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Q&A with Beth Alvarado, author of Jillian in the Borderlands

“…bones could sing, she knew, and if she drew them in pictures, she would give them back their voices.” ~ from Jillian in the Borderlands by Beth Alvarado

One of my favorite books is Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead: a writer on writing, in which she writes a page and a half of reasons given from writers about why they do what they do, why they are driven to put one kind of story or another to the page. To name just a few: To record the world as it is. To set down the past before it is all forgotten. To produce order out of chaos. To express the unexpressed life of the masses.

To give voice to the voiceless.

graphic art of woman looking up, surrounded by birds

Beth Alvarado accomplishes each of these things in her new collection of linked stories, Jillian in the Borderlands (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). The main character throughout this book is Jillian Guzmán, whom we first meet as a young girl and get to know as she grows older and becomes a mother. Jillian is mute, but she can hear. And she can see. She listens, she observes, she sees beyond and behind, she is a finder of lost souls, she draws images of the dead. And in her quiet way, she give voice to the voiceless.

With the ecstatic knowledge of an ancient curandera and the playful, storytelling prowess of a child, Alvarado travels great distances, bears witness, presages problems, and intuits solutions. She isn’t just at the forefront of white writers writing about race, she’s at the forefront of people writing about what it means to be human and how we might survive our own dangerous shortcomings. 

~ Jennifer Tseng, author of Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

I’m honored to host Beth, who shares a little about her book, and to offer a giveaway. ENTER the giveaway by Wednesday, January 20th, for a chance to win a copy of Jillian in the Borderlands. Now, welcome Beth Alvarado!

Christi Craig (CC): Jillian in the Borderlands is very much a “recital of events,” full of reports and revelation. At one point, we read this about Jillian’s mother, Angie: She opened her laptop. Did she believe in the power of the word? That was the question. But what else could she do? Tending one’s own garden was not enough. This is a question we writers face as well. Did you experience this feeling when you sat down to write this book of linked stories? When did you know that, no matter, you must write this book?

Beth Alvarado

Beth Alvarado (BA): I like that phrase: “full of reports and revelation,” because I feel like it somehow describes my aspirations for this book! I’m going to use it somewhere. Thank you.

When I started the first tale, in 2010, before I knew this would become a book, I found myself writing about the anxieties I’d had as a mother when my children were young. In “The Dead Child Bride,” Angie is concerned with keeping her daughter safe in a rather rough neighborhood.

In a way, I believed my writing could “witness” the dangers of the world that young girls had to navigate and, further, that witnessing could help bring about change so, although I didn’t want my work to be didactic, I did believe in writing as both witness and action. This came partly from years of teaching the work of amazing writers who also were activists, like Grace Paley, Carolyn Forché, and Toni Morrison, and from the belief that stories can reach, and therefore change, hearts and minds.

By the time I wrote the last story “Los Niños Perdidos” where Angie wonders about the power of the word and realizes that being able to tend “one’s own garden” has always been a kind of privilege, children were being separated from their parents at the border. I was becoming a little disillusioned. Was it enough to write? Enough to teach? And what kind of writing could make a difference? That’s what I was feeling and, of course, what Angie was facing as she opened her laptop.

By that point the tales were becoming increasingly political but also increasingly magical, and I wondered if I should tone them down but, instead, I decided just to follow the characters. Magical realism, at least in South America, comes out of times of political duress where the writer feels the need to transform reality in order to truthfully reveal it. Of course, in order to do that effectively—so that the magic feels authentic, so that it rises from the story—the writer has to believe that magic is possible. In Jillian in the Borderlands, the magical elements all come from the characters, mostly from Jillian, but also from Juana of God and Junie the Channeling Chihuahua, and from Charlie-Carlos and his mother, Gloria, and from Jillian’s father. Do I believe that people’s spiritual and emotional impulses can transform reality? I guess I do. There are people whose effect on the world has been mythic. Really, what I think we’re talking about, here, is even bigger than intention. We’re talking about the philosophy and worldview of the writer, both of which inform intention. But, as a fiction writer, I believe you have to be willing to let your intentions evolve. You sometimes have to let go of intention and just follow the story, at least as you’re writing it, or it will feel contrived—so you are in a conundrum in a way, between the tensions of purpose and process. Or between the tensions of “reports and revelations”? Elizabeth Bowen said of the novel something like, the ending must seem at once “both surprising and inevitable.” I hope I achieved that. I was surprised by many things in these stories and feel like I somehow tapped into something other-worldly as I was writing them.

