The ‘Gospel of Burning Love’ Finds a Convert : Books: Writing about a fanatic Elvis fan, Laura Kalpakian fell under the King’s spell. She concedes, “I ended up kind of fruitcakey on the subject.”

When the faithful hordes stampede the post office next year for the new Elvis Presley stamp, there’ll be a new fan among them: novelist Laura Kalpakian.

Two years ago Kalpakian regarded Elvis, if she thought of him at all, as a “fat bloated toad of a drug addict” squeezed into a spangled bodysuit. A joke.

That was before she actually listened to Elvis’ music while writing her novel, “Graced Land.”

The book, published in June by Grove Weidenfeld, is being filmed as a TV movie starring Roseanne and Tom Arnold.

It is a tale of a convert, the fictional Emily Shaw, a Laguna Beach brat and USC sorority girl turned social worker who befriends her first assignment, a fanatic Elvis worshiper. Joyce Jackson is a welfare mother who has turned her front porch into a gaudy Elvis shrine, festooned with Christmas lights, plastic daisies and quilted black satin.

Joyce, who has daughters named Priscilla and Lisa Marie (for Elvis’ ex-wife and daughter), mends cast-off clothes to give to drug addicts and ex-cons. Her good deeds are performed in the name of Elvis. “I’d like to carry on Elvis’ work, Joyce tells her new caseworker.

“You want to be a rock ‘n’ roll star?” Emily asks, incredulous.

“That wasn’t his work. That was his job.”

Elvis’ real work, as Joyce explains, was spreading the Gospel of Burning Love. Giving away his time, attention and money. Singing his heart out even when he had nothing left to give.

“He sang himself to death because he loved us,” Joyce tells Emily. “He died for us.”

Emily is put off by Joyce’s deification of the garish entertainer. Joyce’s blue collar world view clashes with her privileged sensibilities. But, by the close of the story, Emily has ditched her Georgetown law school fiance, broken department rules to side with Joyce and her vision, and wholeheartedly embraced the cult of Elvis.

The novel gently chastens anyone who has scoffed at another’s obsession, be it golf, hybrid roses or “Star Trek.”

“I started out like Emily--absolutely indifferent to Elvis. Like, who cares?” Kalpakian says. “And, like Emily, I ended up kind of fruitcakey on the subject. I sing Elvis songs to put my kids to sleep. And we’re the only family in Bellingham who orders a cake on Elvis’ birthday (Jan. 8).”

Kalpakian ultimately was won over by Elvis’ artistic intensity. “All his life he exuded an absolutely tremendous creative energy,” she says. “He was a dynamo, a master of emotion. Even today he moves and shakes people.”

Kalpakian, 42, lives in Bellingham with her two sons. She showed up for lunch at a waterfront restaurant wearing a pink blazer emblazoned with a huge, glaring fake diamond Elvis pin, a trinket she picked up at Graceland during her recent book tour.

Though she has lived in Bellingham for eight years, Kalpakian still considers herself a California writer. She grew up in Southern California, earned a B. A. in history at UC Riverside, and went to work briefly as a social worker.

In 1983, when her marriage ended, the writer lived in California with her two small sons, her life “a wreck.” This is when Elvis first made his appearance.

Each day, while driving her mother to her secretarial job at San Bernardino County Hospital, Kalpakian stopped along the route and contemplated an Elvis shrine in the front yard of a rundown house.

“This one was bleaker than the one in the book,” Kalpakian says. “I was fascinated and touched . . . and condescending.”

Seven years later, Kalpakian was living in Bellingham; she had published three novels--”Beggars and Choosers,” “These Latter Days” and “Crescendo”-- and two collections of short stories. She was reminiscing with her mother one day and they got to talking about the Elvis shrine.

“I said to my mother, ‘I always thought a woman with two daughters lived there.’ The minute I said that I knew their names were Priscilla and Lisa Marie,” Kalpakian says. “From that moment on, the story just came at me.”

But Kalpakian knew nothing about Elvis. “I decided I needed to know him the way my character would know him--through his music,” she says.

A child of the ‘60s who grew up listening to Crosby, Stills & Nash, Kalpakian immersed herself in the King. “I listened to his music eight to 10 hours a day for a year. The whole book is written to his music.”

The Elvis tunes Kalpakian played in her upstairs office percolated down through her big house to her family. Soon, Kalpakian’s parents and sons were fans, too.

Kalpakian remembers the moment when she crossed over.

“I was all by myself one night watching an Elvis video,” she says. “The kids had gone to my folks for the evening. By the end of the show I was moving in closer and closer to the television. Here was this tragic wreck of a man singing a song I loathe--’Unchained Melody.’

“It was six weeks before he died. He could hardly walk, could hardly talk.” Then she whispers, “But he could still sing.

“I just sat there and cried.”

Now entranced with her subject, Kalpakian lost the scorn Elvis generates among sophisticates. She sent the first three chapters to her agent, “joyed over” with her creation and expecting an enthusiastic reception.

The agent’s response was withering. “She thought Emily was nuts; she thought Joyce was nuts; she thought Elvis was nuts,” Kalpakian says. “She just didn’t get it.”

Kalpakian had been supporting herself and her sons on an National Endowment for the Arts grant and a movie option on one of her short stories. She was just about out of money, but she hadn’t lost faith in her book.

She sent the completed chapters off to a new agent, Charlotte Sheedy, who called after reading three pages and said: “This story has soul.”

Elvis’ fans, accustomed to having their hero mocked, are thrilled that Kalpakian sees him the way they do.

Pat Geiger, the 72-year-old Vermont woman who orchestrated the Elvis stamp campaign for nine years, says “I absolutely loved the book. I saw myself in it, although I am not quite as extreme as Joyce--I have my Elvis shrine indoors.”

“I think Elvis is one of the three or four most important Americans in this century,” Kalpakian says firmly, as if she’s daring you to deny it. “What we have here is a combination of Abe Lincoln and Walt Whitman. The man was born in a log cabin and he lived a life of great achievement and great tragedy.”