Made in L.A. Vol. 6

Made in L.A. Vol. 6: Vantage Points

Volume 6 Contents

Where She Wants to Be ★ Raya Yarbrough

A music teacher tutors a burlesque dancer, and seeks to awaken the young woman’s yearning for a life beyond the confines of her exploitative career.

WagWorld ★ Jacqueline Berkman

An aspiring production assistant freelances at a doggy rescue operation and questions the ethics of philanthropic celebrity.

On a Scale of One to Ten ★ Laura McGhee

A dental receptionist thinks she’s discovered how she can use the invisibility of female middle-age to her advantage, but her daring plan doesn’t quite work out.  

Driving the Band ★ Amy Jones Sedivy

An assistant to a successful band navigates the streets of L.A. and tumultuous feelings for the lead singer.

The Foodie Detective ★ Duncan Birmingham

Something is fishy in the LA underground food scene, and a food columnist with acid reflux is on the case. 

Because Jimmy Wore It ★ Meliza Bañales

An abuser is forced to confront this question: Do you love the star you idolize, or the partner who stands by you?

Refunding His Dick ★ Ken Funsten, CFA

A teenager wants to wear a dick costume for Halloween and the adults in his life go bananas.

The Biltmore Girls ★ M. Lopes da Silva

A trans man reflects on the role L.A.’s historic Biltmore Hotel has played in his journey. 

Meal Penalty ★ Katherine Tomlinson

On a sweltering film set, a resourceful caterer battles demanding actors, dwindling supplies, and ultimately, a petty, entitled actress, before quitting with a final act of culinary subterfuge.

Metallic Heart of a Distorted Ghost ★ A. J. Payler

A lead singer puts his ego on the line as he locks horns with the new guitarist over the soul of the band, leading to a tense confrontation and the restructuring of the band.

The Secret Fishing Spot ★ Christine Heriat

An advertising executive learns a lesson in pragmatics when he’s attracted to a mysterious woman at his boss’s party.

Not Permitted ★ Thea Pueschel

The real and unreal blend together in the run-up to the Sunset Junction Street Festival.

Design Inspiration ★ Paula Bernstein

One particular interior renovation is so ghastly that the designer wonders if the owner has malicious intent.

Little Egypt ★ Georgia Jeffries

An ex-Playboy Centerfold and her troubled son set the trash on fire then skip town. They can run but can they hide?

Blonde Noir ★ DC Diamondopolous

A 1950s starlet made famous again in the digital age grapples with what she should reveal to a modern audience. 

Fidelity ★ Jack Nicholls

In this fantasy tale, an actor’s performance disappears from film mere hours after they die. One actress from the old days remains. Could she possess the secret to longevity?

Millie’s Game ★ Kate Maruyama

An invitation to join an elite Hollywood actors’ group requires more than just talent. It might require a young actress’s soul, too.

Mulholland Drive ★ Sophie Frank

A group of friends find solace and connection at the Nancy Hoover Pohl overlook the summer before college, only to watch their bonds fray.

Moving Sale ★ Elizabeth Alice Gray

An older woman gives the gift of encouragement to a younger woman just starting out. By letting go and receiving, they both move onto the next phase of their lives.

Vol. 6 Contributors

Meliza Bañales

Meliza Bañales, aka Missy Fuego (she/they), is the author of six books, a Lambda Literary Finalist, and a Slam Champion. She has written for the Washington Square Review, On Our Backs Magazine, Razorcake, Ladybox, and Encyclopedia Brittanica. Along with being the 2024 Los Angeles Erotica Slam Champion, they were a founding member of the championship West Hollywood Slam Team. They completed 2024 summer residencies at Tin House and the LA LGBTQIA Center. They co-produce the acclaimed L.A. event, the Harold & Belle’s Slam, monthly and are the co-founder of CULTURE Slam Team. They live, write, and cause radical trouble in their hometown of Los Angeles.

Jacqueline Berkman

Jacqueline Berkman is a fiction writer and screenwriter based in Los Angeles. The short film “Panofsky’s Complaint” based on her short story “Picking Locks” was screened at the Cannes Short Film Corner, the Brooklyn Short Film Festival, and LA Shorts Fest, and her short fiction has been published in The Coachella Review, The Write Launch, and The Writing Disorder, among other publications. Check out her work at jacquelineberkman.com.

