At the intersection of literature and journalism, Mark Arax stands tall
* A profile of the reporter, wordsmith and historian
By Paul Chaderjian
History, great characters, human drama are all elements that flow out of the pen of Mark Arax, who has been telling some of the most interesting and untold stories while working as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times for more than two decades.
Mark Arax, considered one of the top journalists at the Times, is also a literary figure in his own right - a modern-day scribe, who was born into the most sensational Armenian stories of the 20th century. He could not help but investigate the story of his family, his people, his native California and turn them into literature, through a unique voice, a narrative voice that is Saroyanesque in spirit, Steinbeckian in scope and as epic as any modern scribe can be.
After working in the LA Times offices in Southern California as a reporter from 1984-1990, what made Mark an overnight literary celebrity in his hometown of Fresno was a book he wrote about the murder of his father.
"The murder is when I first started," he says. "One of the first things I did was bought a little notebook. I think that gave me my first interest in reporting. I would take notes of things I would hear on the streets, things I would hear my mom discussing with one of my uncles.”
Mark says he spent more than half of his life investigating the crime, trying to piece the murder mystery together and looking into “it's permutation and repercussions."
After writing “In My Father’s Name” and telling the story of his family, his town and the murder that shaped his life, Mark was ready to return to the newspaper business. That's when the LA Times decided to base him in his native Fresno and in the middle of a region that was home to fascinating stories.
"It was like a third world country in a way that we needed a bureau here," says the athletic 50-year-old, who looks nothing like the stereotypical newspaper man. The need for a bureau in the most bountiful agricultural region in the world brought Mark back to the front pages of the Times in 1993, and he didn't have to leave home again. He's been working for the paper ever since.
"I started writing the story of this place," he says, "and I almost covered it like a foreign correspondent, covering a foreign land and sending those stories to Los Angeles. And really, it was a foreign land, but in some way it was basically LA in the 1930s and 1940s."
Arax was the first to write about developers buying votes by bribing local lawmakers. "I broke the stories of corruption in Fresno, in zoning. I did a lot of stories on how growth was like a giant Ponzy scheme in the Valley, where it wasn't even paying for itself."
The FBI investigation into local corruption was dubbed "Operations Rezone," and Mark's stories help push the investigation along. The results were the conviction of one biggest local developer, John Bonadelle and several local city officials. "We were subsidizing the wealthiest homebuilders in Fresno, by giving them these incredible breaks on fees and other things," he says.
Gladiator Days & Migrant Workers
We sit in his front year, in a serene and upper middle class neighborhood in Northwest Fresno, and he talks about his career. He is handsome, fit and confident. He speaks slowly and uses his words cautiously. His practice of using precise, deliberately chosen words in his creative non-fiction pieces also shows up during the interview; he speaks carefully, repeating my questions as perhaps a way to validate, verify or think about them before answering.
Mark says another one of the big stories he spent several years investigating was about California's prison system, writing pieces that would eventually change how prison guards did their jobs. "When prisoners would get into fights," he says, "the California guards were shooting them. And it was this crazy logic. These guys are fighting, and to prevent the fight from turning deadly, the guards killed them."
His story, Gladiator Days, made headlines around the world and led other national media to focus on the California Prison System. The judicial system also made the State of California pay multiple million dollars to-date some of the families of the 39 inmates killed and to the more than 200 inmates injured or paralyzed between 1993 and 1998.
Powerful story telling, revealing the truth, focusing on the victims and the perpetrators all led the State to stop guards from shooting inmates engaged in fistfights.
"I also told the story of the farm workers," he says with great modestly. "I had a story called 'the Summer of the Death of Hilario Guzman.' That won the SDX Society of Professional Journalists award for magazine writing this last year."
Mark's 11-thousand word story for the LA Times Magazine followed one family from the highlands of Oaxaca to the Big Valley of California. "They happened to be a family from a tribe that no one had ever documented, Triqui Indians," he says. "I followed them for one year from one raisin harvest to the next in the Valley."
During the year that Mark spent learning about the Guzman family, he watched them deal with the death of one of their elders, cross the border to burry their patriarch, then brave another border-crossing to return to work.
"Really a harrowing story," he says and continues to talk about the two babies the family was blessed with the year he followed them around. Mark spent hours interviewing family members, watching their lives play out to capture for readers the reality of the people whose hard work and sweat put food on tables across America and the world.
