I
have known Elizabeth Bruce longer than either of us probably cares to remember.
A talented writer and remarkably generous person, Elizabeth never tires of
promoting the work of other creative artists, regardless of their field. When
she heard I was having trouble getting a bookstore to launch The Spread,
she opened her home to me and a bunch of strangers. It was as enjoyable an
event as I have ever had.
I
could get into all the things she works on during what would be for her a
typical week, but it’ll all come off better if you hear it from her.
One
Bite at a Time: Welcome, Elizabeth.
We’ve known each other more than twenty years now and I’ve been a fan of your
writing since the first time I heard you read. What was your biggest takeaway
from the workshop we shared with John McNally?
Elizabeth
Bruce: Well, you're right, Dana, you and I've known each other
now for 20 plus years now, since we were both in that remarkable Jenny
McKean Moore Fiction Workshop at George Washington University with the incredible writer John McNally. John has written twelve or thirteen books, many
works of fiction including The Book
of Ralph: A Novel, which has a twentieth anniversary edition coming
out soon, and story collections, Troublemakers, and The
Fear of Everything, plus a
thriller, The Pinned
Butterfly. He’s also written fantastic books on the writing
craft, including Vivid
and Continuous which is for
serious writers grappling with complex craft issues.
We were in the McNally workshop with a bunch of other terrific
writers whose careers have really blossomed. Melanie S. Hatter is a fabulous writer who has several books of
fiction out in the world as well as works in progress. She’s a fellow
Washington Writer Publishing House author whose novel, The
Color of My Soul, was the all-school read at a DC Public High School. Her
recent novel, Malawi’s
Sisters, published by
Four Way Books, was the winner of the inaugural Kimbilio National Fiction
Prize, judged by the esteemed Edwidge Danticat.
Carole
Burns, who’s based in Cardiff
in Wales, has several books out, including her award-winning debut novel, The
Same Country. Nick Kocz, has published a huge number of short stories, as
well as an Amazon bestselling thriller, I
Will Never Leave You, under the
pseudonym S.M. Thayer. Lynn Stearns, who taught at the Writers’ Center for years, has
published lots of stories and flash fictions. Plus, other fabulous writers
Holly Johnson, Susanna Jech Paul, Gua Liang, Vineeta Anand, and the late Jim
Munford, who was in his late 70s during the workshop and was also an
award-winning photographer who had a beautiful exhibit at Rockefeller Center on
The Bars of Hell’s Kitchen in New York in the 1950s.
John was a fabulous instructor. He really walked us through a
bunch of issues of craft. One that I remember vividly was something I believe he
called “the third element.” I've tried to track this term down, and I think it
originates with the great writer Allan
Gurganus, who’s best known for
his novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Gurganus and John McNally, as well as Richard Bausch, are graduates of the Iowa Writer's
Workshop, which literary folks
know as sort of the gold standard of MFA Programs.
“The third element,” as I recall, is a deeper context of more
mythic proportions that runs under a work of fiction. It’s like a literary
Jungian collective unconscious—a more symbolic, more mythic resonance. It’s not
something the writer can intentionally embed. It’s elusive; it surfaces on its
own through this deeper cultural, almost ancestral knowledge.
As a proud English major, I was really struck by this “third
element” as a quality that makes a work of literature endure.
John’s a really funny, jaded fellow, but he’s also incredibly
generous. You and your lovely wife Corky, aka “The Beloved Spouse,” had beers
with him down in Lafayette, Louisiana, where he’s a tenured professor at the
University of Louisiana. And at your urging I reached out to him for a quote
for my story collection, and he gave me the most beautiful quote:
“Elizabeth Bruce’s stories have that rare
quality of feeling as though they have always existed, the way the best stories
always do. In a lesser writer’s hands, the conceit of beginning each story with
‘one dollar’ might seem like a gimmick, but here they echo Wallace Stevens’
‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,’ and I found myself eager for what
came next, curious to see how each new story amplifies the previous story while
also diverging from it, often in dramatically different points of view and styles.
