Susan Straight

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Reviews of In the Country of Women:

  • The New York Times: All in the Family: A Multicultural Memoir

  • The Washington Post: Susan Straight’s memoir is a letter to her daughters — and a reckoning with America’s past

  • NPR: 'In The Country Of Women' Honors The Strength And Resilience Of 6 Generations

  • Entertainment Weekly: 20 new books to ready in August

  • LA Times: Review: Susan Straight’s new memoir amplifies stories of strong women who survive and thrive

  • KCRW: Press Play

  • The Christian Science Monitor: 'In the Country of Women' is a powerful American memoir

  • San Francisco Chronical: Review: Susan Straight's 'Country of Women' describes 'true America'

New Article the LA Times: "Finding a Geography of Home in the Inland Empire"

Read the article here.

Newest Short Story: "The Perseids"

Read it now on Granta.

New Story from Amazon Originals: 'The Princess of Valencia' by Susan Straight

In prose both heartrending and harrowing, National Book Award finalist Susan Straight conjures up the unforgettable voice of a mother coming to terms with her worst nightmare.

Twenty-year-old Jacinta grew up in her mother’s family home in Santa Ana, California, surrounded by a grove of orange trees. Little by little, Jacinta’s mother lost her—first to college, then to a boy she said she loved, and then, finally, to the rage of a school shooter. Snap. In an instant it was all gone. All she has now is her daughter’s phone. Like an album, gripped in the palm of her hand—texts, photos, messages, and videos of her daughter’s first three years at college. With it, Jacinta’s mother is reconstructing her daughter’s last three weeks.

In this uniquely moving exploration of mourning, fury, and reminiscence, Susan Straight evokes—through a grieving mother’s devastating internal monologue—both a modern-day nightmare and exquisite proof of love’s extraordinary power to overcome it.

Get it today!

Back in The New Yorker: 'My Daughters' Fears of Guns, And My Own'

A few weeks ago, I spent time with a woman my age who, like me, was born here in Southern California, grew up with many siblings and not much money, and received an annual pair of ungainly Toughskins jeans, from Sears. We smiled shakily about hating those jeans. We also spoke about her youngest daughter, who went to high school with my youngest daughter, who prepared for her life with children’s theatre and cheerleading, who had planned to marry the boy she met in high school, who had dressed in festival clothes and put on makeup and taken Instagram photos and then walked onto a concert ground last year in Las Vegas, where a musician was singing as she was shot and killed, falling into the arms of her boyfriend.

Read the rest on newyorker.com

Book Review in the LA Times: 'Freshwater' by Akwaeke Emezi

There is a devastating moment in “Freshwater,” the debut novel by Akwaeke Emezi, when the main character known as Ada gives herself over completely to the spirit that has implanted itself into her while she was in her mother’s womb.

Read the rest here. 

February 4th, 2018 Op-Ed in LA Times: Forget it secessionists—we're one California.

"People are often egregiously aggrieved, but divorce doesn’t ensure happiness."

Read more by clicking here. 

Speaking Events in Turkey and Florida

From November 1-3, Susan will be attending and keynoting the American Studies Conference in Ankara, Turkey. Then, on November 16th, she will be speaking at Florida International University. Quite a trek!

Story Map in Collaboration with ESRI

Recently featured this summer in Granta, Susan had the profound experience to help design and direct an interactive map with ESRI, a leading global geo-communications firm, entitled “The American Experience in 737 Novels”. This interactive map is based on the books Susan read by authors writing in and about their land, their home, their people. As Riverside has always been a backdrop for many of Susan’s stories, the same can be said for countless other authors in America. Check out the map and enjoy the experience.

Piece in The Guardian

Featured in The Guardian, Susan has penned an updated version of Jonathan Swift's essay from 1729 regarding the treatment of the poor for the new Administration here in the United States.

When Trump Comes to Town...

Featured in The New Yorker, Susan discusses the recent trip of the likely GOP nominee...

A Personal Piece in The LA Times

Check out Susan's piece from April, 2016 on why she became writer. Click here. And, check out who else, along with Susan, are now Critics-At-Large for the LA Times.

Video Bio of Susan - Kirsch Award Winner

A Battle in San Bernardino

Susan gives a local's glimpse into the gun violence that both unites and divides our nation. Click here. 

TEDx Talk by Susan in Redondo Beach

Death in the bookmobile

Susan reflects on the bookmobile that used to drive around the Alpha Beta where she spent hours reading the likes of James Michener, John le Carre, and Agatha Christie. Published in the LA Times and readable here. 

USC Talk

Sunday Rumpus Times

The Sunday Rumpus Essay by Susan Straight: Van Halen and the Butcher's Apron. Check it out.

New Essay in The New York Times

Making babies, just to make ends meet. 

TEDx Talk in Redondo Beach

Watch Susan give a reading at an independent TEDx event in Redondo Beach. Click here to go to YouTube.

Short-Story Featured in One Story

"They brought her a body. They brought Glorette in and laid her on Marie-Claire’s couch. Like it was Louisiana, when she was a child and their neighbor Michel got thrown from the mule and kicked in the head and they brought him to Auntie Viola’s house and she told Marie-Claire, Sit here with me, bebe, so I don’t lonely while he don’t left alone."