"I also wrote stories about the Black Okies," he says. "There were plenty of stories about the white Okies from Steinbeck. But no one had told the story of the black Okies. And I found them off Highway 99, living in these little shacks on salt ground, alkali ground, and I told that story."
The third world, surreal living conditions, barbaric prison guards, corrupt officials and the human spirit were right here in the Golden State, and Mark was able to uncover the stories through diligent, meticulous hard work, research and laser-sharp insight.
J-School
Under a shade tree whose branches are being blown by breezes from the Western Sierra on this Saturday afternoon, I ask him about the recent headlines and the Armenian community's demands that his Managing Editor step down. He says he doesn't want to talk about the recent headlines, but he is willing to talk about his career at the paper.
He talks about his family and that he was the older of three kids and only 15 when his father was shot and killed by two gunmen, inside his father’s West Fresno bar. "My father was murdered in 1972. My mom was widowed, so I felt a responsibility to stay close to home. That's why I went to Fresno State."
At Fresno State, Mark says he met the most accomplished Armenian-American journalist ever - Roger Tatarian. "He was my mentor," says Mark.
Tatarian had been editor-in-chief of United Press International, one of the biggest news services at the time. "He had a heart attack and returned to Fresno, where he'd grown up," says Mark.
Tatarian had come home to build up the journalism program at Fresno State, and during the years Mark was enrolled, that program had been one of the top three in the country, winning national writing awards and the Heart writing competitions.
"I had won a Heart Award," remembers Mark. "Then we did some investigative pieces. Then I was the editor of the weekly and then the daily."
Then it was off to Columbia University, where Mark had planned to pursue a year of graduate studies in Journalism and another three years in Law. "I decided after that first year in Journalism that I just loved writing so much," he says.
Instead of pursuing a law degree, Mark went to work for the Baltimore Sun from 1981 until 1984. He joined the LA Times in the summer of 1984 after his mother had a bout with cancer.
"I came, took care of her, then went to LA," he says. "Started off in the San Gabriel Valley and became for those first three or four years, our Asian reporter. I was documenting how Asians had moved into the San Gabriel Valley and had created the first suburban Chinatowns in America. Those stories were nominated for a Pulitzer and won some 'Stories of the Year' awards for the LA Times."
Family History
Right around the time his work was being praised by his peers and receiving professional acclaim, Mark decided he was ready to write about his father and his family. The year was 1990, but he had already begun his research in the mid 1970s. He already had a collection of audiotapes with interviews of family members.
"I didn't know what I was doing," he says. "I was just getting the stories of my grandfathers, my grandmothers. I think I was trying to fill the void of my father's death, because there were no answers. It was an unsolved murder. So I was trying to find some kind of an answer about our story."
The stories he recorded were of his two grandfathers. Both had been born in the year 1900 in Western Armenia and had survived the Genocide. One was a Dashnak, a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. The other was a Hunchak, a member of the Social Democractic Hunchakian party.
"My grandfather Yegishe Mekhitarian was the priest of the red brick church," says Mark, referring to the Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Church in Downtown Fresno. "He was a very strong Dashnak from Moush. The last thing his mother did was give him a Bible and the Dashnak [party program] and say, 'don't ever forget the Dashnak.'"
Mark says his grandfather had never talked to his children about the Genocide, but he sat down with the inquisitive journalist and told him the story.
"45 family members killed," says Mark. "Everybody. Mothers. Fathers. Brothers. Sisters. All gone. Only he survived. He was 14 or 15. He walked hundreds and hundreds of miles, a Turkish family took him in, and eventually landed in an orphanage in Lebanon and then in Jerusalem, where he was taken in by priests, and he became a priest."
Principle or perhaps stubbornness or both were driving forces in his grandfather, says Mark, and he sees that dynamic at work in his life.
"Basically, as a matter of principle," he says, "Echmiadzin asked him to recognize some Soviet Armenian holiday. My grandfather, the Dashnak, refused, and they basically declared his church, the red brick church, a renegade church."
Mark says his grandfather continued his duties at the Church, which now falls under the auspices of the Cilician Sea. "He ran it as a renegade," he says, "and Echmiadzin eventually defrocked him. They removed his frock, and he continued to be a priest, a renegade priest."
