If I were to teach Elizabeth Tallent’s short story collection “Mendocino Fire,” I would focus on her depictions of action. Significant things happen in these stories—violent clashes between family members, encounters with forces of nature, characters struggling within themselves.

The way she tells it, it’s happening before you know it’s happening, much the same way the character is plunged into the sea or down a steep drop or into the vortex of an irrevocable relational tangle. The prose is swift and unexpectedly physical.

“He was alone, leaning to throw a bucket of refuse, when a wave lolloped into the bow and the Louise shrugged him into the sea.”

How perfect for this story, “The Wrong Son,” that a young Nate is “shrugged” overboard—almost drowning—by his asshole father’s beloved boat. That verb nails the father vs. son rift plus the vast indifference of nature at the core of this story.

In the title story, “Mendocino Fire,” an activist teenager lives in a 200-foot redwood: “There comes a moment, of course, when she forgets, climbs through the tree of the day before, and where the toehold of the familiar should be, shock blasts a hole. Having stepped off into the void, she adapts. Her feet pedal. She feels a pair of wings flung out from her should blades, beginning to beat.”

The fall continues for another page, containing a significant interaction between girl and tree—and the nature of time for that matter. “She’s not afraid—fear is a kind of error stripped from her brain and what she feels is that she’s been taken in by an element so sumptuous she repents, falling, of the waste and foolishness that have so far constituted her relation to time. Finn falls within this sense of cradling infinity, and what will later strike her as the deepest truth about falling, the thing she will never confide to anyone, is that she was curious.”

This was not what I expected when I picked up the book “Mendocino Fire” mainly for its title. I wanted northern California and wildfires! I wanted action of the news magazine variety. Instead, I received scenes and people of a behind-the-scenes California accessed as if by well-hidden two-track. The working poor, the stagnated, the idealistic and angry.

“Mendocino Fire,” in fact, are the words printed on a volunteer fire department t-shirt the redwood girl, years before her fall, finds in a parking lot, covered with mud. It’s an object I didn’t expect from a place I’ve never been.

There are, by the way, an equal number of stories in this collection about academics—artists and writers and scholars entangled in questions of tenure and awards and publication. Problems no less real than the pedestrian struggles the working class stories contain, but the contrast is powerful. Which neighborhood would you rather live in?, the collection seems to ask. Where is the real place?

Tallent’s prose—especially scenes of action—lifts me up and sets me down in a story much better than the one I was expecting, every time.