Now, in order to enjoy this story, you need to subscribe to One Story. Of course,  you should subscribe because they are a great, responsible, and important journal.

Also, at the website, you can enjoy the Q&A between Susan and Hannah Tinti.

Bay Area Reviews

San Francisco Chronicle: "'Between Heaven and Here' is clearly her passionate effort to get [the stories of Riverside] told."

Zyzzyva: "Imbuing her characters and setting with a rare brand of unexpected and somehow vibrant gorgeousness, Straight tells a story thrumming with love. This, it seems, is her specialty: examining the suffering in everyday places and people and threading their stories with beauty."

GoodReads.com Conversation

Susan recently took place in "Ask Susan Straight" on goodreads.com. Check out some of the interesting questions, comments, and discussions.

Click here for the good stuff.

A Fierce Writer, Writing About a Fierce Mother

BarnesandNoble.com sees "Between Heaven and Here" partly as a book about a fierce mother. Susan responds and recommends five other books about those fiercesome ladies.

"I started with images of a child I tried to help -- one with cigarette burns -- and a pregnant woman killed and left in a shopping cart, whose body was first seen by my brother-in-law. These images got me thinking about what makes a good mother, what makes a fierce mother who tries to keep her child alive and unhurt, and what makes a child love his mother no matter what happens? The following are five books about fierce mothers and their children."

Check out those other books here.

LA Times Interview

 The gripping, sometimes brutal book is filled with graceful details plucked from Straight's observations of nature. She is a master of minutiae, pointing out the way the backs of sunflower petals look in the sunlight and how baby bees cling to a flower's center or describing the way the fronds of a towering palm tree outside a kitchen window light up when the moon rises behind them so that the tree resembles a cosmic sparkler. This last detail is used to tear-inducing effect in "Between Heaven and Here."

Check out the rest here.

Every Story has a start. From Susan's Socal Focus on KCET

"Story is when something won't let you go, when you keep hearing the voice or seeing the image, when you write a novel filled with people who are trying to survive with humor and ingenuity."

Read the rest here.

In the Mood for a Scroll? Check out Between Heaven and Here on The Daily Beast's Hot Reads

The Daily Beast says...

"The plot could fit in an episode of CSI, but a sharp and glancing line like “Why have buttocks? What good are they? And hair?” hardly seems to belong but pops up everywhere. It shows a writer who takes her time, even revels in it—in the past, present, and future. She reaches across the years, back to A Million Nightingale and onward to Take One Candle Light a Room. How is it that Between Heaven and Here is only about 200 pages? It is a very rich 200 pages."

Read The Beast's roar by clicking here...no here.

The Dallas Morning News: "Uplifting, Gorgeous Novel"

Jenny Shank gave Between Heaven and Here a lovely review in The Dallas Morning News.

"How can a novel that is essentially the story of a dead prostitute prove so uplifting? It must be some kind of black magic that only Susan Straight can work."

To read the review, please click here.

Boston Globe Reviews Susan's New Novel

From the Boston Globe...

Take the community storytelling approach of Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio,” but populate it with the cast of HBO’s “Treme,” then add the pathos of Toni Morrison and change the setting to California’s Inland Empire, just east of Los Angeles, and you’ve got something close to novelist Susan Straight’s achievement with her trilogy of novels centered on the fictional communities of Rio Seco (modeled on Riverside) and of Sarrat, a strange enclave of Creole culture just across the river. “It wasn’t even a neighborhood, like the Westside,” explains Sidney, a young man entranced with Sarrat and its people: “It was another world.”

Read the rest of the review here...

A Nice Review from a Nice Book Blog - The Rumpus

"The mélange of voices in Straight’s work creates a plangent refrain, like a strain of music underlying everything that happens to her characters: their choices, their desires, and their habits, all of which she unflinchingly and compassionately describes."

—Mimi Albert

Read the rest of the review...

Between Heaven and Here is, well, here.

Susan Straight weighs in on what the candidates should read. LATIMES.com

'Susan Straight meditates on her writing roots: Where I'm From'

Here's a link to Susan's latest article in the Boston Globe. Sadly, it's not free. We will try and post it here on the website soon.

'Literature and the gift of words' — A precious offer from Susan Straight.

Susan has long believed in giving away her work. Read more about her perspective and what she's willing to offer. 

One reader's response to the article:

What a delight it was to read the lovely Op-Ed article by Susan Straight. Her words immediately took me back to my grandparents' apartment in the Bronx on Christmas Day 1951, when my Aunt Vera presented me with a shiny, fat book titled "Fairy Tales." I remember taking the book to a back bedroom and reading it in its entirety that very night. This is such a vivid memory that I believe it marked the beginning of my lifelong love of books and reading.

Thank you to Straight and all the other people who put books in the hands of children.

Linda Mele Johnson

Long Beach

New Op-Ed piece featured on LATIMES.com

Susan sheds some much needed light on the reality of immigration; the forgotten lives hanging in the balance; how the issues of humanity are often lost in the focus of policy and personal agendas.

