The Hot Climate of Promises and Grace: 64 Stories

by Steven Nightingale

With these short stories, deeply indebted to Sufi Tales and Jataka stories (as well as to the Brothers Grimm and American folktales), Steven Nightingale offers testimonies of revelation, mischief, miracles, and grace given him by sixty-four remarkable women who've appeared in his life over time.

These delightful pieces combine humor and sensuality with surrealism and an oblique spirituality, and each becomes an opportunity of gentle instruction, invention, and entertainment. The book describes a spiritual pilgrimage, beautifully written, a unique offering from this wonderful writer.

Genres: Short Stories

204 pages, Hardcover

Published October 11, 2016

About the author

Steven Nightingale is an author of books of poetry, novels, and essays. He divides his time between the San Francisco Bay Area; Reno, Nevada; and Granada, Spain.

Personal and Family Life

Nightingale was born in Reno, Nevada, and attended public schools there before being admitted to Stanford University, where he studied literature, religion, and computer science. He has lived near London, in Paris, and in Granada, Spain, and traveled worldwide, often to wild country. He moved to Granada in 2001, after buying, with his wife Lucy Blake, a carmen in the ancient barrio of the Albayzin. He and Lucy have one daughter, Gabriella.

Writing

Nightingale is the author of two novels, six books of sonnets, and a travel and history book about Granada. His work is widely anthologized, and he has taught poetry by invitation in over fifty schools and universities in Nevada and California.

His first poetry was published in 1983, by the magazine Coevolution Quarterly, and his first novel, The Lost Coast, and its sequel, The Thirteenth Daughter of the Moon, were published by St. Martin’s Press in New York, in 1995 and 1996.

Following those books, he began to assemble into manuscripts his sonnets, a poetic form with an eight-hundred year history. Nightingale specialized in the sonnet, believing that its history and durability give the form a straightforward and uncanny power. His six books of poetry begin with the limited edition Cartwheels, followed by the trade edition Planetary Tambourine, and four more collections of ninety-nine sonnets each, all published by the Black Rock Press, in their Rainshadow Editions.

In 2015, Counterpoint Press in Berkeley, California brought out Granada: A Pomegranate in the Hand of God. The book describes the move of the author and his family to Granada, and goes on to address the history of gardens and of the Albayzin, the extraordinary history of Al-Andalus, the sacred geometry in Islamic tile work, the work of the Sufis, the history of flamenco, and the life and poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca.

Reviews

[Mary Rakow · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the brief, uncategorizable stories that comprise THE HOT CLIMATE OF PROMISES AND GRACE Steven Nightingale’s narrator assembles tales told by sixty-three present day “lucid women” and one man, composing from them a single underlying canticle as radical as it is ancient.

His co-storytellers bear witness to “a region misty, fecund, with a beauty both sensual and sacramental”. Doubt, anger, hostility, shame, confusion are in these pages set aside. Other words describe the dance between the erotic and the metaphysical-- “pleasure”, “wisdom”, “playfulness”, “mischief”, “peace”.

These women are each, one way or another, possessed of an “otherworldy exuberance”. Many are, like the “diver in the Dutch Antilles” “irresistibly intelligent, sexually effervescent…with ..an easygoing, offbeat genius for life.”

Each is strong, idiosyncratic, certain, and, in most cases, in possession of a kind of work in which she excels. The Cat Giver’s “painstaking genetic experiments” enabled her “to cultivate flowers so variously radiant, that tropical rainbows had questions about them.” Another woman “did mechanical work with automobiles, and she could read Sanskrit.” A third, in a house on a hidden street, “is writing a scared text that will be used to correct and update, at long last, all the sacred texts we presently have.” These women possess certainty even as they hold truths that are paradoxical. That is their strength.

The “work” they do is important because such work, true work, makes the world. “…stories turn into the world” says one. This is true because “the world and each person in it is part of “the continual transformation.”

An artist and former nun encounters “a voice from Beyond” in her studio that tells her Creation was not once and for all but is “renewed every day” and that she is called to such labor. “With your brush, you must paint the world into place. You must do the work that turns into the world.”