These are exquisite short stories that give me hope.” John McNally
OBAAT: Your novel, And Silent Left the Place, is one of my favorite books. It’s a wonderful story
with well-crafted characters that is beautifully written without letting the writing
get in the way. What’s the origin story there?
EB: Oh Dana, thank you so much
for your good words about my debut novel, And Silent Left the Place. As you well know, that
novel was written over a long period of time and workshopped extensively in
this wonderful writer's group that you and I and several writers from the
McNally group, as well as Richard Bausch’s Heritage Writers Workshop at
George Mason University had for a decade.
The origin story of this novel, probably like most novels,
began with a first draft abandoned in despair. The first 300-page draft was
really a coming-of-age story that came out of the short time I spent at the
University of Texas at Austin in the early 1970s before I went back to college in
Colorado. It was both a love story and an exploration of the anti-war movement
during the Vietnam War, but it had this ever-expanding plot that I wasn’t
skilled enough to handle.
I was also startled into putting aside that first draft
after talking to an old friend in Boulder, the late Vic Traibush, a brilliant
man and World War II veteran who used to play the blues with Leadbelly and was
a master Go player. I bought a life insurance policy from him when I was 24,
and he became a friend and confidant. We were walking down the Boulder Mall
when I was there with my husband Michael and our then 2-year-old daughter Maya,
and telling Vic all about the novel in progress, and he says, Oh, so it’s about
you and your mother. And I was stunned. Oh my gosh, I thought, I thought I’d disguised
all the personal references. I can’t be one more middle-aged woman writing
about her lost youth.
So,
when I got back to DC, I shelved the first draft, and focused instead on a minor
character who was about as unlike me as possible. I zeroed in this old man who
had popped up in the first draft at his gas station in the desert of South
Texas—Thomas Riley. I started thinking more and more about this old man.
Riley
is a traumatized 81-year-old World War One veteran who came back from the Great
War middle-aged and silent. He can speak, but he doesn’t speak—not to people
anyway. The mystery of the novel is why Thomas Riley doesn’t speak. Riley dug
himself an underground room behind his gas station, and he goes there to speak
to his beloved wife Dolores, who is absent but not dead. Riley is very loosely
based on my maternal grandfather who was a World War I veteran. He lost an eye
and endured who knows what other horrors of that brutal war. He was a very
quiet man.
The book,
set in April of 1963, takes place in the Texas desert miles above Laredo in a
tiny fictitious town. The whole present action happens in one 24-hour period in
which a young couple passing through trespasses on a wealthy rancher’s land.
The young man is arrested, and the young woman runs off into the desert. A
search for her ensues, led by old John Hopper, the Body Hunter who “combs the
desert looking for the dead. Bodies felled by heat or thirst or the hands of
man that strung them up on scrawny trees, the bizarre brown fruit of a barren
land.”
It’s s
a very short novel with a very spare, plain-spoken style. There are no four
syllable words in it. It’s also a “polyphonic” novel, meaning each chapter is
told from a different POV character. The late, great writer Lee K. Abbott, with whom I workshopped at
the Rappahannock Fiction Writers’ Retreat, told me the novel has a “3rd
Person Central Consciousness POV,” meaning that the tone of the authorial voice
mirrors the voice of the POV character. I asked Lee if he would sign a little
POV ID card that I could laminate and whip out whenever the POV Police pulled
me over.
Short
as it, though, the novel has a lot of backstory about the horrors of World War
One and the Vietnam War, about racial violence, and the cruel, dry land itself.
It's a pretty brutal, short work, told in a Texas vernacular and drawing upon
an invented tall Texas tale. But through a series of plot twists, the reader
does eventually learn why Thomas Riley doesn’t speak.
OBAAT: Speaking of origins, your new book is a collection
of short stories, Universally Adored and Other One Dollar Stories. The unifying feature is every story begins with the words,
“One dollar.” Aside from that, they might be about anything. Where did the “one
dollar” concept come from?
EB: A lot of
folks have asked me that, and the short answer is, I don’t exactly remember.
