Ethel Rohan

One of my best and oldest friends asked, “Are you happy?”

“On a scale of one-to-ten?” she asked.

The questions are a loop annoying my mind.

This morning, the scratches over my stomach and ribcage are red, long, intersecting, sore, and pretty.

I felt this thrilling sense as I read Daniel Orozco’s debut story story collection, Orientation, that Orozco was a rule-breaker, risk-taker, and rebel craftsman.

Orozco’s nine stories read respectively as: A new employee’s office orientation told in monologue; four portraits of insatiable hunger and strange desires; disturbing snapshots from the life of a long-distance runner; the last, horrific chronicles of The Presidente-in-Exile; a startling and moving police blotter report; a series of ill-fated and harrowing connections; unforgettable excerpts from the life of a temporary office employee; and chilling and glorious accounts of a Bay Area earthquake told from countless locations and points-of-views.

These nine stories are often fragmented, messy, jarring, and even sometimes abortive. The stories are also brilliant and wonderfully surprising, interesting, original, and affecting.

God, they made me feel.

“Are you happy, Ethel?”

“On a scale of one-to-ten?”

Write me a story, Daniel Orozco. Put me in that story, Daniel Orozco. Break rules, take risks and be your rebel you, Daniel Orozco. Make everything less hard and scary, Daniel Orozco. Give my story an ending as exquisite as Clarissa Snow’s in “Temporary Stories” or that of the owner of the forgotten Honda in “Shakers.”

An excerpt from “Shakers”:

“Out here they go on about how the light chisels, how it polishes and defines the edges of whatever it falls upon and imparts a dazzling clarity. They go on about how the light comes down around you in curtains or how it pours and spills like honey. It gleams and glints, it sparks and flares. The light has weight, it has density, it is palpable. Sometimes you can even hear it, zinging metallic and bright! What crap. When they aren’t steeped in the cliched golden hues of a shampoo commercial, the skies most days are an insipid palette of white and blueish white and yellowish white. Every vista is dull and bleary, a sun-bleached smudge in the distance. And nothing is chiseled. Everything you look at is foreshortened, flat and common as a souvenir poster. Although there can be days–those mornings of unseasonable fog when the sunlight is filtered through a fragile veil of cloud that renders the air itself luminous as milk; or the clear, cloudless afternoon when you’re walking under a canopy of trees or through the lobby of a building downtown, and just before moving out of the shade, you take off your sunglasses and stand there a moment and anticipate entering the world of sunlight.”

I bought a dozen new books at the 12th Cork International Short Story Festival, all short story collections. Last night, I finished Clare Wigfall’s debut collection The Loudest Sound and Nothing (Faber & Faber, 2007). It’s an interesting, eclectic collection rich with seventeen diverse stories and a plethora of characters. I especially appreciated how Clare ended her stories–often on a downbeat and someplace surprising and unexpected, and always satisfying.

From Clare Wigfall’s, “Folks Like Us”:

“What happened next all went so fast I didn’t know what was going on at first. ‘Fore I knew it, Bonnie’s scrambled up and grabbed at my Colt which we always have close by us when we sleep, and a shot rings out, so damn loud it feels like the sky might crack up, and there was a fallin and a crash and then there was this goddamn fella in a sheriff’s uniform lyin just a nickel’s width from Bonnie’s toe. For a second there she just stood still and watched that fella lyin on the dirt. He was crumpled over himself, left leg bent back crooked, right arm reachin out almost to Bonnie’s foot, a pistol ridgin the dirt where it’d skidded from his hand, big face slammed up against the gravel, fat lips gookin out like a baby’s might when suckin, eyes still as marbles. And Bonnie just stood there quiet, her face pinched in like a doughball. She didn’t say nothin. I’d sat up and I could feel the sun hot on my neck and I could feel a trickle of sweat travelin down ‘tween my shoulder blades, real slow like, tricklin plenty, but still I didn’t curve back my arm to wipe it away. Then she done turns to me and out slips them thoughts that is skeetin through her mind, Clyde … Clyde … what you think? Maybe he’s not dead, Clyde.”

I received my contributor’s copies of The Chattahoochee Review. The magazine boasts a new editorial staff led by Anna Schachner and Lydia Ship and its list of contributors reads like an embarrassment of riches.

