Elizabeth Bruce is a storyteller on the page and on the stage. She began acting at the age of 25, began writing in her 40s and has continued productively on these two creative channels ever since. She’s founded a theatre group and theatre workshops that teach writers drama techniques to create truthful characters and plots. She’s published short fiction and a novel. Her first short story collection, Universally Adored & Other One Dollar Stories, was published in January by Vine Leaves Press. Why are they one-dollar stories? That comes from a theatre game. I’ll let Elizabeth explain.
There’s a theatre game called the Pass the Object, in which you take an everyday object—like a pencil—and pass it around. Each person has to animate the object without talking, like in charades, and the others have to guess what the pencil represents. It could be a telescope or a baseball bat or a pool cue. Each person has to come up with something new. It gets harder and harder the farther along the circle you go. The game is an example of what the creativity expert Paul Torrence calls ‘originality,’ one of the four core competencies of creativity.
So my stories are a written example of Pass the Object. I riffed on the prompt of beginning each story with the words ‘one dollar’. Situations where one dollar has some kind of significance.
I love drama games. I use them as prompts and kickstarts in Nail Your Novel. Speaking of novels, you have a novel – And Silent Left the Place. Tell me about that.
It’s set in South Texas and takes place in one 24-hour period in 1963. The protagonist, Thomas Riley, is a traumatized 81-year-old veteran who came back from the Great War middle aged and silent. He can speak but he doesn’t speak–not to people anyway–and the mystery of the novel is why. On this night in 1963, a young couple passing through sets in motion a cascade of strange events through which the burden of silences passes from old to young as the young man is arrested and the young woman runs off into the desert.
It took me years to write, after putting aside a 300-page first draft of a coming-of-age story and concentrating instead on Thomas Riley. I spent a lot of time with Riley. His anguish and resolve became very personal to me. Riley is very loosely based on my maternal grandfather, who was a World War One veteran—he lost an eye and experienced God knows what other horrors.
You’ve published short fiction in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Do you have a natural length that best suits you?
I lean toward shorter forms–even my debut novel is short—and concentrate on a spare style and compressing back story into the crevices of the present action. I think the spareness of my writing style, and the focus on regular, often plain-spoken people, lends itself to shorter works. My characters often speak in a vernacular of Texas or the South or West, or of city life.
I also try to communicate a lot indirectly to the reader, through the character’s body language, gestures, the ‘stage picture’ of what the setting looks like. My characters are not generally intellectual elites, their inner lives are revealed in terser, more stoic ways than the introspection and ruminations of more cerebral characters.
I don’t have an MFA, or a BFA for that matter, in creative writing. My literary voice, I think, is different from a lot of contemporary, MFA-trained writers. While I’ve published a bunch of stories in the US, I began sending my work overseas because I found literary journals abroad more receptive to my work. So far, I’ve been published in the USA, as well as the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Korea, Israel, Sweden, Romania, Malawi, Yemen, and the Philippines.
You’re obviously creative to the very tips of your toes – with writing, theatre and workshops. Was your family creative?
One of my most vivid memories about creativity, literature and the humanities in general was the little bookmobile that made its way through my small Texas town.
It was magical. A little Airstream trailer that was lined with hardcover books on all subjects. I would gather a huge pile of stories and biographies of courageous women (here’s to you Nellie Bly), and books about the wide world. I couldn’t wait to grow up and travel the globe. Indeed, I had the extraordinary privilege of growing up with parents who not only took us to museums and plays and behind the scenes in canneries, hospitals and other industrial settings, and filled the house with art books, nature books, histories, dictionaries and encyclopaedias. My folks were both World War II Navy veterans, and they had huge, illustrated volumes about that war and other wars.
Also, I spent my late, disaffected 1960s adolescence reading Pauline Kael’s film reviews in The New Yorker. She linked her analysis of a given film to a whole legacy of cinema, of works of literature and historical content, and for the first time I grasped the concept of a knowledge base. I began to understand that if you committed yourself to lifelong learning, this vast tapestry of knowledge would begin to make sense.
In one interview you mention you had a variety of fill-in jobs in your youth – motel maid, secretary and restaurant worker.
I am so grateful for the period in my life when I wasn’t a professional, when I didn’t have white collar skills or advanced training or a razzle-dazzle resume that would land me some kind of prestigious job.
From high school onward, I always worked part time jobs. When I started college, I got a job in the dining hall as the pots and pans washer. I had jobs bussing tables, serving food in the infirmary. One summer I was a spectacular failure as a waitress, but I did manage to keep a summer job in a white-linen restaurant in Colorado Springs working pantry, meaning I spent my days chopping lettuce, making chicken salad and Crab Louie, and trying to avoid Frankie the Cook whose work station was in front of the walk-in refrigerator. He used to pull all the young women inside the walk-in and feel us up and down, and we had to wiggle our way away from him. For me, it was just a summer job, but there were women for whom those jobs were their full-time livelihood, so they had to endure that crap.