Aram Arax
Mark's paternal grandfather, Aram Arax the poet, was from Bursa on the Sea of Marmara. He took his pen name from the Arax River and passed it down to Mark. Aram and his family had left their village for Istanbul before 1914, because his mother was a wet nurse. As had Mark's own father, Aram's father had also died when Aram was only 15.
"When the Genocide began and April 24 happened," says Mark, "Ara went to Beyazit Square in Istanbul, and he saw these Hunchaks hanged. They were hanging there in the square, and he knew something was going to happen."
Mark says Turks were walking around and trying to recruit Armenian boys to join their killing brigades. To escape the 'recruiters,' Aram Arax went into hiding, like the 20 thousand Armenians in Istanbul who hid in attics. "They were called the Army of the Attics, Tavan Tabouri," says Mark.
Mark's grandfather hid in his attic for a year-and-a-half. He had gone into hiding with tons of French literature. "He wanted to be a poet when he came down," says Mark. "He was as strong a Hunchak as the other one was a Dashnak."
When Aram Arax passed away in 1989, Mark says his grandfather died a frustrated poet. "His pen went silent for half a century from the moment he got here. He became a fruit tramp in the Valley, harvesting fruits and vegetables. His first job was picking potatoes and weed patch."
Aram's first employer was Kirk Kerkorian's father, Villa, who lost his empire in the raisin bust, shortly after Aram went to work for Villa. "That was my grandfather's first job," says Mark. "Then his pen went silent. He was just trying to make a living."
Mark says Aram Arax took up writing once again when he was in his 70s. "By then, he had lost too much time," says Mark. "His voice was too political, and it just wasn't honed. You just can't take off from writing for half-a-century and except to pick it up."
The stories of these two men, who marks calls "firebrands," is what Mark recorded on audiotapes early in his career. The making of a poet, the escape to Jerusalem, a renegade priest, a fruit tramp, a renegade church and an unsolved murder, those were the stories that brought Mark's fascinating and tragic life to the present through the pages of his first book.
Investigating the Murder
‘In My Father's Name’ took Mark six years to write. "I think I solved the story of this town," he says. "I solved the story of family, of my father, but I couldn't quite put my hands on the killers or the plot. I surmised some things in there."
The book was published nearly 30 years after the murder, and it unlocked distant memories in those who knew about the murder. "The book dislodged some truths and brought some people to the fore," says Mark, "and ultimately the police were to find one of the shooters."
One of Mark's father's murderers was arrested in 2003 and convicted of first-degree murder in 2004. "Basically, a couple of these drug smugglers got busted," says Mark. "And one of them had a lot of guilt on his mind, because he had just read my book. So he came clean to the police and pointed out this one guy, who had been the shooter."
Even though there was an arrest and conviction in the murder that changes Mark's life forever, the motive behind the murder is still not known.
"There were competing motives," says Mark. "One was that it may have been robbery. But the second is that it might have had something to do with my father exposing a major drug smuggling operation in Fresno."
That drug operation, says Mark, reached the highest levels of the police department at the time, and a few days before his murder, Mark's dad had driven to Sacramento to meet with the Attorney General's office and to try to expose this drug operation and the official corruption. "So in a way," says Mark, "my dad was a like a journalist without a pen and without the protection."
Mark says the convicted shooter is jailed at Avenal Prison, one of the jails that Mark wrote about in his Gladiator Days stories. "This shooter is actually writing me from prison, wanting to talk to me about that," says Mark. But he says the shooter is also wanting money, and Mark says, "we don't pay for interviews."
Juggling newspaper and books
For the past 15 years, Mark's stories at the LA Times have been more than straight-forward pieces of cookie-cutter journalism. Mark's words tell stories but through devices of creative non-fiction and literary non-fiction.
By bringing characters to life, by taking you to the places and people he writes about, Mark is able to convey not only facts but real life in black and white print. "That's been my forte," he says, and it's this forte has as been his entree to the book publishing world. Since 1990, he has been juggling two careers – one in journalism and on in books.
"Many of my stories were long, in depth look at lives," he says. "The paper would sometimes give me a year to do one series of stories. It is a tremendous job."
Mark says it takes a long time to see enough life play out, so that he feels like he knows the people he is writing about.
