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Welcome To Saint Angel excerpts in this font
William
Luvaas quotes from Email Interview with CRC Blog on June 18, 2018 in this font
CRC Blog on William Luvaas’s
Welcome
To Saint Angel
“Home: A Well of
Everlasting Chances”
Anaphora Literary Press published
William Luvaas’s environmental fiction
novel Welcome To Saint Angel on March 15, 2018, with book design
by Anna Faktorovich, PhD. and copy editing by Clare MacQueen.
Luvaas has published three other fiction
novels: The Seductions of Natalie Bach
by Little Brown; Going Under by Putnam; and Beneath The Coyote Hills by Spuyten
Duyvil. He’s also published two short
story collections: A Working Man’s Apocrypha
by University Oklahoma Press and Ashes Rain Down: a story cycle by
Spuyten Duyvil.
Anaphora Literary Press describes Welcome to Saint Angel as “a dead-serious comedy about development
gone mad and townsfolk’s – sometimes lethal – battle to protect their precious
rural community from bulldozers and climate change deniers. Part environmental fiction, part social
satire, it speaks to exurban sprawl and the heedless development of fragile
natural areas – and to the value of community, another endangered species.” (Left-Box of Welcome to Saint Angel copies attributed and copyright granted by William Luvaas)
The idea for Welcome
Saint Angel came to William Luvaas when he was living in Riverside
County, California, 80 miles east of Los Angeles:
“It’s high
desert country, chaparral and rugged mountains.
Summer days are extremely hot, but it cools off in the evenings. This was at the height of the housing boom
before the ‘07-08 crash.
They were
building huge housing tracts everywhere: ugly identical houses crowded together
cheek by jowl out there in the wide open spaces, no landscaping, no soul. It was painful to watch our peace and space
being violated, the owls and coyotes chased off, olive and palm trees cut
down.
I have always lamented our lack of
respect for the natural environment, which is the home we can’t do
without. What a foolish direction to be
moving in: building houses a hundred miles from where people work and golf
courses in the desert. Madness. We fought one of these developments in our
own rural neighborhood. And stopped
it. The whole neighborhood rose up, like
people do in my novel.”
Wealthy and greedy developer and owner of Saint
Angel Land Company Ches Noonen is buying everything he possibly can from Saint
Angel so he can turn the small tight-knit community into a money making
suburbia including houses, malls, swimming pools, and golf courses, which
require a huge amount of water supply in a desert of 50,000 inhabitants that
are already struggling to maintain a survival rate
of water during the desert’s hottest drought. (Right: An image of San Jacinto in Riverside, Los Angeles, California in what William Luvaas views as his Saint Angel. This image has been given copyright permission by Lucinda Luvaas to be used for this CRC Blog entry only.)
(The above two images have been given copyright permission by Lucinda Luvaas to be used for this CRC Blog entry only.)
Naturalist and preservationist and resident Al Sharp
refuses to sell his lands right and water rights despite the pressure from Ches
Noonan and his cronies. Soon Al’s
friends join him in the fight: Soboba
Indian married couple Sage and Wynona Littlefeather, Sam Jenson, Jesus freak
Rob Thompson, Mexican-American computer hacker Tinkerspoon, and Vietnam Vet
Little Lester.
Al Sharpe, the
co-narrator of Welcome to Saint Angel, has had a life of losses – one of which
is the loss of his wife first to her lover and then to her death in an airplane
crash. The one thing that saves Al Sharpe
is their daughter Finley whom Al Sharpe christened after his favorite novel Finnley
Wren by Philip Wylie.
Al
and Finley live a simple existence to some others but to them it is a rich
existence– Finley has her own 800 square foot tree house built on a 30-foot-black
massive oak at the mouth of the canyon – the entrance to Al’s own farmhouse-turned-cottage,
partially handmade by Al himself and made up of the desert’s own canyon walls. (Right: Al Sharp with his pet pig Wallers in his cave home after an argument with lover Mona. This image has been given copyright permission by Lucinda Luvaas to be used for this CRC Blog entry only)
Finley and I slept in
a tent those first three months, while I salvaged what I could from the house
and redid the roof and interior of an adobe cottage with two-foot-thick-walls
built by some early mestizo squatter far back off the road. I christened the place “Second Chance Acres.”
