Featured Interview With Elizabeth Bruce
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I grew up in the small, Gulf Coast town of LaMarque, Texas, which is on the mainland just across the bayou from Galveston Island and right next to the petrochemical industries in Texas City. I had an East Texas daddy and a Yankee mama from Wisconsin, both WWII Navy vets, plus an older sister, a younger brother, and various dogs over the years.
Even though I was a paralyzingly shy kid, I had a funny, funny, fearless best friend named Gladys who took me underwing as her sidekick and to whom I owe all the wild adventures of my childhood.
I left Texas for college in Colorado, where I spent my young adulthood doing theatre in my off hours in the Denver/Boulder area, before moving east to New York City and then Washington, DC, where I still live and where my husband and I raised our two adult children. We have one elder kitty whom we call Kitty Cock-a-doodle since she wakes us up.
I’ve done a lot of other work in my life—as a PreK drama teacher, a theatre producer, a writer for nonprofits, and lots of service jobs in my youth from being motel maid, a paint scrapper, secretary, and restaurant worker—but I’ve always come back to stories in my creative life, first as an actor then as a writer. Indeed, I absolutely owe my writing life to the storytelling Texans of my youth, who forgave anybody anything so long as it made for a great story.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
Like a lot of super shy kids, I loved books. I especially loved the little Bookmobile that would come around the neighborhoods in my small Texas town. It was a dark, magical place you could go into and get a whole new stack of books, amazing stories inside dark green or deep blue or burgundy hard covers. Of course, I read all the stories of girls or young women who went out into the world and had adventures, like Pippi Longstockings, Nancy Drew, Nellie Bly, and Jo in Little Women. I wanted to be like; them—to be a fearless, independent woman, a “free thinker” who was funny and smart and really good at stuff.
I went to college and majored in English and read and read great literature. I still read a lot.
But as an artist, I’m a pretty late bloomer. I didn’t think I was good or smart or creative enough to be any kind of artist until I was 25. I was working as a secretary and wanted to get into theatre administration through a program at a local university, but the professor said I had to first take an acting class. So—against my protestations—I did, and I was hooked. I spent the next dozen or so years doing theatre in my off hours. It’s what cured me of my shyness. I met my husband in DC and we started a small theatre and worked our tushes off for many years.
We had our firstborn when I was 36 and suddenly, with a house and a mortgage and a baby, neither of us could do theatre anymore, not for the miniscule amount of money we were making. I mean, “baby time” and “theatre time” really didn’t mix. So, I started writing creatively a few years later, taking courses, joining writing groups, going to conferences, and working on my debut novel, And Silent Left the Place, which didn’t get published until I was in my 50s. Silent won some awards—the Washington Writers’ Publishing House Fiction Award, ForeWord Magazine’s Bronze Fiction Prize, and it was one of two Finalists for the Texas Institute of Letters’ Best Work of First Fiction.
The main thing, though, is I just never gave up. I kept my head down and worked at the local level, and I’m still at it, in my undaunted way, writing stories and plays and novels, some of which have gotten published or produced either in the US or overseas—I’ve had stories published in journals in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, Malawi, Yemen, and The Philippines!
I just turned 70, and I’m determined to spend the next ten years finishing or cannibalizing dozens of writing projects, capturing a lifetime of work if you will and putting it out there. As the saying goes, an artist’s life is a study in rejection, and indeed, despite my own sea of rejection, I am uncowed. That’s probably the most distinct thing about me.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Favorite authors? Oh man, there are so many. As a native Texas, I’ve read a lot of Southern literary fiction writers, some decades ago like Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Jean Toomer, but one of my favorite writers is the late Pär Lagerkvist, a Swedish author who won a Nobel Prize in the 1950s. He wrote very short books, but they are so incredibly deep.
More recently I’ve read lots of Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, J.M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Roddy Doyle, Ian McEwan, Luisa Valenzuela, Khaled Hosseini, and many others, as well as books by great writers I’ve taken workshops from like the late Lee K. Abbott, Janet Peery, Richard Bausch, Liam Callanan, and John McNally. Plus, I read books by writer friends like Debra Bowling, David Taylor, Melanie Hatter, Dana King, Kathleen Wheaton, David Ebenbach, Sarah Pleydell, and others. I actually buy books by writer friends, but these days I mostly read literary fiction I discover in Little Free Libraries—generally books published 20+ years ago that I’ve barely heard of but which won prestigious awards and sold a bunch of copies –hence, their presence in Free Libraries.
I’m inspired both by classic and contemporary authors, both American, British, and international writers, as well as by the work of writer friends and instructors. I am especially swept away by writers who write astonishing sentences like McCarthy, Perry, and Coetzee. I absolutely love beautiful sentences.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
While I’m shopping around a collection of stories that each begins with the words “one dollar,” as well as working on two additional novels—one of which I’m co-authoring with my friend, former Georgia Author of the Year Debra Bowling–my most recent publication is the new 2021 edition of my debut novel, And Silent Left the Place.
Set in South Texas in April of 1963, the novel revolves around Thomas Riley, an 81-year-old World War One vet who came back from the Great War middle-aged and silent. He can speak but he doesn’t speak. The title comes from a line in Ovid’s Metamorphoses about King Midas’ Barber, who alone knew the secret that King Midas had asses’ ears but was sworn to secrecy. But the Barber couldn’t bear the secret, so he:
"Then dug a hole, and told it to the ground;
In a low whisper he revealed the case,
And covered in the earth, and silent left the place."
Like King Midas’ Barber, Riley dug himself an underground room and goes there to tell his beloved, but absent, wife Dolores about events around him. From his old gas station in the desert above Laredo, Riley witnesses others’ sorrows and humiliations. As the novel says, “Riley saw everything folks tried to hide — all their wounds and unlovedness. Passions and vaguer urges.” He is a catalyst for those who encounter him by accident or design during the 24 hours of the novel’s story. Things happens around Riley, drawing him into a cascade of bizarre events that eventually reveal why he doesn’t speak. Meanwhile, Riley’s silence holds secrets of everyone around him.
As I said in a recent interview in the Washington Independent Review of Books, “the novel’s moral core is more mythic, more metaphorical, more symbolic. It is more of lore than practical reality, which makes it a very unmodern book. Riley’s fidelity to his silence is both atonement and damnation for sins larger than himself. And redemption only comes after a long penance for the sins of the fathers and the fathers’ fathers visited upon the children, to paraphrase Euripides.”
Silent is also a very short book, with a spare, storytelling voice rooted in the oral tradition. It’s written completely out loud, with a cadence and rhythm borrowed from the tall Texas tale.
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