Spotlight on author Elison Alcovendaz

Spotlight on author Elison Alcovendaz
by Sue Staats

Ever wonder how Stories on Stage Sacramento finds its writers? It’s a varied process, but they’re all writers we admire, and want to share with our Sacramento audience. I love the stories of how they come to us. Sometimes, it’s the surprise of a brilliant story submitted out of the blue.  Sometimes, it’s the sneaky appearance of great work by someone we didn’t even know was a writer. Sometimes, it’s somebody very famous who, unexpectedly, says yes to your shot-in-the-dark, what-the-hell invitation. And some, like Elison Alcovendaz, have been on our radar for a long time.

Nearly ten years ago, Elison was Stories on Stage Sacramento co-director Shelley Blanton-Stroud’s student, as he began his MFA program at Sac State.  Two years ago, one of his stories was accepted for our anthology, Twenty Twenty: 43 Stories From a Year Like No Other. And now, he’s been selected as one of the featured writers for our November 2022 event. Which proves that, for a writer, persistence counts! 

Elison holds down a full-time job with the state as the head of a data governance department,  and is married, with two young children.  In a Zoom call last week, we talked about what inspired him to begin writing again (here’s a hint: Harry Potter,) how writing about a difficult family time opened up a whole new writing vista for him, and how he was, very nearly, a pro basketball star.  And also about how, because of the demands of his job and family, writing time is precious, and how he’s found a way to make it count.
 
Sue:  
Tell me about the unique way you manage to continue your writing life, in spite of a demanding job and two very young children.
 
Elison:  
Well, in a word, Instagram (link to his Instagram account below). One of the reasons I like the Instagram world of poetry is that it’s not something I need to sit down for two to three hours to do. I don’t have to work on something longer. Although I do miss that and strive for that. My Instagram writing account is a way for me to stay connected to writing and to a writing community. I can do it in 10 to 20 minutes, usually, and people are really supportive. So it feels like I'm still involved and still engaged and still progressing, without needing to put that extra stress in my of finding three hours to work on a book. And I’ve got two young kids now too. So that's pretty much impossible at this point.
 
Sue:
You’ve published a book of poems and short fiction, The Evolution of Love, which has a great cover, by the way. How did you manage to complete that? 
 
Elison:
I have to admit that the book is sort of audience driven, you could almost call it crowdsourcing. On the Instagram account I've got close to 16,000 followers at this point, and they're very engaged, and they give me a lot of feedback as to what they like and what they don't like. And at the time that I was growing the account, what seemed to be the most popular were these relationship, love, breakup, young love, young breakup, sort of pieces that I was just sort of experimenting with. So when they started asking for a book, I thought, well, this is what they like, I'm going to put these together and create a narrative structure. It was put together with that audience in mind.
 
Sue:
But it reads like it’s overlaid with your own more mature, better realized idea of love and marriage and a long-term relationship.
 
Elison:
Right. And I think people reading the book will see pieces of that. Not in the first two sections, but in the third, there’s some poems about the day-to-day life of being married, and about deeper love,  and how it’s not always easy. But I’ll be honest, some of the others are from when I was younger. You know,  when I was a hot headed teenager, thinking I was God's gift. 
 
Sue:
How has writing in this small, compact format shaped your writing? 
 
Elison:
I never understood poetry until I was in the creative writing program.  But it’s something that the medium demands. When you're on Instagram, and people are scrolling, and they're looking at images, it’s a challenge to get someone’s attention with text, with just words. It was a nice challenge to give to myself to say, okay, how am I going to actually get someone to stop and read this. So, the work has to be more simplistic, and language has to be sort of finite.  The poems are ambiguous on purpose, because I think that, unlike someone who's reading a short story or a novel and wants all the details, the people on the platform, who are reading my work, really want to add their own life to it, right away. If they don't connect to it right away, they’re not going to read it. They're not going to follow me. They're not going to buy the book. 

Sue:
On your website you have a wonderful collection of your favorite books. I love how you not only list them, but tell us why they’re your favorites, and what they’ve meant to you in your life. My favorite, I think is your listing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, because it is the book that made you want to write. Really? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? (as you say, it’s not even the best Harry Potter!)  Tell me why this particular book had that effect on you.
 
Elison:
Well, I actually loved writing as a kid. But come from a Filipino background, and in my culture, pursuing the arts is not really something you do. So I gave it up. And then, after college, I was playing in a poker tournament at home with a bunch of my cousins and I was the first one out. My aunt had brought the book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, to my cousin’s house.  And since I was out first, I just picked up the book and started reading.  I hadn't read any of the others first, but I stayed up that whole night, and the following day, and into the next night, reading the book. I was like wow, this is such an amazing experience that someone could hold my attention like this, and give me all of these feelings, and transport me to another place. And oh, wait.  I remember I used to do this. I used to write as a kid, I used to love doing it. And I'd like to try that again. 
 
Sue:
I’ll bet most writers have a book that inspired them to start writing, or to take it up again. I know I do.  

But it’s not that book that inspired the stories to be read at Stories on Stage – these stories draw on your own life, your own experience. “Tomorrowland” and “Basketball and Breasts” and other pieces, all draw on your experience you and your wife went through of a particularly difficult and prolonged miscarriage. It seems a particularly tough and intimate topic. And I'm wondering if these were hard stories to write.
 
