Pamela Gullard, LAKE CRESCENT AND OTHER SPIRITS

Writer and educator Pam Gullard visits the store to launch her latest collection, Lake Crescent and Other Spirits. These eleven stories, set in the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle, look into the hearts of characters who want desperately to find love and talk intimately about their fears, their desires.

These eleven stories, set in the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle, look into the hearts of characters who want desperately to find love and talk intimately about their fears, their desires. But things go wrong. Conversations break off. People leave or make an outrageous demand or start an affair that flames out of control. In the title story, a writer discovers that the afternoon his careless mother dove from a cliff into Lake Crescent has sunk into his bones. Closed his soul. The secret grip of that day is lost to him until a new lover sees that his biggest obstacle is his own heart.

Lake Crescent is a huge, deep lake in the Olympic National Forest four hours west of Seattle. Jumping into the water is like speeding through burning liquid ice. I am not brave, but when I was twenty, I lived alone through the summer in a one-room cabin near the edge of the lake. This astonishes me still. There was no phone, no heat, not a soul around. My family in Seattle was on a slow roll of breaking up, my boyfriend was in California, and at night, I asked myself how big a window had to be for a cougar to climb in. Or an axe murderer. In the evening, we college kids with jobs at the national park gathered at the small pebbled beach. Cold trees like giant, indifferent gods towered over us as we lay on our backs, our heads on a log, and scanned the Pleiades for shooting stars. At the edge of that glacial lake, I started to write and to piece together the spirit that would become myself.

Pamela Gullard’s recent short fiction has appeared in Arts & Letters, The North American Review, Free State Review, TriQuarterly and Sou’wester. She has won a PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award and the H.G. Roberts Fiction Writing Award judged by Gordon Lish. Breathe at Every Other Stroke, her previous collection, includes stories that appeared in The Iowa Review and others. After graduating with honors in philosophy from Stanford University, she worked as a waitress, book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, motel housekeeper, and editor for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She now teaches literature at Menlo College and lives with her husband Mike in nearby Menlo Park, California. They have two sons who love drama, literary fiction, and science fiction. She likes walking in the California hills and sometimes outfoxing tennis friends with her leftie spin.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Elliott Bay Book Company