"It's a deeper, deeper kind of journalism," he says. "It's one that maybe comes a little closer to the truth. I don't think you can achieve THE truth. But it comes at least a few steps closer to the truth than stuff that's done and turned around like that."
Non-fiction bestseller
The second book Mark wrote, ‘King of California,’ became a best seller. It was on the LA Times "Best Seller" list for seven or eight weeks, selling about 40 thousand hard cover copies.
"I wanted to communicate how the South came West," says Mark, "how the plantation South was uprooted and grafted on to a piece of California, and how the biggest fresh water lake West of the Mississippi was drained by man, with a little help from nature, and turned into the richest cotton land in the world."
Mark says the King of California is a story of guile, will, and a little bit of larceny. "There's a murder or two in there," he says. "It's just this grand story of this rising West, and the story of how through that Tulare Lake basin came the Latinos, the white Okies, and then the black Okies. It's a really rich narrative story too."
Another best seller that features Mark's words is a book called "My California." More than a dozen writers are featured in the collection of essays about the place called California, but Mark is planning his own book of essays about the Golden State. His book will part memoir and will feature some literary journalism.
"Trying to write a modern day version of Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem, which is the seminal book. It's one of the books of the canon of California literature," he says. "That's my ambition and goal. Whether I can pull it off remains to be seen."
One of the stories in Mark's upcoming collection of essays about California is called Saroyan's Pile, and Mark wants to make an entire book out of this one story. The Pile is Saroyan's archives that are sitting in a big warehouse in Livingston, Calif., North of Fresno.
"His archives dwarf Twain's,Steinbeck's, all of them," says Mark. "And those archives have all kinds of stuff in them, his mustache hair clippings. The rocks he collected. The shards of glass he collected on bike rides. He said he collected rocks, because it reminded him that the most beautiful art is simple. He was crazy a little bit, beautifully crazy."
Arax & Saroyan
Mark's second book, ‘the King of California,’ won the International Saroyan Writing Prize from Stanford. The award was significant for Mark, because he had met with the literary genius about a dozen times early in life and then in college.
"I would see Saroyan in the stores, when I was eight, nine, ten years old, on his bike," says Mark. "I would always stop him, and he would talk to me. I just remember his asked a lot of questions. He was very inquisitive."
When Mark received his first journalism writing assignment from Roger Tatarian, he was asked to write about Spring.
"I thought, 'how in the hell am I going to do a story on Spring?'" he says. "I was walking around Fig Garden Village, and there was William Saroyan on his bicycle."
Saroyan very graciously talked to Mark about Spring, waxing on poetically. The year was 1978, and Mark's story about Spring turned into a profile of the writer.
"He'd always tell me, 'write about what you know in the language that you know it,'" remembers Mark. His grandfather Aram would take him to Saroyan's house once-in-a-while for a visit, and the aspiring writer would ask the established playwright and novelist a lot of questions.
"And he said, don't worry about big words," remember Mark. "He said, just count the words in my stories. There's only 300 words.'"
Mark says Saroyan emphasized the simplicity of language. "It wasn't about big words," says Mark. "It was the way you took every day language and turned it into poetry, through the rhythms, the voice, the music of the sentences."
The Future
Mark says he wants to go through Saroyan's archives, because among them are letters his grandfather wrote Saroyan starting in the 1940s. "I want to find those letters and use them. It may be its own book, the Pile, Saroyan's Pile or Journey through Saroyan's Pile. I may find my own family's story through that Pile, the story of Fresno, the story of being an Armenian writer and all that kind of stuff."
Also ahead for Mark is a trip to historic Armenia. "My friends keep bugging me about going to Armenia," he says. "I had the chance to go with my grandfather when I was 19, and I didn't. And I regret that."
Mark says he wants to go back and follow the meanderings of the Arax River. "I want to use the river as a metaphor of something that is there, something that waters the Ararat Valley, and yet the river itself, you can't touch."
The other side of the River, says Mark, "is the story of the Genocide and our loss. It's always there. There is a Kevork Emin poem, where he says, 'I'm eyelash to eyelash with the Mountain, and yet you can't hold it.'"
Knowing Mark and taking into account his accomplishments, he'll come eyelash to eyelash with the Mountain, and in that meeting, he'll find something that others before him had not discovered. He'll ask the questions that have not been asked, and in the end, the power of his pen will prove mightier than all the Ottoman swords.
