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Lava Falls
Scrabbling for ways to believe in themselves and the world, the spirited, heart-driven people who populate these stories find surprising pockets of hope. A woman returns to the Alaskan cabin of her survivalist childhood, full of misgivings and memories. A trip to Yellowstone sparks a crisis for a man who feels kinship with the wolves he glimpses there. Nursing painful pasts, sisters take a cruise together to Antarctica. A runaway finds salvation from violence in her own singing. And in the title novella, a Grand Canyon rafting expedition profoundly changes the lives of six women.
Refusing to buckle under the pressures of family and political traumas, the sojourners in this collection are unified by themes of creative expression and of love―how we define it, how we are impelled by it, and how we are lifted by it.
Refusing to buckle under the pressures of family and political traumas, the sojourners in this collection are unified by themes of creative expression and of love―how we define it, how we are impelled by it, and how we are lifted by it.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
240 pages, Hardcover
Published September 25, 2018
4 people are currently reading
72 people want to read
About the author
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
89 books131 followersPreorder Lucy's new novel, TELL THE REST, about love, rage, and redemption, at https://amzn.to/3QRyHXD. The New York Times says Lucy Jane Bledsoe's novel, A THIN BRIGHT LINE, "triumphs." Ms. Magazine calls her novel, THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE, "fabulous feminist fiction." Her 2018 collection of stories, LAVA FALLS, won the Devil's Kitchen Fiction Award. Bledsoe played basketball in both high school and college. As a social justice activist, she's passionate about working for voting rights.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
January 22, 2019
Absolutely brilliant.
As part of my Sunday Shorts series (of chatting about shorter fiction works on Sundays), I'll be including some stories from this fantastic collection over the year. You'll be able to see them here.
As part of my Sunday Shorts series (of chatting about shorter fiction works on Sundays), I'll be including some stories from this fantastic collection over the year. You'll be able to see them here.
September 27, 2018
Now that it's published, I can add my review with high praise, as I have for Bledsoe's other books. In this eloquently written collection, nature, family, and lesbian and gay characters once again play a prominent role. Although separates stories, they fit together. I found similar themes from the author's recently published novel, The Evolution of Love; about nature, LGBT people facing personal crises and environmental disasters with a sense of humanity, all written in a clean yet full prose. The longest story, more of a novella, about a river-rafting vacation gone terribly wrong, spans the past and future in a haunting and dramatic style.
December 5, 2018
Lava Falls is a fine short story collection that takes one on adventures and into unusual places with a strong sense of the natural environment. The first story in the collection is brilliant and perfectly formed, about a woman returning to the place where her parents relocated her as a child in the wilderness. I loved many of the stories, both for the characters and for the experiences they encountered. Don't miss it! I like Bledsoe's novels, too, but her story telling is deft and takes you places you cannot anticipate.
January 26, 2019
Gorgeous, moving stories. Gripping and gentle at the same time. Highly original tales of love and family. Can’t wait to read more of Ms. Bledsoe’s work.
August 22, 2020
Human Natures work, slide and upend in Lava Falls. It’s not only ironic, but actually painful that the Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and all its rights are, as of August 18th, opened up for mostly foreign corporations to suck dry, pollute and then drop. I think Lucy Jane Bledsoe may think so, too, from this collection.
Bledsoe’s Lava Falls, “a novella and stories at the intersection of wilderness, family, and survival,” speaks a voice of Wilderness Herself; placed in green things, blossoms, food, compost, rocks, soil; as well as the very wind and waters of our “unpredictable” human bodies and hearts.
Even, maybe especially, in common things like “eucalyptus,…with an underbrush of blackberry.” Maybe even in our dreadfully “unnatural” ruby-orange, smoke-filled wildfire-sunset skies.
Bledsoe lives here in Berkeley, “loves teaching workshops, cooking, traveling anywhere, basketball, doing anything outside, and telling stories,” and, almost as an aside, has “traveled to Antarctica three times.” A keen, detached but not overly scientific observer of the world around her, Bledsoe spans publications from Arts & Letters: The Chronicle of Higher Education to ZYZZYVA, “defined by its risk-taking and egalitarianism;” as well as readings at our own Mrs. Dalloway’s and Books Inc. bookstores.
