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Washington-DC-based Texas author Elizabeth Bruce’s debut novel, And Silent Left the Place, won Washington Writers’ Publishing House’s Fiction Award and distinctions from ForeWord Magazine and Texas Institute of Letters. She’s published in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Malawi, India, Yemen, South Korea, Romania, Sweden, Israel, and the Philippines. A co-founder of Sanctuary Theatre, her bilingual book, CentroNia’s Theatrical Journey Playbook: Introducing Science to Early Learners through Guided Pretend Play, garnered four indie awards. 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.
In ‘Universally Adored and Other One Dollar Stories,’ Elizabeth Bruce gives readers 33 ways of looking at a dollar. Her empathetic, humorous, and disarming embrace of plain-spoken people searching for a way out, charms and provokes. Published by Vine Leaves Press, these are bittersweet stories of resilience and defiance.
In “Universally Adored,” a color-obsessed artist draws a facsimile of a dollar—a masterpiece universally adored—to win her girlfriend back. While checking for spare change in the laundry, in “Bald Tires” a Tennessee housewife with a malcontent husband finds an unused condom in his Sunday trousers. In “The Forgiveness Man,” a runaway teen with a newborn follows a vagabond healer absolving the bedraggled godless through hugs of forgiveness. And in “Magic Fingers, a ladies’ room attendant tracked down by her abusive ex finds refuge in a cheap motel with a 1970s era bed massager.
Riffing on the intimate object of a dollar, Bruce’s humane short fictions—from a great mashed potato war to the grass Jesus walked on—ring with the exquisite voices of characters in analog worlds.
I appreciate you making time to talk to me. I wanted to ask about your journey as a writer. I saw you published And Silent Left the Place, which is such a fascinating story, and now you've written a collection of short stories. How did you first start getting interested in this format?
My first creative discipline was as an actor. I got into theater at the age of 25. I wrote things in college and did a lot of nonprofit writing, so being a wordsmith was always a livelihood for me, but I spent about 10 or 12 years as a theater artist. First as an actor, and then as a costumer, and then as a theater producer.
That was thrilling. It was intense. It was a fabulous experience with its own unique set of terrors. Of course, being on stage is terrifying in many ways, but then when I was in my mid-thirties, my husband and I had our first child, and we moved out of our junker basement apartment into a little row house in Northeast DC. So suddenly I was a mom, and I had a mortgage, so my theater life went into deep storage, and it stayed there for a long time. I couldn't have a life in the theater and raise a young infant.
Eventually, I switched to creative writing. I was an English major in university, so literature was always near and dear to me. I started taking writing workshops at different places in this area in Washington, DC, and I started a first novel. I was really fortunate to be accepted into the inaugural Heritage Writers Workshop with the wonderful writer Richard Bausch. As you probably know, he’s won every award and is a fabulous writer and instructor. I spent a long time writing this first novel. I had a first draft that I put aside for various reasons and started all over again with this central character who’s very unlike me, my old man Thomas Riley in And Silent Left the Place. He’s an 81-year-old World War One veteran who came back from the Great War middle-aged and silent.
I spent many years writing this very spare, very short novel, and after a long struggle of trying to get it published, I was fortunate enough to have it accepted as the fiction prize winner for a local literary press in DC called Washington Writers' Publishing House. I’ve stayed active in the press and they reissued a new edition in 2022. It's a slightly updated version with a new introduction.
I'm pretty committed to writing fiction. My acting career has more or less been reduced to doing readings and making audiobooks of my own writing. It's been a great journey.
That's awesome. Do you have a favorite writer?
