Los Angeles Times, View Section, June 29th, 1985.

Kate Braverman, poet, teacher, neo-mythic persona and author of a new novel, "Palm Latitudes,'' is sitting on the snack bar deck of the Miramar Hotel in Santa Barbara on a cool foggy afternoon drinking coffee from a foam cup and accepting homage from writing students who have just heard her read at the annual writers' conference there.

"I love your writing,'' says one woman, as she asks for Braverman's autograph. "I want to get your book.''

"I noticed you didn't have a copy,'' Braverman tells her. "I thought it was too tacky to bring it up. But buy it! Buy it! Get the word out there!''

In truth, it's understandable why Braverman would be a little manic on the subject. She finished the book four years ago but it's only being published now.

"It shouldn't have to be this tough,'' she says. "It just seems like what I've gone through between 1984 and now really seems sort of inordinate. It wasn't like this was the first thing I've ever done. It wasn't like no one had ever heard of me.'' And yet before Braverman had managed to sell "Palm Latitudes,'' she'd gone through a painful, humiliating, soul-searing, drug-infushed rite.

Braverman wrote "Palm Latitudes'' during one 18 month stretch in 1982-83, working so feverishly, she says, she only slept every second night. When it was finished, she had 800 pages of what she considered tightly-crafted magical, evocative, hallucinatory prose.

"The book,'' says Braverman, "is about women's lives. And in a larger sense about sensibilities.'' The three main characters, all of whom live in Echo Park, are Francisca Ramos, a magical voluptuous prostitute (La Puta de la Luna) with an icy fearsome contempt for men. Gloria Hernandez, a silent dutiful wife and mother who is nevertheless quite murderously mad and in a fit of jealous rage kills the Anglo woman next door. And Braverman's favorite character, Marta Ortega, a 74 year old woman with prophetic powers who reads voluminously, grows exotic orchids and raises two wild, eclectic and demanding daughters. Marta Ortega's best friends are a gay couple who live next door. The final scene takes place during an apocalyptic summer heat wave where fires rage in the hills and ash falls from the skies on Ortega's wilting flowers. "The book,'' says Braverman, "is really about the last hours of Marta Ortega's life before the world collapses before her eyes.''

When Palm Latitudes was finished, Braverman needed a rest. She gave the manuscript to her agent and went off with her daughter, Gabrielle, "to live in the jungles of Maui for a year.''

At this point, she wasn't worried about selling the book. Three years before, her first novel, "Lithium For Medea,'' had gotten good and even superb reviews ("Braverman is gifted, even prodigiously so,'' said one major paper.)

Besides, she says, her agent seemed so confident--"Six figures. No problem.'' So imagine her astonishment, she says, when after a year in Hawaii, she came back and her agent said: "I'm doing this for your own good. I can't move the book. You'd be better off with someone else.''

She tried another agent, then another, and another. A dozen agents refused the book as did an equal number of publishers. "I had,'' she says, "double digit rejection everywhere.''

"I really felt I was losing my mind when I could not get a publisher for this book,'' says Braverman, " ... because I gave this book this more than I had.''

But it wasn't just agents and publishers, she says. "People who I thought of as friends and colleagues were utterly unsupportive ... They weren't supportive of my struggle as a single mother. They weren't supportive of me emotionally. They weren't supportive of what the apparent career failure was doing to decompose my personality.''

Which was not surprising, says some of Braverman's current and former friends. Although Braverman is a gifted poet "with a touch of genius,'' at times she can be more than a little hard to take. Her personality goes from deeply insightful to tiresomely melodramatic to touchingly vulnerable with flashing speed. Her use of language is powerful and vivid at times and is only slightly diminished by her tendency to quote herself: "I folded like I'd taken a Comanche war lance in the gut.'' Or "I would shake my ancient rattle and my stone beads and my primal implements ... until my fingers fell off.'' Whereas for years she didn't even own any regular street clothes (she had a bathrobe, jeans and a few party dresses), now she wears eye shadow, high heels, net stockings and an amethyst ring the size of a walnut--"Striking any kind of balance,'' she says wryly, "has (always) eluded me completely.''

