Why do you use the color blue in so many of your stories, like Desert Blues, and Squandering the Blue and in Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta? 

Why do I use the word blue some 66 times (the New York Times actually counted up the number, as an example of my excess? The L.A. Times, when it was still a newspaper of consequence, said I’d gone over the blue. Then they decided going for blue was more interesting than Didion’s white.

Desert Blues is a short story in a book of 12 inter-connected short stories called Squandering the Blue. The idea was to write a short story collection that was so inter-connected, that the stories became more than the sum of their parts (if you don’t have that, you don’t really have a collection worthy of publication.) I thought of STB as being about the same characters/variations of the same characters. It moved through time, but it was essentially always a woman, who may or may not have a daughter, but is alone, in a tropical landscape, most often Los Angeles. My work has always been called “painterly” and I thought of it, these 12 stories, as being my 12-bar blues. I pay attention not only to the visual, but the auditory. So, blue is the poet’s secret for holding the 12 stories together. To make a book of short stories worthy of history, well, the last book of short stories (in English) that I know is Salinger’s 9. I love blue. It can be anything. I learned that from Pablo Neruda and the Spanish, Paz and Garcia Marquez, how water is all known things, or ocean, wind. I would use blue as all things, from the blue of the Mekong River (in the collection’s most famous story, Tall Tales From the Mekong Delta.) to the desert blues that loiter in the minds of delirious women in 120-degree heat. And what is the blue of the Mekong River, where my country lost its collective mind? It’s like all that can contain grandeur, by exquisite beauty and intelligence. The properties possible in blue only a poet knows, when you write for music and dream, all the crushed iris and what implies blue, all things fluid, tasting of rain, all that lagoons absorb, all that is delphinium, all the blue flowers, purple flowers, pewter flowers, all the hours, it is a blue hour, not 2 am, but blue am, then bruised am, broken am, and the clock it is midnight blue and we’re all out of time.

I combine all that is magnificent in blue (sails, breath, cobalt schools of amber thrashed butterflies) with 2 parts of what is ghastly. The blue of the skin of bomb victims.  Blue of the scared and scarred.

Blue has so many meanings. Strive for words with multiple associations. Built into the deliberate overuse of blue is one of its many meanings. Moody. To be in a bad mood, a sad mood. A colloquialism for being sad is being blue. Blue is considered a sacred color in all religions. It carries a history, a pedigree. Blue is a color of zone. Writing is about ambiguity, all the writing I read and all I write, is about not having a solution. There are no more easy or even reasonable answers. We don’t know. It’s a time of hoping for a gesture, even a grunt. We don’t have a vocabulary large enough to encompass our grief. (That’s in another STB story, I suggest you get that book). After a century when Europe thought it had answered, by thought and action, more than god. Then, as you know, those 2 world wars, the best and the brightest, consuming itself.  The writer could only speak in spasms, then formatting and demographics and the disappearance of entire professions. So blue is used to express all human strata, through the profound, through madness. The blue of knowing you live in a time when blue, the color of ink itself, is going into obsolescence. Look at my face. It’s an epic of tarnishing and dissolve. -- Kate Braverman. 

I never know what my stories are about until they are finished, until they choose to reveal themselves. I merely feel their power, how they breathe on me.  I try not to write them. I prefer the rush of having them write me.  “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta” wrote itself.

It is only now that I recognize this story contains elements that have long fascinated me. I once said that “Tall Tales” is my version of “Little Red Riding Hood” at the millennium in Los Angeles. It’s an ancient story, an archetypal tale, set beneath the tattered palms in the ruined California tropics under all that vivid and tawdry blue. It’s about predators in a cutting-edge city at the end of a mean thousand years.

“Tall Tales” is about the legacy of Vietnam, which continues to infect the American conscience, often in unexpected configurations.  It’s about tarnished consciousness and some unspeakable sordid pulse at the core of the American Dream. On one level, its about the irresistible lure of evil, it’s strange sheen. It’s about relationships between men and women itself. It was here before us and it will remain when we are gone. It has something to do with sexual obsession and the glamour of danger and the fragility of ordinary life.  It’s about power and survival in a landscape where the boundaries between dream and reality have dissolved, probably to a rock-and-roll beat.  

Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in site, only the wind and your breaking heart.  Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating.  As soon as Lenny began speaking, I knew I had mainlined it. I felt like I was strapped in the cock pit with the stars in my face and the expanding universe on my back. In my opinion, that’s the only way a writer should travel. When I finished “Tall Tales” I thought, this one is a keeper. This is a trophy brought back from the further realm, the kingdom of perpetual glistening night where we know ourselves absolutely. This one goes on the wall. -- Kate Braverman 

In her first story collection poet and novelist Kate Braverman creates a mosaic with an integral connectedness; the 12 stories form a complete set of variations on a theme. In lingering glimpses of these Los Angeles residents, Braverman portrays women whose desperation and romance with booze or cocaine feed on each other. In "Falling in October," Diana Barrington, who appears in several tales, muses, "We are falling in and out of love without warning. We are asking strangers to marry us. The rain is falling like green bullets. . . . We are falling to the ground, through the earth itself, into debt and disaster." Another heroine, whose husband keeps showing her mean little apartments in bad neighborhoods (harbingers of post-divorce life), travels with him to Hawaii for her 40th birthday in "Points of Decision." There she imagines herself in another life, as a waitress: "She would look satisfactory in such an outfit, carrying a tray of drinks. Someone at the hotel would get drugs for her." Language--her own sensuous prose, and her characters' obsessions with words--the theme of communication-- plays a vital role in Braverman's books. She writes about choices, about what we choose to name or to characterize, about what we allow ourselves to know in words. Although the intense richness which saturates these stories is occasionally overwhelming, the collection is a bold and exotic feat.

The women of these 12 related stories are almost indistinguishable: emotionally fragile, addictive, divorced, exiled, and desperately turning 40. They inhabit a millennial Los Angeles that ranges from the swimming pools and gardens of Beverly Hills in the title story and "Over the Hill" to the anonymous apartments in "Naming Names" and "Temporary Light." They attend AA meetings, reminisce with friends, raise children alone, face biopsies and extinction, and attract men like the fast-talking drug dealer of "Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta." To their stories Braverman brings an elegiac, autumnal vision touched by the absurd. Her most telling revelations occur "in these clairvoyant ruins where we live between improvisations, consecrating the moments with our prayers and lies." A powerful, moving collection that evokes the work of Joan Didion. 

-Mary Soete, San Diego P.L.