Valley Writers: 'Suburban Love Stories'
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
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The room was packed and full of laughter as Karelia Stetz-Waters told tales of growing up and discovering her sexuality.
The Valley Writers Series event for fall term featured Karelia Stetz-Waters, a writing teacher at Linn-Benton Community College, reading from her works. The event took place Thursday, Nov. 5, in North Santiam Hall, Room 209. At the beginning of the event Amy Earls, LBCC’s poet laureate, read from her poetry.
Stetz-Waters read a chapter from her memoir, “Suburban Love Stories,” and a chapter from her new fiction book, “Throwing from the Lie.” After the reading she answered questions about her work and her quest to get her books in print.
Currently neither of the books are published, but her agent is in the process of selling her memoir. The fiction book was just finished in the last few weeks.
Stetz-Waters said she chose to read the particular chapter from her memoir because “the thing that I like best about my own writing is the blend of pretty bold, campy humor mixed right in with fairly serious ideas and poetic language, and I thought this was the best example of those two in the same chapter.”
In this chapter Stetz-Water describes her experiences with high school sex education class, her very sexually active friend and her first kiss with a boy. The kiss was so perfect she decided that she had gotten it right, and thus never needed to repeat it.
“I loved how she uses comedy and makes you laugh when she reads her own writing,” said Sarah Riley, a psychology student at LBCC.
“It gave us aspiring mess-pool of unregistered authors a chance to talk to someone of a bigger name than us,” said Benjamin Brumbaugh, an LBCC student who hopes to become an author someday.
He found the event interesting because Stetz-Waters shared a lot of useful information about getting published and how that works.
Although he found the event useful, he added, “I’m not a fan of gays and lesbians, to be frank … I’ll probably never read or touch one of her books.”
Stetz-Waters said she would be disappointed that someone would not read her work because of that, but she could think of 20 things she would not be interested in reading, and gave the example of motocross. Not because she thinks it is bad, but because she is just not interested.
She has experienced some prejudice in her life because of her sexual orientation, but she says it’s been significantly less than people would expect and not as much as others have experienced.
Her memoir fills a need that she said has not been met. While most gay or lesbian memoirs focus on the prejudices and discrimination that people have experienced, hers does not because she feels that she was accepted and protected by her family, friends, church and others in the community.
“We gravitate to stories of horrible things done by horrible people, and we forget how many really good people are just going through every day being kind, being decent, being open-minded. We don’t give them enough play. So the memoir really is a tribute to those people,” Stetz-Waters said.
On top of the readings she also talked about how much she writes and her plans for the future. She said that during the summer she writes about eight hours a day, and during the school year she tries to do at least eight hours each week.
She said she plans to start writing another fiction novel right away. Currently her idea for this one would be a paranormal setting where students at a college attempt to summon a great dark force as their thesis project. Then the book would follow a band of unlikely heroes as they attempt to save the day from this summoned evil.
“I love the capability of literature to transcend demographic boxes and to tell stories that are appealing because of who we are as human beings, not just straight or gay, white or black, male or female,” Stetz-Waters said.
Comment
Max, I love your article. You are a great reporter, and it was a pleasure to be your subject for the day.
— Karelia Stetz-Waters · Nov 12, 08:55 PM · #
This reading was fantastic and I applaud Karelia for her work. There is no doubt in my mind that there is a place for Suburban Love Stories in the literary world and in due time, we will see it on local bookshelves. Thank you, Karelia for your courage and for your incredible words of wisdom, wit, and progress in the face of ignorance.
— Charlotte Otto · Nov 13, 10:55 AM · #
This is a beautifully fair and even handed article. It’s so nice to read non-sensationalist qgblt news.
— Kenna Warsinske · Nov 15, 11:18 PM · #
Commenting is closed for this article.
