“Shut the door on grief on regret on remorse.”Ī sense of wonder enlivens Berlin’s writing. “The only reason I have lived so long is that I let go of my past,” she wrote in a late story, “Homing,” after surviving her addictions. She willingly examined herself by the semi-fictional nature of what she wrote, so that without any religious fervour her work swells with spirit: a spirit of a secular order that is gentle but also ruthlessly self-apprehensive. I never met her, but we corresponded for a time late in her life (in addition to short stories, she wrote warm and enthusiastic personal letters) I hold dear the words she shared with me about my own writing, words she wrote me when she lived with her son in Los Angeles and when I was first learning to write, like her, from personal insight and experience.

While her life serves as the basic source material for her stories, Berlin has a profound ability to see through time’s accumulating moments as if peering through small windows she discovers the luminous details of a liquid self in steady dissolution. In addition to the charm that animates her style, a tremendous joy in close observation invigorates landscapes, characters, and situations. Her generosity to everyday people and situations, the playful treatments of her day-job employment in schools and hospitals, and the close scrutiny she gave to her alcohol dependence revealed a writer of penetrating self-insight and risk. I knew her writing thanks to three important books published by John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press in the 1990s: Homesick (1991), So Long (1993), and Where I Live Now (1999). Although Berlin began publishing when she was twenty-four in Saul Bellow’s journal, The Noble Savage, and in the Atlantic Monthly, New American Writing, and other small-press magazines, her work remained largely unknown except to a small but dedicated readership. She studied at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where she earned an M.A., and late in her life she taught as an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

When she died in 2004, Lucia Berlin had published seventy-seven short stories, survived years of domestic abuse and alcoholism, travelled extensively throughout both American continents, and worked as a high school teacher, switchboard operator, hospital ward clerk, cleaning woman, and physician’s assistant.

A manual for cleaning women