WHEN ASHES RAIN DOWN: a story cycle by William Luvaas

• ISBN-13: 9781881471172
• Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil
• Publication date: 9/1/2012
• Pages: 288 

   
ON ASHES RAIN DOWN

• There is a sense of shared destiny in the mountain community of Sluggards Creek in a future that seems more like a return to the past. Shared crisis creates a tissue of interconnection as characters hang on by a thread: no food in the stores, no electricity, civil disorder. Stories mostly share the same characters and locales, so it is both a story collection and something of a novel. The deaths of loved ones in The Forever War and from disease and natural disaster ­reverberate in the putative death of the earth. Each story presents some new crisis; collective troubles are reflected in individual troubles as holocaust in the outside world engenders personal holocaust. But, in the end, the stories are about people dealing with personal conflicts and the vagaries of their lives, with the larger environmental issues providing a dramatic backdrop against which those lives play out.
  
  
  Challenged by unforseen predicaments, characters must re­ly on their wits and on streng­ths they didn’t know they had to hold on in the face of disaster­–plagues of flies, exotic diseases, fire and wind storms, drought followed by ceaseless rains…t­he world coming undone. Although there is a sense of impending doom here, there is also much dark humor and a zany spice of grotesque realism.
  
  
  In the title story, “Ashes Rain Down,” fires burn all sides as Lawr Conne­ry drives the lesbian couple Margie and Carlie to Oregon along nearly impassable highways to bury Carlie’s dead mother and confront family dysfunction and a brother who hates her. To free herself from the past’s conflagrations, Carlie sets the house she has inherited ablaze with her mother’s body inside it. A plague of biting flies brings an infestation of hatred to Sluggard’s Creek in “Fly-bitten.” Living alone in an isolated old farm house in the desert beyond the mountains, Dee has unexpected visitors in “Out There.” A salt pine falls on her house, then a family of drifting marauders invades it, stealing her stash of supplies. She befriends the boy Lester, who is abused by his Charlie Manson look-alike father, Alf. We revisit Lester’s “wanderer” family in “Family Life,” encamped in an abandoned suburban development in Bakersfield next door to his aunt’s house. His father, Alf, takes up with his sister-in-law whose husband has died in The Forever War. When his wife confronts him, Alf attacks her, and Lester defends his mother, incredulous at summoning the courage to stand up to his bullying “pops.”
  
  
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  Author Biography:  
  William Luvaas has published two novels, The Seductions of Natalie Bach (Little, Brown) and Going Under (Putnam), and a story collection, A Working Man's Apocrypha (Oklahoma Univ. Press). He has edited an anthology, Into The Deep End: The Writing Center Anthology 3. His new collection is Ashes Rain Down:  a story cycle from Spuyten Duyvil Press. The Seductions of Natalie Bach was nominated for The National Book Award and the Pen/Faulkner Award. Going Under was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and A Working Man's Apocrypha was nominated for the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is at work on a memoir: Wrestling with my Secret Self: A memoir of living with epilepsy.
  

  

  
  Luvaas's short fiction (fifty stories), articles and essays have appeared widely, including in The American Literary Review, The American Fiction Anthology (vol. 9), Antioch Review, Blackbird, Carpe Articulum, Epiphany, Essays & Fictions, Glimmer Train, Grain Mag., Harper's Weekly, North American Review, Short Story, Stand Mag., The Sun, Texas Review, Thema, The Village Voice and The Washington Post Book World. He has been a contributing writer to The San Diego Reader, Cosmopolitan (Japanese edition), and The American College Testing Program. He is online fiction editor for Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts.'
  
  His novels and stories focus on people coping with adversity under difficult circumstances. An apocalyptic wind often blows through his work. Glimmer Train Co-editor Linda Swanson-Davies says of his characters: "He manages to make such swerving and impossible lives feel utterly true...even normal."
  
  Luvaas has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, the Ludwig Vogelstein and Edward Albee foundations. His story "Ashes Rain Down" won first place in Glimmer Train's Winter '08 Fiction Open Contest, "Family Life" won The Ledge Magazine's 2010 Fiction Competition, "The Firewood Wars" was co-winner of Fiction Network's 2nd National Fiction Competition, and "Out There" won Honorable Mention in Carpe Articulum's International Short Fiction Award Series. Ten of his stories have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. His wife's film of his story "A Working Man's Apocrypha" won Best Short Feature Film at the Delta International Film Festival in 2006.'
  
