Ethel Rohan

I’m back from four weeks in Ireland. Literally, less than an hour ago, my family and I walked through our front door for the first time in exactly four weeks. I couldn’t wait to get to my desk and write a blog post.

I have no idea what I need so much to write about only that I do. And that the blog post wants to be titled “Solace.” That I’ll write some about the novel of the same name by Belinda McKeon. That I need to dig inside.

In recent weeks, I’ve read Belinda McKeon’s SOLACE, Jesse Ball’s THE CURFEW, Lydia Millet’s MY HAPPY LIFE.

I reread Lydia Yuknavitch’s CHRONOLOGY OF WATER, Roxane Gay’s AYITI, and Alissa Nutting’s UNCLEAN JOBS FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS.

I’ve read other books these past several and strange weeks, their titles just aren’t coming to my tired and jet-lagged mind.

There’s such suffering and loss depicted in the books I’ve listed above. There’s also so much about how we go on despite suffering. Maybe because of suffering.

So much in the books too about family and how fierce glorious insane those ties are.

So much in the books that I found fascinating and instructive and sad and hopeful.

We can learn from every work ever written. Written works allow us see ourselves and others anew slant upsidedown insideout.

I think about the truisms in the books listed above and I’m mindful that no one should judge anyone else. No point fingers sanctimonious egotistical think they’re so much better than others. But we do, don’t we? All the time.

Four weeks in Ireland gave me pause on many occasions for many reasons and in many ways. I thought a lot about how people need to put others down so they can feel better about themselves. As damaging to the putdowner as it is to the putdownee. Yes, I make up words.

The word solace won’t let me be. Like a warm whisper in my mind. I was about to type I’m not sure why the word solace returns returns returns, but now I know: I’m looking long and hard at what gives me solace and what doesn’t. At who.

I looked long and hard at Belinda McKeon’s photo bio blurbs on her debut novel’s jacket. I felt respect admiration jealousy.

If.

In SOLACE, Belinda McKeon took paragraphs to describe a tractor and in one sentence depicted a fatal crash. Always, I felt the power of her prose.

In CHRONOLOGY OF WATER, Lydia Yuknavitch quotes Virginia Woolf: “Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”

Solace lies in arranging whatever pieces come my way. I’m done with Ifs.

Is.

I’ve no idea what this post is.

Yes I do.

I wanted to be back. here. home.

An excerpt from Carol Novak’s unique and fantastical collection, Giraffes In Hiding – The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novak:

“He frightened me when he clasped me to him in the night, when he lowered the volume of his voice to speak of the mirage of walls and roofs. Not so long ago, he seemed to be my des- tination. He was mine and I was his or so it seemed. After an orgy of mirrors, we sucked and picked at one another’s bones. Then he strayed into that other woman’s residence and stayed too long, I took the turn back to where I’d been going, but couldn’t find it. Pain was my map; I could hardly see clearly.

So I found you hiding in a hedge with thorns, not crying but chanting, no, singing, singing a lament to your mother; you crooned, wanting to crawl back into her, so I came and stroked your head. I remember your hair as soft as dandelion puffs and you trembled but kept still for a spell entranced you let me be your home. And then like flotsam, you floated away, you with your eyes dense with storms. I carried on, tore off my red dress, taunted you. Who can stay still? Who can remain in homes with so many rules? you pleaded. I left that town a long time ago, I answered. At least I thought I did. You looked like a rabbit in a wolf’s yellow eye. All homes have rules, you said. You said I am a nomad. I have no choice. You do, I replied, drawing you into me for the last time, feeling like the rabbit in your jaws. But was I the wolf? Now I have forgotten your name.”

You can read my full review at PANK here.

Following are recent reviews of Hard to Say:

From Yennie Cheung at The Hipster’s Book Club:

“The glimpses into everyday life are quick in Ethel Rohan’s Hard to Say, a collection of interrelated flash fiction portraying one girl’s Irish upbringing. In 15 semi-autobiographical tales of alcoholism and rebellion, sickness and loss, Rohan paints a gorgeous but heartrending picture of one family’s struggle to overcome its own destruction—and all in 55 square pages of text. Rarely, if ever, is a family saga told so concisely. Here, that just means Rohan breaks your heart faster.”

You can read the full review here.

From Amanda Kimmerly at Fringe Magazine:

“However, I think in this case, because the content is so similar, it resembles a long-winded narrative, using “and then this happened, and this…and this, and this, and this,” technique, with each “this” being a new story.”

You can read the full review here.

