Richard Wiley - The Grievers' GroupFrom Stay Thirsty Publishing

On St. Patrick’s Day in 1968, sixteen people sit in Pat’s Tavern, drink green beer, flirt, rib each other, and eventually go home in (mostly) different directions. In the stories that follow, which span 1958 to the present, Richard Wiley pops back into the lives of this colorful cast of characters—sometimes into their pasts, sometimes into their futures—and explores the ways in which their individual narratives indelibly weave together. At the heart of it all lies Tacoma, Washington, a town full of eccentricities and citizens as unique as they are universal. The Tacoma of Tacoma Stories might be harboring paranoid former CIA operatives and wax replicas of dead husbands, but it is also a place with all the joys and pains one could find in any town, anytime and anywhere.

Bob Stevenson

Dr. Ruby Okada meets Bob Stevenson, a charming man with a Scottish accent, in the elevator of her psychiatric hospital. Unaware that he is an escaping patient, she falls under his spell, and her life and his are changed forever by the time they get to the street.

The Book of Important Moments

Ruth Rhodes is suddenly confronted by the man who raped her four years earlier, and must come clean with both herself and her husband, while he negotiates the grief and mystery surrounding the murder of his own mother. The rapist, meanwhile, stands atop this narrative, telling his side of the story in diabolically captivating ways.

Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show

Two American minstrels visit Japan and get caught in Machiavellian machinations at the opening of the country in 1854.

Soldiers in Hiding

American Jazz musicians drafted into the Japanese army during World War II. Pen/Faulkner Award winner.

Fools' Gold

World travelers meet and clash in Nome, Alaska at the end of the 19th Century.

Festival for Three Thousand Maidens

The raucous tale of a mid-1960s Peace Corps Volunteer living in a Korean Village.

Indigo

American school principal involves himself in Nigerian intrigue and politics.

Ahmed's Revenge

Ivory and animals on a Kenyan farm. Out of Africa in the modern age.

Interviews, etc

Reno Gazette Interview

About Race and Gender

Interview

by J.J. Wylie

Bibliography of Peace Corps Writers

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The Grievers' Group
From Stay Thirsty Publishing

The Grievers' Group by Richard Wiley, winner of the Pen Faulkner Award for Fiction

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Three evenings a week the North End Grievers' Group meets in Tacoma, Washington, at the home of its therapist, a woman with her own bizarre life story. The group has six members who mourn their losses in vastly different ways: one is suicidal and terribly difficult to like; another joined the group under suspicious circumstances, while yet a third serves up stories of a lifelong series of love affairs. One has won a lot of money in Las Vegas while trying to loosen the grip of grief's talons, one drives around town in her dead husband's brand-new Porsche; and the last caused the death of a loved one – personally delivering it from the barrel of a gun.

Loss, regret, guilt, damage, heartbreak, and despair are the emotions that simmer in each of their bereavements. Yet, at times, everything seems comic – probably because tragedy and comedy are so intertwined that tears can turn into laughter or laughter into tears in the blink of an eye.

The Grievers' Group lets you peer beneath the surface of these people to see how they handle grief, a part of life that everyone must confront at some point.

About Richard Wiley

Richard Wiley is the author of numerous stories and the novels Soldiers In Hiding (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Best American Fiction), Fools' Gold, Festival for Three Thousand Maidens, Indigo, Ahmed's Revenge (winner of the Maria Thomas Fiction Award), Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show ("The best book you've never heard of!"-anonymous), The Book of Important Moments, Bob Stevenson, and Tacoma Stories.

The Grievers' Group is his ninth novel and his tenth work of fiction.

Richard has lived and worked in Korea (where he was a Peace Corps volunteer), Japan, Nigeria and Kenya. And for twenty-six years he was a professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Many of his stories are taken from those experiences. With Tacoma Stories and The Grievers' Group, he has set his fiction in the Pacific Northwest.

Richard Wiley is professor emeritus of English and a board member of Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He now lives in Los Angeles, California.