Essay selected for Best American Essays 2011

Featured in Believer's October, 201o issue, 'Travels with My Ex' has been selected for the Best American Essays 2011 series. For a preview, click here to visit Believer's site. For more info on the book and to see the other contributors, including Zadie Smith, Chang-Rae Lee, and Christopher Hitchens, click here.

Listen to Susan on NPR's Tell Me More Bookclub

Take One Candle Light A Room was selected as the final book in NPR's Tell Me More Bookclub. Listen to the conversation on NPR.com.

Susan Appearing at the West Hollywood Book Fair 10/2

Along with several other special guests, Susan will on-hand to discuss her new book, Take One Candle Light A Room. Here is more info, although most can be found on her website.

Stone Arabia Roundtable - Part Four with Susan Straight

Click here to read Susan's discussion.

Click here for the previous discussions.

"This is the fourth of a five-part roundtable discussion of Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia. Additionally, Spiotta will bein conversation with Edward Champion on July 20, 2011 at McNally Jackson, located at 52 Prince Street, New York, NY, to discuss the book further. If you’ve enjoyed The Bat Segundo Show in the past and the book intrigues you, you won’t want to miss this live discussion."

Susan Review's Tayari Jones' Silver Sparrow

Click here to read Susan's review featured in the LA Times. This is Tayari Jones' third novel. You can read more about her work at www.tayarijones.com.

Recent Interview with Susan on BlogCritics.org

Check out the interview here.

Susan Reads from Highwire Moon on GuerillaReads.com

LA Times Festival of Books Recap

Here's a little recap on the panel Susan sat on with Mona Simpson and Francine Prose. Enjoy!

Gina Berriault Award

Gina Berriault

Last month, Susan was honored to receive the 3rd annual Gina Berriault award. Here is some info on the award and some info on the event Susan attended in San Francisco.

Here's an indiebound link to Gina Berriault's books. Recommended!

New Op-Ed Piece on NYTIMES.com

Read about how Susan used to work in a Mobil station and was almost killed by an angry mob you may have been in.

'Mildred Pierce' and More Books You Should Read

Susan shares, along with several other writers, about a book she never wanted to read and why she loved every bit of it...you know, the whole don't judge a book by its cover actually holds water thing.

New Essay on HuffingtonPost.com

Susan's new essay entitled "Teacher Layoffs: Spring Rite or National Shame" has just hit the net. Check it out today and join the conversation!

ESPN Magazine's Premier Fiction Issue

Susan's story, Angel Wings, was chosen to help launch the ESPN Magazine's first fiction issue. Check it out!

GoodReads.com

Join the conversation at goodreads.com for this year's winter fiction panel, where Susan will be a guest panelist.

Video Interview on Connotation Press

Interviewed by Ken Robidoux, Susan shares many stories from her life that influence and infuse themselves into her work.

Featured in Black Clock Issue #13

Check out the prolific L.A. magazine's "mix tape" edition, featuring work since the magazine's inception in 2004. Along with Susan's story, you'll find Aimee Bender, Jonathan Franzen, Don Delillo, and Janet Fitch, among others.

Best of 2010 Lists Are Coming Out...

...and Susan's Take One Candle Light A Room is right there on them.

Los Angeles Times - Best Fiction Holiday Gift Guide
(along with fellow UCR prof Andrew Winer's The Marriage Artist)

Kirkus Reviews - Best Fiction of 2010

Washington Post - The Best of Fiction and Poetry

Susan's Golden Gopher in The Los Angeles Times

Photo by Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

In this new article, by Hector Tobar, we learn more about The Golden Gopher and how Susan brought it to life in her new novel, Take One Candle Light A Room.

Essay "Sula" Featured on TheMillions.com

You can now read Susan's essay, "Sula," previously published in Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book. To read the essay, click here. To buy the exceptional book, please click here.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Reivew Reviews Take One Candle Light A Room

Here is a link another gracious review from our friends in Pennsylvania.

Washington Post Reviews New Novel

The Washington Post says that with her new novel, Take One Candle Light A Room, "...Straight adds another complex, compassionate achievement to her distinguished body of work." More here.

Interview on Mixed Chicks Chat

Recently, Susan had the chance to sit down with Fanshen Cox and Heidi Durrow - the hosts of Mixed Chicks Chat. Listen in here.

Bookworm Interview w/ Michael Silverblatt - Nov. 11

Susan recently sat down with legendary Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt to discuss her new novel. Stream, podcast or listen to KCRW.

The New York Times on Take One Candle Light A Room

Check out The New York Times review of Susan's new novel.

Essay on Voting...On Huffington Post

On election day, Susan Straight wrote about where, why and who she votes with. Read more here.

Kind Words from Tennessee's Chapter16.org and Reading Tonight in Memphis

To all the fine readers in the great state of Tennessee, Susan Straight will be reading tonight in Memphis (details to your immediate right on this screen). Also, thanks to Susannah Felts and the dedicated readers at Chapter 16 for the kind words about Take One Candle Light A Room. See you tonight in Memphis!

