A Walking Fire (Margins of Literature

by Valerie Miner

"Here comes a walking fire," the Fool says to Lear as he sees Gloucester walking across a heath carrying a torch. This novel opens in fall, 1988, as Cora, an anti-war activist, returns to the U.S. from Canada where she has lived for twenty years. A college student in the mid-sixties, Cora becomes politically curious, then joins the anti-war movement. Based on King Lear and written from the point of view of Cordelia, the book weighs definitions of patriotism and loyalty. In her return as in her past, Cora is testing borders between suffering and virtue, idealism and commitment, self and family, and exploring possibilities of change.

254 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1994

About the author

Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of fifteen books. Her new story collection, Bread and Salt, will be published in September, 2020. Her latest novel, Traveling with Spirits, will be published in September, 2013. Other novels include After Eden, Range of Light, A Walking Fire, Winter's Edge, Blood Sisters, All Good Women, Movement: A Novel in Stories, and Murder in the English Department. Her short fiction books include Abundant Light, The Night Singers and Trespassing. Her collection of essays is Rumors from the Cauldron: Selected Essays, Reviews and Reportage. In 2002, The Low Road: A Scottish Family Memoir was a Finalist for the PEN USA Creative Non-Fiction Award. Abundant Light was a 2005 Fiction Finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards.
Valerie Miner’s work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Triquarterly, Salmagundi, New Letters, Ploughshares, The Village Voice, Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, The T.L.S., The Women’s Review of Books, The Nation and other journals. Her stories and essays are published in more than sixty anthologies. A number of her pieces have been dramatized on BBC Radio 4. Her work has been translated into German, Turkish, Danish, Italian, Spanish, French, Swedish and Dutch. In addition to single-authored projects, she has collaborated on books, museum exhibits as well as theatre.
She has won fellowships and awards from The Rockefeller Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, The NEA, The Jerome Foundation, The Heinz Foundation, The Australia Council Literary Arts Board and numerous other sources. She has received Fulbright Fellowships to Tunisia, India and Indonesia.
Winner of a Distinguished Teaching Award, she has taught for over twenty-five years and is now a professor and artist in residence at Stanford University. She travels internationally giving readings, lectures, and workshops. She and her partner live in San Francisco and Mendocino County, California. Her website is www.valerieminer.com

Reviews

[Traci · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a King Lear adaptation, but it's hard to see why. It's not bad, but there are reasons why this wasn't widely released. It had promise, but it was boring and fell flat.