I love that question. I can't limit it to one, but several of my favorite writers include Cormac McCarthy, whom I hasten to add I had not read before I wrote my Texas debut novel. He's dark and bleak and so brilliant. I'm swept away by his writing. I also love some old school folks. Carson McCullers is a longtime favorite writer from the mid-20th Century. She's mostly known for ‘The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter’ and ‘The Ballad of the Sad Café’. I also love the 1951 Nobel Prize winner Pär Lagerkvist, who writes these short parable stories. ‘The Sibyl’ and ‘The Dwarf’ are his two best knowns. I have recently become a renewed fan of Marilynne Robinson who is most well known for ‘Housekeeping’. She also has a trilogy set in the middle of the US. ‘Gilead’ is one, and I just finished reading ‘Lila’, and there's another one entitled ‘Home’. I'm in love with her literary voice. She's so beautiful. A couple of other writers are Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote ‘The Remains of the Day’, and ‘Klara and the Sun’ is a more recent one. I love the writing and the sentences of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee. There are a lot more writers I’m just in awe of, including all the writers I’ve studied with, but those are some whom I admire tremendously both for their storytelling, with their lyricism, and their incredibly beautiful sentences and deep characterizations.
Would you say the lyricism and the characterizations are what really group them all together for you?
Yeah, I would say so, I think they're all incredibly lyrical writers, even if they're not using high-blown language. I mean, Cormac McCarthy, he has some big words in there, but it's the cadence of what he writes. As you can tell, I'm partial to Southern US writers; there is this cadence to the speech, the vernacular, the descriptions of the land. I love that, and I'm inspired to reach my own versions of lyricism and cadence in my own writing.
I did notice a certain cadence in your writing, and when I saw later on that you were from Texas, I wasn't surprised, which is a good thing. How else do you think it’s influenced your writing?
Yeah, I am a native Texan from a little town on the Gulf Coast of Texas right off the Galveston Bayou. I had a Texas daddy and a Yankee mama, so I'm not a full blood Texan, and I've been away from the state for most of my adult life. But I still visit family there, and I'm so influenced by the love of storytelling that Texans have. I joke that Texans will forgive anybody anything as long as it makes for a good story, so there's a sort of bigness and brashness and humor that laces through Texas.
I’m slowly working my way through these different eras of my life. I'm still dealing with my early years from a little bitty blue collar town. It was a bedroom community for the petrochemical industry, and it's not a big sophisticated place. I spent most of my adult life in cities, but I'm still really fascinated by small communities. Being from a small place means my life was shaped by regular people. I've had all manner of advantages in life, but I grew up in a really unpretentious place. I've tended to live and work in really unpretentious worlds. And I'm so reverential of the stamina and the grit and the wit of people I've lived and worked with as both a child and as an adult.
My writing isn't terribly cerebral. I have a pretty spare, plain-spoken style as a writer. I don't use a lot of flowery language, and I don't really write about the intelligentsia. Mostly, I write about regular people who are in hard times doing what they can to move on. Writers are smart people, and increasingly literary writers are associated with universities and the academy. They're incredibly well spoken, have deep theoretical knowledge, and there's a lot of intellectual banter that goes on in some cases. There's intellectual game playing that happens in a lot of contemporary fiction between very smart characters who are knowledge workers in this or that field, and I don't come from that world, not really. I'm a college graduate, and I have really smart friends, and my husband's a really smart guy with two terminal degrees, so I love intellectual discourse, but it is certainly not the only sort of prestige that I think should be examined in the world of literary fiction. I admire the wit and the mental gymnastics that go on in a lot of contemporary fiction, but I'm more focused on the struggle, an undauntedness of the characters.
In ‘Universally Adored’, you wrote about a relationship that came apart because one party was pursuing their passion for painting, but it wasn't bringing in enough money, and ultimately that didn't work for them. You mentioned that you pivoted from theater to writing in part because you had a mortgage, so I wanted to ask if you struggled with that personally.
Yeah, my pivots and compromises in life have been continuous. As a younger person, I was doing it all. I was working–I've been incredibly fortunate in my life to have, quote, “day jobs” that I loved and were creative in their own way. And they were focused on the public good, so I've been incredibly blessed to have livelihoods that I felt passionate about. I also had my evening work as a theater artist back in my young adulthood, my pre-parenthood, I would work really hard all day and then I would do theater at night and burn the candle at both ends. None of this was happening at a Broadway level that would require a full-time investment, so as an artist you get used to working all the time. I mean you're working on your art, you're working on your job, or you're working on your life.
