Interview with Elizabeth Bruce, Author of Universally Adored & Other One Dollar Stories

 

Elizabeth Bruce’s new collection, Universally Adored & Other One Dollar Stories, launched in January 2024 from the Athens, Greece-based Vine Leaves Press. Her debut novel, And Silent Left the Place, won Washington Writers’ Publishing House’s Fiction Prize, with ForeWord Magazine and Texas Institute of Letters’ distinctions. She’s published in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Korea, Israel, Sweden, Romania, Malawi, Yemen, and The Philippines in such journals as FireWords Quarterly, The Ilanot Review, Two Thirds North, takahē magazine, Pure Slush, Samjoko Magazine, and others.

Her bilingual educational book, CentroNía’s Theatrical Journey Playbook: Introducing Science to Early Learners through Guided Pretend Play, won or placed in four indie contests. A DC-based native Texan, she’s received DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, HumanitiesDC, and McCarthey Dressman Education Foundation fellowships, and studied with Richard Bausch, the late Lee K. Abbott, Janet Peery, John McNally, and Liam Callanan. As a character actor, she co-founded DC’s Sanctuary Theatre and currently co-hosts Creativists in Dialogue: A Podcast Embracing the Creative Life and its “Theatre in Community” and “Innovators, Artists & Solutions” series. For more information, visit: elizabethbrucedc.com and https://www.vineleavespress.com/universally-adored-by-elizabeth-bruce.html

 Where did you grow up? 

I grew up in a small Gulf Coast Texas town called LaMarque—which means “the mark” in French. It’s on the mainland just off of Galveston Island. LaMarque was a “bedroom community” for the petrochemical industry in the slightly larger, next-door town of Texas City. Back in the 1950s and 60s, the town was known, at least in the white community, for its high functioning public school system. 

The area is semi-rural, with wetlands stretching between the town and the bayou over to Galveston Island. The smokestacks of the refineries—Union Carbide, BP, Monsanto, American Oil, a tin smelter, etc.—dominate the landscape. 

When I grew up, LaMarque was a very small working-class and middle-income community in the segregated south. It was very family-oriented, very religious, and very conservative. I had a Yankee, feminist, integrationist World War II Navy nurse mama, and a storytelling, East Texas, former Navy doc psychiatrist daddy. Politically, in the late 60s, I was at odds with the mainstream culture. The Vietnam War was still raging, and I was against the war. I would come home from school and take off my dress—girls had to wear dresses to school in those days—and put on my bell bottoms and love beads. I was as good a hippie as I could be all by myself in LaMarque, Texas! 

As a kid, however, I totally had a “free range childhood.” My best friend Gladys—to whom my story collection is dedicated—and I would take off on our bikes in the morning and not come back until sundown when my mother would ring the dinner bell. Gladys was the funniest, craziest, wildest kid in town, and I—this paralyzingly shy kid—was her devoted sidekick. I still miss her. 

I was an avid reader, especially of stories of free-spirited, adventurous girls like Pippi Longstocking and Nelly Bly. I adored the little bookmobile that came around the neighborhoods and couldn’t wait to grow up and go out into the world to “seek my fortune.” Luckily for me, my folks subscribed to a ton of periodicals, and I grew up—particularly as a teenager—reading several area newspapers, as well as Time, Life, The National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker. I devoured Pauline Kael’s New Yorker film reviews and then would stay up late at night watching The Dick Cavett and David Frost talk shows on this little black and white TV. That was my Internet. 

The town itself is very economically depressed now, as the petrochemical property that was within the city limits closed down some years back and took the tax base with it, so the LaMarque Independent School District had to become part of Texas City. 

When did you start writing? 