From Laura Ellen Scott at PLUMB:

“Everyone knows that Ethel Rohan is one of the rescuers of domestic realism, snatching the notion of family from the gums of academy hacks to re-energize it with her own lyric volatility. Her latest collection, Hard to Say, is a vampiric stunner of a book, very dark and soulful.”

You can read the full review here.

From Steve Himmer at Goodreads:

“So while the longer arc that emerges through these linked stories delivers the familiar escape to consciousness, what’s more exciting is the escape to narrative consciousness and the way writer, character, and text take control of the story through what they keep to themselves. That creates a provocative tension between readerly demands for more (a perhaps prurient, voyeuristic expectation to “see” the worst as it happens) and the refusal of the narrator to be defined or limited by those unwritten worst moments.”

You can read the full review here.

My deep thanks to Yennie, Amanda, Laura, and Steve for taking the time to read and review Hard to Say. I’m honored.

Three recent unusual and imaginative stories I enjoyed. Congratulations, All:

From Aubrey Hirsch’s “Certainty” at PANK:

“Right from the start, Cris was pretty certain she could get me pregnant. It started on our honeymoon—a six day trip to Vegas where we stayed at the Venetian, ate at the Paris and drank all night at New York, New York. We took a gondola ride to the elevators and made out like high school kids. In our room, Cris slid her soft hands under my cotton skirt. She rubbed against me, her leg between my legs.

“Let’s make a baby,” she whispered.

My breathless laugh came out like a moan. “What?” I asked.

“Let’s make a baby,” she said again. “Right now. Tonight.”

She rubbed her cheek against my cheek and I played along. “Okay,” I said. “Knock me up.”

When we were finished, she put her hand on my abdomen, traced a ring around my belly button.

“Do you think we did it?”

I turned to look at her. Her eyes were wide and hopeful. “Are you joking?” I asked. “You know you can’t actually get me pregnant.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I took a biology class. In third grade.”

“Sometimes unexpected things happen,” she said.”

From Roxanne Carter’s “Beyond This Point Are Monsters” at Dark Sky Magazine:

“her soft eye available for intimacy. an anxiety about whether the phone will ring: she’ll flush, try to say hello. try not to seem like she’s uncertain, pale and ugly in her distress. a rose blooming where her forearm meets her elbow, a stain on the underside, otherwise like a lizard’s cold belly.

darling says, i did not loose track. she points out where the waves were moving, her hand dropping as she realizes the futility of her actions and the impossibility of capturing her reflection in the water.

the cat at the bottom of the stairs awaits dissolution.

darling complains that the ocean is no longer there. she will have to go alone, knocking the bushes and treacle out of her way, reciting against a contrary wind. she imagines it will work: she will be useful. it will end happily. she is no longer impressed by the dark.”

From Otessa Moshfegh’s “The Chaperone” in Guernica Magazine:

“The next morning she sings “Pick Me Up Jonnie.” It’s the martin’s and my least favorite song. “Pish,” it says, and regurgitates a silk worm, poor bird. I’m in the bath. I’m on the balcony. I’m reading, in bed. A snakey layer of tan has already sloughed off on the sheets, leaving my arms raw and blotchy. The martin tugs a loose strand of skin from my forearm. I pretend it hurts. It hops off the bed and flutters to the sill of the window, turning its neck around, head cocked resentfully, ashamed.

“Come let’s go catch a game of tennis then get our nails done.”

It’s Mamie. She puts on white socks, a stretchy skin-colored bra. I pull up the blanket and grit my larynx, grumble: “You go on. I’m going to sleep this bug off.”

It is true that I don’t feel well. Mamie’s thudding steps across the floor, her loud, so wet, cheese-flavored breathing have made me sick. Slackened thighs flashing white and wrinkly through her open robe as she thuds across the floor, yes. Her big-toothed, hot, lip-licking mouth still haunted with Roquefort—“What’s this stuff!”—it ails me. I know how to describe her. It’s Mamie sitting on the floor at her open suitcase: phlegm-fogged, babbling, wide-eyed, curls bouncing, thighs astride, lion-like, lifting her tennis shoes up by the strings going “oooh” and everything, really everything so soaked already with the scent of her—“What?”—birthday-cake-flavored body creams, that nasty sweat of hers. Sweat that’d make a dog gag.

“See, I should just throw all these dresses out,” she’s saying. “Or give them to the needy. Do you want them?”

I gag a bit just then.

“If you get me sick I’ll be so mad,” Mamie says covering her mouth with one hand. “You know how sick I was in Switzerland? Those stupid nuns just kept splashing water on my face. I could have killed them.'”

