Beth Alvarado who'll read first will be introduced
by Aisha Sabatini Sloan.
Aisha graduated from the University of Arizona, MFA
program in Nonfiction in 2008.
Her thesis advisor at the time was Beth.
Throughout the last three years, Beth
has continued to act as a mentor and reader
to Aisha, and due in large part to her continued support,
Aisha was able to complete her first book,
Resolution and Bearing Essays on Race, Place, and Art,
which will be published by University of Iowa Press
next fall.
[APPLAUSE]
That's so cool.
Please welcome, Aisha.
Hi.
So Beth, so much gratitude for this person.
When I was 21, I spent a semester in London.
We lived at a place called the Avalon Hotel.
It was one of my first homes away from home.
The carpet was pink and peeling.
We ate beans for breakfast, and I loved every square foot
and second of it.
When I asked Beth if she would be my thesis advisor,
she said sure.
She sent me an excerpt of what she
was working on at the time and the experience of reading what
would eventually become anthropologies
left me stunned and relieved.
Not the way you feel when you heart
racing embark upon a new adventure
but when finally you start to recognize the road signs
and realize that you are on your way back home.
This synchronistic feeling that I'd found someone I knew
all along became stronger when I found out
that Beth too spent time studying abroad in London when
she was around the same age.
At the same point in our lives, though decades apart, we
both stumbled up the stairs late one night at the Avalon Hotel
at a moment of profound life transition.
In How I Quit Heroin and Other Toxic Substances,
Beth writes of the period of time
when she lived with her husband Fernando's family
and something about her worldview began to shift.
She writes, "I began to believe that dreams did mean something.
They could tell the future for instance.
Not only that, but two yolks meant twins.
A fork dropped on the floor meant company was coming soon.
You should make the sign of the cross when you salted the food.
This was when I began to see that there was
another world beneath this one.
A world of spirits.
A world where you made sense of the disparate pieces of reality
by weaving them together into a story, where you paid attention
to vague feelings that things weren't right, and by doing so,
saved yourself untold grief."
The fact that Beth is analytical--
that's not right.
Beth is analytical in the best kind of way,
always open to reseeing life, noticing mystery, questioning
what lurks beneath.
This gives her writing a lush vitality
that I think keeps her nurtured.
I've been astonished by the way that she
keeps happening upon new projects,
regardless of how many papers she has to grade,
even if as she continues to work without any sign of fatigue
on other projects that aren't quite finished.
Maybe the word I'm looking for is gratitude.
You can feel it.
She is grateful and writes of the word --world--
with a sense of reverence for its strange inner workings,
its accidental grace.
She gives time to people, to her students, to her family,
to her friends.
She seems to care about you beyond the page,
and this compassion orients her storytelling
in such a way that leaves the reader feeling renewed,
as if they've been seen somewhere
by this author at some other time
in a dream or a dirty hotel.
As far as our own writing and especially our lives,
we should all be so good.
Beth?
[APPLAUSE]