# # #
By Paul Chaderjian
History, great characters, human drama are all elements that flow out of the pen of Mark Arax, who has been telling some of the most interesting and untold stories while working as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times for more than two decades.
Mark Arax, considered one of the top journalists at the Times, is also a literary figure in his own right - a modern-day scribe, who was born into the most sensational Armenian stories of the 20th century. He could not help but investigate the story of his family, his people, his native California and turn them into literature, through a unique voice, a narrative voice that is Saroyanesque in spirit, Steinbeckian in scope and as epic as any modern scribe can be.
After working in the LA Times offices in Southern California as a reporter from 1984-1990, what made Mark an overnight literary celebrity in his hometown of Fresno was a book he wrote about the murder of his father.
"The murder is when I first started," he says. "One of the first things I did was bought a little notebook. I think that gave me my first interest in reporting. I would take notes of things I would hear on the streets, things I would hear my mom discussing with one of my uncles.”
Mark says he spent more than half of his life investigating the crime, trying to piece the murder mystery together and looking into “it's permutation and repercussions."
After writing “In My Father’s Name” and telling the story of his family, his town and the murder that shaped his life, Mark was ready to return to the newspaper business. That's when the LA Times decided to base him in his native Fresno and in the middle of a region that was home to fascinating stories.
"It was like a third world country in a way that we needed a bureau here," says the athletic 50-year-old, who looks nothing like the stereotypical newspaper man. The need for a bureau in the most bountiful agricultural region in the world brought Mark back to the front pages of the Times in 1993, and he didn't have to leave home again. He's been working for the paper ever since.
"I started writing the story of this place," he says, "and I almost covered it like a foreign correspondent, covering a foreign land and sending those stories to Los Angeles. And really, it was a foreign land, but in some way it was basically LA in the 1930s and 1940s."
Arax was the first to write about developers buying votes by bribing local lawmakers. "I broke the stories of corruption in Fresno, in zoning. I did a lot of stories on how growth was like a giant Ponzy scheme in the Valley, where it wasn't even paying for itself."
The FBI investigation into local corruption was dubbed "Operations Rezone," and Mark's stories help push the investigation along. The results were the conviction of one biggest local developer, John Bonadelle and several local city officials. "We were subsidizing the wealthiest homebuilders in Fresno, by giving them these incredible breaks on fees and other things," he says.
Gladiator Days & Migrant Workers
We sit in his front year, in a serene and upper middle class neighborhood in Northwest Fresno, and he talks about his career. He is handsome, fit and confident. He speaks slowly and uses his words cautiously. His practice of using precise, deliberately chosen words in his creative non-fiction pieces also shows up during the interview; he speaks carefully, repeating my questions as perhaps a way to validate, verify or think about them before answering.
Mark says another one of the big stories he spent several years investigating was about California's prison system, writing pieces that would eventually change how prison guards did their jobs. "When prisoners would get into fights," he says, "the California guards were shooting them. And it was this crazy logic. These guys are fighting, and to prevent the fight from turning deadly, the guards killed them."
His story, Gladiator Days, made headlines around the world and led other national media to focus on the California Prison System. The judicial system also made the State of California pay multiple million dollars to-date some of the families of the 39 inmates killed and to the more than 200 inmates injured or paralyzed between 1993 and 1998.
Powerful story telling, revealing the truth, focusing on the victims and the perpetrators all led the State to stop guards from shooting inmates engaged in fistfights.
"I also told the story of the farm workers," he says with great modestly. "I had a story called 'the Summer of the Death of Hilario Guzman.' That won the SDX Society of Professional Journalists award for magazine writing this last year."
Mark's 11-thousand word story for the LA Times Magazine followed one family from the highlands of Oaxaca to the Big Valley of California. "They happened to be a family from a tribe that no one had ever documented, Triqui Indians," he says. "I followed them for one year from one raisin harvest to the next in the Valley."
During the year that Mark spent learning about the Guzman family, he watched them deal with the death of one of their elders, cross the border to burry their patriarch, then brave another border-crossing to return to work.
"Really a harrowing story," he says and continues to talk about the two babies the family was blessed with the year he followed them around. Mark spent hours interviewing family members, watching their lives play out to capture for readers the reality of the people whose hard work and sweat put food on tables across America and the world.