New Essays

In the last few weeks, Susan Straight has had new essays featured in the Los Angeles Times and on Powell's Website. Check them out on the Not Books page.

L.A. Times Review

Just released, The Los Angeles Times says Susan's new novel "continues her examination of life well east of Los Angeles, and the pull the people and places there continue to have even for those who leave."

Take One Candle Light A Room Now Available

On October 12, 2010, Susan Straight's sixth novel, Take One Candle Light A Room, will be available. For more information on her book, please click here.

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In the Country of Women (August 2019)
Susan Straight memoir In the Country of Women

“In the Country of Women is moving, fierce, and gorgeous. In a time of individualistic fragmentation and the tearing of the social fabric, Straight offers the contrary narrative, the essential need for community, its past and future, and celebrates her place in its weaving.”
—Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander

“In the Country of Women is a masterpiece and a great read—heartfelt and soul-warming. A full life, cleanly, deeply, and beautifully told.”
—Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina

“In the Country of Women must be the most populated, celebratory, filled-with-life memoir of our time. With her characteristic mix of compassion, warmth, humor, and acerbic insight, Susan Straight writes of her ‘massive black and mixed-race family’ and her ‘quirky, deeply embedded white family’—a memoir that is, though addressed to her three daughters, a valentine to virtually everyone whom the renowned author has known in the course of her vividly described life. Unlike most contemporary memoirs, which focus upon singular, self-obsessed individuals, Susan Straight’s is about an entire way of life, lived with great verve and passion: ‘a strange California transcendentalism which never fit in with American upward mobility.’”
—Joyce Carol Oates

“In the Country of Women is the astonishingly beautiful story of a life and family history that could only happen in California, just as California is a place (and an idea—of expansion, light, color, a meeting of bloodlines and cultures) that could only happen in America.”
—Attica Locke, author of Bluebird, Bluebird

Pre-order the Book (Available August 6, 2019)

  • Amazon
  • Barnes and Noble
  • Indiebound
  • Powell’s
The Batmobile

I just bought a car for my oldest daughter, who is sixteen. A red Honda Civic, circa 1994, with only three dents. She and I were impressed by the chrome rims, but when we brought it home, our neighbor corrected us with a laugh. They’re hubcaps.

Cheap ones.

My ex-husband, Dwayne, helped out physically and financially. We checked out the car together, where it was parked in a dirt backyard not far from where we grew up. After we examined the dents, we both glanced at the pepper trees and then squinted at each other. Even though we have been divorced for eight years, we knew the other’s thoughts: Didn’t we party in this yard, during high school?

We did.

This is southern California. Cars figure in nearly every memory of our lives together in the same city where we were born. In fact, for the most part my ex-husband doesn’t remember names, but connects friends and acquaintances with their vehicles. He’ll say to me, “I saw your old friend today. The one used to drive the Duster.”

“Ah,” I’ll reply. “Julie.” She drove a Duster in 1978.

He’ll say to our three daughters, “Call that one girl – her grandma drives the Escalade.”

Our daughters are very good at recognizing makes and models of cars and trucks. They know the difference between Blazers and Broncos without hesitation.

My father taught me to drive on deserted vineyard roads. He’d raced cars as a teen in inland southern California, and told me stories of using a sewer pipe for a muffler to amplify sound. I practiced on his vintage 1965 Mustang, and when I swerved on a dusty road to avoid a ground squirrel, he shouted at me for the first time in my life. “Who’s gonna live – you or the damn squirrel! Don’t ever choose an animal over yourself.”

Dwayne learned on dirt roads, too, in borrowed cars. But when we began dating, he was just sixteen and I was fifteen. We walked for months to parks and burrito places, until his father broke down and bought The Batmobile.

The first time Dwayne drove up to my house, I couldn’t believe it. The car was a 1960 Cadillac, vintage oxidized brown like faded coffee grounds, with huge fins as if sharks were chaperoning us down the street. Sitting in the passenger seat, I saw a dark stain along the inside of the driver’s door.

It was cold, and I asked him to close his window, but he couldn’t. He didn’t want me to see the spiderweb cracks around the bullet hole in the glass. Then he told me the story of the car, while we headed to the movies. Some guy had been leaning against that car window when he was shot. The bullet pierced the glass; the man fell into the door and the dark stains were reminders of his blood.

“You went out in the Batmobile last night?” his friends teased me at school the next day.

“You let me go out in the Batmobile?” I said to my mother last night on the phone.

“What did I know?” she laughed.

Dwayne’s father had seen the car parked under a tree in someone’s yard, and knew the story. He kept asking the father of the murdered man to sell it, and finally the man relented. $200 was the price.

We never had much money growing up. But we do tell our girls the good-time stories we have, and they all involve cars. My stepfather bought a vintage 1965 Mustang from a barn, and the convertible top was gone while a hay bale filled out the missing back seat. During high school, no one wanted a ride home from me. Then he sold that and bought a 1959 Thunderbird, which I raced against our friend Wendell’s car, a Pontiac named Maybelline. Where the road narrowed to a bridge, he chickened out.

