The Light Here Changes Everything (Signature Series Limited Edition): A Novella

by Patrick Stockwell

Overview

Sophie has managed to keep herself clean for a full year. Now, against her sponsor’s advice, she’s agreed to a road trip with her boyfriend Sid, who sees the journey as a chance to recapture their past. As they make their way from Houston across Texas and the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, Sophie quickly learns that it’s not easy being sober trapped in a car with someone who’s living the life you’re fighting to leave behind. Bar brawls, automatic weapons, and hidden stashes of liquor complicate things even further as Sophie struggles to discover who she’s supposed to be in this new beginning. As they move farther from home, the few lifelines she has left become strained, and even phone calls to her sponsor don’t seem to be enough to squelch the chaos. Sophie’s new life is in danger of collapse, and with Sid around to pour gas on the fire there doesn’t seem to be anything she can do to stop it—unless she can learn what it means to get better.  The Light Here Changes Everything is a story of addiction—to alcohol, to people, to patterns—that, at its heart, seeks to understand why we stay in situations that no longer serve our needs.
 
Winner of The 2018 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, selected by Clay Reynolds
 
The Signature Series comprises signed, numbered, limited edition, hardcover reprints of select titles from the TRP backlist. Books in this series feature clothbound covers with foil stamping and exclusive cover designs, which are variants to the standard paperback edition. Each book in the Signature Series is limited to 100 hand-numbered copies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781680033656
Publisher:	Texas Review Press
Publication date:	04/10/2024
Series:	The Signature Series
Edition description:	Special edition, Limited edition, Numbered edition
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

PATRICK STOCKWELL is an Inprint MD Anderson Foundation fellow and PhD candidate in fiction at the University of Houston. His work can be found in Gulf Coast, Glass Mountain, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from New Mexico State University and is the author of The Light Here Changes Everything, winner of The Clay Reynolds Novella Prize. 

What People are Saying About This

Kurt Caswell

“Patrick Stockwell is a writer who knows how to tell a story. In The Light Here Changes Everything, he explores the powerful influence of personal relationships alongside the seductive dread of addiction. This is a story about trespass, about those who trespass against us, and how readily we trespass against ourselves. Stockwell’s writing is crisp, infused by a satisfying forward momentum, and punctuated by moments of elevated light.”
—Kurt Caswell, author of Laika’s Window: The Legacy of a Soviet Space Dog

Antonya Nelson

“Every good story is a coming-of-age story; Patrick Stockwell’s The Light Here Changes Everything is no exception. Adulthood means abandoning certain romantic notions, and Sophie’s entrenchment in a kind of western wild glamour—replete with bar brawls, road trips, guns and booze—shifts in the course of this utterly engaging novella. This character is funny and flawed and working hard at redemption in the lustrous harsh light of the real, rather than nostalgic, American west.”
—Antonya Nelson, author of Funny Once and Bound

David MacLean

“Gorgeous, patient and electric. This is the kind of work that restructures the reader at the atomic level. Sophie finds herself on someone else’s daffy pilgrimage, but damn it if she doesn’t find what she didn’t know she was looking for. Reminds you that self-destruction is the bastard cousin of self-creation.” 
—David MacLean, author of The Answer to the Riddle is Me

Joseph Scapellato

“Patrick Stockwell’s The Light Here Changes Everything is the mesmerizing story of Sophie’s against-her-will attempt to throw open the blinds on her life.  An in-recovery alcoholic, Sophie finds that after reaching one year of sobriety, the most important relationships in her life—with her hard-nosed AA sponsor, her problematic boyfriend, her dead father, and her sober and un-sober selves—flicker with shadows that are darker and deeper than she suspected.  This is a powerful and emotionally layered debut from a writer with tremendous talent, patience, and grace.”
—Joseph Scapellato, author of The Made-Up Man and Big Lonesome

Editorial Reviews

Patrick Stockwell’s The Light Here Changes Everything is the mesmerizing story of Sophie’s against-her-will attempt to throw open the blinds on her life.  An in-recovery alcoholic, Sophie finds that after reaching one year of sobriety, the most important relationships in her life—with her hard-nosed AA sponsor, her problematic boyfriend, her dead father, and her sober and un-sober selves—flicker with shadows that are darker and deeper than she suspected.  This is a powerful and emotionally layered debut from a writer with tremendous talent, patience, and grace.”
—Joseph Scapellato, author of The Made-Up Man and Big Lonesome

“Every good story is a coming-of-age story; Patrick Stockwell’s The Light Here Changes Everything is no exception. Adulthood means abandoning certain romantic notions, and Sophie’s entrenchment in a kind of western wild glamour—replete with bar brawls, road trips, guns and booze—shifts in the course of this utterly engaging novella. This character is funny and flawed and working hard at redemption in the lustrous harsh light of the real, rather than nostalgic, American west.”
—Antonya Nelson, author of Funny Once and Bound

“Patrick Stockwell is a writer who knows how to tell a story. In The Light Here Changes Everything, he explores the powerful influence of personal relationships alongside the seductive dread of addiction. This is a story about trespass, about those who trespass against us, and how readily we trespass against ourselves. Stockwell’s writing is crisp, infused by a satisfying forward momentum, and punctuated by moments of elevated light.”
—Kurt Caswell, author of Laika’s Window: The Legacy of a Soviet Space Dog

“Gorgeous, patient and electric. This is the kind of work that restructures the reader at the atomic level. Sophie finds herself on someone else’s daffy pilgrimage, but damn it if she doesn’t find what she didn’t know she was looking for. Reminds you that self-destruction is the bastard cousin of self-creation.” 
—David MacLean, author of The Answer to the Riddle is Me

From the Publisher