Braverman's noisy style seemed to work best with other forceful personalities. "I liked her guts,'' says fellow poet Wanda Coleman. "Her bitchiness and braggdocio didn't turn me off. She wasn't afraid of me. She approached me as a peer. I liked her style.''

Los Angeles author and priest, Malcolm Boyd sees Braverman as complex and fascinating personality. Her problem, he says, is that "she was born in the wrong century. She should have been a Druid priestess. She's an utterly restless person, easily bored and she doesn't suffer fools gladly ... I imagine day to day living is very difficult for her. She can be one of the most selfish people on earth and she's totally unaware of it ... She has a fascinating sense of panache. She's bigger than life. She's very demanding'' with "lots of pent-up energy'' and insufficient outlets. "And as a result she's a very troubled person ... I see a very vulnerable side to her. She could be smashed like a vase.''

Braverman readily admits that she hasn't been an easy person get along with. "There was,'' she says, "a period of my life when I did not behave in a reasonable manner. Things that would be difficulties for a reasonable person were perceived by me as overwhelming instances of outrage and ... tragedy.'' Nor was any of this helped, she says, by her tendency to merge her own personality with the wild, dangerous, and daring persona she created in her poetry.

Braverman never planned to write a novel called "Palm Latitudes.'' But in the late seventies, when crime and violence drove her out of her home in Culver City, she rented a little two bedroom frame house on a hilltop in Echo Park. Dodger stadium was off to her left and downtown LA was spread out below. Except for a gay couple across the way, she was the only non-Latin on the street.

"It was exciting,'' she says. "It was like moving to a new city. It became even more exciting when I realized I had moved to a new country.''

She would get up every morning, make coffee and drink it at the typewriter. ("I spent the best years of my life in a bathrobe,'' she says.) In the evening she would work on her garden--lettuce, tomatoes, gladioluses, carnations, irises and "banks of geraniums.''

In time she came to know her neighbors. "I talked to them in Spanish. I got to know their adventures from all these little provinces in Guatemala and Salvador.'' And for Braverman it was a revelation.

"These are people who are impoverished, who are away from their homes. and families. These are people who are frightened ... depressed ... in the midst of trauma. And ... when the heat would come up and people would be outside and in the streets ... there was this pervasive sense of misery .'' Braverman hadn't intended to write about the barrio when she moved to Echo Park. She was simply writing a long poem. Then when her poem hit 40 pages, it occurred to her--"You actually might be working on a novel.''

By this point it was clear to Braverman that the quintessential Los Angeles book "should not be about Anglos.'' Los Angeles, she says, does not have American architecture, American vegetation. Even the streets, she says, are named after "Spanish saints and psychotics.''

Even more importantly, she says, a book about Los Angeles had to have a particularly Latin feel. "I wanted to feminize the language,'' she says. "I wanted to use English in a way that I thought was a more tropical way of using it.'' Unlike the angular quality of standard English, which, says Braverman, is modeled on town squares and steeples and cool, crisp autumn afternoons, "there is a way of using the language that is tropical, lush and feminine-- more of a palm draped plaza than maples in a town square.'' If it was successful, it would be the great Los Angeles novel and she would be the female Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The only question was, did the writing work?

When "Palm Latitudes'' was finished, she left copies with her agent and 30 of her friends and went with her daughter to Maui for a year. Slowly the responses came filtering back. "I'm on page 214,'' wrote one friend, "and ... there is absolutely no reason to continue reading. The language is boring. The characters are boring. You are writing about something you know nothing about ... Whatever it is you are trying to do you have completely failed.''

Another person circled her postscript dedication to her daughter, Gabrielle, and said it was "the only good line in the book.'' From the poet Wanda Coleman, Braverman got a long distance call. "She said, 'You've got to withdraw this from publication,''' says Braverman. "`It is going to ruin your reputation. It's an unmitigated disaster.'''