"I also wrote stories about the Black Okies," he says. "There were plenty of stories about the white Okies from Steinbeck. But no one had told the story of the black Okies. And I found them off Highway 99, living in these little shacks on salt ground, alkali ground, and I told that story."
The third world, surreal living conditions, barbaric prison guards, corrupt officials and the human spirit were right here in the Golden State, and Mark was able to uncover the stories through diligent, meticulous hard work, research and laser-sharp insight.
J-School
Under a shade tree whose branches are being blown by breezes from the Western Sierra on this Saturday afternoon, I ask him about the recent headlines and the Armenian community's demands that his Managing Editor step down. He says he doesn't want to talk about the recent headlines, but he is willing to talk about his career at the paper.
He talks about his family and that he was the older of three kids and only 15 when his father was shot and killed by two gunmen, inside his father’s West Fresno bar. "My father was murdered in 1972. My mom was widowed, so I felt a responsibility to stay close to home. That's why I went to Fresno State."
At Fresno State, Mark says he met the most accomplished Armenian-American journalist ever - Roger Tatarian. "He was my mentor," says Mark.
Tatarian had been editor-in-chief of United Press International, one of the biggest news services at the time. "He had a heart attack and returned to Fresno, where he'd grown up," says Mark.
Tatarian had come home to build up the journalism program at Fresno State, and during the years Mark was enrolled, that program had been one of the top three in the country, winning national writing awards and the Heart writing competitions.
"I had won a Heart Award," remembers Mark. "Then we did some investigative pieces. Then I was the editor of the weekly and then the daily."
Then it was off to Columbia University, where Mark had planned to pursue a year of graduate studies in Journalism and another three years in Law. "I decided after that first year in Journalism that I just loved writing so much," he says.
Instead of pursuing a law degree, Mark went to work for the Baltimore Sun from 1981 until 1984. He joined the LA Times in the summer of 1984 after his mother had a bout with cancer.
"I came, took care of her, then went to LA," he says. "Started off in the San Gabriel Valley and became for those first three or four years, our Asian reporter. I was documenting how Asians had moved into the San Gabriel Valley and had created the first suburban Chinatowns in America. Those stories were nominated for a Pulitzer and won some 'Stories of the Year' awards for the LA Times."
Family History
Right around the time his work was being praised by his peers and receiving professional acclaim, Mark decided he was ready to write about his father and his family. The year was 1990, but he had already begun his research in the mid 1970s. He already had a collection of audiotapes with interviews of family members.
"I didn't know what I was doing," he says. "I was just getting the stories of my grandfathers, my grandmothers. I think I was trying to fill the void of my father's death, because there were no answers. It was an unsolved murder. So I was trying to find some kind of an answer about our story."
The stories he recorded were of his two grandfathers. Both had been born in the year 1900 in Western Armenia and had survived the Genocide. One was a Dashnak, a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. The other was a Hunchak, a member of the Social Democractic Hunchakian party.
"My grandfather Yegishe Mekhitarian was the priest of the red brick church," says Mark, referring to the Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Church in Downtown Fresno. "He was a very strong Dashnak from Moush. The last thing his mother did was give him a Bible and the Dashnak [party program] and say, 'don't ever forget the Dashnak.'"
Mark says his grandfather had never talked to his children about the Genocide, but he sat down with the inquisitive journalist and told him the story.
"45 family members killed," says Mark. "Everybody. Mothers. Fathers. Brothers. Sisters. All gone. Only he survived. He was 14 or 15. He walked hundreds and hundreds of miles, a Turkish family took him in, and eventually landed in an orphanage in Lebanon and then in Jerusalem, where he was taken in by priests, and he became a priest."
Principle or perhaps stubbornness or both were driving forces in his grandfather, says Mark, and he sees that dynamic at work in his life.
"Basically, as a matter of principle," he says, "Echmiadzin asked him to recognize some Soviet Armenian holiday. My grandfather, the Dashnak, refused, and they basically declared his church, the red brick church, a renegade church."
Mark says his grandfather continued his duties at the Church, which now falls under the auspices of the Cilician Sea. "He ran it as a renegade," he says, "and Echmiadzin eventually defrocked him. They removed his frock, and he continued to be a priest, a renegade priest."