CC: Jillian, is such a unique character. Since birth, she has never spoken, but she makes herself known in other ways: in her sublime personality, in her art–drawing images of the dead and maps for the living, and in her gift of listening so well that she can easily find the spirits of the dead and almost dead around her. She’s a complex character with a profound presence, even as she remains silent. How did Jillian come to life for you? Did her complexity grow as you moved further into the writing process?

BA: There is so much that is pure serendipity about this book. “The Dead Child Bride,” the first tale, began as an experiment. I wondered if I could imitate four authors in one story—which gave rise to the structure: with four different “voices,” I would need four narrators and therefore a segmented story. The first author was Flannery O’Connor and I picked elements of “The Life You Save Might Be Your Own,” maybe because it was darkly comical. In that story a grandmother is standing on her porch watching a man approach; next to her is her deaf-mute granddaughter. The grandmother “becomes” Angie; the man, a neighbor; and the granddaughter, a daughter who happens to be “mute”—but I wanted the daughter to have a rich interior life. I wanted to push back against the way O’Connor portrayed the granddaughter as deficient and powerless. And I wanted to see through the daughter’s eyes—which we never get in O’Connor’s story—because I love the way that a child’s naïve point of view can reveal things that we, as adults, have been conditioned not to see. 

Another of the writers I was imitating was George Saunders—who, in his stories, does exactly that, gives us another way of seeing—and so in the first segment from Jillian’s point of view, I tried to imitate the contemporary, surreal, and humorous qualities I saw in his work. Of course, when you imitate you never accurately replicate the original—nor is that the goal—but you instead create something of a hybrid between the original and your own voice or vision. And, always, if an imitation is going to be successful, it has to take on a life of its own. If these things I borrowed hadn’t worked, I would have changed them or never continued to create more tales—but the characters kept coming back to me and the constraints ended up being generative and when they were constraining, I had to invent ways around them.

Anyway, that’s how Jillian was “born.” It was an interesting challenge, making her mute, because one way you develop a character and a character’s relationship to others is through dialog, but I had taken that tool out of the box in her case. She can hear her mother—and she can ignore her—but Angie has to interpret Jillian’s drawings to understand her and she can never be sure if she does so accurately. When Jillian’s father shows up in “Jillian Speaks,” he seems to be able to hear her; at least he “answers” her thoughts. We also are led to assume she gets some of these qualities—hearing others’ thoughts, seeing the dead, intuition—from him or his side of the family.

As Jillian grew older, she did become more complicated. That’s partly because it’s true of all of us, but it’s also a function of the writing. With each tale, I would think, well, okay what other “gift” can Jillian have? I wanted her to have agency, first of all, as well as a “voice.” My idea was that, because she was mute, the “universe” had compensated by giving her other gifts—so she had the gift of drawing so she could express herself. She simply “knew” things about history although it was always an incomplete knowledge; she could also foresee things, but again, that was incomplete, she could only see glimpses; she had the gift of seeing and/or hearing the dead but not necessarily understanding them. I made limits to her “powers” because that created conflicts. In my mind, her gifts are all metaphors for qualities that some people have or develop.

The gift of hearing others is empathy. “Foreseeing” the future might be intuition but it also could just be an intelligent reading of the world. I guess the main thing is: I had made her voiceless and therefore, because she is created in language, I had made her helpless. How could I remedy that?

CC: As an author, you have written memoir, personal essay, and short stories. How has your writing up until now influenced the work you put into Jillian in the Borderlands?

BA: I started out as a fiction writer—my MFA was in fiction—but I remember having a hard time with “plot” because I interpreted it to mean that the writer had a plan. I never had a plan and, you know, I can’t even follow a recipe. But then I read a book on narrative theory that said that the short story was really more like a poem than a novel because it was one moment in time that suggested the life around it whereas the novel had to move through time. It was like the difference between the photograph and a film. True or not, this was really liberating for me as a writer and applies to my stories and essays and even to my memoir Anthropologies, which is actually a series of photographic moments that, together, build a kind of narrative arc.