Those lovelies entered in the draw:

JEFFREY H. MACLACHLAN

BRETT ELIZABETH

KENNY MOONEY

EDWARD J. RATHKE

EMILY LACKEY

KRISTINA BORN

MEGAN FINK

DAWN WEST

RICHARD THOMAS

ELIZABETH, FROM DENVER

D. J. BERNDT

JEN GANN

JACOB S. KNABB

ROXANE GAY

EM

DK

RYAN BRADLEY

STEVE HIMMER

OFELIA HUNT

XTX

MIKE YOUNG

KIMBERLEY SOUTHWICK

JEN DREW

NORA NADJARIAN

And the Winner is …

Congratulations!

Herewith endeth Cut Through the Bone’s reign at The Lit Pub (tissues, please.)

I’m excited to see what books The Lit Pub will feature in July!

Since my last post, Christopher Newgent, bless him, added three more posts to The Lit Pub:

An Interview With Me

Story Focus on “The Long Way”

A Farewell

Everyone else who comments in response to Christopher Newgent’s posts at The Lit Pub through midnight PST, June 30th, with be entered in a LIVE draw tomorrow to receive a $100 gift certificate to spend at The Lit Pub and purchase from the great and growing titles in their library. This gift certificate expires December 31st, 2011. I’m sorry, all previous winners this month are excepted from entry.

Good luck, everyone, and thanks for participating.

I read tonight at Elliott Bay Books, Seattle, at 7 pm, from Cut Through the Bone.  If you have any Seattle peeps you could share this information with, I’d be very grateful.

At last I get to meet my Seattle-based publisher, Kevin Murphy, and book cover artist, Siolo Thompson. Matthew Simmons is also coming along to the reading.

My husband and I are going to make this a rare getaway without our daughters. Dear friends are going to help out so we can play tourist in Seattle through Saturday.

Wish me luck tonight, friends, I’m both excited and terrified.

And please don’t forget about this:

Everyone who comments in response to Christopher Newgent’s posts at The Lit Pub today through June 30th with be entered in a LIVE draw to receive a $100 gift certificate to spend at The Lit Pub and purchase from the great and growing titles in their library. This gift certificate expires December 31st, 2011. I’m sorry, all previous winners this month are excepted from entry.

Thanks.

I believe in The Lit Pub and I’m grateful for and humbled by everything they’re doing throughout June for me and my first book, Cut Through the Bone.

Christopher Newgent of Vouched Books is doing an outstanding and Herculean job of posting three insightful essays a week over at The Lit Pub with in-depth looks at some of the stories in the collection and at the collection as a whole. Here’s the latest post. His threads have generated some excellent discussions and deservedly so. But I’d like to see him and The Lit Pub get more support and exposure.

In the hopes I can harness my spending dollars and better support The Lit Pub and indie publishing as a whole I’m going to shift from my usual book giveaway and do something different.

Everyone who comments in response to Christopher Newgent’s posts at The Lit Pub today through June 30th with be entered in a LIVE draw to receive a $100 gift certificate to spend at The Lit Pub and purchase from the great and growing titles in their library. This gift certificate expires December 31st, 2011. I’m sorry, all previous winners this month are excepted from entry.

I believe in The Lit Pub. I believe in indie publishing. I believe in our power as readers and book buyers to reinvigorate and reimagine the publishing industry.

Please help me spread the word.

As always, my deep thanks.

I’m slacking today and don’t have much to say.

It’s my husband’s birthday.

I read in Healdsburg last night with Lauren Becker and Stefanie Freele at the Healdsburg Literary Cafe and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

My husband and I stayed over in Healdsburg last night, slept-in, lounged by the pool, and went wine-tasting. We’re back in the city and soon our family is going to get together with friends for dinner, cake and poker. Life is good, friends.

I’ve never been busier with an impossible ‘to-do’ list and yet I’m slacking. It’s the right thing for me to do right now. I’m finding the fun again, had gone so long without fun I’d forgotten I’d ever lost it. For too long, I wore myself inside-out.

Some Housekeeping here though before I don a disguise, bite down on a cigar, and buy stacks of poker chips:

The winner of the following books:

Norman Lock’s Grim Tales, mud luscious press

Marcy Dermansky’s novel, Bad Marie, Harper Perennial

My Hard to Say, PANK (signed).

IS:

Jordan Blum!

Christopher Newgent brings the poignant and thoughtful again at The Lit Pub today with his latest post “Story Focus: More Than Gone.” You know the drill. Leave a comment in the discussion thread here and you’re automatically entered in my draw to win the following books:

Kim Chinquee’s OH BABY, Flash Fictions & Prose Poems, Ravenna Press

David Mamet’s, Glengarry Glen Ross, A Play, Grove Press (Winner of the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Drama)

My just released, Hard to Say (signed), PANK

Good Luck, Everyone.