I found the restaurant business was not for me; I’d spend all day working, and at the end of the day, all my product would be gone. It was too temporal.
What were you discovering about yourself?
As a writer and an actor, I’m extremely grateful for those low-wage jobs, because that’s how most of the world lives.
My summer job as a motel maid. It was hard work and a dirty job. You’ve got to pull pubic hair out of a bathtub drain and used condoms out from underneath the bed. You just have to deal with it. This was an economy motel, sometimes rented by the hour, so nobody left tips for housekeeping. I remember thinking if I only had $200, I could quit this job.
Again, for me it was just a summer job while I was in college; it wasn’t my entire future. If I’d never had to pull the pubic hair out of a bathtub, I would have no bloody idea what that reality is like, especially as a hugely advantaged person (I mean, let me count the ways.) So many people I’ve known don’t have comfortable lives.
Later, after college I had a ton of temporary secretarial jobs. One excruciating assignment was sitting in a sensory-deprivation-like closet sorting index cards all day.
I think a lot of young people today in the USA don’t work those kinds of low-wage, low-status jobs any more, if they have any privilege at all. I think that’s a big loss, because they never have the experience of being the lowest rung on the hierarchy of a workplace and working under unpleasant conditions. For me, of course, these were always temporary jobs, despite my despair. I was a college student from an advantaged middle-class family, so I was going to go off and do other things in my life. I have so much respect for people who do this kind of work—the essential workers that we depended on during the pandemic. They didn’t get to stay home or work remotely.
As an actor, you helped to found the Sanctuary Theatre in Washington DC. How did you get from Elizabeth in her mid-20s, who had never acted, to this?
As a young girl, I dreamed about getting out of my little Texas hometown and living an artistic, free-thinking life—though I deeply doubted my capacity to create original work.
I didn’t start acting until I was 25. I was living in Boulder and working in an office, but I used to go to the theatre a lot in Denver. I heard about a certificate program in theatre administration. That sounded good to me, since I was doing administrative work already.
So, I called up the theatre department and they said first you have to take an acting class. I thought, Oh God, I couldn’t possibly.
But they insisted, so I signed up and I was hooked. I kept taking theatre classes and getting cast in shows in the Denver area, and my acting career was off and running. I found a way to synthesize the insights gleaned from my young years observing myself and others. That’s what I did creativity for the next many years, eventually becoming a theatre producer in DC.
Eventually, I hatched a plan to go to New York, to do the whole actor thing. But, in the interim, I had a personal tragedy that shifted the centre of my world.
My closest college friend, a woman named Shelley Norman, who was an obstetrics nurse practitioner and the clinic manager of Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood, was murdered in her apartment in 1981. It was a terrifying, horrifying, cavernous experience of grief. I had never personally experienced that kind of violence, that kind of wickedness.
That grief led me to transform my life. I quit smoking because it was a part of death culture as I saw it. I’d been a chain smoker. I’d been living the vie boheme — working really hard during the day, doing theatre at night, rehearsals or shows, and going out afterwards to a bar and drinking red wine and smoking cigarettes and trying to solve the problems of the world, then getting up for 7:30 breakfast meetings with my boss. It was a fun, exhausting, adventurous life.
But after Shelley was murdered, I quit smoking cold turkey. I took a week off work and went to the movies all day where you couldn’t smoke. I started swimming. I had to stop drinking too because you can’t give up cigarettes if you’re still drinking. I became very pure in my habits, but I was still very shaken internally.
I ended up going to DC and met my husband Robert Michael Oliver while doing a production of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood, and we founded the Sanctuary Theatre, producing plays by master playwrights from around the world whose works had not been widely produced in English in North America.
Then in my 40s, I shifted from theatre to creative writing, took a bunch of workshops, and was in a bunch of writing groups, and in my 50s published my debut novel, And Silent Left the Place.
You run a workshop, Acting For Writers. What fun!
The workshop series was something I did a while back with Michael and our good friend, Sarah Pleydell. We’re all actors and creative writers and educators. Michael and Sarah are also scholars.
What’s the gap that you’re aiming to fill here?
We realized the actor’s process was incredibly applicable to the narrative writer’s process, whether you’re writing fiction or narrative creative nonfiction or narrative poetry.
There were two main parts to the workshops. One focused on the interior process of the actor getting inside and embodying one’s character. The actor must know what the character knows, feel what they are feeling. The script gives you some of that information, but you have to expand upon it, and figure out where your character comes from, what are their ‘given circumstances’ – what is their family like, their relationships, health, economics, what era are they living in, what are the disempowering or empowering forces. What motivates your character, what drives them, what are their conflicts. All that method actor stuff.
