Ethel Rohan

Life is stranger than most fictions. The tough times continue and this has been a hellacious week. Hellacious, not as in ‘wah-wah’ my story was rejected, as in my heart physically hurt, as though the organ needed to be taken out and cradled and stroked. Please, no need to comment or respond, thank you. I will recover.

Curt Dawes in an inmate at Michigan Reformatory. I know little more about Curt except that he has a sister and he reviewed Hard to Say for BULL: Fiction for Thinking Men for a forthcoming issue. This morning, Curt’s sister, N., sent me an advance copy of his review. It’s hard to describe how it feels to know my stories mattered to Curt in Michigan in prison. I’ll make up a word: grathumenc.

I cut off most of my hair, twelve inches of length and a crazy amount in volume, and now have Flash hair. My short-short haircut seems trivial to mention here. Yet it’s where the keyboard has taken me. I don’t know how many times yesterday the hair stylist said I was brave. He seemed shocked that I’d chance a new stylist with a completely new do. We are all brave in our own ways. For me, cutting off my hair felt nothing, felt like a grasp at forcing a new chapter.

I spent so much of this past week wrangling with all the ways I still feel so very afraid. The fall of my shorn hair felt nothing next to that. My head is lighter now that some of the old has fallen away. Scissors, Baby.

The wonderful editors at The Chattahoochee Review today published my ‘Tell-Tale Table’ to their blog. The table reveals the approximate percentage of actual, real-life events depicted in every story published in Hard to Say.

Hard to Say won the 2010 PANK Little Books Contest and is now available in print and on Kindle. Despite the thrilling and humbling advance praise and the excellent reviews thus far, this tiny collection of fifteen linked short-short stories has not sold well.

With hindsight, part of the low-sales problem is the book came out much too soon after Cut Through the Bone and hasn’t thrived in the shadow of the latter’s widespread promotion and success. There’s more to the problem though.

The truth is that because I did draw on parts of myself and my past in these stories, I’ve tried to hide this book from so many, afraid of who the stories might reach and who they could shock, upset, and hurt. I’m afraid of my own little book and that’s a terrible place to be.

I don’t know why I suffer these sometime bursts to draw attention to myself and bare my soul in my writing. It goes against the grain of my Irish culture and my preference for privacy and grace. I pay an awful price emotionally for such revealations. Yet by the very nature of writing and writing well, every time I pull words out of myself, the onus on me is to be as honest as possible about what it is to be human–and by default what it is to be me. Even if I write stories that are 100% fabrication, I reveal myself. We artists all do.

In the worst of my terror, I worry Hard to Say most betrays my mother and belies my deep love and compassion for her. In my strongest moments, I believe the book is a tribute to girls and women everywhere who have suffered and journeyed and who refuse to be silenced.

Today someone dear to me read my post at The Chattahoochee Review blog and felt appalled. I’ve allowed that person’s horrified reaction make me want to crawl into bed, hide under the covers, and never show myself again.

I’ll share two of the best kernels of wisdom I ever received: “It’s none of my business what anyone else thinks of me,” and “Everything gets back to our intention.” My intention in writing Hard to Say was not to shock, upset or hurt anyone. My intention was to write out of me the best stories I could around the real and the fabricated that have long haunted, fascinated and compelled me.

Maybe you’ll help a girl out and buy a copy of Hard to Say from PANK ($7.50), or on Kindle ($4.50), or a signed copy at AWP? Maybe then the right someone will read this book and let me know everything’s okay, tell me I did a good thing in writing and publishing these stories, and reassure me this little book won’t injure me or anybody else, if we don’t let it.

Wait, of course, that right someone is me.

A screenshot of the books I’ve read and added to my Goodreads account. So behind on so much else I’ve read and need to add, and so many more books yet to read and add, but this is gorgeous:

In addition to the online excerpt of Chris Boucher’s generous review of Cut Through the Bone in this month’s Believer Magazine (which you can read here) I’m happy to also share this from Chris: “Whether they win or lose their battles, many of Rohan’s characters share Matt and Joyce’s quiet, impossible hunger and the sadness that accompanies it. Rohan never looks past that sadness: she is mindful of her characters’ plights, her prose guided by a careful, focused empathy. And as to the question of how, finally, one prevails–lives with such space, or bridges the gap between the real and the imagined–she gives us an answer. … Which is to say: fake it till you make it.” Amen, Chris.

My deep thanks to Daniel Levin Becker, the Believer’s big-hearted Book Review editor and to Christopher Boucher, author of the novel How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (Melville House, 2011) for his original and insightful review.

