As the sun set Saturday evening on Barnsdall Art Park in Los Feliz, Mitra Parineh read an essay she wrote reflecting on her life in Los Angeles, which she described as “ordinary,” to a crowd of roughly 100 as part of Voices of Los Feliz, one of the events that made up the inaugural Los Feliz Writers Festival.

Crowd members listened closely to over two dozen writers who shared original short stories, essays, poems and play excerpts Saturday night. The weekend-long writers festival also included a writing competition, a zine-making workshop, literary trivia and a scavenger hunt.

Parineh was one of the featured writers of the night and is also a lecturer for the Dornsife Writing Program. She said she has lived in Los Feliz for the past five years and was glad to have the opportunity to read an essay she wrote to an in-person audience.

“It’s lovely to see something that I think is so local,” Parineh said. “Literary festivals are just a very nice cultural moment, and I think even more than for audience members, it’s just nice for writers to come together.”

Parineh said public events like the Writers Festival are more important than they might seem for building a sense of community.

“Writing is so solitary that you really can write for years and years without seeing other people or other writers, and I think it’s an opportunity to realize you aren’t,” Parineh said. “It’s lovely, particularly for something that a lot of people do in solitude, to come out and see that there is community around it.”

While Parineh was a graduate student at USC, she said she felt inspired as a writer by going to listen to different poets and writers across the city in spaces like bookstores and museums. She said events like the Los Feliz Writers Festival continue to inspire students interested in pursuing careers as writers.

“It is really moving to see your writers in real life because usually you’re only interacting with them on the page,” Parineh said. “To see them come to life, I think, hopefully, is inspiring. I think I found it that way as a student. I still feel inspired by it.”

The festival began as a dream of Sammy Ginsberg, who served as the gathering’s co-director alongside Dawn Socha, both Los Feliz residents. Ginsberg said that after living in the United Kingdom and seeing the number of literary festivals regularly held there, she wished there were more in Los Angeles.

“I love the L.A. Book Festival, but my favorite festivals are the wee, tiny ones, where it’s just a lot of community and the people are really accessible,” Ginsberg said. “I kept dreaming like ‘Oh, I’d love to create that in my home where I grew up.’”

Ginsberg said she decided in January that she would organize the festival. She said the point of the festival was to bring together writers residing in Los Feliz. 

“I know there are writers here, and there are these small groups of them, and we all live in a similar place,” Ginsberg said. “What if we all came together? We kind of connected the dots of different communities.”

Ginsberg said finding writers for Saturday evening’s event was a mix of reaching out to writers the festival team knew personally and having people reach out to them through email or Instagram 

While the goal of the festival was to bring the Los Feliz writer community together in a fun and creative way, Ginsberg said it also created a space where people could gain new perspectives from their neighbors.

“[I] just want people to talk to each other and talk to someone that they wouldn’t have ever talked to otherwise, and to listen,” Ginsberg said. “To me, the magic is getting to hear these different perspectives that all live here. It’s really hard to talk to people like that naturally or normally, but in these spaces, or in writer, art [or] literary events, that’s normal.”

Ginsberg and Socha said they hope that the festival will become an annual event and grow through partnerships with other community cultural events like Porchfest LA, which the Los Feliz Writers Festival plans to participate in. Socha also said she hopes the festival will hold monthly events.

Socha added that the festival gives people an understanding that they can connect and talk to others in their community.

“Anybody just understanding that they don’t have to live inside their … own heads all the time,” Socha said. “They can talk to somebody who’s a perspective outside their own, and maybe it doesn’t have to mean hating each other, just having fun with each other.”

Socha and her husband, Ryan, manage the nonprofit E2M, whose goal is to reconnect people after the pandemic. The nonprofit helped the festival receive grant money, and Socha helped Ginsberg brainstorm ideas for different events the festival could include.

“I just want neighbors to recognize each other on the street,” Socha said. “Los Feliz is a relatively small neighborhood, and [I want people] to be able to walk around and be like, ‘Hey, you. I recognize you,’ and not just be suspicious of each other.”

While Saturday’s event went past the scheduled end time, many crowd members stayed later to hear all of the writers and a reading of a community poem written by some of those in the crowd and some of the featured writers.

“It’s just heartening, and it proves the original thesis, the theory that we want to reconnect with each other. We don’t want to be mad at each other all the time,” Socha said.