I didn't start writing creatively in earnest until I was well into my adulthood. I was a voracious reader as a child, as I mentioned, and a good student—save for trigonometry—and I did a decent enough job on all the written school assignments. I even wrote a tiny bit for the junior high school newspaper. As I kid, though, I was more drawn to visual art. I remember making these elaborate blueprint-like drawings of imaginary houses, doing collages, making ceramic figurines, and endlessly drawing horses. I was a horse-crazy kid, and, though I never had a horse, I did learn to ride. 

As an English major at college, I spend a lot of time reading, of course, and writing papers at the liberal arts college I went to in Colorado Springs--a really innovative school called The Colorado College where you take one course at a time—a semester’s worth of credit hours in three and a half weeks—so there was no slacking off. I wrote some creative stuff in both high school and college, though it was pretty awful.   

For most of my adult life, however, I’ve made a living, at least partly as a nonprofit writer, though writing grant proposals and press releases is a far cry from creative writing. I didn't begin writing creatively in earnest until I was in my 40s. 

My first realized artistic path in life, however, was as a character actor and costume designer, and then later as a theatre producer with my now longtime husband Robert Michael Oliver. I collaborated a bit in those years on scripts and such, but it wasn’t until my theatre career had been placed on the back burner by motherhood and mortgage-hood and the endless, granular business of family life, that I pivoted to creative writing. 

I started writing feature articles for a small community paper in DC’s Mt. Pleasant neighborhood and wrote a bunch of personal essays after I took creative nonfiction classes at the Writers’ Center. I was part of a creative writing group that was launched within this wonderful network called WriterMoms, and it was there that I switched to fiction. 

Then, I was accepted into the inaugural Heritage Writers Workshop at George Mason University with the extraordinary writer and teacher, Richard Bausch, who was so incredibly encouraging. He gave me a great blurb for my debut novel, and I just saw him at AWP. Wonderful man! Then I did the Jenny McKean Moore Fiction Workshop at George Washington University with the amazing writer and teacher John McNally, who gave me a fantastic quote for this new collection. I also went to some writing conferences and retreats, including the Rappahannock Fiction Writers Retreat where I got to study with the late, great Lee K. Abbott and the amazing writer Janet Peery. I also took a fiction writing class twice at Georgetown University’s Continuing Ed with the awesome writer Liam Callanan. I remain so indebted to all of them. 

It took me a long time to finish my first novel, And Silent Left the Place, which was published in 2007 by Washington Writers’ Publishing House when I was in my 50s. It was actually my second novel since I put aside the first version of that novel and started all over with a protagonist who was as unlike me as he could be. 

So, I'm definitely someone who came to writing creatively later in life.   

Do you write during the day, at night or whenever you can sneak a few moments? 

My writing practice has changed a lot from the days when I was a primary parent and working mother immersed in all the mom business. Back then I used to write in little snatches of time I could carve out. I would stop at Rock Creek Park and write for a while in longhand after I dropped my kids off at school. I’d write at the community center when they were in gymnastics or ballet or the cascade of their extracurriculars. I’d stay up at night and work, especially doing research, etc. It was a real patchwork of writing practice. 

Since my kids are now well into their adulthoods and I’m officially “retired” from my long life as a teaching artist and arts producer at the community-based organization, CentroNía, I write a LOT more.  

I walk a lot, and sometimes I take my notebook and scribble out a little section of a chapter or dictate my scribbles into my phone. Then I’ll edit it when I get home. 

I’ve been tremendously aided by my collaboration with several writing groups. One is a an online “Poetry Game” that the poet and scholar and close friend Aliki Barnstone, who is a professor at the University of Missouri and former Poet Laureate of Missouri, has online several times a week with other poets. We generate a list of poetic, imagematic words, then everyone clicks off, writes for 45 minutes, then comes back and shares. That's been enormously valuable in adding depth and texture to rough drafts. I'm also part of an online writing group run by the screenplay writer, solo performer, and facilitator Laura Zam, which is awesome. 