Her characters are so deftly created, I thought they were all her at one time or another in her life (they are mostly women) until I checked out her bio and read the fine print: “either products of …imagination or are used fictitiously.” An imagination deeply informed by wisdom about human nature. Good, bad and mostly, “naturally” in-between. Kind of like rocks thrown about in “that blissful intersection between safety and danger…attaining the skills needed to occupy that slim territory of ecstasy.” Or NOT, tumbling down “a wide dry gully, littered with red gravel and black cinders.”
The wonder of them, and their stories, is I never really knew what they were going to do, what river of “human desperation for resources,” “Grief Tree” of “beautiful. And maddening” actions, feelings or fantasies they were going to sluice down or chop into next. But that’s real life.
Eco-feminists and conservatives who think they’ve “got me filed” as a feminist peacenik stereotype register disbelief when I say I earned a Marksman First Class, Bar Five from the NRA at girls’ camp; and when I reveal I’m both a nonviolent Buddhist and lifelong, unrepentant carnivore. Humans are “unpredictable,” one of Bledsoe’s characters muses, all of whom are so very real, so very classic and surprising at the same time.
And relationships. Even in Lava Falls’ complex novella, Bledsoe weaves in and out between her characters like an astral projection. I watched her slipping from first person to omniscient narrator, a sylph, thinking; “How does she know all that?”
The First Nations of North America’s visceral, “religious,” and enacted concept of “All Our Relations” has seeped into our culture from Dances with Wolves, and even Fenimore Cooper's genocidal "Last of the Mohicans" Leatherstocking Tales. Been recognized, if patriarchally, by the ecological science wanderers, and certainly through shamans, poets and mystics from Rumi through Black Elk to Mary Oliver. Like Rachel Carson and St. Thomas Aquinas, believe it or not. Maybe seeped up into us from the ocean and the earth, got into our DNA from Way Back When...
Uniqueness and diversity are our “way out” of this eco-cultural morass we all, and I mean ALL, are stuck in; and intuition, faith, “gut knowledge” and relationships will guide us; but only with our homo sapiens pre-frontal lobes engaged, which helped get us here, envisioning how to get us "out." And I do mean US. Personally, communally and politically.
April/May of this year, local writer/editor and filmmakers Jessica Abbe and Toby McLeod screened Bullfrog Communities’ Standing on Sacred Ground online; and August 14th, UUCB hosted Dr. Paloma Pavel and Carl Anthony, co-founders of Breakthrough Communities. Both of these were powerful and authentic examples of locals working intelligently and empathetically at the crossroads of political, cultural, land and environmental issues, like Lucy Jane Bledsoe in Lava Falls. I applaud them all.
They make us contemplate “There is No Planet B,” how our daily practices relate to “The We of Me,” and, as Mary Oliver does, ask,
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
I plan to stay curious, observant, and WRITE.
An apple falls, KERPLUNK, from the tree outside
in spite of oil drilling in the Arctic
and smoke from wildfires.
A botany professor who lived here
planted them, --
his joy and study for himself and
for his neighbors --
a gift for us
from a line of ancestors
we did not know or see.
What will our gift be?
Bledsoe’s Lava Falls, “a novella and stories at the intersection of wilderness, family, and survival,” speaks a voice of Wilderness Herself; placed in green things, blossoms, food, compost, rocks, soil; as well as the very wind and waters of our “unpredictable” human bodies and hearts.
Even, maybe especially, in common things like “eucalyptus,…with an underbrush of blackberry.” Maybe even in our dreadfully “unnatural” ruby-orange, smoke-filled wildfire-sunset skies.
Bledsoe lives here in Berkeley, “loves teaching workshops, cooking, traveling anywhere, basketball, doing anything outside, and telling stories,” and, almost as an aside, has “traveled to Antarctica three times.” A keen, detached but not overly scientific observer of the world around her, Bledsoe spans publications from Arts & Letters: The Chronicle of Higher Education to ZYZZYVA, “defined by its risk-taking and egalitarianism;” as well as readings at our own Mrs. Dalloway’s and Books Inc. bookstores.
Her characters are so deftly created, I thought they were all her at one time or another in her life (they are mostly women) until I checked out her bio and read the fine print: “either products of …imagination or are used fictitiously.” An imagination deeply informed by wisdom about human nature. Good, bad and mostly, “naturally” in-between. Kind of like rocks thrown about in “that blissful intersection between safety and danger…attaining the skills needed to occupy that slim territory of ecstasy.” Or NOT, tumbling down “a wide dry gully, littered with red gravel and black cinders.”
