Today we’d like to introduce you to William Luvaas
Hi William, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
Mine has not been a conventional life. I’ve long believed, as Dostoevsky said, “The most advantageous advantage” is to be nothing but yourself. This philosophy has defined both my life and my work. The “madding crowd” and its fetishes don’t much interest me.
Looking for what I wanted to do with my life early on, I tried on many hats. During the heady years of the Sixties and Seventies, I spent time as a VISTA Volunteer/community organizer in Jim Crow Alabama, working in the anti-poverty and civil rights movements. I was a student activist at UC-Berkeley, then lived for a year in a crude shelter in the Mendocino coast redwoods, near a hippie commune called “The Meadows,” where I met my future wife Lucinda. We drove to Alaska, hoping to homestead, but—perhaps fortunately—they had closed homesteading the week before we arrived. We returned south to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where we made soapstone hash pipes that we sold to head shops in the Bay area and managed to save enough money to live for a year and a half in Europe and Israel. In a white-washed house overlooking the Mediterranean on the Costa Brava in Spain, I began work on my first novel, The Uranian Circus, which was inspired by my time living under the big trees in “The Meadows.”
I was reading Joyce’s Ulysses at the time and felt inspired to include everything I knew in the book. There were passages from a vulture’s POV, linguistic acid trips, waking dream sequences. Swamis walked out of the sea at Big River Beach, the Manson Family visited The Meadows in a black school bus prior to the Tate-LaBianca murders (true story), and Meadows dwellers burned down the sawmill in Fort Bragg to avenge death of the big trees (fiction).
After returning from England to the Mendocino Coast, I worked for seven years on the novel, and eked out a living cutting shingle bolts, washing windows, doing carpentry work, and writing freelance journalism for Harper’s Weekly and elsewhere. Remarkably, I found a New York agent for The Uranian Circus. He wanted me to cut it by two-thirds, which I had no idea how to do. It remains unpublished in my manuscript closet to this day, all 1,200 pages of it.
Cin and I began to feel lost in the dreamy coastal fog. Knowing instinctively that we needed to step out into “the real world,” we made a radical leap across country to Upstate New York. There, in an isolated saltbox house near the Adirondacks where it sometimes reached thirty below zero, I began work on my first published novel, The Seductions of Natalie Bach. I taught workshops as writer-in-residence in elementary and secondary schools across Upstate New York, gratifying work, but it required risky commutes over frozen roads to remote places like Saranac Lake. Cin painted murals in nearby cities, including the Glens Falls Civic Center mural. It seemed we had finally landed on our feet. I was already well into my thirties.
We moved to Brooklyn, where I continued to teach writing in public schools, including at Bronx High School of Science, which boasts more Nobel Prize winners among its alumni than any other secondary school in the world, plus adult workshops at The Writer’s Voice. In 1987, The Seductions of Natalie Bach was published by Little, Brown—one of only three unagented books published by the house in twenty years. It was heady stuff to see my novel in bookstore windows in New York City.
We moved up the Hudson River where rents were lower, but it meant a long, tense commute over icy, crowded roads to our work in New York. Once again, we began to feel itchy for a change. Given health scares and financial woes, we also felt a need for more security in our lives. I wanted to teach writing at the college level, but that required an advanced degree. We headed back to California, and I entered the MFA program at San Diego State University.
After graduating, I stayed on to teach at SDSU for another twelve years, and as Visiting Asst. Professor of Creative writing at University of California, Riverside. We bought an old farmhouse in Riverside County, where Cin landed a job as art gallery director at Mt.San Jacinto College. For me, it was back to commuting again. We currently live in Los Angeles with our beloved akita, Mimi, and devote full-time to our creative work.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
When I was twelve, I had a grand mal epileptic seizure in bed one night that terrified my family and me. I’ve struggled with epilepsy ever since. Occasionally, I’ve suffered bouts of status epilepticus (one seizure following on the heels of another) that can be deadly if not stopped. Today, my grand mal seizures are controlled by medications. However, I do have “absence seizures,” wherein I briefly lose consciousness. Emerging from them, I’m disoriented, not certain where I am or even whether it’s day or night. It’s as if a segment has been snipped out of my life, and it takes me a while to fill in the gaps. As Flaubert, also an epileptic, said of such seizures: “It felt as if my me was swallowed in a storm.”