I went to Sacramento with our two daughters this past weekend. Two of my dearest friends and their children also joined us. The eight of us enjoyed sunshine, the swimming pool, and Mary Poppins, to name just three highlights. We three mothers most enjoyed seeing our children so happy and connected. We overdid the tempura asparagus fries. I read, rarely checked my email, and didn’t surf Cyberville or write. I usually write every single day. However, it felt good to switch off and be outdoors and in the sun for so long, to lounge and laugh, and give more time and quality attention to my daughters.

Mary Poppins (I admit I’d never seen the movie) was a wonderful spectacle of music, singing, and dancing. It’s a mix of the cautionary and inspiring and champions children. Mostly, it’s about freedom. Freedom to be, to imagine, to let. At a recent high school graduation party, I enjoyed a wonderful conversation and good laugh with a delightfully eccentric Irish man we’ll call J. When I asked J. how he was he said, “Fabulous.” And I teased his positivity, saying there must be hardly any Irish left in him. He told me about a neighbor of his back in Ireland who liked to say “ah we’ll pay for this yet.”

“Grand day, thank God.”

“Ah we’ll pay for this yet.”

My whole life, I’ve felt afraid to fully enjoy the ‘good times,’ always waiting with dread for the wheel to turn. ‘Ah I’ll pay for this yet.’ Ask me how I am and the most I’ll dare admit is ‘good’ for fear of a kick to the head from life if I give voice to anything more positive.

This past week alone, I’ve had three ‘large’ disappointments with regard to my writing and my writing career. The disappointment hurt a great deal.

“If you’ll let it” was repeated often throughout Mary Poppins. I’ve decided to let my life: let fabulous, let happy, let success, let hopes, let dreams, and on and on. I’m going to let the undesirable too: let fear, let disappointment, let sadness, let worry, let grief, let depression, and on and on. I’m going to let and take one day at a time, instead of worry about what might be around the corner, what price I’ll pay for the ‘good.’ And what relief I’ll take from the bad because it’s most familiar and where I’m most comfortable.

I didn’t know one of my favorite lines was from Mary Poppins, “Get out of your own way.” Everything I want is also everything I’m afraid of: love, worthiness, success, to know I’m enough and for my true self to be known. I saw an orange tree in Sacramento. An orange tree. Oranges capture my imagination. I had no idea oranges grew in California, and certainly not Northern California.

Did you see the Tony Awards last night and that great acceptance speech from Nikki M. James, taker of the ‘Best Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical’ for her role in The Book of Mormon? Nikki said anatomically bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly. She believes bumblebees fly because no one ever told them they couldn’t. Maybe no one told that orange tree it couldn’t grow in Sacramento. For much too long, I’ve told myself all the things I couldn’t do, not in any freeing way, but in a damning way.

I don’t want to fly like bumblebees or to take root and bear oranges in Sacramento, but I do want to be the best woman and writer I can be. And I’m going to stop putting limits on myself. I’m going to reach ever higher and believe I can get there. I’m going to get out of my own way. I’m going to let me be that best woman and writer. I”m going to break out of the prison of fear and stop telling myself ‘ah I’ll pay for this yet.’

Watch this space.

In Other News:

Thank again to Laura Adamczyk for her guest post over at The Lit Put here. The goodness giveaway up for grabs for those who commented on Laura’s post:

Gary Lutz’s, Stories in the Worst Way, Calamari Press

Shane Jones’s, A Cake Appeared, Scrambler Books

Ethel Rohan’s Hard to Say (signed), PANK

Those entered in the draw for this giveaway are:

MW Wittle

Erika Moya

Books Personally

Jordan Blum

Doug Paul Case

And the Winner Is: Erika Moya.

Congratulations, Erika. Please email me your address through my contacts page on the site. I don’t want to give my email out again in posts because of the spam invading my account.

And yes it’s Monday and there’s another new and thought-provoking post from Christopher Newgent titled “Story Focus: The Big Top” on clowns but not clowns and lies. Clowns I’m ambivalent to. Lies torment and haunt me. And yes I’m doing another giveaway and if that interests you or bores you at this point I’m also going to let that be.

The books up for grabs in today’s goodness giveaway are:

Norman Lock’s Grim Tales, mud luscious press

Marcy Dermansky’s novel, Bad Marie, Harper Perennial

My Hard to Say, PANK (signed).

All comments on Chris Newgent’s post, “Story Focus: The Big Top” through midnight, tomorrow Tuesday, June 14 will be entered in this free draw.

Good Luck, everyone.