I'm Major Jackson, and this is the slowdown.

Last week, our team attended the 2025 AWP conference in Los Angeles.

AWP is the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.

The conference is an annual moment to gather together colleagues across the writer world.

This week's episodes include audio we recorded on-site, bringing together many voices, slow-down style.

Today's poem, by the most recent poet laureate of Los Angeles Angeles begins with one of the city's most famous mysteries and goes on to consider reclaiming the stories of women in this land of reinvention.

The Ways of Remembering Women by Lynn Thompson.

1. Do you want to know about the black Dahlia or do you want the truth about Elizabeth Short?

You may not be aware. There is no such Dahlia and yet lovers of crime focus on the dark of it.

The mystery connecting Miss Short to its rare essence, which some say means enduring grace. I thought it was the newspapers who coined it, eager to make a buck featuring

the brutality of that January 1947, but no. It was the sailor men who frequented the waterfront

along the Long Beach pier who gave

the raven-haired Betty her final moniker. They could have called her rose for the tattoo on her left

calf. Could have called her star for those who said she was an actress, well-behaved and sweet,

despite the hideous tableau she was found in. Her torso, head and legs, savagely detached each from the other.

Her body drained of blood.

Her mouth slashed from one ear to the other.

Skull, pulp-like, as it roiled in the tall grass of Limerick Park.

Did you know she was pregnant?

Her fetus removed post-mortem by her killer, that a Chandler,

yes, one of those Chandler's, was rumored to be the daddy, and still we can't get enough of her,

of anything that made her macab. See Time Magazine 2015 describing many confessors to her

...