Rulon Openshaw is your quintessential Los Angeles writer: born, raised, educated – and SHOT – in the City of the Angels.
He has wined and dined with the rich and famous, kicked it with the disenfranchised and disaffected, and on occasion partied with some of L.A.’s most certifiably sick and shameless.
As a native, he’s familiar with not only what is here now, but also what used to be. Before there was Uber, there were streetcars on Vermont Avenue, ponies where the Beverly Center stands, and surfers riding killer waves when most of L.A. was still under water. Okay, not the latter – it was a few million years ago. But Rulon knows where the old shoreline used to be.
His stories explore the city’s underbelly, where lawless is rampant and corruption rife. Aided by his fluency in the King’s English, as well as the lingua franca and the argot, his readers gain a deeper understanding of the residents of Los Angeles. To write authentically about a place as diverse as L.A. requires more than familiarity with landmarks and points of interest. You have to know the secret location of the hottest rave or the hippest food truck, as well as which neighborhoods to avoid after dark.
So if you’re looking to read about the Los Angeles known only to insiders, welcome!