About the Book: These eleven stories, set in the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle, look into the hearts of characters who want desperately to find love and talk intimately about their fears, their desires. But things go wrong. Conversations break off. People leave or make an outrageous demand or start an affair that flames out of control. In the title story, a writer discovers that the afternoon his careless mother dove from a cliff into Lake Crescent has sunk into his bones. Closed his soul. The secret grip of that day is lost to him until a new lover sees that his biggest obstacle is his own heart.
Lake Crescent is a huge, deep lake in the Olympic National Forest four hours west of Seattle. Jumping into the water is like speeding through burning liquid ice. I am not brave, but when I was twenty, I lived alone through the summer in a one-room cabin near the edge of the lake. This astonishes me still. There was no phone, no heat, not a soul around. My family in Seattle was on a slow roll of breaking up, my boyfriend was in California, and at night, I asked myself how big a window had to be for a cougar to climb in. Or an axe murderer. In the evening, we college kids with jobs at the national park gathered at the small pebbled beach. Cold trees like giant, indifferent gods towered over us as we lay on our backs, our heads on a log, and scanned the Pleiades for shooting stars. At the edge of that glacial lake, I started to write and to piece together the spirit that would become myself.
About the Author: Pamela Gullard is an author and teacher living in Menlo Park, California. Her latest collection of short stories, Lake Crescent and Other Spirits, was published by Galileo Press 9 July 2025! Her stories have appeared in the North American Review, Arts and Letters, The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Her short story collection, Breathe at Every Other Stroke, published by Henry Holt, appeared in Kindle format in 2014. She has also written, with Nancy Lund, three city histories, showing in microcosm how the booming economy of the 19th century led to Silicon Valley.
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