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Situated on an incline in Echo Park, Michelle Huneven’s house is cozy in all the right ways: Kilim rugs, an invitingly plush couch, a kitchen that is used for more than just putting on the coffee. But something is amiss. Huneven is a novelist, a journalist and a lecturer in creative writing at UCLA, so where are all the books? Gone in the Eaton fire, it turns out. Huneven lost two homes in the deadly conflagration last January. Her insurance company is paying for this Echo Park rental while she and her husband, an environmental lawyer, inch toward building a new house on their property.

“Some friends of ours in Altadena showed up at 6 p.m. the night of the fire, thinking that it would be safe at our place,” says Huneven. “Then the lights went out.” By 4:30 in the morning, Huneven and her husband were forced to abandon their house, which, along with a home they used as a rental, burned to the ground.

“I’ve got a lot of processing going on, but a lot of it is being done unconsciously,” says Huneven, who is preoccupied with trying to negotiate the state’s Kafkaesque laws to rebuild her home at the same time that her new novel, “Bug Hollow,” is being published. “There are a thousand bureaucratic details to deal with, like applying for a [Small Business Administration] loan, and you can’t concentrate on anything else, because you get a call in the middle of the night asking you to attend a meeting with the Army Corps of Engineers the next day. With all this going on, I forget that I have a book coming out.”

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