The wonder of them, and their stories, is I never really knew what they were going to do, what river of “human desperation for resources,” “Grief Tree” of “beautiful. And maddening” actions, feelings or fantasies they were going to sluice down or chop into next. But that’s real life.
Eco-feminists and conservatives who think they’ve “got me filed” as a feminist peacenik stereotype register disbelief when I say I earned a Marksman First Class, Bar Five from the NRA at girls’ camp; and when I reveal I’m both a nonviolent Buddhist and lifelong, unrepentant carnivore. Humans are “unpredictable,” one of Bledsoe’s characters muses, all of whom are so very real, so very classic and surprising at the same time.
And relationships. Even in Lava Falls’ complex novella, Bledsoe weaves in and out between her characters like an astral projection. I watched her slipping from first person to omniscient narrator, a sylph, thinking; “How does she know all that?”
The First Nations of North America’s visceral, “religious,” and enacted concept of “All Our Relations” has seeped into our culture from Dances with Wolves, and even Fenimore Cooper's genocidal "Last of the Mohicans" Leatherstocking Tales. Been recognized, if patriarchally, by the ecological science wanderers, and certainly through shamans, poets and mystics from Rumi through Black Elk to Mary Oliver. Like Rachel Carson and St. Thomas Aquinas, believe it or not. Maybe seeped up into us from the ocean and the earth, got into our DNA from Way Back When...
Uniqueness and diversity are our “way out” of this eco-cultural morass we all, and I mean ALL, are stuck in; and intuition, faith, “gut knowledge” and relationships will guide us; but only with our homo sapiens pre-frontal lobes engaged, which helped get us here, envisioning how to get us "out." And I do mean US. Personally, communally and politically.
April/May of this year, local writer/editor and filmmakers Jessica Abbe and Toby McLeod screened Bullfrog Communities’ Standing on Sacred Ground online; and August 14th, UUCB hosted Dr. Paloma Pavel and Carl Anthony, co-founders of Breakthrough Communities. Both of these were powerful and authentic examples of locals working intelligently and empathetically at the crossroads of political, cultural, land and environmental issues, like Lucy Jane Bledsoe in Lava Falls. I applaud them all.
They make us contemplate “There is No Planet B,” how our daily practices relate to “The We of Me,” and, as Mary Oliver does, ask,
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
I plan to stay curious, observant, and WRITE.
An apple falls, KERPLUNK, from the tree outside
in spite of oil drilling in the Arctic
and smoke from wildfires.
A botany professor who lived here
planted them, --
his joy and study for himself and
for his neighbors --
a gift for us
from a line of ancestors
we did not know or see.
What will our gift be?
November 25, 2018
I really enjoyed reading all the stories in Lava Falls. Bledsoe does such a good job at creating vibrant settings. So many writers don't get the important of setting, of setting as character. I always appreciate the philosophical aspect of her writing, her interest in grappling with the big questions like religion and the nature of love and empathy. My favorite story was the one about the mail order bride. I loved the quietness about it and the way that the setting both brings the characters closer and pulls them apart. The bride's independence and stubbornness made her a truly original character. My second favorite story was the one about the two sisters who go to Antarctica. Bledsoe portrayed both their closeness and the distance and secrets between them really well. Writing about religion and about religious people is something that always fascinates me. It's also hard to pull off without being judgmental or patronizing, but the characters in those stories were sympathetic and complex. Of course, her descriptions of nature and her ability to describe complicated physical moves like navigating Lava Falls with just the perfect details to bring the scene alive without getting into tedious and overly-detailed descriptions is a whole art unto itself.
February 23, 2019
An engaging, highly readable collection of stories, diverse in theme and subject matter but sharing a dedication to exploring the wild terrain of the human heart. My favorite might be “Wildcat,” in which a blind man teaches his young grandson about the power and freedom of imagination (and how to suss out a really big cat).
May 1, 2019
I liked almost all of these, which is rare for a short story collection. Full of interesting settings and situations, and a surprising amount of grace, by which I mean people turning out to care about and help each other when I didn't expect them to.
December 10, 2018
Some fantastic stories in here!
March 21, 2019
Don't usually like short stories but these were really good, great settings, good characters, good writing. A+
May 23, 2022
A preoccupation with nature and complicated human relationships. Lots of queer characters. Truly satisfying.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews