Collected Works of Mavis Hopgood

About the Book

She lives in the desert a few miles outside Barstow in an old Airstream trailer. In the dirt off the side of the Airstream there's a small table with two foldout wooden chairs shaded by a big umbrella. When I pull up, she rises from one of the chairs and steps out into the sun. Tall, the muscles in her arms and legs defined in the way of an athlete, lean, dressed in pastel blue shorts and a sleeveless yellow top, she's still a striking woman for being in her sixties. There's a dancer's fluid and suggestive grace in the way she moves that echoes her years as a Las Vegas showgirl in her twenties and thirties. Her skin wears a smooth and even desert tan. Her hair, a soft faded red in the late morning sunlight, is loose and moves in cadence with her walk.

This is Mavis Hopgood, the author of this itinerant collection of 29 stories, short prose pieces, anecdotes, and poems that come from different places and events of what she calls the pinball life she has lived across the country. In "Oasis" there's the tragic portrait of Katy, once a lawyer, now a bartender in a dive bar with its circle of regulars n a field of oil refineries. In "The China Doll" there's Frankie, a New York trumpet player on his way to a gig in L.A. who stops in Salt Lake for lunch and an attempt to reconcile with his recently widowed father. There's the Pushcart Prize story "Utah Died for Your Sins." In "City of Uncles" a young soldier on his way to another assignment wanders a blue collar neighborhood yearning to finally come off the road and find belonging and permanence . There are Brazilian wolves. There's a magic radio in a 1953 Buick Roadmaster. There's winter in an upstate town and anecdotes about what people did to stay sane in 25 feet of snow. There's a dying refrigerator. There's Pearlita who works in a dashboard factory in the midwest. Jimmy, a street guy from the South, who keeps his New York neighborhood honest.

The poems in her collection are equally wide ranging and surprising in style, range, and subject. There are lighthearted poems about a dying refrigerator and . Powerful purely imagistic poems like "After You Set Your Head on Fire" and "A Woman's Ass Is a Sometime Wondrous Moment." Love poems like "That You Will Awaken " and "Asking for Nothing." In "Newly Wed" a young freshly married couple can't wait to get home from work to do what a priest gave them the right to do.

After fifteen years in Vegas, dancing in one casino hotel after another, she realized there was more to life than doing leg kicks in a chorus line. She wanted to let her life just happen. Let life come at her. Let it be spontaneous. Let its path be accidental, like the ball in a pinball machine, sent off in new directions with new possibilities one bumper or flipper to the next. Sometimes the bumpers hurt. Sometimes the flippers were mean. But there was always another bumper. Always another flipper. And usually there was a man involved.

The pieces in her collection reflect the expanse, diversity, unpredictability, and poetic courage of that life. She has always loved writing. Whether the occasional poem, brief prose piece, or short story, it has been the one consistent and indestructible attribute of who she is. The one attribute that has never been accidental but has always held steady. From the slimness of this collection you can tell that she'd written only intermittently. She was always on the move. But writing held everything together for her.