It was an unmitigated disaster, Coleman now says. "I told her, `Why don't you write out of your own ethnic perspective?' There was a phrase--`La Puta de la Luna.' The glorification of the whore. I told her, `Boy, Chicano chicks ain't ... going to care for this.'''

The fact was, says Coleman, the book was "amateurish.'' Braverman really went crazy with variations on green, lime, verdant. "It appeared 100 times within 20 pages.''

"I told her I would call this back, get it back from my agent. I told her to seriously consider revising it.'' But Braverman was so "adamant,'' says Coleman, "she don't talk to me anymore.''

It didn't get any better for Braverman when she got back to Los Angeles. A reading was arranged at a local university. Three people from the humanities department showed up. Halfway through the reading, one guy got up and walked out. "When I finish reading,'' says Braverman, "one of the (remaining two) guys looks at me and says, 'You can't be serious.'

"And I said, `I am serious,'

"And he said, `This has got to be some kind of joke.'"

Braverman was shellshocked. "I began to think I'd lost my mind ... I couldn't seem to connect up with a publisher or an agent or an audience or a support group or supportive individual of any kind anywhere under any circumstances.''

Braverman felt so dispirited and adrift she decided to go back to college and study literature. "I said, 'Clearly I have no reference point. Clearly my sensibility is in utter disrepute. There's nothing I can do but start with the ABCs of it.’''

In the fall of 1985, Braverman enrolled in a master's program at Sonoma State, a little school in the wine country 50 miles north of San Francisco. "After being laughed out of town on Palm Latitudes,'' says Braverman, "it was nice to land somewhere ... It was like I'd come in from combat. I was walking around the campus taking these classes. My credits at this point where as good or better than most of the people teaching there. Talk about paying dues. I paid dues and what did they punish me for--originality?'' When editors would return the manuscript, she says, they would simply enclose a form letter of rejection: "This doesn't meet our current editorial needs.'' Braverman was devastated—"That's what they do,'' she says, "for people who can't write."

At Sonoma State, got her first hint that the novel wasn't a dreadful embarrassing disaster when she gave the manuscript to the writer in residence and the Milton Scholar. The first, says Braverman, called it "a tour de force'' and the second said parts of it were as good as "anything in the English language.''

In the meantime, a friend of a friend had forwarded the manuscript to Simon and Schuster's Linden Press. When they hadn't responded after nearly a year, Braverman wrote and ask them to send the manuscript back. Instead they wrote to say they'd be pleased and honored to publish it.

Braverman was still so hurt by all the "contempt and rejection'' she'd received, she said, that she didn't tell a "single person for six weeks.''

In June, after 4 years, Braverman's book was finally published. Braverman was prepared for anything, she says, but the initial reviews looked surprisingly good. "I have them memorized,'' says Braverman, "dazzling ... breathtaking ... not characters but archetypes ... the book is a poetic tour de force ... surely a work of genius.'' And the New York Times after a quibble about what it called the book's occasionally over-strident feminism, called Palm Latitudes "a genuine achievement. Ms. Braverman possesses a magical incantory voice and the ability to life ordinary lives into the heightened world of myth and in using these gifts to recount the lives of these three women she has succeeded in creating a work of hallucinatory poetic power.''

For the moment, Braverman is living in her mother's large four level home on a Beverly Hills hillside just up the street from the Marvin Davis estate and trying to figure out just where to go next. After years of intense and dramatic living, she says, she has finally learned the value of quiet and simplicity. She meditates every day, walks 5 miles every morning and evening, "I read a lot. I listen to music. I thrash around in my consciousness. I love being a mother. I am more interested now in simplicity.''

She's on a strict 800 calorie a day diet. For the first time, she doesn't drink. Except for smoking cigarettes, she says, she now has "no flagrant and obvious vices.'' For the future, she says, she'd like to be a poet or novelist in residence at some university. Or else find a nice little rent controlled apartment in Santa Monica.

"Someone gets to live there,'' she says. "Why not me?''