Beth Alvarado: Grieving in Dreams

Twenty years ago, when we both joined the same writers’ group in Tucson, Arizona, Beth Alvarado was already occupying the revolving space between the personal, the social, and the political. Her sentences had a ghostly confidence, by which I mean they had a lasting ephemerality or ethereal reality. Alvarado can bring absence—that which you can’t see anymore—to the page so that you feel you’re holding the missing thing in your hand.

There is a lot that is vanishing. In Alvarado’s latest essay collection, Anxious Attachments (2019), she considers the water pollution that contributed to her husband’s death, the anxieties of motherhood rearing up in the middle of wildfire season, her own “apocalyptic imagination.” “I grew a garden in the backyard because I wanted to be able to feed my family when civilization ended,” she writes.

In one of the fourteen essays, “Ordinary Devotions,” Alvarado’s daughter gives birth to twins on the eve of Trump’s election and almost loses one in an emergency delivery. There, in the shadow of what is nearly lost, so much more becomes visible. “Waiting for my daughter, the irony of my fears did not escape me. I was watching the muted television news, and I was aware of what was not being shown: not the children actually being orphaned or killed in Aleppo, not the families of refugees in flimsy boats on the Mediterranean seas, not the child refugees atop the train called The Beast . . . not the children in Flint who had no clean water to drink, not the women giving birth as they were protesting the Dakota Pipeline.”

I called Alvarado for literary advice last December. Her short-story collection, , in which a young woman, lost in the desert, is led to safety by the ghosts of dead, is set during a complete breakdown of society—economic, technological, and political—that plays out through intimate relationships. The book’s vision, that devotion to one another and to our ideals can help us survive, was one that Alvarado could identify with.