Elison:
I started writing them to work my way out of my grief, you know, to have a pathway out. And then I was at the Squaw Valley Writers Conference for nonfiction and shared an early draft of that ABCs of miscarriage piece. (“A Man’s ABC’s of Miscarriage,” published in The Rumpus in 2016) And the women in the group were this is amazing. We need this perspective. You never hear about how this is for men. And so I started digging further and writing more. I actually have a memoir that I'm working on about this. And many of the scenes are taken from there.  And from the Rumpus piece, I’ve gotten so many  emails from people just saying thanks for writing this, this gives me insight into what my husband is going through.  I was contacted by a lot of different people, and was interviewed for a podcast. It just opened up a lot of things for people, because it's not something people talk about. But then, it was very tough.
 
Sue:
I would imagine, because it’s always seen, and written about, as the woman’s experience, but really the lost child is also the husband’s. Then, too, the man is usually the caretaker and has to stifle everything. You write about all of this so well. You’ve talked about the public response. How did your family respond to these writings?
 
Elison:
I didn’t write about it till I got my wife's, and I wrote about that in the ABC’s. She was totally supportive, because she hadn’t been in a place where she could be there for me in the way that I needed. So she said yes, this is what you need, go do it. My immediate family were very supportive. My friends were all supportive of me writing about it, and they knew that I needed it to get out of my grief. But I think there were a few who weren’t happy with the way things were portrayed. But I guess that's par for the course when you're writing nonfiction.
 
Sue:
You’ve mentioned the Filipino culture you come from. Were you born in the Philippines?
 
Elison:
No, I was born here. My parents moved here a year before I was born.
 
Sue:
I was wondering why, at least in the work of yours that I have read, that there isn’t a lot of evidence of that Filipino culture. Is that a conscious decision you’ve made as a writer?
 
Elison:
I think for these pieces I was trying to make it more like universally, male experience, and not necessarily specifically a Filipino experience. I have published other things that are more about my culture, but when it came to the miscarriages, culture didn't really play into it much. 
 
Sue:
Who you think you most resemble as a writer? What writers do you emulate?
 
Elison:
Raymond Carver. I mean, it’s funny, because the book is nearly all poetry, but I have never considered myself to be a poet. I never understood poetry until I was in the creative writing program at Sac State. And I always consider myself a prose writer. And so initially, when it came back to writing, it was all short stories. And they were all very Carver-esque. I read a lot of George Saunders and Lydia Davis, so some of the flash fiction pieces that I've had published are surreal like that, anchored in every day, and then magical, strange things happen.  I would never say that I resemble Carver. He's great. I think he was probably the person who influenced me the most.
 
Sue:
You write fiction, you write nonfiction, you write poetry.  Which of these do you enjoy most?
 
Elison:
The writing that I'm most excited about is, actually, literary fiction. That’s my dream, and I do have a book that I'm working on, centered around my family. It's about my grandma dying. And her eight adult children sitting around her bed telling stories, and disagreeing about how these stories went. The grandma has this huge secret – this is all fictionalized – and the secret is revealed as her children are piecing together all these stories. 
 
Sue:
They each have a piece of the truth.
 
Elison:
Exactly. And that's one of the themes to it is that there's this overarching, familial truth that we really have to communicate and talk to each other to build and understand. And that's what I get most excited about writing. It's also the one that I am avoiding the most because it's the hardest to write. And so when I sit down, even if I have an hour, I'm usually working on some more poems, or my young adult novel. I don't want say those are easy to write, but they're easier. And they require less of me.
 
Sue:
I have to ask you about something completely different. It’s basketball. What about that career as a pro basketball player you almost had?
 
Elison:
Yeah, true story. So after high school, I got an offer to play professionally in the Philippines. Don't get me wrong, I was good enough to play there. I was a pretty good basketball player. But the reason they even knew about me was my uncle was involved with the team, and he was like, we'll get you a house, you’ll have a maid, they'll iron your underwear, you'll have a great life, and if you get really good and become popular, and you can be in movies and all this stuff. But I was just an 18 year old kid who was scared to leave home. You know, I try not to have regrets. But I wonder what if.
 
Sue:
Well, what if? Suppose you had said yes. What do you imagine your life would have been? Like?
 
Elison:
You know, I think probably, honestly, it probably wouldn't have lasted very long. I probably would have come back to Sacramento. And, I probably would have followed he same path, gone back to school,  found an old passion that I had pursued as a kid, and pursue it again. Interestingly, I met my wife in the very first creative writing class I took when I decided to come back to school. So a lot of things fell into play. I think it would probably be the same, to be honest, just a little bit later. 
 
Sue:
Do you still play basketball?
 
Elison:
I don't. I tore my Achilles eight or nine years ago and haven't really gotten back to it. I coached for a while at Christian Brothers, my alma mater. So I'd like to get back to either coaching or playing.  My friends all say, come back, come back. You can just stay on the three point line and shoot threes. You don't have to run. But I worry that my brain will tell me I can do things that my body can’t do. So no, no more basketball. Now I write.
 
Excellent choice, Elison. And, it’s a game you’ll never age out of! 
 
Some links to Elison’s website, Instagram writing page, and the work published in The Rumpus
https://elisonalcovendaz.com/
https://www.instagram.com/elisonwrites/
https://therumpus.net/2016/10/12/a-mans-abcs-of-miscarriage/
 
Edited for length and clarity

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