We cruised with eight bodies packed into our friend Penguin’s Dodge Dart, and when The Bar-Kays sang “Your Love is Like the Holy Ghost,” we all moved in unison so that the car leaped up and down without the aid of hydraulics.

One of our girls’ favorite stories is about our wedding. We got married downtown, and we had no limo, but after the ceremony, Dwayne’s cousin Newcat drove us around the local lake in his Cadillac, which had a broken horn. The best man, Dwayne’s older brother, shouted out the open windows to waving onlookers, “Honk, honk, damnit, these people just got married!”

Well, now we’re not married. But we both taught our daughter to drive. Her father counseled her to stay out of the bike lane. I reminded her not to drift into the left lane on a right turn.

I brought the red Honda home, and she drove with one or the other of us for a few weeks. The car drove fine, but it didn’t have a radio. I offered to have one put in, but Dwayne said he wanted to take care of it.

He got an inexpensive CD player at the local swap meet. When I came home from work that day, Gaila had her first car story.

“I was doing my homework and Daddy kept calling me with his cell phone.”

“Where was he?”

“In front of the house installing the stereo,” she said, rolling her eyes. “First he said, G, bring me a lighter. We didn’t have one, so I gave him some matches. Then he called again. G, bring me some tape. I brought the wrong kind twice. The silver tape and the white tape. He wanted that black one.”

“Electrical tape,” I said.

“Yeah. Then he said, G, bring me some water.”

I laughed. “You’re slow,” I said. “Didn’t you realize what your dad wanted?”

She shook her head.

I remembered our early days of marriage, our old broken down cars – a Fiat, a Renault, each of which required hours of Dwayne’s time under the hood. In our old gravel driveway, I used to sit in the driver seat with my own work, because every few minutes he would ask me to do something. “Start it up. Rev the engine. Push down on the brake pedal. Okay.”

Really, he wanted my company, and so I wrote most of my first book there, in the car.

“He just wanted you to sit out there with him,” I said.

She sighed. “Well, I had homework. Then he called me again and said, ‘G, listen.’ He turned the music up real loud and I heard Kanye.”
When I saw my ex-husband the next day, I said, “Thanks for the stereo.” He handed me a small silver figure with a clip. It was an angel holding a note that read, “Drive safely, Daughter.”

“I got this at the swap meet today,” he said. “Put it on the visor, okay?”

“I will,” I said.

When he left, he hesitated by the red Honda for a moment, and nodded his head.

Mercury Village

I finished my seventh novel on New Year’s Day. After transcribing the tiny, cramped sentences I’d originally written by hand on a series of those subscription cards you find inside magazines, I wanted to sign off with the date, and then name the exotic locale or city considered an intellectual haven where I’d typed the final page.

Books have a certain literary cachet when authors sign off with Prague, Paris, New York City, Cape Cod, and Rome and mention writer’s colonies in Italy, Vermont, and Santa Fe. But I always tell the truth, when I’m not writing fiction, and so the most appropriate end note for me is Mercury Villager, Riverside, California.

I wrote most of my new book, Take One Candle Light a Room, in my car. Longhand, on legal pads, on the backs of discarded homework papers from my daughters, and yes, on about fifty of those inserts from Runner’s World or Sport Fisherman (from the waiting rooms of doctor’s offices.) You have to write very small, around all the print on those things.

I tell my students – whether in college classes, prison workshops, or elementary school presentations – that anyone can write, anywhere, at any time, and I mean it. I bring my legal pads to show them. I have lived in the same house for 22 years, less than a mile from the hospital where I was born and two blocks from the city college where I wrote my very first short story, when I was sixteen, in a lined notebook like the one carried by Harriet the Spy.

I wrote my first novel Aquaboogie in a pale green 1975 Fiat parked in my father-in-law’s driveway, often while my husband was working on the vehicle. He would say, “Check the brakes!” from underneath the car, and I would push down on the brake pedal, then write a few more pages in my notebook.

After that novel was published in 1990, I was 29, and had a baby about to turn two, was pregnant again. My life seemed so circumscribed, and I fantasized, as many writers do, about the writers’ colony where I would have meals delivered silently to my porch while I typed in a room where only the sound of birds would break into my concentration. But I worked on my second novel while sitting on the curb, while my first daughter had finally fallen asleep in her stroller. I was hunched over my notebook, the stroller beside me with the brake on, when a car pulled up. A woman offered me money and sympathy, since she thought I was homeless.

I’m just writing, I said. She frowned. Writing what?

I couldn’t say it, back then. I knew I looked bad. Tired, wearing old clothes, holding a legal pad. A novel? Just writing, I replied. She shook her head and drove away.

This year, I tried to feel sorry for myself – but then I remembered a photograph of Eudora Welty, sitting with perfect posture at her desk in her bedroom in the house where she was born. I remembered an interview with Raymond Carver, who said that to escape the chaos of his home and family, he often wrote in his car, parked in front of the house.

I realized I was a native southern Californian who had spent much of her life in the car. There was an expansive freedom in the windshield, completely different from a house window. And my middle daughter was most like me – when we pulled up after school, everyone else went inside, but she and I stayed in the car while the sun was lowering, starting homework or just staring at the trees before the others came to get us, puzzled by that small liberty.

