Guest post written by The Ephemera Collector author Stacy Nathaniel Jackson
Stacy Nathaniel Jackson is a trans poet, playwright, and visual artist whose work has appeared in Electric Literature, Georgia Review, and New American Writing, among other publications. He currently resides in Washington, DC.
About The Ephemera Collector: A tenacious curator fights to save her beloved library and a new, groundbreaking archive in this epic Afrofuturist debut.
I learned from a cousin in a text message that the Eaton Fire had snatched her family home, the one she grew up in; no longer the place she lived but apparently still owned. She and her husband were safe, she said, since their primary residence didn’t burn. “We have a long road ahead of us, but we are grateful to be alive.”
As a fourth-generation Los Angeleno, Altadena and Pasadena is where most of my grandmother’s siblings lived, as well as their children—my father’s cousins—and their children, when I was a kid. My great-grandparents participated in the Great Migration via Greenville, Alabama to Los Angeles. Although my great-grandfather passed away during the late twenties, I can still visualize the interior of my great-grandmother’s house, which she owned on South Budlong near Exposition Park, until she died at the age of ninety-six. My parents and I lived nearby on Rodeo Road (now Obama Boulevard) until I was five. I told my cousin in our text exchange I hadn’t seen our extended family since we were young children.
Less publicized, the Teresa Fire in Monterey Hills broke out, whipped up by thirty mile-an-hour winds. It was eventually knocked down by the South Pasadena Fire Department when Eaton began to consume the San Gabriels nearly an hour later on the seventh of January, 2025.
No doubt I would have grown up in Altadena, but for the Altos de Monterey redevelopment project’s use of federal funds that prohibited racial covenants. South Pasadena had an overtly racist past, prohibiting non-White people from owning, renting, or running businesses. Apparently, legal provisions were made for non-White people to be in South Pasadena after its founding in the early 19th century only for menial or domestic work. In 1921, the Klan felt overly confident that an advertisement placed in the South Pasadena Courier would yield recruits. I’ve only recently learned the public pool I swam in, the Orange Grove Plunge, unconstitutionally discriminated against non-White swimmers on a regular basis.
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The sale of a fixer-upper tract home, after over fifty years of family ownership for a seven-figure profit, cannot be considered a loss. At least not an economic one. My parents bought their lot in Monterey Hills in 1965. My mother refused to monetize the house before she died. Where you gonna go? East maybe? A senior citizen condo in Riverside? Away from friends? Miss her daily McDonald’s coffee klatch after mass? That house represented the Black middle-class dream. Nope. She refused to be displaced by us, for us!
Understandably my mother wanted to stay in her own home despite her strained budget on a fixed income. I know she was proud there was an inheritance she could give us—the family home. (In frustration, once she raged that all my father left her when he died was a pile of bills.) Years later, once she fell ill to multiple strokes, it was clearly understood we were to sell the house and split the proceeds, versus keeping it and fighting over who did or didn’t live in it, who did or didn’t pay the property taxes. Her ultimate fear was that we would sue each other (like her siblings had done more than once over the years.)
Decades of memories created in a place attach to your backstory, whether the structure is gone or not—like the manicured bonsais and bottle-brush trees that lined either side of our curved driveway, and the stairs I had fun pushing my siblings down in a plastic infant bathtub mimicking a roller coaster ride, and the swing-set in our backyard positioned in sand where we ran barefoot, and the glass insets in our front door that my hand shattered when a sibling slammed the door in my face. The body holds memory of a place: the good, the bad, the traumatic, all of it. Having a family home destroyed by wildfire feels particularly cruel, triggering.
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I own my self-exile from L.A. County, initially for cleaner air and queer San Francisco. I never expected sibling estrangement years later. But our home won’t let me go; it’s the occasional backdrop of sleep-apnea infused wake-ups. In my novel The Ephemera Collector primarily set in 2035, the protagonist Xandria Brown is an archivist at The Huntington Library. She is beset with grief and doesn’t (or can’t) do anything with her family home other than occasionally use it, her dead mother’s clothes still in the closet. Brain fog and delirium from long COVID cause her to mistake Octavia E. Butler’s grave marker for her parents’ grave marker in her mind. In this near future, carrying a full-face particulate respirator for work is as common as wearing a backpack stuffed with snacks and a water bottle. Sounds from CAL FIRE choppers dropping water and fire retardant over canyon-brush hot spots is constant, the Santa Ana winds no longer seasonal. Speculative (fiction?)
In Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina’s journal entry dated February 1, 2025 begins: “We had a fire today.”
Ten days after the Eaton Fire began it was 65% contained. Altadena’s Mountain View Cemetery announced on its website the cemetery had sustained minimal damage, but was still closed due to an ongoing evacuation order. Neither Eagles View, Lot 4517, Grave 6—Octavia Butler’s final resting place—nor others, had been razed by the blaze.
I scroll through photo documentation of the destruction of the Eaton and Palisades fires on social media. I do not linger. The weight of these fires, nothing short of catastrophe, and yet what else is there to do but move—not on, but through.