Paula Bernstein

Paula Bernstein is a physician, a scientist, and the author of the medically-themed series Hannah Kline Mysteries. Her short stories have been included in the anthologies LAst Resort, Avenging Angelinos, A New York State of Crime, and Angel City Beat. They have also been published on Short-Story.me, and Fiction on the Web. She has been an active member of Sisters in Crime and served as President of the Los Angeles Chapter and Chair of the California Crime Writers Conference. Her nonfiction publications include Carrying a Little Extra, A Guide to Pregnancy for the Plus-Sized Woman (Penguin) and Woman to Woman, A Gynecologist’s Guide to Your Body (Bantam).

Duncan Birmingham

Duncan Birmingham is a writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His short story collection, The Cult in My Garage, was published by Maudlin House and the title story was chosen for the Selected Shorts radio show. His fiction has appeared in The Oxford Review, Volume 1 Brooklyn, Joyland, and Mystery Tribune, among other publications. He’s worked as a writer/producer on TV shows that include Maron (starring Marc Maron) and the Jonathan Ames comedy Blunt Talk starring Patrick Stewart. His short films have premiered at various festivals, including Sundance, and his feature film directorial debut Who Invited Them was named one of the best horror films of the year by The Hollywood Reporter. 

DC Diamondopolous

DC Diamondopolous is an award-winning short story, and flash fiction writer with hundreds of stories published internationally in print and online magazines, literary journals, and anthologies. DC’s stories have appeared in: Progenitor, 34th Parallel, So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, Lunch Ticket, and others. DC has two published collections of short stories, Stepping Up and Captured Up Close (20th Century Short-Short Stories). She was nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and twice for Best of the Net Anthology. She lives on the California coast with her wife and animals. Find her online at dcdiamondopolous.com.

Sophie Frank

Sophie Frank is a writer and teacher who grew up under the shade of oak and eucalyptus trees in Laurel Canyon. She has spent her adult life in cities up and down the East Coast but is always called back to her native Los Angeles for inspiration.

Ken Funsten, CFA

Ken Funsten, CFA, has been a librarian, English teacher, punk-rock journalist, stock analyst, corporate executive, and hedge fund manager. And yet his most life-changing event took place before all this, at age ten, when he crashed his bike into a tree and lay in a coma for a week, then bedridden for most of a decade, during which time often all he could do was listen to Vin Scully or read in bed. As his body atrophied, his mind grew. He absorbed Homer to Heller, Freud to Tolkien, Melville to Miller, Updike to Spillane. His first published fiction is in Angel City Beat: A Mystery Anthology from Sisters in Crime (2024). He likes writing about financial fraud and white-collar crime, using his professional designation Ken Funsten, CFA, so when readers see this they’ll know to expect a story set in the wider world of business and finance. His website is yourfunsten.com.

M. Lopes da Silva

M. Lopes da Silva (he/they/she) is a polyamorous, bisexual, and non-binary trans masc author and artist from Los Angeles. He writes pulp and poetry, and lectures about the political power of desire. Their short fiction has been published within In Somnio: A Collection of Modern Gothic Horror Fiction, Stories of the Eye, and at Electric Literature. Weirdpunk Books released his collection of heartbreaking and exquisite trans and queer horror stories, Infinity Mathing at the Shore and Other Disruptions, in March of 2024.

Elizabeth Alice Gray

Elizabeth Alice Gray has decades of working on television documentary series and feature documentaries and is a Primetime Nonfiction Emmy Award-winning producer and a Best Documentary nominee from the National Association of Minorities in Cable. A long-time resident of Los Angeles, she also writes for radio, television, and film, and is a published and produced playwright. A multimedia writer, her words can even be found in Playboy Centerfold rejection letters from the late 1970s and early 1980s. She is always on the hunt for a good book and loves cats. This is her first short story publication with Made in L.A.