  Raised in Eugene, Oregon, Luvaas graduated cum laude from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a student activist. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University. He was the first VISTA Volunteer in Alabama, working for civil rights and economic justice. As Fiction Coordinator for New York State Poets in Public Service, he served as writer-in-residence at dozens of schools, hospitals and juvenile detention facilities, including The United Nations International School and Bronx High School of Science. Luvaas has taught creative writing at San Diego State University and in the MFA Program at UC-Riverside, as well as at The Writer's Voice in New York and The UCLA Writing Program. He has also worked as a carpenter, pipe maker, window washer, and freelance journalist. Luvaas has lived in England, Israel, and Spain, and for a year in a primitive cabin he built in a giant stump in the Mendocino County redwoods. He now lives in Riverside County, California with his wife, Lucinda, a painter and film maker.
   www.williamluvaas.com

Coffee House Confessions by Ellaraine Lockie, reviewed by BL Kennedy

 

Ellaraine Lockie

Silver Birch Press

Los Angeles, CA

44 pgs

ISBN: 97806157677

$9.00

They Speak Starbucks in Italy

When I order

Two shots of espresso

The order taker and coffee maker

At the Bar La Cisteria sayss

You want two espresso

Holding a demi-cu in each hand

‘No, two in one cup,’ I say

He carries both cups to the machine

‘No second cup’ I say louder

He flings arms wide enough to hold

Every American word he’s ever heard

Palms open to the heavens in a plea

Probably for no more customers like me

In my first Italian body-talk lesson

I take a used cup from the counter top

With a sweeping flourish hold out two fingers

And poke them into the cope

His prayer slips into shoulders that shrug

‘You want doppio, why not say so’ 

I have never met Ellaraine Lockie, I just know of her and of her work as a poet through my dear friend Ann Menebroker. So you can imagine my surprise when a copy of Coffee House Confessions came in the mail. This is a handsome little book and a very good read to any lover of poetry. I like Ellaraine Lockie, I like her approach to the line and I highly recommend this nice little book of poetry to any lover of the craft.  

About the Author

Ellaraine Lockie is a widely published and awarded poet, nonfiction book author, and essayist. Coffee House Confessions is her tenth poetry chapbook. Her recent books have received the Best Individual Collection Award from Purple Patch magazine in England, the San Gabriel Poetry Festival Chapbook Prize, and The Aurorean's Chapbook Pick. She teaches poetry workshops and serves as Poetry Editor for the lifestyles magazine, Lilipoh. Ellaraine writes every morning in a coffee shop no matter where she is in the world.

 

Shop Talk : A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work by Philip Roth, reviewed by BL Kennedy

Vintage Press

New York, NY

160 pgs

ISBN: 0-375-71413-8

$12.00

The transformation of the novelist who published Dangling Man in 1944 and The Victim, into the novelist who published The Adventures of Augie March in ’53 is revolutionary.

How can I say this? There is a certain charm when, as a writer, you return to examine your past. Part of my path was the novelist (or as he would say, the ‘American’ novelist) Philip Roth. Shop Talk is exactly what it was meant to be: talking craft, talking shop with Philip Roth. And not only is the bulk of this book an interview with Roth, its simply a delightful read. Now understand: I’m kind of old school, and I love reading interviews with writers who have in one way or another influenced me as a poet, as a human being. And that is a charming place to be. Philip Roth is a master writer, a novelist whose prose bleeds a poetry. 

Amazon's description:  In Philip Roth’s intimate intellectual encounters with an international and diverse cast of writers, they explore the importance of region, politics and history in their work and trace the imaginative path by which a writer’s highly individualized art is informed by the wider conditions of life.

With Primo Levi, Roth discusses the stubborn core of rationality that helped the Italian chemist-writer survive the demented laboratory of Auschwitz. With Milan Kundera, he analyzes the mix of politics and sexuality that made him the most subversive writer in communist Czechoslovakia. With Edna O’Brien, he explores the circumstances that have forced generations of Irish writers into exile. Elsewhere Roth offers appreciative portraits of two friends—the writer Bernard Malamud and the painter Philip Guston—at the end of their careers, and gives us a masterful assessment of the work of Saul Bellow. Intimate, charming, and crackling with ideas about the interplay between imagination and the writer’s historical situation, Shop Talk is a literary symposium of the highest level, presided over by America’s foremost novelist.