Also in January’s Believer Magazine, an excellent essay titled “Haterade” by Meghan Daum. Daum has been an opinion columnist at The Los Angeles Times since 2005. The essay rightly condemns the internet’s vitriolic comment culture: “Ugly commentary just doesn’t litter the internet, it infects it. … Perhaps worst of all, it gives the impression that the opinions expressed in those fights are not just the ravings of a few local idiots but the ‘voice of the people.’ Spend enough time in the company of that voice and the world will begin to look like a very bleak place indeed.” Yes, too many see ‘Comments’ and feel invited, entitled, to spew hate. The art of crafted, controlled rebuttal and criticism is on the endangered list.

Fascinating interview too from Blake Butler with Denis Wood, an author and mapmaker subverting the cartographic dogma with his insistence that a map is not factual but subjective, personal, and political. Wood takes issue with the idea that maps name, claim and say what things really are: “There’s a huge arrogance that’s built into the map, that ‘we can name and claim.'”

I loved this from Wood: “What I was a kid I read the Walt Disney’s story “Our Friend the Atom.” It had an image of Leonardo da Vinci breathing and having so many atoms of oxygen pass through his body in his lifetime, and these things are exhaled and they get caught up in the atmosphere, and the stochastics of themodynamics means that they get spread all over the place. So every time you inhale, you inhale two hundred atoms that were part of Leonardo da Vinci’s body. … The whole idea that ‘I’m me’ is preposterous.” That about sums up my growing religion: Each of us is everybody.

Suffice to say, after reading this interview, I will never look on a map or the atlas in the same way again.

Moving schema, too, on Top 8 Seriously Anguished Soul Singers: Little Johnny Taylor; James Carr; James Carroll Booker III; Little Willie John; O.V. Wright; Ted Hawkins; Jimmy Ruffin; and Darrell Banks.

I’m sorry to say I’d never heard of a single one of these 8 African-American soul singers all of who lived crushing lives and died ridiculously young (with the exception of Jimmy Ruffin). I felt so touched by these bite-size stories of the rise and fall of these artists I’ve set a goal to buy each of their music and listen as I write. Will likely kill, though, my hopes of turning into a humorist.

Nick Hornby’s monthly column “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” included a glowing review of Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang, a novel I very much look forward to reading: “The Family Fang is pretty much the kind of novel you might dream of finding during an aimless twenty minutes in a bookstore: it’s ambitious, it’s funny, it takes its characters seriously, and it has soul–here defined as that beautiful ache fiction can bring on when it wants the best for us all while simultaneously accepting that most of time, even good enough isn’t possible.”

Okay, I admit that I just closed my eyes and imagined for the briefest, sweetest seconds that Nick Hornby wrote that about Cut Through the Bone AND Hard to Say, because I’m greedy like that. Congratulations, Kevin Wilson.

There’s so much goodness is this issue, I’m still working my way through. I felt sufficiently seduced already, though, to fork out for an annual subscription. Suspect this won’t be the last you’ll read about the Believer from me (you are still reading, aren’t you).

I have an extra copy of the issue if anyone would like it (because again I’m greedy like that). Just send your addy via my contact page or my regular email if you have it.

Meet Coife (“Keefe-a”)

Because, as you well know, I am lazy, do nothing, and have SO much extra time on my hands. I also LOVE sleepless nights and potty-training and saying ‘no’ ad nauseum and am in no way house proud or obsessive about hygiene:

WHAT HAVE I DONE?

Thank you, Stonecliffe Animal Rescue (I think! :-))

I tried to get to Mel Bosworth’s novel, Freight (Folded Word Press, 2011), for a long time. I tried ever longer to get to write about Freight. Maybe we read every book at the perfect time. Maybe we write about what we need to write about at the perfect time.

Freight is the perfect title for this novel. This work is about what we do and don’t carry around inside us–the food, drinks, places, people, memories, needs, yearnings, all of it. Freight risks absurdity and sentimentality and succeeds. The tone is terrific: vulnerable, honest and sincere. Freight carried me for a time, like floating on a river. I will carry Freight inside for even longer, because it’s as wise as it is whimsical.

Congratulations, Mel Bosworth.

Heartfelt congratulations to Matthew Salesses on his nouvella The Last Repatriate (Nouvella Press, 2011).

This beautifully written nouvella renders with fittingly brutal detail the horrors of war, torture and imprisonment. The gorgeous prose and gripping plot also testify to our strangeness, resilience, and capacity for love.

The depiction of man’s inhumanity to man here is so raw and visceral, I sometimes felt nauseated and almost despairing. I will never understand how one human being can torture, maim and kill another. The protagonist, Teddy’s, harrowing experiences both during and after the Korean War are heartbreaking and as I read I also sometimes felt anxious, angry and disturbed. That’s how all war stories should make us feel.

What I’ve most taken away from this nouvella, though, is Salesses’ skill and the beauty of his writing. I felt fully drawn into this fictional and powerful story, and felt especially invested in Teddy’s relationship with his parents and in the ‘love’ triangle of Teddy, Kate and Beth. It’s an interesting and ambitious “we” narratorial choice too that Salesses really pulls off. I highly recommend this excellent read.