I’m pretty sure, however, that it started in a generative writing workshop at
the Writers on the Green Line series I co-produced for 13 years at CentroNía. It was a free, monthly, intergenerational workshop
that had rotating facilitators, many of whom received small stipends from the
Readings & Workshops Program of Poets & Writers. My late friend and
colleague, the late, great Timothea Howard, and I launched the Green Line at CentroNia, and she,
and my husband Robert Michael Oliver, and I anchored it for all those years. So many noted
area poets & writers facilitated over the years—it’s an impressive list!
I started writing short pieces that each began with
the words “one dollar,” and they were well received, so I kept writing them. I
loved thinking of all the manifold ways the “universally adored” American
dollar could factor into a character’s life. I had to keep shaking my
imagination.
Sometimes the dollar is an “intimate object” and key
plot device, and sometimes it’s a prop for some “stage business,” (meaning the
ways in which an actor interacts with objects on stage). A friend of mine joked
about how a lifelong anti-materialist like me (I’m freakily frugal) could end
up writing an homage to the almighty dollar! I was thrilled and honored that
our former teacher John McNally likened the repetitive theme to Wallace
Steven’s iconic poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
Michael wanted me to get fifty one-dollar stories so I
could call the collection “Fifty Dollars,” but I never got that far. All but one of them have been published somewhere. I’ve
been sending stories abroad for many years now, and have been published in the
USA, as well as the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Korea,
Israel, Sweden, Romania, Malawi, Yemen, and The Philippines.
OBAAT: The
thirty-odd stories of Universally Adored Etc. are broken into five sections:
Couples;
Parents and Children; Brothers and Sisters; Known Associates: and Gathered Loved
Ones. Did you have this overarching structure in mind when you began the book, or
did you have the stories written and realize these were reasonable groupings?
EB: Oh, thanks for both noticing this structure and asking
about it. I didn’t have a particular structure in mind when I was writing them.
But after I decided I had enough for a collection, I went through them a bunch
of times to see what connective tissue there was beyond the one dollar opening
line. I had lists of different “given circumstances”—to use a theatre term—in
the different stories. You know, how many characters have dead mothers or
failed relationships, what are the time periods they’re set in, should I order
them chronologically, etc.
What
surfaced was the central relationship of the focal character. Couples are both
straight and gay, married and not, young and old, etc. Parents and children
include fathers and sons, mothers and sons, mothers and daughters, fathers and
daughters. Siblings are of different configurations.
The
Known Associates section---I thought of you, Dana, as a hard-boiled crime
writer with this category!—includes folks who hang out together for better or
worse. This ranges from ex-cons to childhood best friends. Gathered Loved Ones
includes folks with kinship ties that don’t fit the other categories, including
the last story in the collection, “All Knowledge” in which the “gathered loved
ones” are all the great books the bibliophile character has gathered.
I
must give a huge shout-out to my friend and fellow writer, David A. Taylor, who was in the inaugural Richard
Bausch Heritage Workshop at George Mason University with me way back in 1999.
David is a brilliant writer and documentary producer who’s written a number of
books, including his The Soul of a
People: The WPA Writers Project Uncovers Depression America, which was also a
PBS documentary. He’s also a fellow Washington Writers’ Publishing House author; his
beautiful collection, Success: Stories, was published the year after my
debut novel.
Anyway, I leaned on David’s extremely generous nature to read the collection
and ponder its structure. David had some great insights and thought of various
ways to cluster the manuscript, but he too agreed that the central
relationships worked best, though he suggested simplifying them into the
current categories. David also suggested that I open the collection with the
flash fiction, “Sweat,” that’s the love song of an aging blind woman to her
late husband, and the ending story, “All Knowledge,” that’s a love song to
great literature.
I
added one story (with the developmental editor’s blessing)—“Mouse Socks” (which
had recently been published in Samjoko Magazine in South Korea)--after the collection
had been accepted for publication by the Athens, Greece-based independent,
literary press Vine Leaves Press.