This year, while I worked on a novel about a travel writer who has never married or had children and who has refused for years to help her orphaned godson, my 20-year-old nephew came to live with me and my three girls. My nephew, who needed me in the past, and who I was afraid to take in, because it seemed too much. With his dreadlocks and skateboard and ONE LOVE tattoo, his Pan-like mischief, he has transformed our house. The constant laughter of visiting skateboarders and YouTube drove me to a familiar place – the van – where I wrote about the travel writer, a woman selfish and beautiful, with only coffee in her kitchen, rather than endless stacks of frozen pizza. Would she rescue her godson from the trouble that could get him killed?

Six yellow legal pads, the backs of letters, even day passes from Disneyland covered with words. I finished the novel at dawn during the rare night all the children spent elsewhere, typing ten hours without stopping except for coffee and chocolate. My brain went into a fugue state of imagination that might feel like a deserted cabin somewhere, a colony, so that I could write after the very last line something that sounded impressive and not the prosaic and common name of my village.

It seems like I’ve never gotten anywhere, but I’m cool with it now, I’d better be, and so I write – 2010, Riverside, California.

Chickens

I just let the chickens out to play. We’ve been at work and school for most of the day, they’ve been cooped up (that’s where the word comes from – chicken coop) and the sun is shining. The hens are teenagers, but they are still cute, unlike many teenagers. They are six months old, one golden and friendly, one black speckled and wary. They are sisters, named Butter and Smoke.

They run around in the back yard, following me the way my daughters used to, when the garden was a daily-explored universe full of ladybugs and earwigs and pink jasmine blossoms and green apricots like fuzzy pieces of jade.

I am embarrassed to admit I feel tender and companionable toward two chickens.

And because within minutes our neighborhood hawk is circling above us, crying and warning and feinting in the wind, I can’t believe I’m babysitting. When we first put these two chicks in an old rabbit cage, one morning the hawk sat on top of the wire mesh, cocking his head. He’s been hunting these chickens for weeks now, but if I’m here in the back yard, he stays away.

I sit on a wooden chair and watch them scratch the soil. Every few minutes, the chickens run over to see if I’m still here. I turn over a paving stone and they eat an entire nest of slugs in about two seconds. Very convenient. My older daughters, 16 and 14, don’t come into the garden very often now, because of SAT classes and basketball, and they don’t even want to rake leaves, much less help me destroy slugs. Last week, I moved two wooden crates full of tools, and when black widows dropped from the slats and ran toward my toes, Butter snapped them up. (For a moment, I worried that she might be poisoned, but the spiders must have tasted good, because she looked frantically for more.) Kids can’t do that.

Even my youngest daughter, Rosette, who is ten and still loves the garden, often has homework. These are her chickens, but they are my odd company. Butter and Smoke come when I call them, as my girls used to, when I say loudly, “Look what we’ve got here,” and I move aside the birdbath. My girls used to have pillbug farms, and their Tonka trucks and bulldozers are still here, half-buried in the dirt.

But I can’t believe I’ve developed maternal feelings toward chickens during the years of avian flu, during the afternoons of hawks.

Recently I went to a lecture on avian flu and learned that backyard poultry could be the first place where this disease will gain entry to our population. (I also learned that influenza viruses are ingenious and lethal, can mutate from birds to swine to humans, and that the Spanish Flu which killed millions of people in 1918 was not from Spain, but began in Haskell County, Kansas as an avian flu, mutated through bird droppings consumed by pigs into a swine flu, and then was transmitted to American troops stationed there for training. The soldiers took the virus on ships to Europe.)

Tom Scott, an expert who spoke during the lunchtime seminar, believes the present avian flu virus, H5N1, will probably not travel to America through an infected wild bird. He showed us the migration patterns of this flu from Southeast Asia to Europe to Africa, a series of jagged routes running north to south. It looked the same as the pattern West Nile virus took throughout America, through mosquitoes and birds.

He, and other experts, don’t think ill migratory birds would make it across the Atlantic Ocean. They believe it will arrive on another winged carrier – an international flight, with an infected human.

But other experts believe birds will travel as usual from Asia to Alaska, bringing the virus to the Western United States, very soon. When migrating birds fly over southern California in great numbers, which they do every year to seek shelter in the desert at the Salton Sea, they could spread the virus through feces. Ron Farris, poultry expert at UCRiverside’s Cooperative Extension, told me I had better put the chickens inside a wood-roofed enclosed coop, and never let them out to be exposed to the wild.

I watch my chickens ruffle their feathers until they are bigger for a moment, like brief explosions of fringe, and then they settle down for their daily dirt bath. They like the moist soil near the rabbit cages, where they scratch out a shallow depression and open their wings to throw dirt onto their backs. That’s how chickens keep mites and bugs out of their feathers.

I had been feeling proud at my little utopia, my rabbit fertilizer which nurtures my corn crop, my corn cobs feeding the chickens, along with bugs I don’t want around anyway, and then the fresh eggs. But the chickens are pecking at the poop now. I have visions of influenza virus mutating into the rabbits, and Snowball, the meanest one, biting one of the girls.