I’ve also been part of fabulous in-person prose writing groups for decades, which have been vital to me as a writer. A close friend who’s a psychotherapist in a group practice likened the dynamic of a writing group to what clinical therapists call “staffing.” When a therapist in a practice is going to be gone, they brief each other on their clients’ histories and issues, so that their fellow practitioners can step in, knowing what’s going on with each client. Working on a long piece of fiction in a writing group is like “staffing” for your characters. I love that! 

My husband Michael, who’s an incredibly prolific and disciplined writer, and I will go off for a week or 10 days on self-financed writing retreats at an Airbnb country house someplace with more space and no interruptions where we can spread out our work and get it organized and take it to the next level. 

But I would say to writers who do not have big chunks of time to write, to just hang in there, and keep chipping away at the larger story. It gets better once your kids are in school, and even better when you’re an empty nester, and much better once you're no longer working your day job. 

What is this book about? 

My new collection, Universally Adored & Other $1 Stories, just released by Vine Leaves Press of Athens, Greece, features 33 short fictions that each begin with the words “one dollar.” As the writer John McNally suggests, the book offers 33 ways of looking at a dollar, to riff on the Wallace Stevens’ poem, “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Each story pivots in some way around the meaning of the “universally adored” dollar. They feature primarily “analog” people—plain spoken, regular folks who are trying to find some respite from the challenges in their lives. 

Many of the stories are set in small communities or the countryside, in Texas or the South or West of the 1970s, 80s, 90s and 2000s. There’s one pandemic story, and a few are set in Washington, DC, some years ago. One is set in post-Civil-War Texas, and another is set in a dystopian future time. 

There’s a ladies’ room attendant escaping an abusive husband, a stable owner and her alcoholic father, an urban street vendor of ice-cold water and a laid off ammo factory worker. There’s a street jazz musician, a color-obsessed artist, a germaphobe bartender, a migrant farmworker girl, and an odd-job bibliophile. There’s a jaded humanitarian doctor, an older brother in charge of his neurodivergent younger brother, a vagabond healer, and some middle schoolers, single mothers, and more. And there’s a subset of characters embroiled—voluntarily or not—in the underground economy: a drug mule, a soon-to-be conscripted-into-prostitution young girl, an ex-con, and a wrongfully convicted lifer. 

Many of my characters speak in a vernacular that comes out of my upbringing in small town Texas, or from living in northeast DC for almost 40 years. I’m very attuned to the oral quality of language. Everything I write is created aloud; there’s a cadence and rhythm to it that’s for the ear as much as the page—an approach that comes from my years as a character actor. I’m super keen to create an author-read audio book for the collection like I did for my debut novel.

What inspired you to write? 

While I don’t remember exactly how I started writing these one-dollar stories, I’m pretty sure it started in a writing workshop. I spent a dozen plus years either producing or co-producing a free community, intergenerational community writing workshop called Writers on the Green Line that met monthly at CentroNía in Columbia Heights (on the Green Line Metro) where I was the Community Arts Producer for many years. 

Many of those workshops were generative, led by a host of wonderful writers and poets from all over the metro area, thanks in part to the good people at the Poets & Writers’ Workshop Program. 

These stories were well received, and I started to riff on the prompt of beginning each story with the words “one dollar.” I liken that process to a theatre game called the “Pass the Object Game,” in which you take an everyday object—like a pencil—and you pass it around the circle and each person has to animate the object without talking, to act out what the object is like in charades, and the others have to guess what the pencil represents. It could be a telescope or a baseball bat or a pool cue, etc. Each person has to come up with something new. It gets harder and harder the farther along the circle you go. The game is an example of what the creativity expert Paul Torrence calls “originality,” one of the four core competencies of creativity. 

So, in many ways my dollar stories are a kind of written example of the “Pass the Object Game.”  What’s another situation where one dollar has some kind of significance? That’s how each of these 33 dollar-stories started. 

Was the road to publication smooth sailing or a bumpy ride? 

