About Elizabeth Bruce
Photo credit: K Whipple Photography
Elizabeth Bruce’s debut story collection, Universally Adored & Other One Dollar Stories, is forthcoming in January 2024 from the Athens, Greece-based Vine Leaves Press. Her debut novel, And Silent Left the Place, won Washington Writers’ Publishing House’s Fiction Award, ForeWord Magazine’s Bronze Fiction Prize, and was one of two finalists for the Texas Institute of Letters’ Steven Turner Award for Best Work of First Fiction. Bruce has published prose in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Sweden, Romania, India, South Korea, Malawi, Yemen, and The Philippines, including in FireWords Quarterly, Pure Slush, takahē magazine, The Ilanot Review, Spadina Literary Review, Inklette, Lines & Stars, and others, as well as in such anthologies from Paycock Press’ Gargoyle series, Weasel Press’ How Well You Walk through Madness: An Anthology of Beat, Vine Leaves Literary Journal: A Collection of Vignettes from Across the Globe; Madville Publishing’s Muddy Backroads, Two Thirds North, multiple Gargoyle anthologies, and Washington Writers’ Publishing House’s This Is What America Looks Like. Her educational book, CentroNía’s English and Spanish editions of the Theatrical Journey Playbook: Introducing Science to Early Learners through Guided Pretend Play garnered awards from four indie book contests. As a character actor she co-founded DC’s Sanctuary Theatre with Michael Oliver and Jill Navarre. She’s co-written scripts performed at the Adventure Theatre and the Capital Fringe Festival; one of her plays won Carpetbag Theatre’s W.F. Lucas Playwrighting Competition. Bruce has been awarded several fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, Poets & Writers, and the McCarthey Dressman Education Foundation, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Microfictions. She’s workshopped fiction with Richard Bausch, the late Lee K. Abbott, Janet Peery, John McNally, and Liam Callanan. An honors graduate in English from The Colorado College, Elizabeth and her husband, writer/educator Robert Michael Oliver, have long lived in NE DC where they raised their two adult children, Maya and Dylan.
Artistic Statement
I write from a respect for community, for memory, for imagination. I write to honor the local, as an old-timer, a newcomer, and the way stations in between. My writings―my stories, my novel, my scripts―focus on regular people pressed into the margins, their equilibrium gone. And yet they go on. Theirs are narratives drawn from my childhood, my friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, the legions of hardworking, plain-spoken people I have known and admired.
I came to writing fiction from years as a nonprofit staffer with a creative life as a character actor. I portrayed characters on the sidelines: the old, the homeless, the estranged, the alcoholic, the discarded. When as a working mother I could no longer manage a life in the theatre, I turned to creative writing. My entry process into fiction echoed the actor’s process: sense memory, subtext, context, setting, stage picture, and profound humility. One is invited into the inner life of someone else, and the responsibility to listen and understand circumstances beyond one’s own mandates empathy.
Indeed, as a writer, reader, and actor, I take solace in the stamina and wit of characters―in resilient people who find meaning and sustenance in the barest of encouragements: the father and son in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road taking shelter in a bunker, Becky in Jean Toomer’s Cane living on a narrow strip of land, Moll Flanders counting her linens.
I strive to discover such sustenance for my stories’ characters. To bring into focus those pristine moments that speak to the whole of a life—those bits of pure aliveness pressed into the wetness of memory like an image on photographic paper. I hope to do them justice.
Literary Awards
Fellowships
DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities
This project was supported by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
Education Awards