Near my feet is a peanut hidden by our resident scrub jay, pushed into dead leaves under the geranium. Every day, I find pecans hidden by the crows, who always forget their stash. Usually, my girls and I consider this found treasure and crack them open on the spot.

But now I recall the viruses shown on the lecture-room screen, their mutation capabilities, and I see the bird poop on the fence, and on the birdbath.

“You have chickens?” people at work say to me, incredulous, frowning. “Actual chickens? You’d better get rid of them now. Haven’t you read Mike Davis’ book?”

I have.

“Why chickens?”

We’ve always had rabbits, and a dog. We have twelve rabbits now – they’re quiet, easy to play with, and they make great fertilizer.

But my brother lived for years on an orange grove, next door to a man from Chihuahua who raised fighting roosters. My brother loved to see the birds growing and trained, but he didn’t like the fighting part. He got a few roosters for himself, but only trained his favorite rooster to sit on the couch with him and watch Monday Night Football, complete with Doritos for their snack.

Rosette wanted a farm like her uncle’s, and so several years ago my ex-husband brought her home with a shoebox containing two day-old chicks. Oldest trick in the book. Cute babies, held by a cute kid.

I learned that there are few sounds sweeter than baby chicks getting ready to go to sleep at night, in the laundry room, in a tin washtub. It’s not peeping. It’s more of a strange little comforting song, directed at the sky turning purple, almost as if they were chanting to themselves what they’d done all day and what they planned to do tomorrow.

But my ex-husband doesn’t speak Spanish, and though he’d tried to convey his desire for hens at the feed store whose proprietors were from Mexico, when the chicks had quickly outgrown the tin washtub and been transferred to a large rabbit hutch, where we fed them warily but didn’t know what else to do, they began to crow. At five am.

I called him during his graveyard shift that night and said, “You’d better come get your roosters.”

I have to give him credit. He took them to his back yard, where they tortured his neighbors, whose dogs tortured him. The roosters crowed so loudly and constantly that we had trouble talking to Daddy on the phone.

Those dogs broke the fence eventually. But he bought two more chickens for us, insisting they were girls. Caramel and Fudge. We put them in a nice big coop, which was an old dog run, but they were still mean. Animals have personalities, and these females were mean enough to be on The Bachelor. Caramel ate her own eggs, which was just wrong. Fudge taught us the terms pecking order (we were last), henpecked, and you feeling peckish?

During the summer when West Nile virus hit hard in Riverside County, both chickens got sick. Fudge recovered, after losing her tail feathers, but Caramel languished for three days, getting weaker and weaker.

She was still a creature. I put her in a separate cage, as she didn’t try to peck me, and I put water and food near her beak. It was hot, and the earth was hard, and I knew she would die in the morning, when I would have to get ready for work, so late that night I soaked the ground near the old bunny graves, marked by river rocks. Then I dug the hole, in the dark.

My ex-husband called during his night shift to see how she was. When I told him, he was shocked, “You dug the hole and she could see you? Dang. That’s cold. At least move her around the corner.”

I said, “You’re the one who keeps bringing me chickens.”

“I bring them for Rosette,” he said.

I buried Caramel at dawn, and he brought Butter and Smoke, shortly afterward.

The other day Luis, an acquaintance from Corona, showed me how to hypnotize them. He lay Butter on her side while she struggled and squawked, and with a stick he drew a line in the dirt near her eyes, over and over, while murmuring, Hey, hey, hey.

He said, “If you do this right, they’ll just lie here forever, until you snap them out of it. I learned it on my grandma’s chicken ranch in Mexico.”

I watched Butter, who did look dizzy and limp. “But why?” I asked.

Luis laughed, and Butter ran off. “There was nothing else to do down there.”

I’ve tried it only once, but the motionless chicken made me nervous. I don’t want to dig holes for these two birds stepping contentedly around my feet right now. I know the interface between the larger world and my yard, between the urban and wild, is so permeable. I stay awake at night, hearing the skunk and possums lumbering through the leaves, thinking of the fleas that carry bubonic plague. I see the raccoon peer from the sewer drain across the street, and think of rabies.

Amid the garden of blackberries, beds for corn and tomatoes and zucchini, the chickens eat everything, even spider eggs and microscopic insects invisible to me.

And when I am out checking the beans, I remember that chickens are women’s provenance. (That’s where the term egg money comes from.) All over the world, women are throwing corn for hens, hoping hens will eat the grasshoppers decimating their plants, and surviving on the children of the chickens.

These have not laid eggs yet, but Fudge does, and I take today’s egg into the house. The teenaged chickens are on their own for now, because the girls are calling me.

At the sink, though, washing the large brown egg while my kids do their homework at the kitchen table, I wonder how avian flu will drift into my yard, my small postage stamp of soil in this huge map of the world.

Right now, the resident sparrows, a flock of ten or so that live in my mock orange hedge, are following the chickens around the yard. The blue jay is sitting on the fence. The hawk is gone, but he will return.