Oh man, both of my books took a motherload of a long time to get published. It was a long slog, finding a publisher for this collection. I went to the ends of the Internet searching for small traditional literary presses that publish story collections. There were various hurdles: Did it fit the word count? Did it have the right tone? It’s sort of an odd duck of a collection. It has this hook of beginning each story with the words “one dollar.” I mean, who does that? It’s also not your standard, jaded, ironic MFA literary voice. The characters are not particularly hip or cerebral. They're straight forward, regular people, and while not all their stories end happily, most reveal a kind of resilience and grit that led John McNally to say, “These are exquisite short stories that give me hope.” 

Interestingly—and this is a bit of advice to other writers—I didn’t submit to Vine Leave Press for many moons because I didn't have a website, and my digital footprint was not very robust. It took me a long time to get a website up. I finally worked with a wonderful designer named Amy Williams, and then I revisited sending the manuscript to Vine Leaves Press. I’d had a few vignettes published in a beautiful anthology they did when they were still headquartered in Australia. 

Once I got my digital ducks in row, however, I sent it to Vine Leaves and got this wonderfully positive response. I was just over the moon. I’ve had the best experience working with the publisher, Jessica Bell, who also designs the covers, and production director Amie McCracken, and developmental editor Melanie Faith. They are all amazing. 

Vine Leaves Press has an International Voices in Creative Nonfiction Competition going on right now (February 1-June 1, 2024), so I urge your readers who have CNC manuscripts ready to go to check it out. It’s a very high-performance, robust independent traditional literary press. 

If you knew then what you know now, is there anything you would have done differently? 

I certainly would have gotten my website up and running a lot sooner so that I had a robust digital profile as fiction writer. I could have spared myself a lot of the labor of submitting the manuscript everywhere across the English-speaking world. But I’m a digital immigrant, so it took me longer. 

I also think I could have engineered my life a little better to have more bandwidth to write creatively. I’m not too hard on myself, though, because before I retired, I had a very busy, very full, and very creative professional life as an educator. 

As a teaching artist and arts producer at CentroNía, I created a program and wrote an educational playbook about The Theatrical Journey Project: Introducing Science to Early Learners through Guided Pretend Play, which is an incredibly engaging, constructivist, hands-on playful process of working with 3- to 5-year-old PreK children using the tools of improvisation. Using kid-friendly, tactile, and multi-sensory props, the project simulates real science phenomenon, and the children become the skilled science problem solvers. It is such a joyful and rewarding program, though it’s super high energy and exhausting. But I wouldn’t have given up that long chapter in my life for anything. Other than raising two amazing adult children, the Journey Project is probably the greatest contribution I will ever make to the world.

Where can readers purchase a copy of your book? 

It’s available through my website here.  Plus, E-Review copies are available via EBruceAuthor@gmail.com I also have hard copies that I’m selling at my many author events, which you can find out about at: Events — Elizabeth Bruce (elizabethbrucedc.com). 

The e-book is available everywhere, all around the world! Just Google Universally Adored & Other One Dollar Stories. 

I’ll put in a plug to anyone who reads my book—or other authors’ books—especially if you like it, to leave a short review on Goodreads, BookBub, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Thriftbooks, and any other booksellers’ site. They really help with marketing! 

What is one piece of advice you would like to share?  

As someone who came to creative writing later in life. I would tell emerging writers, or anyone really in any discipline, to keep your head down and just keep working at it. Do not allow yourself to be swept up in all this competitive buzz about who’s the hot new writer. Who's the fresh new voice? Who just landed this big shot agent or publisher or just got this huge advance? Who’s got the zeitgeist, etcetera, etcetera? For me, that kind of energy breeds panic that you’re not doing enough, you’re not good enough, that the ships are passing you by. It’s so debilitating. To quote Hamlet, “Pray you, avoid it.” 

Sure, there are isolated fairy tales of some debut writer who catapults to celebrity status overnight, but almost all writers—all artists—experience a ton of rejection. 