I
must say, I’ve had the most wonderful experience publishing with Vine Leaves
Press. Everyone, from Publisher and Book Cover Designer Jessica Bell to
Production Director Amie McCraken to Developmental Editor Melanie Faith. They
have all been extraordinarily welcoming and exquisitely professional, and made
my publishing journey a wonderful experience.
I’ll
insert a quick plug for Vine Leaves Press’ current 2024 International Voices
in Creative Nonfiction Competition that’s open until July 1, 2024.
OBAAT: I don’t want to provide ammunition for others in the
“literary vs. genre fiction” debate, but I’ll confess I don’t read a lot of
“literary” fiction. It’s not so much because, as some put it, “nothing
happens,” but more because too many “literary” writers let the words get in the
way of the storytelling, by which I mean they become preoccupied with the words
and forget the words exist to tell the story, not to stand alone. You are truly
a literary writer who crafts sentences as flowing and beautiful as any, yet you
always manage to get them to serve the story and not come off as “look what a
beautiful writer I am.” Is that something conscious on your part?
EB: Well, Dana, you are an incredibly
prolific writer—you have like, ten books to every one of mine! —but we are both
undeterred from examining the darker dimensions of the human condition. I’m
assuming your readers know your work well—from the Nick Forte series to the
Penns River series and beyond. They delve deeply into the recesses of the human
heart and have intricate plots that move the action forward.
My
work is very short—even my debut novel is short—and these 33 stories are also very
short. A number are “flash fiction,” meaning 1,000 words or fewer, though
several are much longer.
I’m
delighted you find my work both accessible and “literary.” There are a lot of
definitions of “literary fiction” out there, but mostly I think it means that
the work is more character than plot driven.
In
a lot of my fiction, I have a very spare writing style. I write primarily about
forthright, regular folks with analog realities. I don’t tend to write about
cerebral elites, with their neuroses and ruminations, witty and erudite though
they may be.
Perhaps
most importantly, though, I don’t often write ironically—where the authorial
voice holds itself apart from the characters or their narratives and comments
on the world of the play with great cleverness and, in my view, judgement. Old
school as it is, my heart is almost always with the characters. I’m rooting for
their resilience more than chronicling their depravity or destruction. Which is
not to say there’s no cruelty in the work; there’s a lot of brutality and
hardship, and not everyone makes it. But more often my characters find a way to
get through the day and find some respite.
Many
of my stories are set in small communities, and often the characters speak or
think in a vernacular from Texas or the South or West or the inner city. While
the vocabulary I use is deceptively simple, everything I write is composed out
loud. As a former character actor, I’m absolutely wedded to the cadence and
rhythm of language. There are often extra words or long sentences that might
look superfluous on the page, but if you read them aloud, you’ll hear the
musicality of the voice.
One
of my all-time favorite lines, for example, comes from Chapter 1 of And
Silent Left the Place. The highway patrolman coming off the graveyard shift
remembers his father’s words: “You were raised on the parched flatness of south
Texas where a man’s worth can be measured by the stillness of his shadow at
sunset, and the liveliness of it at dawn.” The aforementioned great writer Lee
K. Abbott loved that line, so I figured I was on to something.
I
have an author-read audiobook of Silent--which I invite all your readers
to reach out to me for a copy--and I’m going to make an author-read version of Universally
Adored, so stay tuned.
But seriously, I’m thrilled
that you like the collection, Dana. That is high praise! I should warn your readers—though as your
readers, I don’t imagine this is necessary---that a couple of the stories in Universally
Adored & Other One Dollar Stories have a lot of profanity. A few
folks have been put off by that language, but that’s just how those characters
talk, so I figure either I don’t write about rough characters like these, or my
readers just have to accept the roughness of their language.
OBAAT: You and husband Michael Oliver do an entertaining
and enlightening podcast called “Creativists in Dialogue.” How did that come
about and how is it going?