In 1953, after the end of the Korean War, 23 POWs refused to repatriate to America. The Last Repatriate tells the story of Theodore Dickerson, a prisoner who eventually returns to his home in Virginia in the midst of the McCarthy Era. He is welcomed back as a hero, though he has not returned unscathed. The lasting effects of the POW camp and troubles with his ex-fiancée complicate his new marriage as he struggles to readjust to the Virginia he holds dear.

I wish one and all the merriest Season and everything bright and wonderful in 2012.

Kevin Barry is a genius. He is doing with his life and his gift exactly what he was put on this earth to do and continues the long and great line of Irish writers. His debut novel City of Bohane (Jonathan Cape, May, 2011 and forthcoming, Graywolf Press, March, 2012) is an original and remarkable work of inventiveness.

Set in the fictional and futuristic city of Bohane, somewhere in the West of Ireland in 2053, this is a dark and harrowing tale that is at turns horrific and stunning. For all the memorable and well-dressed characters, gripping plot twists, and brilliant molding of lyric language, the work holds up a truth about the Irish psyche that has long and deeply troubled me: A savage violence. We’re fierce about land, love, family, and reputation and all that brings out both the worst and the best in us. Of course in both Irish life and literature, it helps that however dire our circumstances and dark our urges, we know how to have a good time. City of Bohane is also, thankfully, sprinkled with wit, humor and humanity.

This novel won’t be for everyone. City of Bohane is not an easy read and requires work of the reader. There’s a large and colorful–and sometimes confusing–cast, dense dialect and colloquialisms, and visceral violence. Hell, Barry even makes up words throughout, and delightfully so. For me, it is the strange, twisted and beautiful language that makes this novel so compelling. As I read, I felt fortunate to gawp at this wondrous treasure trove of Barry’s creativity and mastery.

I’ve made some grand statements here and could qualify all of the above with ‘in my humble opinion,’ but feck that.

Today marks a year since Cut Through the Bone’s release. The book and I have had quite the year. Cut Through the Bone has sold over 1,000 print copies in 10 countries; was longlisted by The Story Prize along with collections by Robin Black, Amelia Gray, Belle Boggs, Nadine Gordimer, Ron Rash, Justin Taylor, Joyce Carol Oates, and more.

I’ve read from Cut Through the Bone at over twenty readings including trips within California and to Seattle, New York, and Ireland. Thanks to this book, I was invited to read at the 2011 Cork International Short Story Festival, at which I shared the stage with many incredible writers and people, including Órfhlaith Foyle, Siobhan Fallon, Mary Costello, Alison MacLeod, Suzanne Rivecca, Valerie Trueblood, Yiyun Li, Alexander MacLeod, Colm Tóibín and Edna O’Brien–the festival was a thrill, honor and the highlight of my year.

It was also such a surprise and honor to have Cut Through the Bone be one of the first books showcased at The Lit Pub. Thank you to Molly Gaudry and Christopher Newgent for the tremendous read, love, and exposure you gave Cut Through the Bone and for all of the same insightful and generous attention you give other fortunate writers and books.

Readers and reviewers have received the book well, thank you, and I’m delighted and a little terrified that a review is forthcoming from The Believer Magazine in its January, 2012 issue, written by Chris Boucher, Managing Editor of Post Road Magazine and author of the much-hailed novel, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (Melville House).

I’d like to thank Kevin Murphy and Dark Sky Books for believing in Cut Through the Bone. My deep thanks too to Siolo Thompson for my gorgeous book cover. Thanks to John and Jenn Coen for the series of stunning book trailers.

I remain indebted to the writers I deeply respect and admire who were gracious enough to read Cut Through the Bone and provide such generous book blurbs:

Matt Bell, How They Were Found

Michael Kimball, Us

Victor LaValle, Big Machine

Kyle Minor, In the Devil’s Territory

Lori Ostlund, The Bigness of the World

Laura van den Berg, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves us

William Walsh, Ampersand, Mass.

Kevin Wilson, The Family Fang

My deep thanks also to the editors of the following literary magazines who first published stories included in Cut Through the Bone:

Bound Off, Dark Sky Magazine, Emprise Review, Existere: Journal of Arts and Literature, FRiGG, Ghoti Magazine Issue 18, Guernica, Halfway Down the Stairs. Hobart, Keyhole Magazine Issue 9, Los Angeles Review Issue 6, Necessary Fiction, PANK, Pindeldyboz, Sententia, Issue 2, Southword Journal, Staccato Fiction, The Emerson Review, Toasted Cheese, and Up the Staircase Magazine.

Most of all, I’m grateful to each and every person who bought this book, read this book, talked or wrote about this book. It takes a village to put a book out in the world and a whole lot more to keep a book in the world. I feel very fortunate and grateful.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned this year is that my gift and my curse is that no writing or ‘success’ will ever be enough, I will always strive.