Love, Loosha
Love, Loosha
The Letters of Lucia Berlin and Kenward Elmslie
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 isthe 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.
An intimate, touching portrait of a friendship, one bound by a love of literature.’—Publishers Weekly
Conversational, unsensational, ironic, attuned to the absurd.'—Times Literary Supplement
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 counterargument 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
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
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
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.
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 books and lyrics for Broadway and off-Broadway musicals.
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
