Love, Loosha: The Letters of Lucia Berlin and Kenward Elmslie

by Lucia Berlin, Chip Livingston (Editor), Kenward Elmslie

Overview

At the time of her death in 2004, Lucia Berlin was known as a brilliant writer of short stories, beloved by other writers but never achieving wide readership or acclaim. That changed in 2015 with the publication of A Manual for Cleaning Women, a collection of some of her best work. Almost overnight, Lucia Berlin became an international bestseller as readers everywhere fell in love with her smoky, gin-soaked voice--at once dark and yearning, funny and wry, naïve and wise.

Love, Loosha is the extraordinary collection of letters between Lucia Berlin and her dear friend, the poet and Broadway lyricist Kenward Elmslie. Written between 1994 and 2004, their correspondence reveals the lives, work, and literary obsessions of two great American writers. Berlin and Elmslie discuss publishing and social trends, political correctness, and offending others and being offended. They gossip. They dish. They entertain--for not only are Elmslie and Berlin writing to each other, they are writing for each other.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826367310
Publisher:	High Road Books
Publication date:	11/01/2024
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Chip Livingston is the author of five books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is a professor of creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is a former fiction student and close friend of Lucia Berlin, and, upon Lucia's introduction and suggestion, he became Kenward Elmslie's personal assistant for ten years.


Lucia Berlin was the author of several short-story collections. In 2015 A Manual for Cleaning Women was published posthumously and became both a New York Times and an international bestseller. In 2018 Evening in Paradise, a second collection of her remaining stories, and Welcome Home, a memoir with letters, were also published to wide acclaim in the US and abroad.


Kenward Elmslie was a member of the New York School of poetry, having written fifteen books of poems, several plays, and a novel as well as opera librettos and the books and lyrics for Broadway and off-Broadway musicals. The grandson of Joseph Pulitzer, he founded the nonprofit small press and foundation Z Press, through which he provided professional and financial support for writers and artists.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I. 1994-2000
Letters from Maxwell Avenue, Boulder, CO
Letters from Calais, VT, and New York, NY

Part II. 2000-2001
Letters from Valmont Road, Boulder, CO
Letters from Calais, VT, and New York, NY

Part III. 2001-2003
Letters from Croyden Avenue, Los Angeles, CA
Letters from Calais, VT, and New York, NY

Part IV. 2003-2004
Letters from Washington Blvd., Marina del Rey, CA
Letters from Calais, VT, and New York, NY

Afterword
"Who'll Prop Me Up in the Rain?"
References
Index

Editorial Reviews

09/12/2022

Livingston (Owls Don’t Have to Mean Death) delivers a revealing collection of letters between short story writer Lucia Berlin (1936–2004) and poet and lyricist Kenward Elmslie (1929–2022). Their correspondence began in 1994 after they attended Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program as visiting writers, and ended a decade later when Berlin died of lung cancer. In their correspondence, the writers are candid about their insecurities regarding their works (in one instance, Berlin admits she’s nervous about writing a short story inspired by a real love affair with a 17-year-old student when she was 35) and their personal lives (Elmslie frequently mentions his lover Joe Brainard, who died of AIDS and inspired Elmslie’s play Postcards on Parade), and offer book recommendations (Berlin praises Alice Notley, Elmslie references Chekhov). As a whole, their correspondence makes for an intimate, touching portrait of a friendship, one bound by a love of literature. Especially powerful is one note in which Berlin reflects on Elmslie’s strengths as a writer, praising his style, which “shines” as much as Flaubert’s: “Your letters have such history in them, valuable information about musicals, poetry, writers.... They should be published.” The result is a fine tribute to the careers and lives of two writers. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Conversational, unsensational, ironic, attuned to the absurd."—Times Literary Supplement

"An intimate, touching portrait of a friendship, one bound by a love of literature."—Publishers Weekly

"This book, the correspondence of two good writers and close friends, presents completely new material written very well and at the same time in a comfortable and natural style. The letters are personal, warm, witty, imaginative, detailed, sometimes lyrical, and, most compellingly, written with frankness, honesty, and good humor. Here, we can look 'behind' their art and witness what goes on in their day-to-day lives, how they experience moments of joy or well-being, how they suffer and try to laugh off their suffering. Above all, the compelling pleasure of the book is the opportunity to spend personal, intimate time in the company of these lively, intelligent, compassionate, and mutually loving people."—Lydia Davis, author of Essays One and Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and The City of Arles

"More than a delightful record of a unique literary friendship, more than a chronicle of how Lucia and Kenward negotiated distance, patronage, moodiness, and the volatility of two artistic temperaments, Love, Loosha is a splendid treatise on aging out of lives in which decisions were made for pleasure and art more than for practicality or stability. A luscious and lyric counter argument to the dangers of a life lived in pursuit of beauty. Brava. Bravo."—Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

"These letters read like a literary love affair between two brilliant writers who aim to delight, entertain, and confide in each other. What Berlin says of Elmslie's side of the correspondence is true of both: 'Beautiful writing, good gossip, funny stories. . . . You and I have known remarkable people.'"—Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, editor of Collected Poems: Edward Dorn

From the Publisher