro of Nathanael West, one of America’s most mordant authors Fifteen minutes ago, a bit after 2:30, they started driving north from the grand, desert-white De Anza Hotel in ...
January 14, 2023
Will you understand this Murrieta and Lemon Grove casual killer?
In the infinite flatness of southern California’s Imperial Valley, an irrigated desert of cropland and skin-frying heat, lies Calipatria State Prison, a mostly maximum-security Level IV warren of cellblocks, surrounded for miles by massive ag ...
August 31, 2022
San Diego crime boss gunned down on Lamont St.
How Frank Bompensiero met his fate "Bomp kicked the door shut, Mirabile wrapped his arms around Borgia just as Jimmy dropped the garrote over his head, handing the other end of the rope to Bompensiero. ...
July 17, 2022
USD students look back at high school, the campus's Catholicism
Class Struggle “We had a lot of cliques at my school. There were the drama kids, and we had a group we actually called the Clique. It was just the people that seemed to party ...
February 7, 2022
Judith Moore feels her daughters' pain, Reader writer marries Cynthis Heimel
Lines of Love, Lines of Pain We lived by the hospital. I heard sirens every day. When both girls were with me in the house, I felt a smug assurance when I heard the sirens ...
January 30, 2022
Where is San Diego's local news going now?
It’s been a couple years since the alt-weekly San Diego CityBeat and its blend of local news, irreverent columns, and cultural coverage went silent. The paper disappeared after a cascade of events, starting when Times ...
I-15 mimics L.A traffic, when there were quail in Bonita
Traffic spares no one “People say, ‘You got a real transportation problem on the 15.’ Well, it’s less a transportation problem than it is a land-use problem. A lot of the people, because they can’t ...
January 24, 2022