Sometimes I cry, sometimes I laugh: J. California Cooper spins tales of common folk who insist on being heard.

J. CALIFORNIA COOPER IS AN ORIGINAL. She is the consummate storyteller, weaving tales that go straight to the soul of the many who wait to hear, feel and understand.

"If you want to write," notes Cooper, who will not give her exact age, but admits to being older than 50, "you have to know something about life. I've been around a long time. You see things, you learn things. I have always loved wisdom, even as a child."

Cooper says she played with paper dolls until she was 18. Then her mother took them away. "I decided to write my stories down, since I couldn't play them out anymore," she explains. "That's why I started with plays."

After seeing some of her plays, Alice Walker, the acclaimed poet and novelist, told Cooper that if she recast them as short stories, she would publish them. "I didn't change any of the plays that I had," says Cooper, who has 17 staged works to her credit, and was named Black Playwright of the Year in 1978. "I had a lot of people in line in my mind who had stories to tell, and I wanted to tell them."

Searching for a Place

Through three novels and six volumes of short stories, Cooper has been telling these tales in a voice that is shoot-from-the-hip direct, moralistic, cautionary yet always compassionate. Her appeal lies in her honesty, and in her ability to tell her tales through common folk, with a deceptive simplicity that flies in the face of a world going increasingly awry. Cooper, whose new collection of short stories, Wild Stars Seeking Midnight Sun, will be published in 2005 by Doubleday, established her trademark style with her first collection of short stories, A Piece of Mine (1984), which became an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year, and her follow-up collection, Homemade Love (1986), winner of an American Book Award.

The Berkeley, California, native, who also lived in Marshall, Texas, for a time, continues that compelling fulktale tradition with her latest novel, Some People, Some Other Place (Doubleday, October 2004).

Cooper, who now lives between Oakland and Gualala, California, notes that one of the main things people are ultimately searching for is a place: "People always say, 'One of these days I'm gonna get a place in ... there's a place for me ... some place to be somebody ...'" In Some People, Some Other Place, issues of deprivation, family, independence, freedom, survival, loneliness, greed, perseverance, selfishness, and the search for love and trust are played out in the lives of characters whose paths lead them to Dream Street in Otherplace, Placeland (also called Place). A short distance away, "for the young at heart and the seekers, there is a big little city, Elysee City," which is reminiscent of the Elysian Fields, a paradise in the afterlife in Greek mythology.

Cooper says the story came to her while she was sick with the shingles and lying on her back on and off for about two years. "I was staring at the ceiling, and I kept seeing these six houses, like through a haze. These houses all had a story to tell, but nobody came to tell the tales." Eventually, the voice of an unborn child, in search of its parents-to-be, emerged as narrator, commentator, teacher/preacher, from its perspective of pre-birth original wisdom.

"It had to be somebody that could look that far back into the past at the different families living on Dream Street," explains the author. "The narrator had to tell the story of all these houses and how everybody got there. And how they all suffered, how they all struggled to survive, how some of them were nice, and some were not."

The dreamers and seekers include Eula Too, descendant of generations who had longed to live "on their own place." Eula Too's yearning to escape the drudgery and hopelessness of her parents' lives by fulfilling her mother's dream to get to Chicago, thrusts her, at 15, into a life-altering experience that physically rips her from her past and puts her in the hands of Madame LaFon, who runs a high class whorehouse. Eula Too serves Madame in Chicago for many years as companion and aide, while still dealing with family issues. She ends up in Place where, still serving Madame, she begins to open up like a late-blooming flower through a series of encounters, becoming the catalyst for change in the lives of several inhabitants of the multiethnic dreamscape that is the town.

What the Characters Dictate

"I do not make up these stories," says Cooper, who is a prolific reader. The rain. Rachmaninoff's Third or Fourth Concerto. Music by Erik Satie. These are a few of her muses. "I have all this stuff just sitting in my mind," she says. When some or all of her muses come into play, "these people [characters] start showing up and start talking, mad I start taking the dictation," Cooper says. The characters are very demanding: "They don't like machines, so I write in longhand" she says" They don't like the house dirty; they don't like dishes in the sink; they want me just to sit in bed and wait ... and they come. They tell these stories." Through the various characters in her short stories, to those in her novels, such as Family's Always, The Wake of the Wind's Lifee and her husband, Mor, and Some People, Some Other Place's Eula Too, Cooper writes "to people who do not have the easy way."

Cooper celebrates her childlike spirit and her young womanhood with as much fervor as she does her wisdom born of maturity. "I know all these people still live in me" she says with conviction. "I haven't left anything behind. I've got them all, and I'm full of their stories, their feelings. I can understand. I'm listening to them, and I'm seeing them, and I'm feeling them. Sometimes I cry and sometimes I laugh. I live it."

It is this bonding with her characters that helps Cooper portray them so vividly. "The antagonist in my stories is always life, not a person," she confesses, "because you can get rid of a person, but life still happens to you." Some People, Some Other Place "is about life," she adds. "These people are not so much fighting each other as they are fighting the situations that come up in their lives."

Readers hail her as one of the best storytellers of our time, yet Cooper, maintains, "I'm just a lady who's intrigued with life and fascinated by the way some people live it."

People, Places and Pain

Titles by J. California Cooper

Short Stories

A Piece of Mine (Wild Tress Press, 1984) Anchor Books/Doubleday, January 1992 $10.50, ISBN 0-385-42087-0

Homemade Love (St. Martin's Press, 1986) St. Martin's Griffin (reissue edition), December 1998 $12.95, ISBN 0-312-19465-X

Some Soul to Keep (St. Martin's Press,1987) St. Martin's Griffin (reissue edition), December 1998 $12.95, ISBN 0-312-19337-8

The Matter Is Life (Doubleday Books, 1991) Anchor (reprint edition), October 1992 $12., ISBN 0-385-41174-X

Some Love, Some Pain, Some Time Anchor Books/Doubleday, October 1996 $12.95, ISBN 0-385-46788-5

The Future Has a Past Anchor Books/Doubleday, October 2001 $13., ISBN 0-385-49681-8

Novels

Family, Anchor, December 1991 $11.95, ISBN 0-385-41172-3

In Search of Satisfaction (Doubleday Books, 1994) Anchor, October 1995 $13., ISBN 0-385-46786-9

The Wake of the Wind Anchor Books/Doubleday, December 1999 $13.95, ISBN 0-385-48705-3

Some People, Some Other Place Doubleday, October 2004 $24.95, ISBN 0-385-49682-6

Denolyn Carroll is the deputy managing editor of Essence magazine.