Memory's Fire

E. A. Gray has published work in a number of genres and venues, under this and her common name, Lisa Gray Fisher. Her poetry has appeared in diverse journals, ranging from the Parisian zine Breakfast All Day to The Christian Science Monitor, Mediphors, and War, Literature, and the Arts. By summers (and now full-time) a writer, during the school-year season Gray has been an English teacher at Santa Fe Community College and for most of her career, at Santa Fe Preparatory School, where she headed the English department for twenty years. Earlier, she worked as an editor at the trade division of Houghton Mifflin in Boston and as a drama teacher, both of which experiences proved invaluable in the English classroom. Gray's inventive electives became a hallmark of her multifaceted work at Santa Fe Prep, courses such as Rebels, Outcasts, and Imposters, The Darkness Within, The Soul of Wit, Awakened Voices, On the Road, and Hinges of Light. The thinking she did with so many brilliant students in her classes, and all that she learned from and with them, serve as the foundation for Memory's Fire. Gray's love of the Southwest is endemic. Raised in Colorado, she and her husband Rick, in turn, raised their children in New Mexico, across a state borderline that does not interrupt the flow of rivers or run of mountains. The immense land- and sky-scapes of this region are embedded in Memory's Fire, beloved by her characters as they are by her. At present, the fragility of the Southwest under the onslaught of climate crisis is a constant source of anguish that triggers an advance nostalgia for what may well be lost.