From early on—with the blessing of my father, family doctor, and neurologist—I have refused to let epilepsy prevent me from living a full life. I did everything the other kids did: was an avid skier; leapt off the Armitage Park Bridge into the McKenzie River, camped out, hiked, played football, drove a car and dated. Fortunately, there were no Donald Trumps at North Eugene High. No one ridiculed me. Instead, they voted me “most likely to succeed.”
Many writers have been epileptics, including Dostoevsky, Charles Dickens, Moliere, Edgar Allan Poe and Lewis Carroll. Our spells allow us a peek at the subterranean realm beneath consciousness where everything is distorted and strange. We can’t help but be aware of this unconscious zone, since it sometimes rises to the surface in us and takes control.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’ve published four novels and two story collections, plus dozens of stories, essays and articles in many publications, including Glimmer Train, The Antioch Review, The Village Voice, The American Fiction Anthology, Stand Magazine, and The Cimarron Review. The Three Devils and Other Stories is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in January 2025, and I am at work on a memoir about living with epilepsy. Ashes Rain Down: A Story Cycle was The Huffington Post’s 2013 Book of the Year. Other honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, first place in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open Contest, and finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. My books have been nominated for The National Book Award, the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, and The L.A. Times book Prize. I have also edited an anthology of works inspired by COVID-19: The Corona Chronicles.
It has not always been easy to find publishers for my books. Four of my novels remain unpublished. I am a literary writer whose work doesn’t fit neatly into a category in our age of commercial and genre fiction. I write what I want to write rather than what publishers are looking for. I go wherever my muse takes me. My subject matter is also unruly: from hippies living in the redwoods (The Uranian Circus), to a young artist growing up in New York (The Seductions of Natalie Bach), to a dysfunctional upper-middle class family in Oregon in the Fifties and Sixties (Going Under), to a homeless epileptic visionary in the California high desert (Beneath The Coyote Hills), to rural people trying to save their home from developers (Welcome To Saint Angel), to a woman who escapes her abusive husband (Blind Flight) to a semi-literate diabetic handyman who commits suicide so as not to be a burden to others (A Working Man’s Apocrypha). Now I’m writing apocalyptic short stories about climate change. Commonly in my work, characters are sorely tested by trouble in their lives and struggle to overcome it.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
I was raised in an upper-middle-class home in Eugene, Oregon. Ours was a traditional family: we ate meals, went skiing and attended church together. My father was a successful lawyer and civic leader, my mother a stay-at-home Fifties mom, housewife and excellent cook. They were Rockefeller Republicans—fiscally conservative but socially progressive—a far cry from today’s MAGA crowd. On the surface, we were a happy family of five, living in an affluent suburb; we belonged to the Country Club and lacked for nothing—except emotional stability. A far-more tumultuous reality was playing out beneath the calm surface of our lives.
Our home was fraught with tension. My parents were ill-matched. My mother was a moody, tempestuous alcoholic, and my father largely in denial about her drinking. While he offered excellent counsel to clients and friends, he seemed lost facing his own domestic troubles and unable to cope with them. My novel Going Under was largely inspired by my own family drama.
Nonetheless, my parents’ legacy remains mostly positive for me. They put their own problems aside where their children were concerned. They taught my sister, brother and I right from wrong and respect for others, the importance of education, self-discipline and honesty, nurtured us in self-confidence, despite my mother’s struggle with her own. They were always supportive of us. I’m deeply grateful for that. We did well in school and stayed out of trouble and were given a good send-off into adulthood, as I fear too many children today are not.