Aram Arax
Mark's paternal grandfather, Aram Arax the poet, was from Bursa on the Sea of Marmara. He took his pen name from the Arax River and passed it down to Mark. Aram and his family had left their village for Istanbul before 1914, because his mother was a wet nurse. As had Mark's own father, Aram's father had also died when Aram was only 15.
"When the Genocide began and April 24 happened," says Mark, "Ara went to Beyazit Square in Istanbul, and he saw these Hunchaks hanged. They were hanging there in the square, and he knew something was going to happen."
Mark says Turks were walking around and trying to recruit Armenian boys to join their killing brigades. To escape the 'recruiters,' Aram Arax went into hiding, like the 20 thousand Armenians in Istanbul who hid in attics. "They were called the Army of the Attics, Tavan Tabouri," says Mark.
Mark's grandfather hid in his attic for a year-and-a-half. He had gone into hiding with tons of French literature. "He wanted to be a poet when he came down," says Mark. "He was as strong a Hunchak as the other one was a Dashnak."
When Aram Arax passed away in 1989, Mark says his grandfather died a frustrated poet. "His pen went silent for half a century from the moment he got here. He became a fruit tramp in the Valley, harvesting fruits and vegetables. His first job was picking potatoes and weed patch."
Aram's first employer was Kirk Kerkorian's father, Villa, who lost his empire in the raisin bust, shortly after Aram went to work for Villa. "That was my grandfather's first job," says Mark. "Then his pen went silent. He was just trying to make a living."
Mark says Aram Arax took up writing once again when he was in his 70s. "By then, he had lost too much time," says Mark. "His voice was too political, and it just wasn't honed. You just can't take off from writing for half-a-century and except to pick it up."
The stories of these two men, who marks calls "firebrands," is what Mark recorded on audiotapes early in his career. The making of a poet, the escape to Jerusalem, a renegade priest, a fruit tramp, a renegade church and an unsolved murder, those were the stories that brought Mark's fascinating and tragic life to the present through the pages of his first book.
Investigating the Murder
‘In My Father's Name’ took Mark six years to write. "I think I solved the story of this town," he says. "I solved the story of family, of my father, but I couldn't quite put my hands on the killers or the plot. I surmised some things in there."
The book was published nearly 30 years after the murder, and it unlocked distant memories in those who knew about the murder. "The book dislodged some truths and brought some people to the fore," says Mark, "and ultimately the police were to find one of the shooters."
One of Mark's father's murderers was arrested in 2003 and convicted of first-degree murder in 2004. "Basically, a couple of these drug smugglers got busted," says Mark. "And one of them had a lot of guilt on his mind, because he had just read my book. So he came clean to the police and pointed out this one guy, who had been the shooter."
Even though there was an arrest and conviction in the murder that changes Mark's life forever, the motive behind the murder is still not known.
"There were competing motives," says Mark. "One was that it may have been robbery. But the second is that it might have had something to do with my father exposing a major drug smuggling operation in Fresno."
That drug operation, says Mark, reached the highest levels of the police department at the time, and a few days before his murder, Mark's dad had driven to Sacramento to meet with the Attorney General's office and to try to expose this drug operation and the official corruption. "So in a way," says Mark, "my dad was a like a journalist without a pen and without the protection."
Mark says the convicted shooter is jailed at Avenal Prison, one of the jails that Mark wrote about in his Gladiator Days stories. "This shooter is actually writing me from prison, wanting to talk to me about that," says Mark. But he says the shooter is also wanting money, and Mark says, "we don't pay for interviews."
Juggling newspaper and books
For the past 15 years, Mark's stories at the LA Times have been more than straight-forward pieces of cookie-cutter journalism. Mark's words tell stories but through devices of creative non-fiction and literary non-fiction.
By bringing characters to life, by taking you to the places and people he writes about, Mark is able to convey not only facts but real life in black and white print. "That's been my forte," he says, and it's this forte has as been his entree to the book publishing world. Since 1990, he has been juggling two careers – one in journalism and on in books.
"Many of my stories were long, in depth look at lives," he says. "The paper would sometimes give me a year to do one series of stories. It is a tremendous job."
Mark says it takes a long time to see enough life play out, so that he feels like he knows the people he is writing about.
