A Writer’s Portfolio
Selected published pieces by Devon O’Brien (print and online).
Print Pieces
Vogue, April 2012
Vogue, December 2008
Vogue, April 2008
Online Pieces
Huffington Post, August 2012
The first five posts (of 32) of my blog on Huffington Post, Of Lice and Men.
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“I was standing in a glass box on a street in Brooklyn, an area in which I had not a single friend—three thousand miles from my doorstep in Los Angeles. Curbside, a giant, gleaming, black Mercedes sedan idled in which two strangers—men whose names I did not know and who spoke a language I did not understand—waited for me. My young son was a few blocks away, in their basement. He was with a woman who went by an alias, and demanded cash. I wracked my brains for the PIN number of an account I’d not used in a decade, hoping to coax more money from the ATM. This was a Zoom Moment, for sure; a moment that makes no sense unless the lens trained on my life is pulled back. Way back. In a Zoom Moment, pulling wide is the only way to answer my existential shout out: How the hell did I get here?”
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Huffington Post, September 2015
On the day the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were attacked, I—like everyone else in the world—was trying to understand what was going on. I turned on the radio and the television and collected words and made a poem of them:
“9/11 in L.A.: A Poem Written on The Day.”
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“It reminded me of “The War of the Worlds”—that old and infamous broadcast by Orson Welles—what I heard when I turned the radio on around eight a.m., having left my son for the fourth day of the seventh grade at his school in Laurel Canyon.”
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Huffington Post, December 2012
The night of the massacre of elementary school children in Newtown, CT, I could not sleep, so I stayed up for days and wrote a poem:
“To The Mommies of Newtown.”
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“Olivia and Avielle, Benjamin and Jack,
Dylan and Daniel, Catherine and James, Ana and Noah,
Caroline and Emilie, Jessica and Allison,
Madeleine and Josephine, Charlotte and Jesse, Chase and Grace—”
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USC Dornsife, January 2010
An article on how to morph from journalist to memoirist: Get yourself an ‘I’:
“An I of My Own.”
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“‘What was it like for you…?’
“This is a question my editor at the Los Angeles Times never asked me back in 1989, after my luncheon interview with a young and unknown Australian movie actress. So, I will tell you now.
“Near 30 and newly pregnant, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself as I swirled in the revolving doors and entered the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. I was well prepared; I had seen her movie, my tape was in place and my legal pad was blank. I felt smart in my designer suit and it hid my baby bump. I had another secret, too. I was also an actress—yet, for the time, I had returned to journalism, the family trade. Inwardly, though, I felt I was as glamorous as any movie actress.”
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