Good evening.
Beth Alvarado's fiction and creative nonfiction
have appeared in many literary journals,
including CUE, Ploughshares, and Northwest Review.
She is a graduate both of Stanford and the University
of Arizona creative writing programs
and has taught here in the Department of English
since 1990.
Tonight, Beth will be reading from her collection of stories
called Not A Matter of Love just out from New Rivers
Press and winner of their 2005 Many Voices Award.
The suspense of Alvarado's stories
is located in familiar domestic and suburban settings
in which the natural world, often
this desert of the Southwest, serves as grist and foil
for events driven by plots as lyrical as they are dramatic.
This book delivers us a voice that
is equidistant from our weakness and our strength.
In stasis or in action, in hands and faces,
in exhaustion and in mercy, Alvarado
allows us to see and to suffer the consequences of what we are
and what we lack.
As readers, our experience ranges,
both associative and discursive, as her characters, mothers,
daughters, uncles, cousins, sons unmoored by circumstance
adapt, regroup, dress wounds, bury the dead,
confront the inevitable authorities, and go on
or pass on.
Given the stark and secular circumstances
of her plots and characters, we might be caught off guard
when we find, in many of the stories,
that the final authority is the soul.
Not the soul as delivered from on high,
but the soul as a made thing, wrought and crafted.
The soul as hewn cello, broken and repaired, and ultimately,
played as a somber and abundant gift to others.
I have read each of these stories
as Beth has written them, always in awe
and always waiting for you, the audience she
welcomes and deserves.
I give you an accomplished artist.
I give you my friend.