The “real history of the world…is mostly secret…beyond the trumpeting…the declarations of tribunals…beyond all this, within all this, real work is being done.”

Perhaps the most elemental act of making is in eros itself. The “wise woman and man” in the Eve story “saw how the good world may be kept alive in the playfulness of a couple in love.”

From a woman met on an overnight train from Paris to Madrid says “…the body is the soul.” The arts of love include the arts of pillow talk, through which , as one of many ways, if not the most central way, “life may be recomposed.”



If there is anything fundamentally “wrong” with the world Nightingale’s narrator and his co-storytellers seem to suggest it lies in two ill-conceived notions. Articulated by a woman in Boston who plays the flute, they are that people ”took pride in thinking the course of their lives resulted from their own decisions” and the idea “that just humankind, and not each thing in this world, is alive.” Her story and all of thee stories are written against that grain.


For this ill, we might presume, Nightingale gives these women’s stories to the reader. Because, like the Maroon whom he first introduces, these narrators have “a lyrical way of healing.” If the world is described as “contaminated by the pessimism that turns up everywhere” it is to introduce women like Juliana who “was not contaminated by it.”

“..our lives are not separate from the world,” says Suzanne, another storyteller. Our lives are not separate—we are.”


A woman from Eureka, Nevada says, “No one believes in beauty anymore,” but goes on to say, “but the world is showing itself, beckoning us….” And again, “No one believes in heaven on earth anymore,” but her conclusion is a happy one. “… and so heaven is freely available.” This renewed, altered thinking is the “real work” of these women. To make this turn, as an angel painter does, is to do this work right in “the pitch and commotion of daily affairs.”


When buying postcards in Bend, Oregon, our narrator met a woman who also gave witness to “necessary visitations from a next world” but added “…a next world, which is this world.”

If this is the premise of all of the stories, the benefits of such a shift in thinking are incalculable. “…our dear world,” the woman called The Cat Giver asserts, is that the world “…will not be able to prevent good from being done.” “…in the soil of their hope,” says a woman in a bank in London, “there might already be seeds.”

A woman in the Basque country of Southern France asks “what might be the expression of the face of paradise?” before she supplies the answer. “Quizzical. Amorous. Full of longing, rigor, hopefulness, independence.”

The book is a creed. The book is an assessment of the state of the world. The book is a celebration of the co-creating power of work on oneself. The book is an invitation to see that paradise is in the world and to move toward it.

“The location of the soul, the character of god, the current of resemblance that unifies this world and all others: these are three subjects,” says a woman taking the overnight train from Paris to Madrid. “Think of them as a band in a bar: a lead guitar, a bass, drums,” she continues. “They need a fourth, a singer.” And we think of ourselves. Then she says, “Step right up.”

This book is a kaleidoscope turned and turned and turned again and we hear, when people “rid themselves of themselves” they are able “to have new lives of impeccable kindness, easygoing clairvoyance, and powerful account.” Some will “garden among the stars; others might carry all the oceans in the pockets of an old coat.”

[Brett Pyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvelous. Beautiful and lyrical. I read this very slowly, one story at a time to savor it. I greatly enjoyed The Lost Coast/Thirteenth Daughter of the Moon and this book felt like more of the short tales told by various characters in those books. If you enjoyed those parts of his novels you will love this book. I will definitely reread this book. One of my top 10-20 books I have read. Thank you Mr. Nightingale for your lovely poetry and you thought provoking and smile inducing prose.

[Gina Pickering Hutchison · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was a DNF. 1 to 2 page stories did not do it for me. The first few I read were interesting, but when it got good, it was over. If you want something you can pick up and read for a matter of minutes, then this is for you.

[Kristy · Rating 2 out of 5]

There’s a few stories I will revisit in this but overall it was just too whimsical for me & it also felt a bit repetitive

[Nedra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, I know I will need to read this book again! Through mystical tales from various religious and philosophical backgrounds, the author explores human nature and the nature of physical world to spiritual world and ( from his perspective) a woman’s unique ability to see into those worlds. It is poetic, beautiful, often mystifying, but sometimes profound. Yes, I will need to reread this at some point.