You can see a variation on this structure in Jillian in the Borderlands: each tale is composed of a series of segments, each narrated by a different character, although characters recur in order to provide over-all coherence. I think this technique also increases the narrative tension, but in order for it to work—and I learned this from writing Anthropologies—the writer has to become aware of the way her mind is moving associatively. Her mind is making leaps from moment to moment. How is it doing that? And how can she help the reader’s mind do that? I wanted to give the reader a feeling that she is omniscient, knows more than any one of the characters knows, and so can put together a narrative.

sewing needle threaded with three colored strands fanned out

I also do this because I want the work to include multiple perspectives—which I did even in the memoir by including other people’s stories and dreams and memories. In Jillian in the Borderlands, I’ve compared it to being at a cross-border dinner party where people are telling their stories, sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish. From the accrual of details, the listener puts together a narrative, even if there are gaps or contradictions.

While I didn’t set out to do that, once I’d done it, I realized it was a very organic form for a book set in the borderlands.

I’ve heard it said that Style = Vision and, in this case, this narrative technique does reflect my philosophy and political beliefs. I see our lives as interwoven and our “reality” as composed of many points of view. Even in the first book of stories, Not a Matter of Love, I use shifting third person point of view most of the time. My essays are more self-contained, of course, but often include other people’s perspectives. I think this comes from having married into my late husband’s family when I was only nineteen. He was Mexican American and when we were first married, we lived with his family, eight younger brothers and sisters, on the “Mexican and Indian” side of town. My monolingualism in a multi-lingual neighborhood is a kind of metaphor. Suddenly I understood that I was coming from a very limited and very privileged point of view, that my family’s understanding of history was only one understanding, and that there were whole other ways of being the world. It was transformative and liberating. I will be forever grateful for that experience.

CC: Here we are, 2021 (finally!). In the spirit of Jillian, what is your vision for the new year?

BA: I am hopeful, both because of the election and the vaccine. I think we’ve learned that, even at its best, our system is not yet equitable, inclusive, or sustainable. When we falter, the rest of the world also suffers. We need to make changes. Of course, right after I wrote this, I took the dog for a walk and got a ping on my phone: Trump’s followers had become a mob and they broke into the Capitol. So, our hard lessons will continue, evidently but, in the spirit of Jillian, I will be hopeful. We can value and take care of one another. We can band together and tend to the garden that is the earth. We need to listen deeply and be creative in order for transformation to happen. Women, in Jillian’s vision, can lead the way to healing.

CC: What are you reading these days?

BA: I am reading—and rereading—a whole bunch of essay collections because I am writing a new collection and because I am trying to revise a review essay I wrote on recent collections. So this is the list: Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, Sejal Shah’s This is One Way to Dance, Lacy M. Johnson’s The Reckonings, Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land, Esme Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, andT. Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. Rereading is one of the greatest joys of being a writer, I think, because it’s how you teach yourself to take your work in new directions.

Jillian in the Borderlands: A Cycle of Rather Dark Tales is Beth Alvarado’s fourth book. She has written extensively about her experiences as a Euro-American woman marrying into a Mexican-American family and spent most of her life in Arizona. Her essay collection Anxious Attachments, an Oregon Book Award winner, was long-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Art of the Essay Award. Beth is also the author of Anthropologies: A FamilyMemoir, and the short story collection Not a Matter of Love, which won the Many Voices Project Award. She teaches for OSU-Cascades Low Residency MFA Program.

DON’T FORGET: Enter the Book Giveaway for a chance
to win a copy of Jillian in the Borderlands!

*photo of needle and thread above by amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash

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Guest Post: Donna Miscolta on Why I Write

In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Donna Miscolta, who writes on finding her voice.

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

I once wrote an essay called “Can’t You Talk, Girl?” They were the words said to me when I was ten. Said is not quite the right word. Hurled is not quite it either. Spat is close. There was something meant to denigrate and discard not just in the words – the word girl signaling I had no name to humanize me – but in the tone, which suggested girl was a category I might not even deserve.

I was extremely shy as a kid, sometimes almost pathologically so, sweating, trembling in social situations, wishing to flee or magically disappear from them. And yet, in my imagination I thought I could be different if only given the right circumstances. I could be like other kids if, for example, my parents allowed me to spend a week away at summer camp whose brochures showed happy kids bonded in friendship while hiking, singing around a campfire, and making art from pine cones. Then I could be like Trixie Belden, outdoorsy, tomboyish, and fearless, maybe able to solve the mystery of how not to be shy. 

All of that existed in my imagination. In real life, one afternoon at the crafts table during that one long week, three attractive blond kids laughed and talked among themselves while I sat, awkward and mute, polishing my little piece of wood to make an amulet, my camp souvenir that would be a reminder of my week of camp adventure. Those kids fit the Trixie Belden profile – blond, fearless, their wholesomeness on display in well-fitting shorts and tanks. I was skinny and brown. I wore glasses and braces. My clothes were cheap and hung loosely on me. I was invisible to the blond kids, until a weird sound escaped from my throat. It was meant to be a laugh in appreciation of a joke one of the blond children told, but because my vocal cords had been dormant during crafts hour, they emitted a strangled bark, like some wounded stray.