Christine Heriat

Christine Heriat is a fiction writer intensely interested in the everyday magical, the fantastical, and the adventurous. Her work has been published in Baltimore Gothic and the University of Alabama’s Al Dente Journal. When not writing, she is an avid traveler, cook, and hiker. She lives in Venice, CA, crammed into a small house filled with too many books and cooking gadgets.

Georgia Jeffries

Georgia Jeffries is the author of The Younger Girl, a Midwest noir based on a true crime of family murder and deception crossing three generations. Her short story, “What would Nora Do?” appears in the Mystery Writers of America Odd Partners anthology and was praised by the Los Angeles Review of Books as “domestic tragedy brilliantly segueing into comic farce.” A writer of Emmy and WGA Award-winning television, she is a professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts where she created the first undergraduate screenwriting thesis at an American university. Born in the Illinois heartland, she came of age in the San Francisco Bay Area and the wilds of Los Angeles. Read more at georgiajeffries.com.

Kate Maruyama

Kate Maruyama is the author of Alterations, The Collective, Bleak Houses, and Halloween Beyond: A Gentleman’s Suit. Her novella Family Solstice was named Best Fiction Book of 2021 by Rue Morgue Magazine. Her short work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the Uncharted Short Story Prize. She served on the working Board for Women Who Submit, and the Board for the Shirley Jackson Awards. She writes, teaches, cooks, and eats in Los Angeles.

Laura McGhee

Laura is an alumna of The Second City Theater, with an Honors Bachelor of Arts Degree from The University of Western Ontario and a Master of Education Degree. Laura has written and performed on CBC RADIO and at the Just for Laughs Festival. Her play, Joyride, won the Special Merit Award in the 7th Annual National Playwriting Competition. Another play, Reservoir Dogs, received a Canadian Comedy Award Nomination for Best Play. Laura’s television writing credits include the 2001 Canadian Comedy Awards, nominated for a Gemini Award. A retired airline pilot, Laura is now a STEM instructor.

Jack Nicholls

Jack Nicholls is a British-Australian writer based in Melbourne, but with many fond connections to the United States. Their speculative fiction has been published in a variety of anthologies and internet corners, including in Grist, Aurealis, and Tor.com. Jack’s father Peter Nicholls was the Hugo award-winning author of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and, for a time, a Hollywood filmmaker. He has since faded out.

A. J. Payler

Author A. J. Payler’s novels include The Killing Song, Lost in the Red, Terror Next Door, and Bank Error in Your Favor; his short writing has been published by Suspect, Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight, Flipside, Black Cat Weekly, and Flash in a Flash. He has also released several albums of original music including That Says It All and Apocalyptic Sunsets, performing live as often as time permits. Born in Hawaii, he lives in California with his family. He has shaken hands with both Kurt Vonnegut and Lemmy from Motörhead, but not at the same time. Learn more at ajpayler.com.

Thea Pueschel

Thea Pueschel is a writer, multimedia artist, and the Chapters Liaison for the literary nonprofit Women Who Submit and a repeated Dorland Arts Colony Resident. Thea has been published in Short Edítion, Perhappened, and Made in L.A. Vol. 5: Vantage Points, among others. Thea is known for drinking copious amounts of iced tea, random acts of binge creation, taking people through subconscious journeys, and teaching people to make shapes with their bodies.

Amy Jones Sedivy

Amy Jones Sedivy grew up in Los Angeles and has lived in many of L.A.’s neighborhoods. She admits that the best was her childhood home a block from the beach; sadly, it was torn down for the LAX expansion. Amy currently lives in Northeast L.A. Recently retired from years of teaching high school English, she spends her time reading, writing, and exploring the rest of Los Angeles. Her most recent stories have been in The Write Launch, Chiron Review, and Roi Fainéant Press. She also proudly had a story in Made in L.A. Volume 4: Beyond the Precipice.

Katherine Tomlinson

Katherine Tomlinson is an award-winning fictionista, a Pushcart Prize nominee for her short stories, and a screenwriter and editor. She began her career as a writer/editor for city magazines in Virginia, Hawaii, and California before transitioning to writing features for Copley News Service. She has worked in the entertainment industry as a development executive, researcher, and script doctor. An inveterate traveler, she is currently a digital nomad living in northern Portugal. She is fond of cats, train travel, and dark chocolate.