I was a character actor before I was a writer, and as an actor, you get used to rejection. You learn to internalize the fact that “the artist's life is a study in rejection.” You audition for this part or that part and you don't get cast, or you don't get the part you wanted, yadda, yadda. But then, you do get cast, you do get to perform, or you write your own one-person show, and life goes on. 

Being a writer is the same thing. You submit, you submit, you submit. You get rejected and rejected and rejected. But then, along the way, you get some acceptances. And meanwhile, you finish your manuscript, you write new stories or poems or essays, that hopefully, you can nurture and refine through the intimacy of a trusted writers’ group.. 

There was a seminal article in Literary Hub by the author Kim Liao in June of 2016 entitled “Why You Should Aim for 100 Rejections a Year.” A literary version of the “Go for the No” mantra in the business world. 

Echoing the practice of a writer friend of hers, Liao urged writers to submit so much that they garnered 100 rejections a year because along the way, you’re going to get a bunch of acceptances. Say 10%. That’s 10 published works a year. That’s a lot! 

So, I too would urge any writer, not just emerging writers, but any artist or person trying to do anything that involves convincing the external world to take some action, to steel yourself against rejection, to not take it personally, and keep going. To understand that there are so many different value systems and sensibilities, different aesthetics, etc., that finding a place that truly resonates with your work is a winding road. 

I would also strongly agree with the advice to get organized, however you do that—in whatever digital or analog way that works for you—so you know where you’ve submitted to, what the outcome was, etc., so you don’t end up re-submitting the same piece to the same place. That’s embarrassing, although I’ve done it! 

What is next for you? 

Well, I’ve actually almost finished a rough first draft of a novel-in-progress that’s a sequel of sorts to my collection of one-dollar stories. I take about 10 characters from different dollar stories and plunk them down altogether in the same place. Same characters, same cursory backstories, but a lot more present action and a lot more backstory. 

The setting is a fictitious diner in 1980 in the petrochemical town of Texas City, which is right next to my hometown. A lot of these characters have been struggling to keep their heads above water and deal with the challenges of their daily existences. There isn’t a lot of joy in their lives, and a lot of them are pretty lonely. Over the course of the novel, however, various characters find some companionship with each other. I flesh out a lot of really dramatic backstory, history, and personal narratives of some very hard times. 

There’s also a deep backstory to the setting which has to do with this terrible industrial accident that happened in 1947—called the Texas City Disaster—which is still the deadliest industrial accident in US history. A French ship full of ammonium nitrate blew up in the Texas City harbor and then a cascade of other explosions happened in the petrochemical refineries, and then the next day another ship full of ammonia nitrate also blew up. 

It was a devastating accident. The blast was felt hundreds of miles away. People thought it was an atomic bomb. At least 600 people died, and thousands were injured. Until 9/11, It was also the deadliest loss of firefighter lives in US history. Twenty-seven of the 28 members of the Texas City Volunteer Fire Department were just vaporized. A horrible disaster. 

While I don't have any first-hand experience with it, my folks were living in Galveston at the time. My mother was a nurse, and she was part of the triage team, so I grew up hearing about this. 

The Texas City Disaster was also very indicative of the country in 1947. It was the post-war boom, there were almost no environmental controls or occupational health and safety regs. The petroleum industry was flying high, and there wasn’t much of a line in the sand of what industry could or couldn’t do. 

This new work is a “polyphonic, discontinuous” novel, meaning that there are multiple POV characters and multiple narrative arcs going on, though they all come together eventually, in part through my very traumatized, somewhat unreliable central narrator who is haunted by the dead. Though there is also a lot of joy in the book as characters find some love and belonging. 

So that's what's next for me. Plus, of course, continuing to produce our podcast, “Creativists in Dialogue: A Podcast Embracing the Creative Life,” and its new series, “Innovators, Artists & Solutions.” Plus, getting to know our adorable new granddaughter, Lucia!