Welcome to our Indie Spotlight series, in which TNBBC gives small press authors the floor to shed some light on their writing process, publishing experiences, or whatever else they'd like to share with you, the readers!
Today, we are joined by William Luvaas, who shares some insight into his forthcoming collection.
THE THREE DEVILS AND OTHER STORIES
My first story dealing with climate change, “Season of
Limb Fall,” was published two years before Al Gore’s documentary “An
Inconvenient Truth” was released. The reality and horror of global
warming struck me hard, and I felt I needed to write about it, which I’ve done
ever since in my short fiction—not exclusively but imperatively.
My forthcoming collection, The Three Devils And Other Stories, is a work
of Climate Fiction (Cli Fi), as it’s known, like my 2013 collection Ashes
Rain Down: A Story Cycle (the Huffington Post’s 2013 Book of the Year and a
finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards). While I dislike
genre labels and the formulaic approach to subject matter they imply, I embrace
Climate Fiction’s use of magic or grotesque realism to bring a future
threatened by climate disaster and its accompanying social upheaval to
life—creating a world that is at once both recognizable and grossly distorted.
In The Three Devils, the apocalypse comes to
Southern California in the form of a worldwide pandemic of mythological
proportions and the ravages of climate change that imperil the economy and
social order and wreak havoc in people’s lives in a nearly-unrecognizable near
future. Call it a work of dystopian or apocalyptic fiction, as well as
Cli Fi.
Climate Fiction is intrinsically political since it
assumes that global warming will seriously impact our lives. Climate
change skeptics consider this a partisan stance, but most of us who write such
works see it as inevitable given our undeniably warming planet: tomorrow will
be a rough ride. We consider it our writerly duty to enter the fray
rather than leave the vision of our collective future to politicians, corporate
executives, and right wing pundits.
While some works of Climate Fiction have been well received, such as Octavia E.
Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and
Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry For the Future, many publishers,
especially big ones, eschew Cli Fi, as do some literary magazines, seeming to
consider it unfashionably political at a time when most fiction focuses on
personal and identity politics—what Don DeLillo calls
“around-the-house-and-in-the-yard” fiction—rather than on the larger dramas
that impact us all. Joyce Carol Oates also bemoans current American
fiction’s avoidance of political themes, which is a departure from the recent
past. Consider the many impactful, even prophetic socio-political novels
of the last century: The Jungle, Invisible Man, To Kill a Mockingbird,
Grapes of Wrath, Fahrenheit 451, Catch 22...to name a few. Since
then, fiction’s scope has narrowed.
Perhaps understandably, Cli Fi is often conflated with Sci Fi. This puts
off some editors and readers, especially of literary fiction. While both
genres are speculative and hyperbolic, the two are quite different. Cli
Fi is earthbound and set in the near-future, while Sci Fi often looks far ahead
and far away to extraterrestrial realms. The monsters in Cli Fi are not
two-headed Cyborgs but earthly, natural forces spinning out of control. I
might also suggest that while science fiction regularly challenges current
scientific knowledge, Climate Fiction is predicated upon global warming being
settled scientific fact.
Cli Fi writings that make readers uncomfortable are doing their job well.
While such works, like all good fiction, should be engaging, dramatic,
colorful, even entertaining, they are meant to wake readers up rather than lull
them to sleep. Now, as we face what is likely the greatest existential
threat humans have ever known, likely to end our civilization and drive many
plants and animals we love to extinction, we need to have our eyes wide open
and not turn our heads away. For publishers, readers, and writers to
ignore or avoid this most critical issue of our time is akin to ignoring racism
and gender inequality as American fiction generally did prior to the last half
of the Twentieth Century.
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https://www.amazon.com/Three-Devils-Other-Stories/
From acclaimed writer William Luvaas comes a new
collection of dark and devastating tales. With grit and grace, chaos
and compassion, angst and absolution, The Three Devils makes us reckon
with the maelstrom, all while wrestling with the longings of the busted and
beautiful human heart.
Praise for The Three Devils and Other Stories
“William Luvaas, my friends, is a
wild-eyed genius.”
—Lauren Groff, National Book Award Finalist
“Wildly imaginative and always engaging.”
—Kim Barnes, Pulitzer Prize Finalist
“A rare read, a post-apocalyptic odyssey that’s fun.”
—George Michaelson Foy, author of The Last
Green Light
“A nightmarish vision of the inevitable conclusion of the
world we’ve created today.”
—Chase Dearinger, author of This New Dark
“The apocalypse may be no fun to live through but in
fiction it can offer thrills and chills—
and insights into the human condition at the intersection
of resilience and evil. William Luvaas’s The Three Devils
delivers these and more.
—Mark Brazaitis, author of The Incurables
“The Three Devils is one of those masterpieces
that is hilarious until it isn’t—
a window into the human psyche and the destiny of our
species.”
—Jacob M. Appel, author of Einstein’s Beach
House
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William Luvaas has published four novels: The Seductions of Natalie Bach (Little, Brown) Going Under (Putnam), Beneath The Coyote Hills (Spuyten Duyvil), and Welcome To Saint Angel (Anaphora Lit. Press); plus two story collections: A Working Man’s Apocrypha (Univ. Okla. Press) and Ashes Rain Down: A Story Cycle (Spuyten Duyvil), which was The Huffington Post’s 2013 Book of the Year and a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. His new collection The Three Devils And Other Stories is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press at the Univ. of Wisconsin. His honors include an NEA fellowship, first place in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open Contest, The Ledge Magazine’s 2010 Fiction Awards Competition, and Fiction Network’s Second National Fiction Competition. Over one hundred of his stories, essays, and articles have appeared in many publications, including The Sun, North American Review, Epiphany, The Village Voice, The American Literary Review, Antioch Review, Cimarron Review, Short Story, and the American Fiction anthology. He has taught creative writing at San Diego State University, U.C. Riverside, and The Writer’s Voice in New York and has also worked as a carpenter, craftsman, community organizer, and freelance journalist. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Lucinda, an artist and filmmaker, and their headstrong Akita, Mimi.
https:///www.williamluvaas.com
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