David Francis: Poet and "Village Folksinger"

Singer-songwriter and poet David Francis calls his film a "documentary musical collage."  Village Folksinger chronicles his life in New York from 1999-2009, from a residency at the notorious 24-hour BMW Bar in Chelsea to the ecological protest song "Anthem for Green England" becoming a digital hit in the UK. It is an historical documentary in that the bars, venues, cityscapes and, unfortunately, some of the individuals are no longer with us. Each music segment in the film is distinctive, assembled from personal snapshots and drawings as well as series of black-and-white photographs and video. The soundtrack is from the albums David Francis, Fake Valentine and Poems, outtakes, cassette demos, live footage, rehearsal tapes, cable and internet TV interviews and radio broadcasts from England. These disparate elements are re-combined—therefore, "collage"—to create an unglamorous, poetic portrait of an independent artist, his demons, struggles, and moments of transcendence.
Check http://www.davidfrancismusic.com for details on the New York City premiere of this film.



Here is a podcast I did with him a few years ago.  He uses excerpts in the film.

Hey Yo! Yo Soy, the collected works of Jesus Papoleto Melendez

Jesus Papoleto Melendez is a native Puerto Rican New Yorker who grew up in East Harlem in the heart of El Barrio.  He was nurtured by the Civil Rights Movement, and various youth groups who advocated for uplifting the quality of life for the disenfranchised Latino community.  He was encouraged by his middle school teachers who saw much promise in his writing.

The Nuyorican movement emerged in the 1960s. By the early 1970s, a number of prominent Nuyorican poets took center stage.  Jesus Papoleto Melendez was among the first to publish books during the height of the Nuyorican Movement.

In Hey Yo! Yo Soy! Bilingual Edition, Papoleto combines  the work of his first three books of poetry from the 1970s.  They are  Casting Long Shadows (1970), Have You Seen Liberation (1971), and Street Poetry and Other Poems (1972). In Papoleto's early poems he struggles with a style which he eventually coined "cadence."  His words sing and dance from the page and through his mouth.  In his first book there is innocence and hope.

From Here I sit...By the open window: 

 ...I'll go on listening/ to the free wind blow,// And make one wish:/ To fling myself/ from my chair-/And sing like the birds;// To make all the lovely sound/ of the world/ To dance in the street-/ And be free as the wind. 

 From  Yet the World Turns: 

And at the break of dawn,/ Along with a beautiful morning /the world excepts the news/ of the tragic death /of a hopeful believer. / And so to ease the discomfort,/ of this nightmare/ which is to become part of our life;/ The words are uttered:/ "Let us not / let his dream die..."/...the world still turns.

From Silent Poem:

Then, when lips /are kissed in privacy, /Away /from eyes and ears- /Restricting /all known hates and fears;/ Love's poem / will be whispered / into each lover's lips/...silently. 

Near the end of the first book  disillusionment of the so-called social and political gains of the 1960s begins to show.  From the brothers are dead:

...the brother are dead / they died for you  /for me / & for the many more sisters and brothers / who are dying every day / police raids / drugs/ even poison/ & just for being right on // the brothers are dead / & the marches still continue / & the banners still wave / the media still lies / the brothers are dead / & the 4 of July is still a national holiday!....

In his second book righteous anger starts to creep in and make a home.  From the revolutionary:

Reporters / gather around him / questioning him / (playing a game)/ & he answering / they laughing / as he constantly contradicted himself. // then / over their laughter / he yelled://"my shit is sooooootogether it's constipated!"/ but what he didn't know / was it also stunk.

From message to the grass-root folk

FUCK YOU/ if Rockefeller speaks better spanish than your child/ FUCK YOU / FUCK YOU / FUCK YOU/ go back to Puerto Rico/ so we can exploit you in Spanish/ & fuck you with an accent.

In his third volume, Street Poetry and Other Poems some happiness sneeks in. From OYE Mundo /Sometimes:

....sometimes/ sometimes/i run up the fire escape/ not to escape/ & climb on the roof/ & stand on the ledge / & look down / & yell out / to the midnight world / below / above / around / within /OYE MUNDO TU ERES BONITO!!!/ & i forget / the junkies on the stoop.

Love, compassion and sorrow are shared in my ghetto love:

i met a girl / she opened herself to me; /allowed me to share her pain / a pain i already knew//......... i loved her so much// she died waiting  waiting/ for a welfare check...........her voice lives on/ whispering in my mind:/"being poor is nothing to be proud of / but it is worse to be ashamed of."