Because the sky is going lavender, the huge flock of crows begin their flight to the riverbottom pecan grove where they’ve lived since I was a child. For the seventeen years I’ve been in this house, they have flown over us in a long skein of trembling black, calling to each other. They were gone, that year of West Nile, and the sky was eerily silent.

I have the kitchen window opened, and I am listening. The girls squabble over lined paper and talk about boys who think they’re players. Above the sound of traffic on the busy four-lane avenue outside, and the dogs barking and car stereos thumping, I’m listening for the hawk. And when the cry comes, it pierces the air like a dart – the high keening register, the echo off the tallest palm trees, and I’m grateful. I hurry outside and put the protesting chickens back in their cage for the day. The hawk flies far above me, circling, dipping, riding the currents. The wind tosses the branches of the carob trees.

In the air above us now, predators wait patiently, and in the soil under us, viruses and fleas thrive. And yet there are still young hens and children and those of us watching, narrowing our eyes, only vigilance and hope to protect us.

Aquaboogie (1990)

“Susan Straight is a remarkable writer— there is no new, emerging voice of the past decade more exciting, more surprising, and more richly and subtly human than she.”
— Joyce Carol Oates

“A book by a writer whose love for her characters infuses her work with the dignity and urgency they so clearly deserve.”
— New York Times Book Review

“Rarely is a black community so precisely, humanly, and searchingly delineated.”
— Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A world of pain and love and longing is contained in these stories.”
— Los Angeles Times Book Review

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I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots (1993)

“Straight’s portrayal of a black woman’s life is nearly miraculous in its astonishing richness of detail, its emotional honesty and its breadth of human thought and feeling.”
– USA Today

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Blacker than a Thousand Midnights (1995)

“Susan Straight opens up a whole world, which good writers do. In her case, however, it happens to be a world that many of us don’t really want to go to…It is a world where the language is often not lush but hard and rough as concrete.”
– Los Angeles Times

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The Gettin’ Place (1997)

“Straight gives that Godforsaken area of Southern California back some of its natural beauty…This is fine writing, and fine now means something different as well, something sparkling and glamorous, but with a big-hearted integrity born of much suffering.”
– Los Angeles Times

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Highwire Moon (2001)

“Her gallery of misfits reminds one of Flannery O’Connor’s– but with a dash of sympathy and human goodness.”
— The Washington Post Book World

“An eye-opener of a novel, a road map to the real California. Straight turns headlines into poetry.”
— The New York Times Book Review

“Packed with the kind of detail about people, places and emotions that transport the reader to a different world.”
— San Francisco Chronicle

“One of America’s gutsiest writers … a polyglot with an astonishing ear for how people really talk in places we hardly remember they are living.”
— The Baltimore Sun

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A Million Nightingales (2006)
“Powerful and moving. . . . Written in language so beautiful you can almost believe the words themselves are capable of salving history’s wounds.”
— The New York Times Book Review

“Radiant. . . . Unforgettable, a classic haunting story of love, tragedy and perseverance.”
— The Miami Herald

“Moving. . . . Lush passages drip like Spanish moss from Straight’s prose [she] writes with nuance and insinuating grace.”
— The Seattle Times

“Intelligent and heartbreaking. . . . Celebrates the individual’s power to create a personal freedom within the most rigid social order.”
— The Portland Oregonian

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Between Heaven and Here (2012)

“It is only the rarest of novels that cry for a sequel, the most unusual of stories that at once satisfies and leaves the reader aching for more. Susan Straight’s remarkable Take One Candle Light A Room is such a novel. And she has satisfied our desires in Between Heaven and Here, a magnificent novel, that manages to be at once unflinchingly real and transcendently beautiful. Susan Straight is one of the very best American writers. If you haven’t read her, you’re in for a delight and an awakening. If you have, then you’re probably as thrilled as I am that she has taken us back to Rio Seco.”
—Ayelet Waldman

“Susan Straight finds LA’s secret heart in Between Heaven and Here and with a sleight of hand only the masters have, she creates an alley, a neighborhood, a history that is as rich and tragic as any Shakespearean tale.”
—Walter Mosley

“Straight employs glorious language and a riveting eye for detail to create a fully realized, totally believable world.”
—Kirkus (Starred Review)

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The Friskative Dog (2007)

“Beautifully-written narrative.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Straight thoughtfully captures the 9-year-old girl’s ability to perceive her parent’s emotional struggles while dealing with feelings and questions of her own.”
— Booklist

“Readers will . . . be glad to see the quiet and persistent heroine rewarded not only with the love of a good dog but with the promise of a closer family.”
— The Bulletin

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Take One Candle Light a Room (2010)

“In luscious prose, Straight expertly captures the complexities of Fantine’s identity.”
– Booklist

“A searing, ultimately redemptive novel about America’s legacy of racial violence and a woman’s struggle to forge her own identity…Straight writes about the thorny subject of race with sensitivity and nuance.”
– Kirkus (starred review)

“A vivid portrait of a mixed-race family, proud yet haunted by the vagaries of the past…Straight beautifully blends the rhythmic cadence of the Creole patois with the down-and-dirty slang of the street.” — Library Journal.

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Cover Design by Toni Scott.

Susan Straight
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