Profile of Cathryn Alpert

Her father directed "Maverick," "77 Sunset Strip," "The Twilight Zone,"
and every "Green Acres" ever made. She has a Ph.D. in Theater from UCLA and has been both a director and teacher. Her first novel, Rocket City, earned her a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 1997. But ask Cathryn Alpert what really gets her excited, and she'll tell you it's adoption. "Adoption has been my life for the last three years. As a child, I knew absolutely that someday I would adopt. I guess when my mother told me to eat my peas because children were starving in India, I took her seriously." Cathryn and her husband, who have raised two sons by birth, are now the parents of Senna, from Vietnam, and Sofia, from India. "It's like they've always been a part of us, and in a way, they have." For both adoptions, Cathryn and her husband traveled to their daughters' birth countries. "The Ho Chi Minh Museum is probably the most surreal thing I've ever seen – imagine 'Worker Industrial meets Rod Serling on acid.'" Cathryn's award-winning short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies including O. Henry Festival Stories, Best of the West 5, and Walking the Twilight: Women Writers of the Southwest; she also pens book reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle and is at work on a second novel.

Chapter one of Rocket City begins,
     Three melons and a dwarf sat in the front seat of Marilee’s ’72 Dodge, but the cop was not amused. "I’d get rid of that bumper sticker if I was you," he said. "Folks ‘round here, they’re proud of their history." Marilee’s bumper sticker said, "One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day." Wrong place, wrong time. This spot on the road crossing While Sands Missile Range was fifty miles southwest of Alamogordo.

Chapter one of Rocket City ends,
    Marilee gazed up into the desert night—so many stars it would take a lifetime to count. She felt Enoch’s gnarled body bobbing close to hers in the water. So close, yet separate. Different, and alone. A strange silence took hold of her. Night silence. Water silence. Star silence. She threw her head back and let the water wash over her face, fill her eyes, stream out the corners of her mouth. Liquid smooth as desert sand. Liquid cool as starlight. She felt intoxicated by the water, the darkness, the explosion of stars. This is crazy, she thought.
     Crazy and real.

Read Cune's profile of Rocket City