And, there is humor in The Old Man:

....His body was found / early the next morning ./ "Alcohol poisoning"/ was scribbled on the doctor's report.// The note was read.../...the people laughed /"Crazy old fool," /one man did pipe .// But they laughed / louder and fuller/ at the postscript which read:/ "Cremate my body ,/ and place it in a jar./ Pour the remainder of my liquor / along with it too, / For I'll be damned if where I'm going/ I'm gonna find a bar."

I am honored to be presented with this collection and to learn of the life and work of Jesus Papoleto Melendez and the Nuyorican movement.  This book is completely bilingual so that it can be appreciated by millions.  It is a thorough work with a Forward, Translator's Note, Preface, Acknowledgements, Introduction, 3 volumes of poetry, a lengthy interview with Mr. Melendez, many photos from his life, an Afterword, and bios and photos by all who helped piece this 338 page volume together.  It is a monumental work and a piece of history.       ----Belinda Subraman

KICK ON by Kelly Jennings, reviewed by Su Zi

       Romance novels are specifically gendered: the protagonists are usually female, the setting and significant objects are generally  seen in hyperbole, the plot invariably concerns  the conflicts of liaison with a specific other—even when other conflicts are entwined in the rising action. As such, the genre is a sort of granddaughter to the novels written by British authors of the 19^th century, but without the social statement that was so shining in such classics as  Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Glaspell’s North and South, Dickens’ Bleak House  et cetera. In the words of author Kelly Jennings, modern romance novels are meant to be “ a fun journey, an escape if you will” (541), and her novel  Kick On  will certainly provide many avenues of light pleasure for readers whether or not their reading habits generally  include the genre of romance writing.

   With a setting of Modern Panama, the Diaspora of former Zonians –those who were raised or lived with dual citizenship during American occupancy of Panama—will find a setting that plays on their nostalgia; other readers will find the setting sufficiently exotic and tropical. Jennings does utilize certain aspects of Caribbean culture and the Panamanian setting in fluid fashion, such as a when the  central characters visit a market whose vendors are Kuma , aboriginals to the area.:

         “Brightly colored strands of tiny beads forming geometric patterns were wrapped around their calves and forearms. On their heads, they wore bright red and gold patterned scarves. As we moved through the market, I noticed that some of the women wore gold nose rings, some wore red face paint, and still others had both”(124).

The protagonist, Lauren Todd, begins to shop for molos, “brightly colored fabric panels created from multiple layers of fabrics”(125) , that are familiar to those with Caribbean experience; however, Lauren encounters “an elderly Kuna woman”  who has the “milky white skin and ginger hair of an albino”, and who then terrifies the protagonist with free fortune-telling (125-128). That the incident heightens the novel’s suspense, already complicated by the protagonist’s struggle with memories of trauma, works in favor of the book’s pacing, despite the discomfort of the spooky-native stereotype.

     An interesting aspect of this novel is the central theme of equestrianism, specifically dressage, that unites the central characters. Here  many readers will find just enough horsieness to be interesting, while those with actual equestrian experience will find enough accuracy to keep from flinging the book. Unlike other works that fictively portray characters in interaction with horses, there’s no short shrift given to the huge commitment of time and effort that any life with horses entails. Lauren rides nearly every day, and on multiple horses, in –due to the Panamanian setting—a heat that would have many equestrians  snuggling under their air conditioning. Despite the fantasy of the novel’s circumstances, Jennings shows an awareness of  the details of classical dressage  that is absent from most fiction where a horse has even a bit part. At one point, the Dressage Instructor remarks:

    “Your core, your seat, in fact most of your body, literally doesn’t move, he does all the work. What you need to do is allow him to work beneath you and recognize the difference between uphill and forward versus fast. Welcome to the world of truly wonderful school canters”(235).

Of course, the fine details of horse-keeping, the daily commitment of their care, does not intrude too much into the life of the protagonist, except for mentions of midnight barn checks at the big show at Wellington, Florida—a familiar name to anyone on the equestrian community. Nonetheless, there’s sufficient accuracy here to satisfy both non- and horse- knowledgeable readers, and that Jennings manages this while  urging her plot forward  puts her on par with other writers whose works venture into specialized areas, but without the pure pulp and plagiarism of research that can be so infuriating.

     Jennings creates a likeable reading experience which  ought to find appeal among any fans of romance writing, or fiction involving horses. That the antagonists are motivated by greed, need and drugs does not cast the best light on  the nonwhite citizens of the more tropical countries of the Americas, and that the sexual allure of men is restricted to those who are comfortable mostly outdoors, have big shoulders and a clean smell may not resonate with more urban-minded readers; however, the limit of the sexual contact scenes to a certain specific point makes this work suitable for most readers.