By
William Luvaas
Ashes Rain Down
Ashes pile in drifts against fences, turn our lawns calcium white, make a foul, acrid soup of water in dogs’ bowls. They sift down collars, creep through walls, and form a fine pellicle over the furniture.
Thomas O’Malley
Monstrum
There were no more Apollo rockets. I was thirteen now, and it had been three years since mother had taken me from The Home and over a decade since the last Apollo astronaut bobbed on a tethered spacewalk or toddled, unsteady as a child, upon the moon.
Christopher Bundy
Walking on the Moon
Ivan Karnow leaned into the foyer of his thirties-era bungalow, one foot in, one foot out, the smell of garlic and ginger familiar.
Ruth Ozeki
Interview by Kyoko Amano
As you can imagine, we have these things that we care about passionately, but if you die too quickly, if you die too soon, you’ve got all these unfinished projects.
Al Sim
Soledad
Enough sunlight filtered in for Rico to see what he was doing, so he left the lights in the big room turned off. The weather was unusually cool, so the swamp cooler was off too, and the windows all stood open.
Andrea Cohen
The Pretty Lady Brand
Back when we were having trouble, Inge planted three hundred bulbs in the backyard. She tucked them into the rock-studded earth one bleary afternoon just before the ground froze. Later she said, “I didn’t know if I’d be here when they came up, but I figured seeing those flowers might be nice for you, might make you happy.”
Eric Trethewey
Jefferson Street
His large jowls spread out from beneath a railroad cap, and he got progressively wider all the way down to the ground. His legs spread apart, like the legs at one end of a sawhorse, to support his tremendous weight.
Danielle Lavaque-Manty
The Safety of Milk
She’d begun saying this soon after their wedding, whenever she grew anxious about something he planned to do.
Jay McInerney
Interview by Victoria Blake
I think one of the things that I discovered for myself and subsequently exploited in the book was that the second-person singular is the most common form of our interior monologue. When you look into the mirror after you’ve done something stupid, you don’t say, “I idiot,” you say, “You idiot.”
William Luvaas has published two novels, The Seductions of Natalie Bach (Little, Brown) and Going Under (Putna¬m), and a story collection A Working Man’s Apocrypha (Oklahoma Univ. Press), and edited an anthology Into The Deep End (TWC Press). His short fiction, essays and articles have appeared in many publications, including The American Literary Review, Antioch Review, Blackbird, Cosmopolitan, Confrontation, Glimmer Train, Harper’s Weekly, Grain Mag., North American Review, Open Spaces, San Diego Reader, San Francisco Chronicle, Short Story, Stand Mag., The Sun, Them¬a, The Village Voice, Washington Post Book World, and the anthologies Paraspher¬es, Pretext 10, Veritales and American Fiction (vol. 9). His new novel, An Unimagined Fate, and a memoir, The Secret People: A Memoir of Living with Epilepsy, are being represented by Victoria Sanders Associates in New York.
Based on “A Working Man’s Apocrypha,” the title story in his collection, he received a 2006-07 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. His story “Ashes Rain Down” won first place in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open contest (Winter ‘06-07); another story, “The Firewood Wars,” was co-winner of Fiction Network’s 2nd National Fiction Competition. A film of “A Working Man’s Apocrypha,” produced by Wing ‘n’ a Prayer Productions, was awarded Best Narrative Short at the Delta International Film & Video Festival in the spring of ‘05. He has received writing fellowships from the Edward Albee and Ludwig Vogelstein Foundations.
Raised in Eugene, Oregon, Luvaas is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a student activist. He received an MFA from San Diego State University, and stayed on to teach Creative Writing and Literature there. He has also taught at The Writer’s Voice in New York and The University of California, Riverside, and served as Fiction Coordinator for New York State Poets in Public Service and writer-in-residence at dozens of schools, hospitals, and other institutions in New York State. Luvaas was the first VISTA Volunteer in Alabama, working for civil rights and economic justice. He has also been a carpenter, pipe maker, window washer, craftsman and free-lance journalist. He has traveled widely and lived in Alaska, England, Israel, and Spain, as well as California and New York. He currently resides on Chinaberry Farm in Riverside County, California, with his wife Lucinda, a visual artist and film maker.
Additional information about Luvaas’s work can be found on the internet at:
www.nea.gov/features/writers/writersCMS/writer.php?id=06_32
www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v3n1/fiction/luvaas_w/