It’s a gorgeous issue with cover and layout design by Vanessa Lowry that’s pretty to look at and satisfying to hold. The issue contains my review of Roxane Gay’s forthcoming collection, Ayiti. Thus far I’ve read in order: Anna Schachner’s editorial note; Aimee Bender’s story, “Origin Lessons”; Roxane Gay’s story, “More Hers Than His”; Caitlin Horrocks’s story, “Flight” and Kevin Wilson’s “A Series of Lessons.”

Just like the characters in Kevin Wilson’s story, “A Series of Lessons,” as a child, I killed slugs with salt. Our family also killed mice with traps and once, in our back garden, my brother’s friend killed a rat with a hurling stick. I remember rolled newspapers with black, bloodied dots of fly parts.

I most remember our dogs. The theme of ‘lessons’ is woven throughout this magazine issue. The lesson I learned from keeping dogs as a child is how cruel we can be to the beings we love.

From Kevin Wilson’s “A Series of Lessons”:

“The animal, now ten feet from Caleb, is not the dog that he has dreamed of for these past few months. Mangy and covered in mud, its back is hunched and the fur standing up as if touched by electricity, the color actually darkening. There is a sound now, low and steady, and it freezes Caleb in place, a growl punctuated by sharp exhalations of breath. Caleb’s extended hand is now curled into a fist, and he slowly pulls it away from the animal, which is no longer moving, the muscles jumping across its skin. Caleb knows not to run, but this is all he can think of, to simply stay in one place and hope that things will fix themselves, which he has begun to learn, unfortunately, is not the way the world works.”

I scratch my skin a lot. Especially at night. The worst nights, I wake up mornings and look as if ratnails tore at me. Even after all these years of worst mornings, my husband still says, “What the?” I tell him, myself, I scratch because I itch. It’s weird and I’ve tried a lot of products to help it, I even found some which succeeded. My friends gave me recommendations too like propaira. Well I looked up where to buy propaira in australia, because that’s where it originates, but I also found that you can order online anywhere you are. So that’s helpful. In fact many other products have the same thing. I could go to the ends of the earth to find a product to get rid of my excessive itching but my skin is on a different level! What is its problem!

I loved Caitlin Horrock’s debut story collection, This is Not Your City. It’s an outstanding story collection written with great beauty, skill and compassion that I’ll return to again and again in my lifetime to reread, study, savor, and celebrate.

The collection is so consistent it’s hard to say I’ve a favorite story, but “Steal Small” especially makes my heart wish it could sometimes wear armor.

From “Steal Small”:

“I brushed the backs of his knuckles. ‘The gangrene’s back,’ he said, which it was, but he doesn’t need to warn me like he thinks he does. He doesn’t really have gangrene, just some weird skin thing that makes him itch so bad he scratches even in his sleep, until the skin breaks open and starts oozing, sometimes blood and sometimes something clear and sometimes both together, so his skin shines in the light like a pink glaze, like glass or pastry.”

And then later, close to the story’s heartbreaking end:

“[Leo’s] skin thing is getting worse. He’s got patches so bad they’re swampy with fluid, where his shirts stick and scabs won’t form. He’s always been hourly at National Beef so there’s no insurance. It’s like he’s molting into something new and horrible, and all I want to do is hold his skin closed, press the seams of him together, so he won’t fall apart and nothing in our lives with change, because I figure I’m about as happy as I’m going to get the way things are.”

You can buy This Is Not Your City, Sarabande Books, here.

Within days of subscribing to The Journal, I received the Spring/Summer 2011 Issue. Last night I read Jessica Hollander’s story “What Became of What She Had Made.” Here’s an excerpt:

“‘I’m sleeping with someone at my office’, the husband said. “I can’t tell Olivia. I can’t stop fucking the woman.” He pulled to a stoplight. Lynette felt the car’s vibrations in her cheeks.

“Are you going to tell her?” he asked.

Lynette didn’t want to know about this, and Olivia wouldn’t either. “She’d feel bad about it.”

“Seems like the kind of information a mother would get across best.”

She wanted her daughters to be good and proud and happy. She wanted them to love and trust that she was a good mother. “I’d rather she believe she has a happy life.”