Making the decision to pivot away from a life in the theater was an incredibly easy decision to make. I'm an older person. I came to my creative life at 25, was an older mom at 36, and an older writer. I didn't publish my first novel until I was in my 50s, and I've just published my first story collection at 72. So in some ways, all these compromises and trade-offs have meant that I'm just on a more delayed time track than a lot of younger people who have been really focused and able to pursue their artistic disciplines, if not full-time, then at least with all deliberate speed during their younger years.
I don't regret any of it. I think all of these pivots away from a completely artistic life give a person insight, humility, and a depth of life experience that can only enrich your work, either as an actor or as a writer. I've been fortunate enough to be able to do both. So many people in the world have no time at all in their lives for anything other than work and survival and maintenance of whatever equilibrium they can scratch out of the hard worlds that they live in. Being able to traffic in some of the same realities that one's characters traffic in is a plus. I know what it's like to be a motel maid. I didn't have to do it for my whole life, but it's good to have done that just for some interim point in one's life. So I don't regret any of the trade-offs.
You said you managed to have some day jobs that you were passionate about that had some public good. Which was most significant to you?
I met my now husband, Michael Oliver, in DC in 1983, and we started a theater company where we were knee-deep in theater production for five or six years. It was called Sanctuary Theater, and it was in the sanctuary of an old and desperately poor church. It was sort of a Peace Corps-like experience because we were in a poor community, and it was the hardest I'd ever worked. We didn't make much money. I had little side jobs, and my husband was teaching full-time, but he didn't make a lot of money either, so that was incredibly formative.
When we became parents, we both pivoted full-time to education. I spent about three decades working as a teaching artist, an arts administrator, and a nonprofit writer, and I had tremendous intellectual and creative freedom.
I spent 10 years creating a project called the Theatrical Journey Project: Introducing Science to Early Learners through Guided Pretend Play. I worked with three to five year olds on these really beautiful, sweet journeys where the kids would become the skilled science problem solvers, and we would go and solve the problem of the sick teddy bear or why the farmer can't find the rain, or other wonderful things. It was incredibly dynamic, exhausting, and joyful working with young children. Three to five year olds are natural actors, fabulous actors, they are completely available to the theatrical impulse.
That was my “day job” for the better part of 30 years. It was flexible, so I could do my mom duties and have a creative life in the corners and crevices of working full-time or part-time. It took me a long time to write my first novel as a result, in between taking the kids to school and all the ballet classes and gymnastics and staying up late, but I have noticed since I've, quote, “retired” that my creative output has increased tremendously. I no longer have to run off and teach four classes in the morning. That was incredibly creative, but it was a different kind of creativity; it was narrative, but it was also performative.
I love what you said about three to five year olds being completely available to the theatrical impulse. What did you teach in those classes? Could you teach someone to be available to the creative impulse?
That's a great question. The kids would come into the journey space with their teacher, and we'd sit down and do vocal and physical warm-ups, warm up their imaginations, and do a lot of social-emotional stuff where you create a culture of collaboration. There's a lot of focus on mutual respect, where the children become the experts, and the Journey Guide is not a teacher but a colleague.
