LUELLEN SMILEY ADVENTURERS IN LIVINGNESS

Where Gaps of Expression are Liberated

ABOUT

Luellen Smiley is a creative nonfiction writer, author, columnist, and historian whose writing is deeply rooted in a controversial personal history. She is the daughter of Allen Smiley, a close friend, associate, and business partner of notorious Las Vegas gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Her father was sitting only feet from Siegel when Siegel was murdered in Beverly Hills on June 20, 1947.

That extraordinary childhood history became the foundation for Smiley’s first book, Cradle of Crime: A Daughter’s Tribute, published in 2017. The memoir explores what it was like to grow up as the daughter of a man connected to organized crime while trying to reconcile her love for her father with the secrecy, fear, and criminal world surrounding him.

Smiley’s work has appeared in publications including the New York Post, MORE Magazine, Southern California newspapers, and Authorlink. She wrote the newspaper column Smiley’s Dice—Adventures in Livingness, which earned a Blue-Ribbon Award from the California Newspapers Association for her Growing Up With Gangsters columns.

Her interest in her father’s history also led her to become a researcher and commentator on organized crime history. She has participated in television, radio, and documentary interviews.

Smiley’s next book, Gaslighting Greta, will be published this year. A personal story that reads like fiction. Her own website describes the project as exploring a woman whose life is destabilized by gaslighting and psychological manipulation.

Her writing career reflects a recurring theme: using personal experience and research to uncover the truth behind complicated relationships and extraordinary lives. From the secretive world surrounding her father and Bugsy Siegel to the deeply personal territory of Gaslighting Greta, Smiley’s work transforms difficult experiences into stories of survival, discovery, and ultimately reclaiming one’s voice.

Luellen Smiley is an author whose life has given her an unusual perspective on secrecy, manipulation, family loyalty, betrayal, and survival—and she uses that perspective as the raw material for her nonfiction storytelling.

WORLD VISION


politics+cartoon+power+of+people
WORLD VISION
By Luellen Smiley

I made a list of the horrors, corruption, and confusion that dismantled the ordinary into extraordinary. The notebook is on top of my desk, on top of the entire works-in rewrite documents. All the other tributes to my success or failure are stored mentally; I have to look and hear the world. I am addicted to news alerts, commentaries, panels, and interviews. Along with the experts and analysts I listen to, my own voice and opinions are exploding.
I am not Charlie, Kayla, or Kyle’s wife. I am a writer of interior battles. My writing has never steered towards Politics. It is a freeway I never understood; a freeway my father told me at a young age was not to be trusted. A subject I avoided in college, and a topic that fumbled my thinking during my young adulthood rap sessions.
How faraway those years grow everyday. We chanted peace and love, in our kooky outfits, and our imaginative minds. I was full with Lennon, Dylan and Joni.

How much longer can I remain silent? There is a blockade of conversation about politics; it goes up like a digital wall, as soon as I meet a stranger. I was in La Posada Hotel the night the terrorists captured the Kosher Deli and Coffee House. I went to record by hand, the reactions of people I pick out very impulsively. A sort of lightning rod hits when I go into public and select my conversations. I may meet someone I have to write about.

No one had time to really absorb the truth of this historical moment. We may read, or watch the news, shake our heads, and then tuck our children into bed. I feel that our lives our complicated more with finances than any other single threat. Most of us just want to take a vacation. So what can they expect of us. Do we have a voice? Do we have a fax number to the Administration? Sometimes I dream of one representative in every state of the Union grabbing the microphone, and all digital devices, and shouting out, “Stop the war Republicans and Democrats!  IMAGINE IF WE WERE UNITED… JUST A LITTLE.

LouLou

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2 responses to “WORLD VISION”

  1. I feel the exact same way…and have lost my grip and flummoxed over politics and how our country has gone down the tubes but who,isn’t down the toilet and what CAN WE DO besides try to score our own reality TV Shows. My Dad couldn’t wait to leave the planet because……look at it!!

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  2. Sorry, but there are toooooo many ego’s and self centered arrogant people that think they know it all and what’s best for you and I. Does it matter what gets voted on and wins…..noooooo, for with the stroke of a pen, it all gets erased…..and we all know the responsible person. Hide it, so the populace won’t have a clue. To them, “Transparency,” is a 4 letter word. Just sayin, that’s all.

    But we can dream…………….Great post, loved it.

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