Raya Yarbrough

Raya Yarbrough is a singer-songwriter, and a writer of poetry and prose, based in Los Angeles, California. Although she may be most recognized for her musical work in TV and film, such as her featured vocal on the theme song for Outlander on Starz, Raya has written and produced five albums of original, eclectic music. Most recently, she released North of Sunset West of Vine, a concept album, based on Yarbrough’s original staged musical of the same name, and Artifacts of Grace, which is her poetry converted to song, based on a series of paintings and sculptures by artist Pam Douglas that explores the way female-bodied experiences intersect with larger issues of race, justice, and equality. In addition, Raya writes creative nonfiction about growing up as a multiracial human. She lives with her husband and children and is finishing a humorous memoir about her first five years of being an artist while parenting. Yarbrough is also preparing for a month-long art/poetry/music installation at the TAG Gallery in Los Angeles with artist Pam Douglas. This installation will include both musical and spoken word versions of her poetry, performed by Raya Yarbrough.

Anthology Series Editors

Sara Chisolm

Sara Chisolm is a speculative fiction writer based in the Los Angeles area. Her urban fantasy short stories “Serenade of the Gangsta,” “The Fortune of the Three and the Kabuki Mask,” and “We Found Love as the Undead,” were featured in the second and third volumes of the Made in L.A. fiction anthology series.

Gabi Lorino

Gabi Lorino is a writer, editor, and organizer of people, tasks, and information, currently based in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her articles and short stories have been published in newspapers, websites, newsletters, magazines, and books. She has self-published one novel, A Magical Time Called Later, in addition to a journal series. She is a founding member of Made in L.A. Writers and serves as a co-editor for the Made in L.A. fiction anthology series.

Allison Rose

Allison Rose is a novelist, screenwriter, and visual artist born and raised in Los Angeles. While Rose’s stories vary in genre, the city often acts as a diverse backdrop for complex stories about female and LGBTQ+ characters and the deconstruction of tropes about women. Rose has worked in the entertainment industry in varying roles, including television production and music engineering. She is a founding member of Made in L.A. Writers and has used her twenty years of graphic design experience to create her own book covers, including every volume of Made in L.A. Recently, Rose has turned the lens onto herself in an upcoming memoir, which promises to be as darkly compelling and controversial as the figments of her imagination.

Cody Sisco

Cody Sisco is an author, editor, publisher, and literary community organizer. His LGBT psychological science fiction series includes two novels thus far, Broken Mirror and Tortured Echoes. He is a freelance editor specializing in genre-bending fiction and the acquisitions editor for RIZE Press. In 2017, he co-founded Made in L.A. Writers, an indie author co-op dedicated to the support and appreciation of independent authors. His startup, BookSwell, is a literary events and media production company dedicated to lifting up marginalized voices and connecting readers and writers in Southern California and beyond. He serves as a co-executive on the board of governors for the Editorial Freelancers Association and as a board member at APLA Health.

Vol. 6 Volunteer Editing Team

Christina Hoag

Christina Hoag is the author of novels Law of the Jungle, The Blood Room, Girl on the Brink, and Skin of Tattoos, and co-authored Peace in the Hood: Working with Gang Members to End the Violence. A former journalist for the Miami Herald and Associated Press in Los Angeles, she reported from Latin America for major media Christina Hoag

Jovon C. Johnson

Jovon C. Johnson was born and raised in Compton, California. Educated at San Diego State University, Oregon State University, and Antioch University Los Angeles, where he received an MFA in Creative Writing. He is a Kimbilio Fellow and the author of a poetry collection, Keep Striving. He assisted in the creation of the Kuumb

Thea Pueschel

Thea Pueschel is a writer that is equal parts technical and literary, a multi-media artist, yoga teacher, hypnotherapist, blog managing editor for Women Who Submit, a facilitator for Shut Up & Write, a California Arts Council Panelist 2022, and a Dorland Arts Colony Resident. Thea’s published works can be found in Short Edítion, Perhappened, and the WWS Gathering Anthology, among others.