A Working Man's Apocrypha: Short Stories

(Bill Luvaas read as part of the Writer's Voice Visiting Author Series on November 16, 2007. This is my spoken introduction to the event...) William Luvaas has an ability to present facts about characters that in lesser hands would come across as mere quirks, but within "A Working Man's Apocrypha," provide us with telling insight into each one. All the characters, no matter how briefly they appear within contribute something essential to the story, and Bill paints them fully, using vibrant, tactile, details, filling our senses in ways that most writers do not in the relatively smaller environs of the short story. All over AWMA, Bill makes the natural world as much of a character as the people within; in "Original Sin" it's "Fog creeping up along empty streets, ambushing buildings..." action that directly reflects the emotional state of our protagonist. In "The Woman Who Was Allergic to Herself, it's "the wind was brutal this morning It decapitated waves and sent them skittering, throwing white spume in the air and leaves down in a steady rain..." How he makes the leaves there into water, mixing elements to better give us a sense of the physical moment here and elsewhere how things physically come apart, things, and people, too. And he truly gets how profoundly connected people can be, how one's emotions are tied inextricably to their intimates, whether lovers, friends or family, how people joust, banter, joke and tease, pushing and pulling, claiming their space. In "The Sexual Revolution," he writes of twins, who share a preternaturally unusual bond, even for twins, Bill writes "How and Hol were like taut piano wires side by side; a vibration begun in one invariably translated to the other." I could make the rest of this introduction a scrolling of my favorites parts of this book, the original use of language, how Bill makes the characters colloquial, explicitly specific, yet never clichéd, how he uses phrases like "whumped it flat," describes the day-to-day difficulties of living as "life's pesterups," or a violent occurrence as taking place in "a few thick seconds," but we'd be here all night, as that covers exactly one page. Just know that the language never takes you further out, away from the heart of the story. It always-always--draws you further in. Especially in the two stories that to me make up the heart of the collection, "The Woman Who Was Allergic to Herself" and the towering and devastating title story, (and frankly in all the stories), Bill is determined to grant each character their full humanity, their full dignity, even when their circumstances would make most of us turn away. And the joy in much of AWMA is watching each character gauge and reckon their own reactions; tentatively coming closer, pulling away, questioning their own motives, and finally, in most of the cases, making the inevitable, yet invariably brave step, to recognizing something of themselves in everyone, good and bad. And conversely, in so