He pulled into her driveway in Appleridge. It was a community for retired people. Tired and then retired, like old food dried out and zapped in the microwave.

He leaned his head against the steering wheel. “Nobody’s happy.”

“Sure we are.” Her girls were in pieces. They didn’t belong to her anymore. “Watch us smile.'”

The story is about a mother and her two daughters. About violences large and small. About trying to recover the unrecoverable. About knowing what to hold onto and of what to let go.

Maybe it had nothing or everything to do with Jessica Hollander’s “What Became of What She Had Made,” but as I struggled to sleep last night I recalled and silently repeated that excerpt from Reinhold Neibuhr’s “The Serenity Prayer” (1926):

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

“The better solution is, as a part of your daily work as a writer, support the communities you wish to be a part of, by reading books, writing reviews, promoting other writers or bookstores or whatever in your social networking. It’s a small but old truth, but the more you give, the more you will receive. And this isn’t any kind of slimy networking. This is every writer’s responsibility, and the writers who create the most buzz for the good work of others will find that same energy waiting for them, when their own excellent book finally comes out.”

You can read the rest of Laura van den Berg’s excellent interview with Matt Bell as part of her “Innovators in Lit” series over at the Ploughshares Blog here.

Matt Bell is extraordinary. Thank you, Matt.

A note from the 12th Annual Cork International Short Story Festival here.

My second post from the Cork International Short Story Festival is now live at Dark Sky Magazine.

Thanks for reading.

I hope all is great with you.

The first in my blog posts on the Cork International Short Story Festival, September 14-18, can be read at Dark Sky Magazine’s blog here.

To coincide with the Festival, Cut Through the Bone, both paperback and Kindle, will be sold at 50% off.

Thanks.

I hope you’re all well.

Not just to Ireland. Not just because I’ve been busy with both daughters out of school. Not solely due to doing book reviews, readings, solicited posts, interviews and stories, and networking. Not simply down to reading. Voracious reading. No. Some spark in me was gone. Faded. Out.

Grief. Old, old griefs.

But now I’m back. A re-born Writer. I’ll save you the blood and guts and gore. I’m together once more. And I’m not going to fall down again, shattered. Not ever. At least not out of any self-doubt or the internal voices that have previously held me back and beaten me up, I won’t.

Have I said any of this before? Yes. Have I meant it then? Yes. Is it hard to stay confident and resilient in this world (of writing)? YES. But read my words: I will NEVER again doubt my place as a woman who writes. Never again worry I’m not good enough. NEVER.

At some point we all have to take a stand and declare ourselves to those around us and the world: I write. I live the writing life. I won’t have it any other way.

My rebel’s freed. All is in harmony. See me live, laugh, love and write.

Now I’ll put all that wasted energy into writing the best stories I can and into a return to championing and supporting the Arts and Literature and other Writers also as best as I can.

Okay, enough gunslinging and Zen and on to some links that might interest you or that you might not care one iota about:

On September 12th, I fly to Ireland to take part in the Cork International Short Story Festival. I’ll read from Cut Through the Bone on Friday, 16th along with Alison McLeod. The next morning, I will teach a beginning fiction workshop to ten participants. To get a sense of what so many of these ‘firsts’ mean to me you can read my post at the Festival’s blog here.

To coincide with this trip to Cork, I’ll blog daily to the Dark Sky site and my story collection Cut Through the Bone will go on sale throughout those five fabulous days of the Festival. More details to follow.

This past weekend I got to read at San Francisco’s beautiful downtown Catherine Clark Gallery with Ireland’s Kevin Barry and Julian Gough as part of Imagine Ireland’s Contemporary Irish Writers Series. Kevin and Julian don’t read. They perform. And they’re both unique voices and brilliant writers. My deep thanks to Kevin, Julian, Catherine Clark, and Ethan Nosowsky of Graywolf Press for making me feel so welcome and at-ease.

I look forward to receiving in the mail my contributor’s copy of The Chattahoochee Review. Along with stories from those AllStars mentioned below the issue will include stories from Roxane Gay and my latest literary crush, the amazing Caitlin Horrocks. The issue also includes my review of Roxane Gay’s debut story collection, Ayiti.