Falling Room

Coming of age poor in spirit in the America of plenty is an old story and yet endlessly new, beginning afresh every time a confused teenager tries to make sense of his privileged place in the world. Eli Hastings got a head start when his idealistic, permissive parents divorced, and he sought answers by sneaking out at night to play chicken with freight trains, write graffiti, and get high with friends. This youthful rebellion included the mild inconvenience of an arrest and weekend in jail for drug possession as well as days of brutality in the streets and then jail for an intentional act of civil disobedience. This is the story Hastings tells in "Falling Room", a tale of how one young man matures through the sometimes violent blessing of social change and finds himself - and a sense of purpose - through the loss of innocence and naivete, the Seattle of his youth, and his father. In seventeen narrative essays, Hastings recounts how a privileged, white, fiercely leftist American male tries to make sense of himself in relation to the contrary people and situations he finds in books and his travels to Cuba and Central America. Hastings's story, reflecting the firsthand experience of hip-hop and substance abuse, of the fracturing of family and of the imperialism of the United States, offers a new and moving look at how families, nations, and individuals survive and heal. Eli Hastings is a Seattle native who now lives in Barcelona, Spain. He received an MFA in creative non-fiction from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and has published in numerous literary journals, including Third Coast, Whetstone, and Cimarron Review. He has worked in food service and retail sales, as a creative writing teacher and a manual labourer, as a Get-Out-the-Vote coordinator and a health care and utilities campaign coordinator.