Susan Lowell – författare

Everyone knows the story of the three little pigs. This book features the three little javelinas - wild, southwestern cousins of pigs. Living in homes of built of tumbleweeds and cacti, the first two javelinas are soon running from the hungry coyote, who had hoped to eat them with red chili sauce. Where do they go for shelter?

Lavina Cumming has spent her entire first ten years of life on the Bosque Ranch in Arizona Territory, but when her mother dies, she must go live with her aunt in Santa Cruz, California.Armed with the Cumming family motto, “Courage,” Lavina starts off at dawn on September 16, 1905, leaving behind everything that is familiar. She arrives in a world of two-story houses, automobiles, a new school, and her cousin, “awful Aggie.” Trying her best to settle in, Lavina is as shocked as everyone else by the great earthquake that nearly demolishes the nearby city of San Francisco. In the aftermath of the quake, she must make a big decision about her future.Based on the true story of the author’s grandmother, I Am Lavina Cumming offers a compelling look at life in early twentieth-century California and a girl struggling to find her place there.

Winner of the George Garrett Fiction Prize, Susan Lowell’s Two Desperados is a collection of southwest-flavored stories that feature a blacksmith, several smugglers, a mule, a jaguar, a runaway groom, a murderess, a witch, a basket weaver, a Gremlin, three cowboys, and a ghost. Settings range from a grand university library to a construction site, from an apocalyptic dream world to the coyote-haunted banks of the Rio Grande. A novella called “Captain Death” traces a journalist’s odyssey along the U.S.-Mexico border. Another novella, “Two Desperados,” follows a prodigal daughter’s return to her eccentric Arizona home. And although they grapple with love and death, many members of this motley gang still manage to find sparkles in the darkness and a few crazy moments of grace. These eighteen stories play a few games with traditional short story form, but by and large they remain in the realism camp—yet it is realism tweaked or enlivened with an occasional sprinkle of magic or a small electric zap. In length they range from a few words to many pages, from the brief text of a bumper sticker to a full-scale novella. In the words of Apuleius, author of The Golden Ass: “Reader! Pay attention! You’re going to enjoy yourself!”