Drift, Victoria Patterson's sly and subversive short-stories expose the underlying misery and crisis in the ostensible Elysium of Newport Beach, California. Rosie, a troubled teenager who grows up to be an alcoholic college student, acts as the story's common thread, and the cast of characters she encounters includes an addled drifter, a lesbian psychologist who falls for Rosie's mother, a duplicitous trophy wife, and a damaged but wise transvestite.

Ms. Patterson is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in various literary journals, including The Southern Review, Santa Monica Review and The Florida Review.

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Vicki Forman gave birth to Evan and Ellie, weighing just a pound at birth, at twenty-three weeks’ gestation. During the delivery she begged the doctors to "let her babies go" — she knew all too well that at twenty-three weeks they could very well die and, if they survived, they would face a high risk of permanent disabilities. However, California law demanded resuscitation. Her daughter died just four days later; her son survived and was indeed multiply disabled: blind, nonverbal, and dependent on a feeding tube.

This Lovely Life tells, with brilliant intensity, of what became of the Forman family after the birth of the twins — the harrowing medical interventions and ethical considerations involving the sanctity of life and death. In the end, the longdelayed first steps of a five-year-old child will seem like the fist-pumping stuff of a triumph narrative. Forman’s intelligent voice gives a sensitive, nuanced rendering of her guilt, her anger, and her eventual acceptance in this portrait of a mother’s fierce love for her children.

Vicki Forman’s work has appeared in the Seneca Review and the Santa Monica Review as well as the anthologies, Love You To Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child With Special Needs, and Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined. For several years, Forman wrote the popular column, “Special Needs Mama” at Literary Mama. Her memoir, This Lovely Life, received the 2008 Bakeless Prize in Creative Nonfiction.