Then there’s the ‘stage picture’ stuff. Actors have to reveal their characters and the actions of the play physically—through dialogue, expression, gesture, physical interactions with other actors, All the body language and blocking and what’s called ‘stage business’, meaning how you interact with objects, props on stage—do you flip through a book, are you snapping peas, are you cleaning a gun?
The setting and costumes and lighting are all super important in theatre. So the creative writer also needs to set the stage on the page the same way theatre designers set the stage in the theatre. Are the characters indoors and if so where? What does the landscape look like? Is it twilight or midday? Is it raining or humid, freezing or bloody hot? What are the characters wearing? Do they put on or take off any garments? So much context and subtext and texture can be communicated by dressing the stage of your narrative writing.
As an actor, what kinds of dramatic parts appeal to you?
Oh, thank you for asking this question! I’ve always been a character actor playing people who were in the margins, often people for whom life was not going well. I have neither the looks nor the poise or sensibility to be the leading lady, the ingenue, the romantic lead, even when I was younger. Instead, I always played alcoholics or bag ladies, mad scientists or elder aunts, abusive mothers, jaded lawyers, medieval bawds, or mousey wifelets. On a number of occasions, reviewers have commented on my ‘wispy hair’ or ‘ample white bosom!’
Does this correspond at all with the kinds of characters in your writing?
When I pivoted to fiction writing, I simply applied my actor’s process. There’s another, almost out-of-body experience that happens when you’re under the stage lights and there’s this huge blackness between you and the audience. You can’t see them because of the lights, but it feels like the light is coming from behind you, through your head and out of your eyes, filling the space between you and the audience, and it has such presence. That energy is so palpable and timeless. I’m sure more accomplished actors have spoken about this more eloquently, but it’s magical. Time becomes a physical thing. Stage time is different from other kinds of time. A beat, two beats, three beats are an eternity onstage. As a fiction writer, I also try to embed that pregnancy of time in my writing.
What are your interests and curiosities?
Like most writers and all actors, I watch people. Regular people in all kinds of situations, and I file them away until they resurface as characters. I’m humbled by the realization that you could go into any city or countryside almost anywhere on the planet and randomly pick out anyone, and their life story would blow you away. I’m awed by the incredible density and complexity of human experience.
As an older person who came to fiction writing somewhat late in life, I think I’m slowly working my way through the different decades of my own experience, and dipping way back into the histories that have informed the human landscapes I’ve known. Perhaps I’ll get to this present moment if I live long enough, but we shall see.
I’m really drawn to the mythic core of a narrative. I think we’re all so guided by these deeper forces that have shaped lives and history. And shaped the land itself. Of the blood and birth that have taken place on top of it, and how the land endures.
As someone raised in the segregated South of 1950s and 60s Texas by a Yankee integrationist, feminist mama, I’m deeply aware of the horrors of that era and the continuing effects of it on both those who were targeted and those who did the targeting. While my work is generally very spare, the landscapes on which my tales are drawn are often historically sweeping.
Tell me about your podcast on Substack, Creativists in Dialogue.
With my husband, Michael, and our small team of colleagues, we produce Creativists in Dialogue: A Podcast Embracing the Creative Life. We’ve talked with people from all walks of life—from a Nigerian international chess master to master chefs, translators, early childhood educators, fashion designers, a birth doula, a chemical engineer, a Double Dutch leader, immigrants from around the world, and artists and writers, about the role creativity plays in shaping who they are.
In our subseries, ‘Theatre in Community,’ we did a deep dive into interviews with some of the amazing theatremakers from the Washington, DC, theatre scene from the 1970s to about 2019. And in our current series, ‘Innovators, Artists & Solutions’ we’re talking with individuals who are creatively innovating to address real and pressing issues.
What are you working on now?
I recently narrated the audiobook of my novel, And Silent Left the Place.
I’m also working on a sequel of sorts to my Universally Adored collection, in which I follow several characters from different dollar stories and weave their narratives together in a fictitious diner in the Gulf Coast refinery town of Texas City. Set in 1980, it explores issues of isolation and loneliness, and the lingering trauma from the horrific Texas City Disaster in 1947, which is still the deadliest industrial accident in the USA.
Find Universally Adored & Other One Dollar Stories here. Find Elizabeth on her website, her Substack podcast, and her Facebook page. And tweet her on @EbruceTexasDC)
There’s a lot more about writing in my Nail Your Novel books – find them here. If you’re curious about my own work, find novels here and my travel memoir here. And if you’re curious about what’s going on at my own writing desk, here’s my latest newsletter. You can subscribe to future updates here.
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