When one of the blonde ponytailed girls narrowed her eyes at me and jeered, “Can’t you talk, girl?” all I did was nod that, yes, I could, withholding all proof.

I didn’t know then that I would one day be a writer. At least, I didn’t know it consciously. I like to think the notion circulated in my body’s cytoplasm, trapped in some membrane for safekeeping, that it had always been a part of me, finally to be released in mid-life.

Here, in part, is the proof that I can indeed talk.

DONNA MISCOLTA’s third book of fiction Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories, about lessons a young Mexican American girl learns in a world that favors neither her race nor gender, was published by Jaded Ibis Press in September 2020. Her story collection Hola and Goodbye, winner of the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman and published by Carolina Wren Press (2016), won an Independent Publishers Award for Best Regional Fiction and an International Latino Book Award for Best Latino Focused Fiction.

She’s also the author of the novel When the de la Cruz Family Danced from Signal 8 Press (2011), which poet Rick Barot called “intricate, tender, and elegantly written – a necessary novel for our times.” Recent essays appear in pif, Los Angeles Review, and the anthology Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19. Find her at donnamiscolta.com.

On Thursday, October 8th, @ 7pm Central, join me at Hidden Timber Books to hear Donna Miscolta read from her new book, Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories. 

Register for this Small Press Author Reading HERE.

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Q&A with Joanna Rose, author of A Small Crowd of Strangers

“Wonder,” she said. “We are seeking wonder.” . . . Wonder is a lifting in the heart. Wonder is belief in the fleetest moment. Time stops and starts, goes away and comes back from somewhere. Frankie called Bullfrog the Wonder Dog. “He wonders what’s going on,” he said. It is a wonder she and Michael ended up married.

~ from A Small Crowd of Strangers. (Forest Avenue Press, 2020)

In these times of a pandemic/firestorm/unrest, time stops and starts. We are carried along by the news. We’ve stayed inside so long that our friends become strangers and strangers–in the grocery store, at the gas station–become friends. And like Pattianne Anthony, the protagonist in Joanna Rose’s new novel says, we too are seeking wonder, seeking answers. Watching for signs.

Though A Small Crowd of Strangers is a novel, it is easy to find bits and pieces of one’s own life in the unfolding of Pattianne’s. A young woman who seems to fall into life, Pattianne feels at first that if she was led to a place or a person, she must stay there in that city and in that relationship. 

Then, she begins working at a tiny bookstore run by a woman with a huge personality. Pattianne meets stranger after stranger and Bullfrog the Wonder dog, and they become her guides so that she is no longer falling into life but feeling grounded.

I’m honored to host Joanna Rose as she shares more about her new novel, about writing (this whole interview is a lesson in craft!), and about her favorite pandemic pastimes. Plus, there’s a giveaway (courtesy of Forest Avenue press!)

Enter HERE by Wednesday, September 30th.

Now welcome Joanna Rose!

Christi Craig (CC): What a cast of characters in A Small Crowd of Strangers! From Even-Steven, Pattianne’s “sometimes-boyfriend,” to Michael Bryn, the perfect husband (until his Catholicism gets the best of her). There is the interrogator priest and the priest gone rogue, Pattianne’s indifferent mother and Mrs. Taskey, who is everything her mother isn’t. And those are just a few of the people we meet! As each character rises to the page, we feel their pull on Pattianne, giving the story a natural ebb and flow as she is carried along from one place to another to what begins to feel like “home.” Do you build your characters from scratch or do they form from traces of personality in people you see on the street?

Joanna Rose (JR): Early in the story process I start with people I have known, and they are almost always people from my past. I am haunted by my own past and have connections to people I have lost, not necessarily to death but to time. Early in my life, as my parents moved around the country, I formed the habit of letting people drift away. I have spent most of my life interacting with strangers.

Every time we moved I would make up a new past for myself. When I was very young that past was rather absurd; my dog was the original Lassie. I was related to the Queen of England. I had a brother who died of polio. By the time the truth was out it was usually time for us to move again. I was never called out for my lies. Lying was a big problem for me.
 
What I know now is that in making up myself I was putting a wall around myself, and no one could get in. I am no longer in the habit of telling whoppers but that habit of not getting to know people, of assuming I don’t know people, in is a very basic part of who I am.