EB: Yes, my
esteemed husband and creative partner, Robert Michael Oliver, and I co-host and produce an audio podcast that
we've been doing now for about a year and a half. It's called Creativists in Dialogue:
A Podcast Embracing the Creative Life. It’s available for free on Substack at https://Creativists.Substack.com, though we’re thrilled, of course, with paid
subscribers. We’ve been very fortunate to have some funding from both the DC Commission
on the Arts & Humanities and HumanitiesDC.
To date, we’ve interviewed 53 people, and posted weekly podcast
episodes since January 2022.
Creativists in Dialogue was really born out of the long
history of discourse Michael and I have had as creative partners for 41 years. Almost
every day we have a conversation about some aspect of the human condition,
current events, literature, etc. I’ve always been amazed by Michael’s ability
to take in and synthesize so much complex information. He’s a theatre director,
actor, playwright, novelist and poet, as well as a lifelong humanities and
theatre educator, so he’s read and taught all manner of literature and
philosophy. He has a PhD from the University of Maryland in Theatre in Theatre
and Performance Studies and an MFA in Directing. He’s a brilliant man with,
what I call, “x-ray vision” for structure. Plus, living with him for the 10
years it took him to get his doctorate spared me from ever having to get a PhD
myself!
Both of us believe deeply that in our
fractured, traumatized world, the creative process can be profoundly healing.
We wanted to celebrate that process for everyone, to raise it up and validate
it in the lives of many kinds of people, not just so-called “artists.”
Our current sub-series is called “Innovators, Artists &
Solutions,” supported by the Commission on the Arts & Humanities. We’re
talking to a wide range of innovators who have been using creativity to address
compelling issues, from campus-wide creativity initiators to an art therapist
working in a sobriety program, to a founder of a trailblazing early childhood
organization, a teaching-through-creativity pioneer, a leader of a steel band
for youth, a multicultural theatre leader, and more.
We actually just concluded a year-long deep dive into theatre
in Washington, DC, from the 1970s to about 2019 through our series, “Theatre in
Community,” funded by HumanitiesDC. We posted 28 podcast episodes of our
dialogues with 17 theatremakers, from Joy
Zinoman of Studio Theatre to Molly
Smith of Arena Stage to
actor/playwright Clayton
LeBouef, who was a regular on The
Wire, to Nucky
Waler and Marcela Ferlito of Teatro de
la Luna, and many others. It’s a tremendous resource for theatre folk and
anyone interested in the cultural history of DC.
In our inaugural season of Creativists in Dialogue we talked
with people from all walks of life about the role creativity has played in
shaping who they are—from a Nigerian international
chessmaster to master chefs, translators, early childhood educators, fashion
designers, a Double Dutch leader, a birth doula, a chemical engineer,
immigrants from around the world, and more, as well as artists and writers.
We have a small, but mighty team of colleagues who’ve helped
produce the podcast, including our Audio Engineer Elliot Lanes, our former
Social Media Manager Erinn Dumas of Dumas83, and our Transcription Editor Morgan Musselman.
Increasingly, we’re publishing our interviews in two parts,
each part being about 30 minutes or so. The audio interviews are posted every
Wednesday at midday, and the transcript posts every Sunday at midday. The
theatre interviews also have hyper-texted glossaries of theatre terms and names
mentioned in the interview.
We’ve been thrilled and honored to have had so many different
people from so many different walks of life join us for this independent, civil
discourse about the complexities of our world.
While
we’ve been very fortunate to receive some funding, absent that funding Michael
and I will have to scale back the whole project. It’s extremely time-consuming
and costly. So we’ll see.
Again, your readers can check us out at https://Creativists.Substack.com.
OBAAT: You typically have more irons in the fire than I can
keep track of. What else is on your horizon?
EB: Well, I do have a lot of irons in the fire! In addition to
the podcast, I’ve been really focused on book promotion these last few months, having
lots of book launches and readings, and reaching out for reviews and
interviews, etc. I’m working with a lovely young social media guy, Liam
McCrickard, so there are a bunch of cool posts on my author pages at (1) Facebook. I have a great review in the Washington City Paper, and a bunch of online
reviews.
But
it's been great, and really satisfying to have a lot of people enjoy the
readings and buy the collection and enjoy the stories.