"It's a deeper, deeper kind of journalism," he says. "It's one that maybe comes a little closer to the truth. I don't think you can achieve THE truth. But it comes at least a few steps closer to the truth than stuff that's done and turned around like that."
Non-fiction bestseller
The second book Mark wrote, ‘King of California,’ became a best seller. It was on the LA Times "Best Seller" list for seven or eight weeks, selling about 40 thousand hard cover copies.
"I wanted to communicate how the South came West," says Mark, "how the plantation South was uprooted and grafted on to a piece of California, and how the biggest fresh water lake West of the Mississippi was drained by man, with a little help from nature, and turned into the richest cotton land in the world."
Mark says the King of California is a story of guile, will, and a little bit of larceny. "There's a murder or two in there," he says. "It's just this grand story of this rising West, and the story of how through that Tulare Lake basin came the Latinos, the white Okies, and then the black Okies. It's a really rich narrative story too."
Another best seller that features Mark's words is a book called "My California." More than a dozen writers are featured in the collection of essays about the place called California, but Mark is planning his own book of essays about the Golden State. His book will part memoir and will feature some literary journalism.
"Trying to write a modern day version of Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem, which is the seminal book. It's one of the books of the canon of California literature," he says. "That's my ambition and goal. Whether I can pull it off remains to be seen."
One of the stories in Mark's upcoming collection of essays about California is called Saroyan's Pile, and Mark wants to make an entire book out of this one story. The Pile is Saroyan's archives that are sitting in a big warehouse in Livingston, Calif., North of Fresno.
"His archives dwarf Twain's,Steinbeck's, all of them," says Mark. "And those archives have all kinds of stuff in them, his mustache hair clippings. The rocks he collected. The shards of glass he collected on bike rides. He said he collected rocks, because it reminded him that the most beautiful art is simple. He was crazy a little bit, beautifully crazy."
Arax & Saroyan
Mark's second book, ‘the King of California,’ won the International Saroyan Writing Prize from Stanford. The award was significant for Mark, because he had met with the literary genius about a dozen times early in life and then in college.
"I would see Saroyan in the stores, when I was eight, nine, ten years old, on his bike," says Mark. "I would always stop him, and he would talk to me. I just remember his asked a lot of questions. He was very inquisitive."
When Mark received his first journalism writing assignment from Roger Tatarian, he was asked to write about Spring.
"I thought, 'how in the hell am I going to do a story on Spring?'" he says. "I was walking around Fig Garden Village, and there was William Saroyan on his bicycle."
Saroyan very graciously talked to Mark about Spring, waxing on poetically. The year was 1978, and Mark's story about Spring turned into a profile of the writer.
"He'd always tell me, 'write about what you know in the language that you know it,'" remembers Mark. His grandfather Aram would take him to Saroyan's house once-in-a-while for a visit, and the aspiring writer would ask the established playwright and novelist a lot of questions.
"And he said, don't worry about big words," remember Mark. "He said, just count the words in my stories. There's only 300 words.'"
Mark says Saroyan emphasized the simplicity of language. "It wasn't about big words," says Mark. "It was the way you took every day language and turned it into poetry, through the rhythms, the voice, the music of the sentences."
The Future
Mark says he wants to go through Saroyan's archives, because among them are letters his grandfather wrote Saroyan starting in the 1940s. "I want to find those letters and use them. It may be its own book, the Pile, Saroyan's Pile or Journey through Saroyan's Pile. I may find my own family's story through that Pile, the story of Fresno, the story of being an Armenian writer and all that kind of stuff."
Also ahead for Mark is a trip to historic Armenia. "My friends keep bugging me about going to Armenia," he says. "I had the chance to go with my grandfather when I was 19, and I didn't. And I regret that."
Mark says he wants to go back and follow the meanderings of the Arax River. "I want to use the river as a metaphor of something that is there, something that waters the Ararat Valley, and yet the river itself, you can't touch."
The other side of the River, says Mark, "is the story of the Genocide and our loss. It's always there. There is a Kevork Emin poem, where he says, 'I'm eyelash to eyelash with the Mountain, and yet you can't hold it.'"
Knowing Mark and taking into account his accomplishments, he'll come eyelash to eyelash with the Mountain, and in that meeting, he'll find something that others before him had not discovered. He'll ask the questions that have not been asked, and in the end, the power of his pen will prove mightier than all the Ottoman swords.
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