Venice Beach is a coming-of-age story about a thirteen-year-old boy who flees an abusive household for the lure of sunny California in 1968.

A captivating memoir of living on the streets along California’s Highway 1, for fans of Mistakes to Run With and Nearly Normal. At twenty-one, Ceilidh Michelle was homeless, drifting through countercultural communities along California’s coast, from Venice Beach to Slab City to Big Sur. This restless and turbulent time began when she was sleeping on her sister’s couch in Vancouver and decided to become a yoga disciple in California. Denied entry at the US border in Washington state, and stuck overnight in the Greyhound station, her already shaky pilgrimage began to take another direction, away from the inward sanctuary of an ashram and toward the sea and light and noise of Venice Beach, and eventually up Highway 1 to the desert. Having spent much of her youth outrunning family turmoil, the peripatetic lifestyle once key to Michelle’s survival is now a habit she can’t or won’t break—unless it breaks her first. Sleeping in parking lots, camping out in abandoned beach cottages and mansions, she finds community, easy and fraught, with fellow travellers: musicians, veterans, ex-cons, addicts, drug dealers, artists and con artists. Still, dreams and fleeting notions of home fuel and shadow every encounter, haunting the places she stays, offering moments of both grace and violence. Told with deadpan humour and insightful lyricism, Vagabond is an observant and at times shimmering narrative suspended between a traumatic past and an as yet unimagined future. Coursing through it is the story of an emergent writer just beginning to find sanctuary in her own creative instincts.

Robert "'Cali" Callahan is a teen runaway, living on the streets of Venice Beach, California. He's got a pretty sweet life: a treehouse to sleep in, a gang of surf bros, a regular basketball game...even a girl who's maybe-sorta interested in him. What he doesn't have is a plan. All that changes when a local cop refers Cali to a private investigator who is looking for a missing teenager. After all, Cali knows everyone in Venice. But the streets are filled with people who don't want to be found, and when he's hired to find the beautiful Reese Abernathy--who would do anything to stay hidden--Cali enters a new world filled with mysterious characters, dangerous choices, and his first chance at real love.

The Rollicking Bun--Home of the Epic Scone--is the center of Suzanna Wolf's life. Part tea shop, part bookstore, part home, it's everything she's ever wanted right on the Venice Beach boardwalk, including partnership with her two best friends from high school, Eric and Fernando. But with thirty-three just around the corner, suddenly Suzanna wants something more--something strictly her own. Salsa lessons, especially with a gorgeous instructor, seem like a good start--a harmless secret, and just maybe the start of a fling. But before she knows it, Suzanna is learning steps she never imagined--and dancing her way into confusion. 68,000 Words

A photo documentary about the amazing but endangered culture of Venice Beach

Following My Thumb follows the wandering, rambling, bumbling travels of Gabriel Morris from 1990-2000. In the summer of 1990, at the age of 18, he sets off to Europe with his over-sized backpack, thumb guiding the way. He hitchhikes the entire length of Great Britain, sleeps in barns, on bridges and beaches and under benches, explores the Greek Isles, sneaks into a Parisian movie theater, spends a night at the center of the Place de la Concorde roundabout, and more. In Part 2 of the book, he spends the bulk of the mid-1990s as a wandering traveler back home in the United States, searching for something elusive: a place to call home, a community, love, adventure, meaning, purpose. He both finds and loses all to varying degrees as he attends tribal Rainbow Gatherings in the woods, falls in and out of love on the road, lives on farms and communes, and spends several months in an idyllic valley, far from civilization in the Hawaiian rainforest. The book culminates with his amazing and thought-provoking travels in the mystical land of India. ,