“Second chance for
what, Daddy?”
“For doing it right
this time. To be self -employed and avoid relationships where I’m considered
comic relief, to love you as much as two people combined.”
Page 25.
The
one thing that Al has at Second Chance Acres that is more valuable than gold
and money is water – in the form of his own well – one of the few wells that
are not in the control of the greedy developers. Al describes his well as having its living
source from below his own ground, deep in the ocean, which has been drinking
snowmelt from the mountains for millions of years. (Above Left: diagram attributed to schillerinstitute.org. Fair Use)
Fossil water. It tastes like time, our water. Mine, one of the few remaining wells in the
valley that doesn’t belong to the major ranchers and land magnates (which is to
say Ches Noonan and Cal Hale and associates) or wells on the rez.
Page 10
Al’s
abode is in the beautiful high desert in a valley of Southern California known
as Santa de Rosa de Los Angeles, also known as Saint Angel.
Al’s physical, emotional, and spiritual ties to this land and his home
is part of his identity. (Right: This image has been given copyright permission by Lucinda Luvaas to be used for this CRC Blog entry only)
It
only seems fitting that Luvaas gives Saint Angel its voice as co-narrator along
with Al Sharpe in the novel Welcome to Saint Angel: “It
occurred to me that since the town of Santa Rose de Los Angeles is one of the
most important characters in the book, and the most endangered in a way, it
should have a voice. Moreover, I wanted
to be able to look into the lives of characters beyond Al Sharpe, who narrates
much of the story in first person, to tell the reader things about them that Al
couldn’t know. So Saint Angel is the
omniscient, all-seeing perspective.” (Above Top Left: William Luvaas during the time he was writing Welcome To Saint Angel. The two images on the left have been given copyright permission by Lucinda Luvaas to be used for this CRC Blog Entry only)
Saint Angel is not my formal name as you will find
it on the map, but I prefer it. In 1864,
J. Mayberry Haynes stood up on the mountain with his party of Indian scouts and
San Francisco entrepreneurs and declared, “What you see below us, boys, is the
Valley of Angels.” He christened me
Santa Rosa de Los Angeles. Indians in
the rancho days, watching their horses sicken and die after drinking from my
black soughs, named me “La Cienega del Diablo.”
Devil’s Swamp. Sam Jenson calls
me Saint Ain’t. By whatever name, I am a
high desert town – and the valley wherein it lies- of 12,000 souls (at story’s
outset), nearly 50,000 at mid-point), diminished to 8,000 at the end. All within the space of two hectic years.
Pages 17-18
Al and Finley have always been close but
just as the fight between suburbanization and naturalization begins Al and Finley
face their own battles when Finley turns 17, the age he promised her he would
tell her all he knew about her mother. But
despite his words that she died in an airplane crash Finley is convinced he is lying,
that her mother is still living so she goes on her own quest against her
father’s wishes and warnings to find her own mother whom she believes she has
met on Facebook. (Right: image attributed to and copyright granted by Christal Ann Rice Cooper)
In the meantime Al is losing his
self-control and falls into a dangerous affair with his enemy Ches Noonan’s
manipulative wife Penny while maintaining an authentic relationship with lover
Mona Sahlstrom, the loan officer at Saint Angel Federal Bank. (The image on the left has been given copyright permission by Lucinda Luvaas to be used for this CRC Blog entry only)
Al’s
world darkens to include beatings, shootings, attempted murder, murder, the
illegal loss of his land and water rights, his missing daughter, the loss of
his daughter’s college fund, and the loss of his community. In the end there is redemption and salvation
because Al realizes home is NOT just a place you inhabit from without yourself,
but a place within yourself and with the people you love. (Right: Clip from Welcome to Saint Angel book trailer attributed to Lucinda Luvaas. This image has been given copyright permission by Lucinda Luvaas to be used for this CRC Blog entry only)
I wake to Finley leaning over my
bed. “I missed you, Dad. I missed Second Chance Acres. They’ve like totally trashed it.” Her voice convulses in a sob.
