Susan Straight had a front-row seat to the impacts of COVID-19, from the window of her home in Riverside’s Wood Streets.
During COVID-19, nurses working shifts at Riverside Community Hospital lived in RVs or rented rooms near the hospital, which is in Straight’s neighborhood.
“They would walk by my house for their 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. shifts,” Straight recalled at a Nov. 19 Culver Center of the Arts event marking the release of her book, “Sacrament.”
From this experience, Straight summoned a novel about a fictional group of ICU nurses at a San Bernardino hospital in 2020. They camp out in RVs near the hospital, separated from spouses and children by the pandemic.
Straight, a creative writing professor at UC Riverside since 1988, noted the deep COVID-19 impact on Riverside County. The region was No. 3 in the nation for infections at one point, Straight said, “because people had to keep working in the fields and in the warehouses.”
“People in my community died,” Straight said. Referencing the quarantines that kept dying patients isolated from family members, she said, “I wanted to write about the idea that people weren’t alone, but they were alone.”
The Culver Center event might well have been called “Susan Straight and Friends,” as it featured an on-stage discussion with two others who have close ties to Southern California, UCR colleague and author Alex Espinoza, and Inland Empire politician Jose Medina. In the background, KUCR deejay and Superior Court judge Jorge Hernandez played R&B oldies referenced in the book.
“This is my big deal; my coming home,” said Straight, a National Book Award finalist, Guggenheim Fellow, and Kirsch Award winner who has been on a national tour to promote her new novel, her 10th, which has been featured on the New York Times books page and in The Washington Post . The LA Times wrote “Sacrament” is “her best novel yet.”
The subject matter of Straight’s books is Southern California – mostly Inland Southern California - and her Inland Empire roots run deep. She is a graduate of North High School who sings the North fight song as a lullaby to her grandchild. Straight has been called “the bard of overlooked California.”
“My reason for being on this earth is to write about Riverside and San Bernardino and Orange County and Coachella,” she said at the Culver Center event, which drew about 75 people, about a third of whom she referenced by name during her talk.
“Your use of the geography of the region is real,” commented Medina, a Riverside County supervisor who named Straight Woman of the Year in 2021 for the 61st District when he was a member of the California State Assembly.
Added Espinosa, UCR’s Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair and a professor of creative writing: “There is something in the soil here.”