What else I know now is that I have always been making up stories and characters.

People are a mystery to me. Do I reconstruct them to seek out the roots of this mystery?

My characters come from all different places in my life. Miss Mimi Stein was very loosely based on my own dear Aunt Mimi, who was not Jewish (very Presbyterian) but who never had children, and was beautiful, and gracious, and had a lovely home. She treated me kindly and warmly and with humor – not something I ever got from my own parents.

Even-Steven is an amalgamation of several boyfriends (none named Steven!).

Jen is an exception; she is my own sister in pretty much every way. Smart-alecky and smart and funny, and we’re not close. I feel like I have managed to immortalize my sister’s smirk.  And Pattianne’s parents are my parents in that they were cold and distant.

But I have never known priests like either Father McGivens or Father Lucke.

Michael Bryn was made up out of whole cloth. He was the hardest character to write, and he didn’t even get  his own point of view until a very late draft.

So were Mrs. Taskey, and Mr Bleakman and Josie.

Mr. Patel is based on a really kind man who runs the QuickPrint shop near my house, who always helped me with the copy machine. Mr Patel looks like this man, and he’s kind like this man.

Lakshmi and Maya were easy; I’ve worked with youth for 20 years, and I know how funny and fun and annoying they are.

What I see as I consider them all is this: I start out with a character like me and a couple people whom I give characteristics that are like people I know. Brushstrokes of reality just to get me started. But as I create the story they become who they need to be in the story, and my work is in fleshing them out. I have to pay very close attention to what they do in the story, and I have to understand why they do it, and not only I terms of story dynamics. They all have to be real in their own stories even if their own stories never emerge. They develop from the story itself.

It’s the same with place. I have to make it up, but for a reason.

I have even never been to Montclair New Jersey, but I lived near there quite a bit as a child, and I loved the name Claire  – St Claire was kind of a female St Francis, who was a big hero to me from very early on. I had a little paperback book called The Lives of the Saints, and while I was too young to read many of the stories, which are mostly pretty gory, I did learn that St Francis could apparently talk to animals, and somehow I learned that St Claire was a female St Francis.  One of the first churches we went to was St Francis Church in Edison new Jersey. This might be a good time to say that while I was never a believer when it came to God in the clouds or Jesus and miracles or guardian angels, I loved going to Mass. The Latin chanting, the music, the priest in his beautiful robes. So I learned that St Francis talked to animals, and they to him. I actually equated him with Shari Lewis. When I got a Lamb Chops puppet for Christmas I was disappointed that she didn’t talk. My mother explained that Lamb Chop only talked to Shari Lewis. I remember thinking Aha! Just like St Francis.

Is this a good reason for making Montclair the beginning of the story?

These beginnings are sacred to me: my love of the drama of the liturgy and my love of animals and the natural world. So it made sense for Montclair to be the beginning of the story.

CC: I’d love to know a little more about Bullfrog, the unassuming hound-dog like companion that Pattianne calls her “spirit guide…St. Francis’s Brother in Christ.” He’s made famous in gracing the cover of your book. Were you anticipating that he would make the cover design?
 
JR: Bullfrog. That’s an easy one – he was my first dog (as a grown up.) We’d always had dogs when I was a kid, and a few of them were basset hounds. When I was about 20 I got this basset mix puppy, whose name was Bullfrog but whom I renamed Frisco,  after the little mountain town I was living in then. He became my hitchhiking  buddy – I was the girl on the side of the road with a dog, thumb out, just me and him. There were some dark years there. I had him until he was 17.

When he died I cried for a year. I’ve had other dogs – I’m on numbers 5, 6 and 7 now. But he was the first creature that I had to take care of, and taking care of him meant taking care of myself. Get home at night. Make sure there’s some food around. Like Pattianne and Bullfrog, alone against the world.

And I do find animals, dogs in particular, to be spirit guides. I am kind of crazy for dogs.

Frisco has been gone for 40 years, and here he is again. I find his presence both in the story and on the cover compelling. There is my past, haunting me.

And no, I never thought of Bullfrog being part of the cover. Gigi Little, the artist who created the cover, came up with that. I love it. She looked at a few old fuzzy Polaroids I have of him, and she got him perfectly, which thrills me. The cover speaks to a gentler, funnier side of the story.