“Where have you been?” I ask my daughter. “I’ve been worried sick about you.”
“Doing something stupid, okay, brackishly
stupid. I’m over that now.”
I take her hand. “We haven’t spent all our chances yet. Not by nearly.”
Page 224.
In the end Welcome
to Saint Angel is about home – something every human being, plant, creature, and landscape needs in order to abound. “Yes, the book is definitely about home and
how precious it is to us, how threatened we feel when someone infringes on
it. Maybe it’s partly our territorial
instinct, because we are animals, after all.
All animals protect their nests. (Left: This image of William Luvaas and Mimi is given copyright permission by Lucinda Luvaas for this CRC Blog entry only.)
There is the old proverb: “Home is where you hang your hat.” That’s part of it. We all need a place to call our own, where we
feel comfortable and where we belong. A
place for our kin and, yeah, our stuff.
Thus many homeless folks cart their meager belongings about in shopping
carts. (Right Fair Use) They have mobile homes, because
all of us need certain bare necessities to survive. Beyond this, home is where we hang our
hearts–where we belong or start out. It
feels like a birthright.
As Robert Frost said , (Left) “Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you
in.” Something we can’t be denied. Our safety zone, our welcome zone where we
can be exactly who we are, as we sometimes can’t out in the world. We enter the front door after a tense day and
relax. Home can be a simple shack or a
mansion. Or we may even refer to a town,
state, or country as home. “I call
Oregon home.” “Maryland is my home
state.” “I’m a New Yorker.” It’s also a way of seeing things. My work is always colored by where I live at
the time I’m writing. The atmosphere of
the place bleeds over onto the page.
I
suppose I look at home a little like my big akita Mimi (Right: this image has been given copyright permission by William Luvaas to be used for this CRC Blog entry only) does. She always curls up in the old, unused
fireplace in our living room because she loves the cool tile floor, and she
feels safe there; it’s her place, even though only about ½ of her big body fits
into it. She is fiercely protective of
her territory if someone trespasses on it uninvited, just as the characters in
my novel are.”
It only seems fitting to end this
piece
with the last paragraph of the last page because it is this excerpt that Luvaas
found the most emotional and compelling to write: (Left: this image has been given copyright permission by Lucinda Luvaas to be used for this CRC Blog entry only)
So we are back to normal again here
in the Kingdom of The Excessed. Waiting,
Rob Thompson says, for the next onslaught. I disagree with him. Disaster is
never inevitable. We go about life in our separate ways which tangle together
in a single ravel, one strand inextricably linked with the others. We are never
isolated, never fully alone. So I believe I speak for all of us when I say, If you
ever pass Saint Angel way and think of visiting, you’d be more than welcome.
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS
PIECE:
A Working
Man’s Apocrypha
Lillian Able
Anaphora Literary Press
Facebook
Anaphora
Literary Press Web Page
Ashes Rain
Down: a story cycle
Beneath The Coyote Hills
Sammy Corrado IV
Anna Faktorovich
Going Under
Little Brown
Lucinda Luvaas Facebook
Lucinda Luvaas Web Page
William Luvaas Facebook
William Luvaas Web Page
Clare MacQueen
Putnam Facebook
The
Seductions of Natalie Bach
Spuyten Duyvil
University Oklahoma
Press
Welcome To
Saint Angel
Leonard Kelly Young
Al’s
abode is in the beautiful high desert in a valley of Southern California known
as Santa de Rosa de Los Angeles, also known as Saint Angel.
Al’s physical, emotional, and spiritual ties to this land and his home
is part of his identity. (Right: This image has been given copyright permission by Lucinda Luvaas to be used for this CRC Blog entry only)
There is the old proverb: “Home is where you hang your hat.” That’s part of it. We all need a place to call our own, where we
feel comfortable and where we belong. A
place for our kin and, yeah, our stuff.
Thus many homeless folks cart their meager belongings about in shopping
carts. (Right Fair Use) They have mobile homes, because
all of us need certain bare necessities to survive. Beyond this, home is where we hang our
hearts–where we belong or start out. It
feels like a birthright. 
