WEBVTT

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Good evening.

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Beth Alvarado's fiction
and creative nonfiction

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have appeared in many
literary journals,

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including CUE, Ploughshares,
and Northwest Review.

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She is a graduate both of
Stanford and the University

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of Arizona creative
writing programs

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and has taught here in
the Department of English

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since 1990.

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Tonight, Beth will be reading
from her collection of stories

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called Not A Matter of Love
just out from New Rivers

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Press and winner of their
2005 Many Voices Award.

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The suspense of
Alvarado's stories

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is located in familiar
domestic and suburban settings

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in which the
natural world, often

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this desert of the Southwest,
serves as grist and foil

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for events driven by plots as
lyrical as they are dramatic.

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This book delivers
us a voice that

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is equidistant from our
weakness and our strength.

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In stasis or in action,
in hands and faces,

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in exhaustion and
in mercy, Alvarado

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allows us to see and to suffer
the consequences of what we are

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and what we lack.

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As readers, our
experience ranges,

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both associative and discursive,
as her characters, mothers,

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daughters, uncles, cousins,
sons unmoored by circumstance

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adapt, regroup, dress
wounds, bury the dead,

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confront the inevitable
authorities, and go on

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or pass on.

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Given the stark and
secular circumstances

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of her plots and characters,
we might be caught off guard

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when we find, in
many of the stories,

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that the final
authority is the soul.

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Not the soul as
delivered from on high,

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but the soul as a made
thing, wrought and crafted.

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The soul as hewn cello, broken
and repaired, and ultimately,

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played as a somber and
abundant gift to others.

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I have read each
of these stories

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as Beth has written
them, always in awe

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and always waiting for
you, the audience she

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welcomes and deserves.

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I give you an
accomplished artist.

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I give you my friend.

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