Vagabond: Venice Beach, Slab City and Points in Between

by Ceilidh Michelle

A captivating memoir of living on the streets along California’s Highway 1, for fans of Mistakes to Run With and Nearly Normal.

At twenty-one, Ceilidh Michelle was homeless, drifting through countercultural communities along California’s coast, from Venice Beach to Slab City to Big Sur. This restless and turbulent time began when she was sleeping on her sister’s couch in Vancouver and decided to become a yoga disciple in California. Denied entry at the US border in Washington state, and stuck overnight in the Greyhound station, her already shaky pilgrimage began to take another direction, away from the inward sanctuary of an ashram and toward the sea and light and noise of Venice Beach, and eventually up Highway 1 to the desert.

Having spent much of her youth outrunning family turmoil, the peripatetic lifestyle once key to Michelle’s survival is now a habit she can’t or won’t break—unless it breaks her first. Sleeping in parking lots, camping out in abandoned beach cottages and mansions, she finds community, easy and fraught, with fellow travellers: musicians, veterans, ex-cons, addicts, drug dealers, artists and con artists. Still, dreams and fleeting notions of home fuel and shadow every encounter, haunting the places she stays, offering moments of both grace and violence.

Told with deadpan humour and insightful lyricism, Vagabond is an observant and at times shimmering narrative suspended between a traumatic past and an as yet unimagined future. Coursing through it is the story of an emergent writer just beginning to find sanctuary in her own creative instincts.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

Published September 4, 2021

About the author

Ceilidh Michelle is an author from rural Nova Scotia based in Montreal.
Her first novel, Butterflies, Zebras, Moonbeams, published by Palimpsest Press, was shortlisted for the Hugh MacLennan Award for Fiction. Her second book, Vagabond: Venice Beach, Slab City and Points In Between, was published by Douglas & McIntyre in September 2021. Her novella, Living Waters, was shortlisted in the Malahat Review's Novella Prize, and she's been listed twice by the CBC as an author to watch.
Michelle has contributed to Maclean’s Magazine, Room, Saltwire, Long Reads, and others.
She holds her MSc in Creative Writing from University of Edinburgh.

Reviews

[Patrick Fassnacht · Rating 3 out of 5]

So excited for this read, I found it to be entertainingly dissatisfying. Maybe misunderstood as to its intent, this reader found its stories and relaying of experiences less than fulfilling. The story itself was compelling enough to turn pages, building anticipation for events and happenings that never seemed to reach somewhere more. Maybe displaced in expectations, awaiting for the central character to turn her focus to surroundings, the locations, environment, and/or a bit deeper that transactional recollections... readers were left to experience not-so-warm interchanges between characters and situations. Sadly, I missed her point, statement, or depth...

[vicki honeyman · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author recounts her year-long experience as a homeless vagabond, drifting from Venice Beach to Big Sur to Slab City, the famous California squatter community, hanging out with other stoner drifters she took on as "family." Though weed and alcohol were always at her fingertips, Michelle reveals the hardships of not knowing where she'd find her next meal or place to sleep, who was a physical danger to her and who she could trust. I found this to be an intriguing slice-of-life memoir of a lifestyle I'm grateful to have never had to experience.

[Calli Taffel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eh, fine.

[Brad Donaldson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pulling from the notebooks she filled during those days, Vagabond is non-fiction recount of being young enough to live both freely and dangerously. Hitching rides, sleeping in parking lots. It's a story that takes place on the fringes, places I wouldn't want to necessarily go myself but followed the narrator to anyway.

Despite the roughness of these settings, there's a delicate mix of love, kindness, and community within their figurative and literal walls, too.

This is exemplified most by the wide cast of characters -- kids brimming with street dreams and philosophies. They make you pause and think, and then continue reading

[Josh Quirion · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ceilidh Michelle's Vagabond made me want to try homelessness the way Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting made me want to try heroine. It's really, really quite good. Michelle's a musician. Her sentences are effortlessly lyrical. And not in a, "Hey, check me out! I'm a writer and I write effortlessly lyrical sentences" way, but, rather, in a way where she takes something one might've read 1,000 times before and gives it a crafty, back alley facelift. Reading Michelle, you might feel as though you're walking alongside her on the Venice Beach boardwalk; like you, too, are craving a cigarette in the early morning light, or praying for a place to sleep at night. And, eventually, like you're yearning to go home ... but only to leave again. Michelle's on my shelf, right next to Kerouac.

[Anne-Sophie Lambell · Rating 5 out of 5]

What starts as a determined bolt towards a spiritual awakening ends in aimless vagrancy in one of America’s richest cities. As the author finds herself adrift she seeks anchorage amongst her chosen family, shadows living in the underbelly of Venice Beach.
One can only admire her tenacity and ability to render each encounter bitter sweet and colorful, and quite frankly harrowing at times. Despite the grit and bleakness of life on the streets, Michelle clings to the humanity of the forgotten who drift quickly in and out of her life.
A stark reminder that behind the crumbling American dream is a sick nation that continues to abandon its own humanity and values on Venice Beach.

[Alison Gadsby · Rating 5 out of 5]

VAGABOND is a true story about Ceilidh Michelle's journey from Vancouver to Venice Beach. Poverty and homelessness are at its core and for many it’s an inescapable cycle of hunger, addiction and shame. Michelle says in one piece: “Needing charity was a constant shame.”

At times scary (because she is alone) and other times inspirational (she is a strong person), VAGABOND is a journey you will enjoy taking.

I felt at times there were truths missing, but after speaking with Michelle, I get how important it was to tell HER story and not the WHOLE story.

Ceilidh Michelle

[Jay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed this one more than the author's last book, but sometimes the descriptions were a bit general and repetitive, leaving portions feeling fluffy. I did appreciate the humor and absurdity of the more unqiue details.

[Joliane Roy · Rating 3 out of 5]

You pass from one mini story to another, get to know people that you won't read about again, and question yourself about certain characters that would have made a great book. The title sets the scene. It is well written and I'm sure it was catharsistic for her to write. It sounds a bit childish and white privileged for me and I think she realises it at the end.

I'm curious to see where her writing career will go. She has talent. She just needs to find a good story to tell.

[Louanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good writing and I would definitely follow this writer. My only issue is that I felt like I didn't know the narrator enough--was she doing this for love of novelty and adventure, or was she truly escaping something horrible at home that would justify her being in these situations? Threading her past through the story would have made this much richer to me.

[K]

Catching up on books from work! Read on sailboat. Really enjoyed this - great writing, very precise and tight. Not nostalgic or sentimental or romantic, which I think was appropriate for the subject matter. Undecided if the beginning / ending bookend worked for me.

[Danielle Riggins · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a southern Californian with being surrounded by drifters and vagabonds and friends with some of the street kids in ocean beach when u lived there, it was interesting to have her point of view. I enjoyed the style of writing and I would love to here more about her life in another memoir.

[Janilyn Kocher]

Not my cup of tea. I really derived nothing from reading this book.
Thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for the early copy.

[Rachel Zilkey · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF.

[George Ilsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aimless and chaotic, the structure of this wandering disjointed memoir evokes the spirit of youth on a quest —lost youth, youth fleeing, young hippies, older hippies, counterculture types; a blur of names and details, people we meet and hang out with and who then disappear into a fog of rumour.

The language is poetic and precise, the moods are moody, and the characters both memorable and fleeting.

The writer is Canadian, on a vague spiritual mission to California, sleeping rough and bonding with instant companions. It's quite a tale, narrowly focussed on that time, which goes nowhere and achieves nothing and yet manages for a time to be everything and everywhere. Until it is gone, like history.