As a young girl growing up in LaMarque, Texas, a small, blue-collar town on the Gulf Coast, all I ever really wanted was to go out into the world and live an artistic, “free thinking” life—”la vie boheme.” I never wanted money or power (on that front, I have been wildly successful!). I just wanted to do creative work that I loved and have the respect of my peers.
Despite my artistic dreams, however, I doubted my capacity to create original work. Being an artist requires a presumption that one’s creative output has import and worth. For me, as an exceedingly shy kid, that presumption was elusive until I entered the theatre world in my mid-20s and found a way to synthesize the insights gained from my young years observing myself and others.
For the first time I found creative legitimacy—as a character actor. I have neither the looks nor the sensibility to be the romantic lead, so instead I played plain-spoken people for whom life was not going well—recluses and alcoholics, bag ladies and elder aunts, abusive mothers and mad scientists, chamber maids, medieval bawds, or “mousey wifelets.”
I’d left Texas at 18 to go to The Colorado College and earn my sweet BA in English. I spent the rest of my young adulthood on the front range of Colorado working as a nonprofit writer for the mid-70s version of “the Green Agenda” by day and as an actor by night. After relocating for a hot minute to New York City, I moved to Washington, DC, 43 years ago, met my now longtime husband Michael and co-founded Sanctuary Theatre, a nonprofit, transcultural theatre in the old sanctuary of an inner-city church in DC. It was a wild, exhilarating and exhausting experience.
When, as a new mother in my late 30s I could no long manage the theatrical life, I pivoted to fiction writing and simply applied my actor’s process to it. There’s an almost out-of-body experience that happens on stage—a presence that’s magical. Time—one beat, two beats—becomes a physical thing. As a writer, I try to embed that palpable experience of time.
And as a fiction writer I also returned to the plain-spoken people I played onstage. My characters are not usually fashionable or prosperous. They’re not the cerebral, frequently alienated, cynical characters of much contemporary literary fiction. They’re local people, often from analog worlds. “Somewhere” not “anywhere” people. While they don’t always succeed, mostly they soldier on. My fiction is an homage to the grit of local people. That’s who I am too: a local person.
Indeed, I’m another in the long tradition of writers who leave their places of origin—either by choice or necessity—yet who revisit that home again and again in their literary work, imbuing where they are from with a touch of the mythic. We strive to turn the familiar, the remembered, into the eternal and universal. Southern American writers famously do this, and I—for better or worse—consider myself a Southern writer.
Here’s a bit more about my literary journey:
Elizabeth’s collection, Universally Adored & Other One Dollar Stories (Vine Leaves Press, 2024)—in which all 33 stories begin with the words “one dollar”—won five indie awards and received rave reviews in publications in the US and UK. Her debut novel, And Silent Left the Place, won Washington Writers’ Publishing House’s Fiction Prize, as well as Foreword Magazine’s Bronze Prize and was the Finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters’ Best Work of First Fiction.
Elizabeth Bruce’s second novel, I Will Read Ashes for You (forthcoming from Regal House Publishing in Summer 2028) explores what happens when a town is destroyed by the deadliest industrial accident in US history and must rebuild. The 1947 Texas City Disaster, in which a French ship full of 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer exploded, killing 600 people and mutilating 3,500 others, was—until 9/11—also the deadliest loss of firefighter lives in American history. Thirty-three years later in a diner risen from the ashes of catastrophe, a wounded community still gathers for pie and respite. A tender and heartbreaking chronicle of grief, shame, and resilience, I Will Read Ashes for You is a tapestry of love stories, past and present among the heirs and survivors of the Texas City Disaster.
Elizabeth has published prose in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Korea, Israel, Sweden, Romania, Malawi, Yemen, and The Philippines, in such journals as The Ilanot Review, FireWords, The Bangalore Review, Spadina Literary Review, Two Thirds North, and The Washington Post. Her book, CentroNía’s Theatrical Journey Playbook: Introducing Science to Early Learners through Guided Pretend Play, won four indie awards. A native Texan who’s lived in NE DC for over four decades, she’s received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, HumanitiesDC, and McCarthey Dressman Education Foundation, and studied with Richard Bausch, the late Lee K. Abbott, Janet Peery, John McNally, and Liam Callanan. For many years she was a Teaching Artist and Arts Producer at the bilingual, multicultural educational organization CentroNía. Elizabeth now co-hosts Creativists in Dialogue: A Podcast Embracing the Creative Life with her husband and creative partner, Robert Michael Oliver. She and Michael raised two fabulous adult children, Maya and Dylan, who have professions and families of their own. elizabethbrucedc.com
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Elizabeth Bruce’s I Will Read Ashes for You in 2028.
