United States of America
Lora Rivera hails from the University of Arizona with an MFA in Creative Writing. Her passion is to tell emotionally impacting stories that foster the kind of curiosity that drives action. She has found a home in the Sonoran Desert. It's monsooning here, and so smells electric of wet creosote, thin and far-off lightning, and blowing duff. Her published works run the gamut from fiction and poetry to lyric essay.
The Journey: Post-MFA, her internship at Claire Gerus Literary Agency catapulted her into a position as Associate Agent. Since 2008, she has worked largely for nonprofits and small businesses as a writer, editor, collaborator and communicator. She is equally adept at writing for the web and inter-organizational messaging as she is at long-form creative copy. She was the Senior Writer for Aviva’s Life Book Program from 2009 to 2013, and is presently the Senior E-Learning Developer at Ridgewood Interactive Communications.
She likes: prickly and soft things, rocks and climbing on them, people and connecting to them, milk in steam or cream form, and tiny ferns because they are old and slow to evolve and so must be very wise. Extracurricularly, she juggles: Presidency of a nonprofit climbing organization, noveling, and penning a collection of desert-themed vignettes.
For three years, no winter came to the pine forest. The boy was not expecting that, but he had not expected to fall through the glass globe, either, with his fingers outstretched, palms pressed against the cramped, concave terminus of his world.
Stories from the Drylands II: A Southern Arizona Climbing Anthology memorializes this time in climbing history for one pocket of a diverse and dynamic community. The collection gives voice to the myriad reasons that individuals of all skill levels, ages, genders, backgrounds, and socio-economic statuses come to rock climbing.
Black Dandy #1, featuring: George Salis, Charles Wilkinson, Guinotte Wise, Lora Rivera, Mason Boyles, Ed Hagelstein, Max Devoe Talley, Emily Linstrom, Eddie Jeffrey, Andrea J. Orton
All genres are created equal.
The jacket is the first thing to go. Turn on the heat, and a good hard hike up two flights of stairs to the classroom makes for two blushed cheeks, and spreading arms pull off the coat—a gift from a love so long ago now you cannot remember whether they preferred you make tea or coffee in the morning...
You are standing where an earthen vessel shattered and became the land once dissolved in hungry tongues of basalt grown still red-black boils roil and burst and freeze holding form the trajectory of long ago volcanic force. But not so long ago if you listen.
Mysterious machines, mangy coyotes, mad professors, murder sprees, bacterial puppet-masters, Clara Bow, Bettie Page, Bloody Mary, cool devils, cheerleaders from Hell, the ghost of James Joyce, sexual prayers: FLAPPERHOUSE X
Last night, while you slept, steam still curling from the teacup on your nightstand, we moved in the stillness that had descended upon the trail.
She stands in the grove, in the pecan tree's shadow, looks up - there the nest and there the silent crow. A slice of the first quarter moon sifts through black branches. And above, through the bruisy blue, through those gray and yellow cliffs and caves of clouds: moonslip and sink and sunder.
I never pass through Oak Ridge without visiting the old house. I invent excuses, hairdresser and nail appointments, implausible runs to the grocery store. I point to yard sale signs in nearby neighborhoods from which I can steal away on foot, or I grope in my purse for wads of bills and push them at my two children.
a web & print magazine of magic realism & slipstream
Voiceover / Audio Narration
Three stories, each in 66 words exactly. Endless possibilities. Graduation, Adriana, and First Contact.
Five stories, each in 66 words exactly. Endless possibilities.