Why do I use the word blue some 66 times (the New York Times actually counted up the number, as an example of my excess? The L.A. Times, when it was still a newspaper of consequence, said I’d gone over the blue. Then they decided going for blue was more interesting than Didion’s white.).

Desert Blues is a short story in a book of 12 inter-connected short stories called Squandering the Blue. The idea was to write a short story collection that was so inter-connected, that the stories became more than the sum of their parts (if you don’t have that, you don’t really have a collection worthy of publication.) I thought of STB as being about the same characters/variations of the same characters. It moved through time, but it was essentially always a woman, who may or may not have a daughter, but is alone, in a tropical landscape, most often Los Angeles. My work has always been called “painterly” and I thought of it, these 12 stories, as being my 12-bar blues. I pay attention not only to the visual, but the auditory. So, blue is the poet’s secret for holding the 12 stories together. To make a book of short stories worthy of history, well, the last book of short stories (in English) that I know is Salinger’s 9. I love blue. It can be anything. I learned that from Pablo Nureda and the Spanish, Paz and Garcia Marquez, how water is all known things, or ocean, wind. I would use blue as all things, from the blue of the Mekong River (in the collection’s most famous story, Tall Tales From the Mekong Delta.) to the desert blues that loiter in the minds of delirious women in 120-degree heat. And what is the blue of the Mekong River, where my country lost its collective mind? It’s like all that can contain grandeur, by exquisite beauty and intelligence. The properties possible in blue only a poet knows, when you write for music and dream, all the crushed iris and what implies blue, all things fluid, tasting of rain, all that lagoons absorb, all that is delphinium, all the blue flowers, purple flowers, pewter flowers, all the hours, it is a blue hour, not 2 am, but blue am, then bruised am, broken am, and the clock it is midnight blue and we’re all out of time.
I combine all that is magnificent in blue (sails, breath, cobalt schools of amber thrashed butterflies) with 2 parts of what is ghastly. The blue of the skin of bomb victims.  Blue of the scared and scarred.

Blue has so many meanings. Strive for words with multiple associations. Built into the deliberate overuse of blue is one of its many meanings. Moody. To be in a bad mood, a sad mood. A colloquialism for being sad is being blue. Blue is considered a sacred color in all religions. It carries a history, a pedigree. Blue is a color of zone. Writing is about ambiguity, all the writing I read and all I write, is about not having a solution. There are no more easy or even reasonable answers. We don’t know. It’s a time of hoping for a gesture, even a grunt. We don’t have a vocabulary large enough to encompass our grief. (That’s in another STB story, I suggest you get that book). After a century when Europe thought it had answered, by thought and action, more than god. Then, as you know, those 2 world wars, the best and the brightest, consuming itself.  The writer could only speak in spasms, then formatting and demographics and the disappearance of entire professions. So blue is used to express all human strata, through the profound, through madness. The blue of knowing you live in a time when blue, the color of ink itself, is going into obsolescence. Look at my face. It’s an epic of tarnishing and dissolve. -- Kate Braverman.