CC: One of the things I love most about your book–about Pattianne, really–is the way she takes in the world around her, often in bits and pieces. Small bits and pieces…a bobbing Adam’s Apple, the short painted fingernails of a woman who drinks too much, “Cuticles, too, bright red.” Sometimes we never get a full glimpse of a character, but we get just enough details from Pattianne’s perspective that we know that character. Putting those kinds of telling details together in such a way isn’t easy. But I know you write poetry as well as novels. Does your craft in poetry play a big part in how you craft your novels?

JR: My poetry owes much to the tendency of the ordinary. I love the drama of objects and the physical world.

When we pay close attention to the sensory world we are strangers in a strange land. This may be the influence of Alice in Wonderland, which was my favorite book as a child, and quite possibly still is. I still read it every so often.

I love how the concrete world can be stepping stones through a story.

Sound is also important to me. Mark Twain said “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”   I understand this to go beyond content. The sound of words can build create or ease tension and can affect pace.

A longer line in poetry goes by a little slower. A short line speeds things up. Same with sentences, and clauses within sentences, in prose.

And vowels and consonants have specific sounds that resonate in the body. Harsh sounds like Ks and Ts cause tension. Low vowel sounds like Os  or short Es can create calm or dread. High sounds like long Es or long Is can create a sense of excitement or panic.

CC: What are you reading these days?

JR: Ack! I always have several books going at once. I eat up UK crime novels (Anne Cleeves, PD James, Elizabeth George) and am always looking for new ones. I love the way language is so different from character to character, and the landscapes of the north of Britain. They usually stay on my bedside table for when I wake up and can’t go back to sleep in the middle of the night. That’s when I need a good plot to carry me along.

I usually have beefy non-fiction book going. I just finished The Architecture of Happiness (Alain de Botton) which is actually about architecture. Now I’m reading The Gene (Siddhartha Mukkergee).

I had to stop everything to read the new Anne Tyler. And dear friends gave me the new Carl Hiasson, which means I won’t get any work done on Sunday.

And poetry: Norman Dubie, Jack Gilbert and Brigit Pegeen Kelly tend to float around the house these days. And I love poetry essays. Right now I’m reading What Light Can Do (Robert Hass)
David Biespiel has a new memoir called A Place of Exodus: Home, memory and Texas. This one I’ll probably save for when I can dive deep into it. Like take it away for a rainy beach weekend. He was one of my poetry mentors at the Attic Institute and this is prose but his sentences are each small journeys.

CC: Favorite Pandemic Pastime?

JR: Watching re-runs of Perry Mason and Big Bang Theory.

Going for long walks in Lone Fir Cemetery. It’s a big and it’s easy to veer wide around d other walkers. It’s a pioneer cemetery, and I read the gravestones and it helps me remember that there are entire lives that have come and gone during other times, troubled times and peaceful times alike. Gravestones are beautiful. I’ve always loved going into cemeteries anyway, and now it feels particularly powerful to be among the dead. 

And while it’s not really a pastime, I like getting up at 3 AM. As do many people I have trouble sleeping now. I finally gave trying up at one point and just started getting up and going downstairs and puttering about. I find it a particularly good time to read those beefy non-fiction books I mentioned  I find it soothing to be up then. Since the shut-down the streets of my urban neighborhood are depressingly still. The busy little cafes are closed, and the shops are closed. No music from the bars, no outbursts of rowdy laughter. At 3AM all that stillness feels normal. I look out and see lights on in here and there and know there are other people awake and it’s comforting. It plays hell with my productivity though. I would like to cultivate the habit of napping.

JOANNA ROSE is the author of the award-winning novel Little Miss Strange (winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Prize, and finalist for the Oregon Book Award). Her poetry, essays and short fiction (as well as other pieces that don’t fall into any of those categories) have appeared in Oregon Humanities, High Desert Journal, VoiceCatcher, Calyx, and Bellingham Review, among others. Her essay “That Thing With Feathers” was cited as Notable in 2015 Best American Essays. She works with youth in Portland Public Schools and cohosts the long-running critique group Pinewood Table. When she’s not at the beach she lives in Portland OR with her husband and, at any given time, several dogs.

A Small Crowd of Strangers (Forest Avenue Press) is part slightly sideways spiritual journey, part coming of age: a middle-aged librarian from New Jersey accidentally gets married and ends up in a convenience store on the wild west coast of Vancouver Island playing Bible Scrabble with a Korean physicist and a drunk priest.

DON’T FORGET: Enter the book giveaway by Wednesday, September 30th, for a chance to win a copy of A Small Crowd of Strangers!