In Orange County, of All Places: On Some Final Beauty

I am not from Orange County.

I grew up in and around Los Angeles and indeed, many of the stories in my collection Some Final Beauty and Other Stories are set there, in the places where I first learned the value of community.

But now, at age sixty-four, I have worked and lived in Orange County longer than L.A. – teaching at Irvine Valley College for thirty-three years and living in beautiful Modjeska Canyon for over twenty. My collection feature stories inspired by this place and its people too.

I am grateful to this county that has given me so much, especially a career and a neighborhood where I have been able to actively practice the values of community, in the classroom, in the streets and in our canyons. Indeed, the final story I wrote for the collection, “We Told You So,” is set in the canyons. It’s the longest story and shows what can be done in the face of great loss when we come together across our differences. It is, indeed, a story written for where we are now, as a people and perhaps as a country.

The stories in this, my debut fiction collection, were written and published in small literary journals over the period of a decade. Many at the college, in the community, and in my summer life one of the nation’s oldest seasonal writing conference --- the Community of Writers in Olympic Valley --- have encouraged me and heard me read them.

I do mean it when I say that without these communities, I am not sure I would have persevered. Returning every summer to the conference and every fall to the classroom renewed my faith in writing and my desire to produce what so many others have, that particularly satisfying object: a book.

Sharing how these stories finally became a book may be instructive to some out there writing their own stories, piecing together their own collections.

Years ago, I first imagined a collection of stories each embodied by various political activists modeled after the wonderful women I knew in the 1980s.  I had the best girlfriends! They did so much good work at the same time they were living full, complicated lives. I was encouraged to finally boldly follow the advice I received from Grace Paley at the only other writing workshop I ever attended, the Women’s Voices writing conference at UC Santa Cruz. Paley instructed me to find and write the stories that I and only I could write featuring characters I had not seen represented before. That’s your work, Grace said, popping her seemingly ever-present bubble gum. Don’t try to write like anyone else. Find your stories.Your people. So, I did. Readers will find them too, young activists finding their voices and their footing.

Later I re-conceived the stories as a more sprawling ekphrastic collection, rooted in and commenting on the Ocean Park neighborhood I once shared with the artist Richard Diebenkorn. This framework fit with the earlier stories but gave me more room to develop other characters and to explore what it means for a writer to be in dialogue with an artist, especially an abstract expressionist artist like Diebenkorn. I found inspiration in his color palette, in his relationship to community and in his “Notes to Myself on Beginning a Painting,” especially the first one: “Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.” Diebenkorn’s instructions helped me write stories that embraced uncertainty. When I first submitted the manuscript, its title was an homage to him: Ocean Park and other Neighborhoods.

Finally, I recognized that what really bound the stories together was, first, their focus on setting, and theme and reoccurring characters. This is reflected in the title, Some Final Beauty, which is simultaneously sad, ironic, and aspirational. Plus, of course, the affirming realization that I had written all of them! I was having lots of realizations then. It came with getting older. I was writing, publishing here and there, but what of it? Finally, I counted what I had – eleven stories - and decided, yes, I had a collection. It cohered. And setting aside the old dreams of an agent or a contest, over the course of a frantic week before yet another semester of teaching began, I put together a manuscript, quietly, all on my own, and sent it out to two independent publishers whose work I respected.

When the collection was accepted by the University of Nevada Press in late 2023, I imagined these stories would be somewhat nostalgic and dated, tales of community activists and organizers from the Reagan 1980s to the first Trump administration: people trying to do the right thing in difficult circumstances.

I imagined that these stories would be perhaps instructive and wistful, and a reminder of the long-gone and perhaps forgotten terrors of reactionary politics if, indeed also chronicling the righteous resistance of good people.

But apparently, resistance is timeless. Here we are. Hello George Santayana.

Those who cannot forget the past are doomed to write about it.

Often at my readings I share the opening pages of “Manuel,” a story born of a challenge presented to me three years ago in the free community workshop at Chapman University with Richard Bausch, who encouraged me to write a different kind of story from the others he had seen. He encouraged me to set the tale in my familiar Los Angeles, but to place it in a past I’d never lived in and to try on a different POV but still stay true to my activist themes and love of people struggling together. Richard’s encouragement empowered me to explore these themes of class struggle and racial and ethnic identity and communities in coalition in the 1940s, a moment in our nation, and in a post-war Los Angeles when and where workers, women, Black and brown people, as today, discovered one another and often indeed joined together. I imagine Grace Paley would approve.

Here's my recent podcast interview with host Jon Saviano, who does me the terrific honor of reading the entire short story at the conclusion of this episode of his Short Story Today show.

Many of my Irvine Valley College creative writing workshop students, fellow writers, and Community of Writers participants will have heard how challenging it is to find a good home for a story collection, especially a debut. As I quipped to writer Molly Giles, I seem to have done the near impossible: placed a book of stories as a debut female author over the age of sixty. Indeed, when the book was published, I became that rare bird: a debut author at age sixty-four. A life dream come true.

In publishing this delusional collection, gently shaped by the advice of Paley, Diebenkorn, and Bausch, a kind of joyful certainty has indeed arrived. A delusion is, after all, a belief that conflicts with reality. I see that I have captured something of an under-appreciated reality, both on the page and in life, and much of that life lived lately in Orange County, of all places.

Lisa Alvarez’s debut collection of short fiction, Some Final Beauty and other Stories was published in August 2025 by the University of Nevada Press, as part of their New Oeste series. Her poetry and prose have appeared in journals including Air/Light, Anacapa Review, Huizache, So It Goes, and in anthologies including most recently, Rumors, Secrets and Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice (Anhinga Press) and Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters (Stanford University Press) edited by David Kipen. She has edited three anthologies including Why to These Rocks: 50 years of Poetry from the Community of Writers (Heyday). She teaches at Irvine Valley College where she co-directs the Puente Program.  She co-directs the Writers Workshops at the Community of Writers and serves as Assistant to the Poetry Director.