As you
know, we writers labor over our work, and labor over getting published, and
labor over getting the word out, so actually having other people read and enjoy
our stories is hugely gratifying. Granted, I’m not gonna be on Oprah anytime
soon, but that’s ok with me.
I am
also working on a novel-in-progress. I'm approaching a first draft. It’s kind
of a sequel to the $1 collection. I take about 10 characters from different
dollar stories and plunk them down in a fictitious diner in 1980 in a small
town on the Gulf coast of Texas. It’s not my hometown; it’s a neighboring town
called Texas City that’s a petrochemical, refinery town.
There’s
a lot of backstory (of course, I am a queen of backstory) And there’s a lot of
cross-fertilization between characters who either meet each other for the first
time or have known each other for a while. A lot of my $1 characters are pretty
lonely, and I’ve been worried about them, so I decided to introduce them to
some other characters and see what happens.
While
the novel is set in the analog days of 1980, there’s also a deep backstory
about this horrible industrial accident in 1947 called the Texas City Disaster. A French ship full of
ammonium nitrate blew up in the Port of Texas City, and that set off a cascade
of other explosions at the adjacent refineries. Then another ship also full of
ammonium nitrate blew up. The blast was heard hundreds of miles away. People
thought it was an atomic bomb. The town was just flattened.
Almost
600 people died, and many thousands were injured. All but one of the 28 members
of the Texas City Volunteer Fire Department were just vaporized. Until 9/11 it
was the deadliest loss of firefighters’ lives in US history. In fact, the Texas
City Disaster is still the deadliest industrial accident in US history.
In
those post-World War II days, the industrial, petrochemical sector was roaring.
There weren’t many occupational health and safety protocols. There certainly
wasn’t an Environmental Protection Agency. A lot of safeguards about toxic
substances came out of this tragedy.
My
novel-in-progress has a somewhat unreliable narrator, who is a deeply
traumatized survivor of both that disaster and Pearl Harbor who is haunted by
the dead. He’s the absentee dad of the two brothers in the “Tuesday Theory”
story. The younger brother is autistic, and his older brother became his
guardian after their mother died of cancer. There’s also a lot of cancer in the
backstories of several characters, this area being awash in carcinogens.
Like
my debut novel Silent, this novel-in-progress is “polyphonic” (meaning more than one
POV/point-of-view character). It has a “discontinuous” structure with
intersecting story lines—think of the movies “Crash” or “Nashville” or the
novel Let the Great World Sing. There isn’t just one
central plot, the various narratives of a large cast of characters connect to
each other, though they all eventually come together.
I’m
having a lot of fun fleshing out the stories of these characters, including
some very minor folks mentioned in the dollar stories. There’s the alcoholic
grandfather and his daughter and grandson from “Flounder.” There’s the
bibliophile from “All Knowledge,” and the Depression-era farm worker girl from
“Evening in Paris.” There’s the woman fleeing her abusive ex in “Magic
Fingers,” who’s the daughter of the waitress in “Tuesday Theory,” plus the
abusive husband himself. Manny the Cook from “Tuesday Theory” is there as a
Filipino veteran of the last mounted cavalry unit under US command in WW2, and
Chester the bait man from “Flounder” resurfaces as well.
On the
personal front, Michael and I are the happy new grandparents of our daughter
Maya and her husband Nico’s baby daughter, Lucia—the joys of which I know you
can understand, Dana, having just become a grandfather yourself. And there’s
visiting our son Dylan and his partner Megan and daughter Ava in Colorado. I’m
also trying to do this “Swedish Death Cleaning” and get rid of a ton of stuff
that has accumulated in our little rowhouse in NE DC.
We
have almost 1,000 theatre books—plays, methodology, history—that I’ve
categorized and hope to sell for super cheap to a theatre institution. I’ve
managed to sell about 1,000 of the other 4,000 books of fiction, critical
theory, etc., though I haven’t even started on the poetry.
Plus, we
have some domestic house projects, and the endless granular business of life.
So, on a personal level, life is good.