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THIRTEEN WAYS
OF LOOKING AT Anthologist Steven Gilbar brings together stories set in his home town, forming a composite portrait that spans five decades and all walks of life. What is special about Santa Barbara, California? Is it the weather? The scenery? The rich cultural history and the quaint architecture? Whatever the attraction, Santa Barbara has become home to artists of all sorts, including an impressive roster of fiction writers. Of the many writers who have lived in Santa Barbara since World War II, surprisingly few have set their fiction in Santa Barbara, and even fewer have written and published short stories about the California Riviera. Steven Gilbar has collected what he considers the thirteen best examples of the "Santa Barbara story." The first thing to notice is that these stories are not about weather, scenery, cultural history, or quaint architecture. They are, like all good short stories, about people. It's true that the stories are placed in familiar scenery: the sandy beaches, the fancy hotels, the Fiesta parades, the mountain cabins, the trendy bars and lower State Street dives. But the people we meet in these stories are a cross-section of society in any small American city. Here you'll find wealthy neurotics and homeless psychotics; academics and poets, busboys and winos; lovers and spouses, losers and louses; athletes, musicians, detectives and psychics. Santa Barbara Stories is about people who happen to be Santa Barbarans, but they could live just as comfortably (or uncomfortably) in any small American city, regardless of the landscape. In fact one of the joys of this collection is that it does away with clichés about Santa Barbara and its population. It provides a good tour of this tourist town, but the reader will finish the collection having learned mainly about people, and about situations that never make it to the postcards and travel brochures. About the contributors. Some of the authors in this collection have written best-sellers and earned prestigious literary awards. Others are less famous, and a few are known mainly to their colleagues in the Santa Barbara writing community. Some are writers in transition. (Catherine Ryan Hyde, for example, signed a six-figure film/book deal with Simon & Schuster for her second novel, just prior to the publication of Santa Barbara Stories.) Each is a superb writer in his or her own way, and each has added to the composite cityscape that this book presents as a backdrop of thirteen individual and haunting tales. About the Editor. Steven Gilbar is an attorney specializing in literary law. He is the founder/producer of "Speaking of Stories," a program of performed fiction. He is also a list-maker, a collector of literature. His many anthologies include Good Books; The Open Door-When Writers First Learned to Read; Reading in Bed-Familiar Essays on the Pleasure of Reading; Tales of Santa Barbara-From Native Storytellers to Sue Grafton; and Natural State-A Literary Anthology of California Nature Writing. |
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