Then the imaginary phone would ring, and the science emergency would be introduced. For example, in the journey of the water cycle, the farmer can't find the rain. The animals are thirsty; the crops are dying. So the kids would have to put on their Water Scientist hats–these little headbands with a picture of the water cycle on it–and they'd get a little Sun Stick–which was a popsicle stick with a picture of the sun and a magnet inside–and they'd go over to the ocean, which was just a big piece of blue cloth, and there would be paper clips on top. Then they have to shine the sun harder and harder, beating down on the ocean, and touch the Sun Stick to the paper clips, and it would attach to the magnet, and they could bring it up like evaporation. They’d go into the clouds–which were white streamers–and they'd swirl around and around in the condensation stage of the water cycle, then go over to the mountain, and there'd be this device that was covered up with a cloth, and they’d make thunder sounds by shaking a poster board, and there would be a storm over the mountain. Then you take the cloth off, and there was this little upside down salad bowl that had cloud pictures on it and was attached to all these tubes, and they would have to take the paperclip, the evaporated raindrop, and drop it through these clear plastic tubes to make precipitation. They’d run back and forth to get more evaporation drops. It was so sweet. Especially for the little bouncy guys who were always plucking the teachers' nerves; they would never be in trouble during journey class because the parameters of acceptable behavior were wider, and they were up on their feet and moving around.
To close it down, we'd write a letter to the farmer, so it’d have an emerging literacy component to it. You don't really write at three to five, but we’d draw pictures of the sun or the raindrops and tell the farmer not to worry, we found the rain, it's over in the ocean. You just have to get the evaporation up to the condensation, and then we're going to have a storm over the mountain so we'll have precipitation, so it's coming.
I love that so much. I absolutely adore that. And it makes science so approachable.
It's so completely approachable. But to answer your question, part of it is revering the theatrical space, the world of the play. The Journey Guide never drops the pretend world. You don't step out of the role and become the teacher and fuss at someone for making too much noise or something. You're completely engaged. It's this immersive experience where, in the moment, you are in the world of the play, the same as the kids. Then, at the end of a journey, you close your eyes and say goodbye to all the journey elements to bring them back to their school. I’d open my eyes and go, “Are you back at your school?” and they’d go, “Yes!” And you point to their teacher and go, “Who is that?”
There's a Theatrical Journey Playbook available in English and Spanish. I've done workshops all over DC, and I went to Ghana twice, worked with colleagues over there, went to Colombia once. It's available for anybody who's interested. They can shoot me an email, and I'll talk to them more about the Theatrical Journey Project. Happily, my longtime colleague Edelmira “Mimi” Nuñez Kitchen has taken over the Journey Project at CentroNía.
My husband Michael and I, on our podcast, Creativists in Dialogue, just interviewed a long-time colleague named Aleta Margolis, who runs a trailblazing organization called Center for Inspired Teaching. It's all about using creative teaching methods to transform the teaching and learning experience for both teachers and children.
Episode Transcript: https://creativists.substack.com/p/transcript-our-conversation-with-0e0
Have you noticed a difference in availability to the theatrical impulse among different age groups?
Another great question. Adults are not nearly as available to imaginative play. They have all these concerns about being undignified and silly. With adults, you have to do warm-ups and get people to reconnect with their playful selves by being playful as a teacher. Reconnecting as an adult to your playful, joyful self means that the kids get to experience a kind of joyfulness also. So working with adults, I do pretty much the same journey. I have to get them to loosen up and take the theatrical space seriously, but if you can get people to loosen up, they have a great time. They come up with wild, crazy solutions for things.
The older a child gets, the more self-conscious they become, so you have to give them an “actor hat.” You have to give them some kind of ego cover so they don't feel silly becoming a teddy bear doctor or something. And they can be more judgmental about who you are. Like, “What do you have to offer, lady? Are you worthy of my abandonment?”
Fascinating. Thank you for speaking with me today, I learned a lot. Is there anything you’d want to leave our readers with?
Thank you so much for your time, and thanks for being responsive and more thanks to the Spadina Literary Review for publishing one of my stories sometime back, and even recommending it for the Pushcart Prize. I was really honoured by that.
Anything people want to know about me is generally on my website, Instagram, Facebook pages, or LinkedIn. My social media footprint is not as tremendously high as some people’s, but I am available for book clubs and author chats and anything else. If you want to review the book, just holler at me. I'll give you a copy. And of course your readers can buy the book directly from Vine Leaves Press at Universally Adored and Other One Dollar Stories by Elizabeth Bruce – Vine Leaves Press.
