Ethel Rohan's Blog, page 51

Cut Through the Bone contains thirty such vignettes, small shards of lives which "never fit right in the world," as a character says of himself in "The Bridge They Said Couldn't Be Built." They are lives relayed with reportorial precision and clarity, all

If you'd like to read the rest of this review for Cut Through the Bone from Jesse Hicks over at Barrelhouse, you can find it here.

Thank you, Jesse. Thank you, Dave Housley. I always liked Barrelhouse.

Thank you, you, for reading.

 

 

Cut Through the Bone contains thirty such vignettes, small shards of lives which "never fit right in the world," as a character says of himself in "The Bridge They Said Couldn't Be Built." They are lives relayed with reportorial precision and clarity, all

If you'd like to read the rest of this review for Cut Through the Bone from Jesse Hicks over at Barrelhouse, you can find it here.

Thank you, Jesse. Thank you, Dave Housley. I always liked Barrelhouse.

Thank you, you, for reading.

 

 

Cut Through the Bone contains thirty such vignettes, small shards of lives which "never fit right in the world," as a character says of himself in "The Bridge They Said Couldn't Be Built." They are lives relayed with reportorial precision and clarity, all

If you'd like to read the rest of this review for Cut Through the Bone from Jesse Hicks over at Barrelhouse, you can find it here.

Thank you, Jesse. Thank you, Dave Housley. I always liked Barrelhouse.

Thank you, you, for reading.

 

 

Another Fantastic Book Bundle Giveaway

Yes, I'm doing it again. The following excellent books are available to win:

Matt Bell, How They Were Found

Paula Bomer, Baby and Other Stories

Alissa Nutting, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

Ethel Rohan, Cut Through the Bone (signed)

Chad Simpson, Phantoms (chapbook)

Trust me when I say I hate to give away Bell's, Bomer's, Nutting's and Simpson's books. I tell you they are all an unforgettable, often riveting, read.

What do you have to do to get your name in my red cowboy boot and be eligible to win? Simple. Forward me a copy of your receipt to Tiny Hardcore Press for your advance copy of xTx's forthcoming story collection, Normally Special, for a purchase made between today, January 11 and January 31st and you could win all five books. Only purchases made between these dates are eligible. Send receipts to ethelrohan@gmail.com. Winner announced February 1st. Books mailed same day to winner. Please spread the word.

Good Luck everyone!

And the Winner of the Fantastic (Chap)Book Giveaway is

*Mitzi McMahon*

Congratulations, Mitzi, I'm thrilled for you. For those of you not familiar with Mitzi please check out her blog with links to her wonderful stories. Mitzi's work always delivers. Mitzi, please email me your address and I'll get your (chap)books on the way to you. Here's the goodness again:

Rusty Barnes, Breaking it Down

Molly Gaudry, We Take Me Apart

Sean Lovelace, How Some People Like Their Eggs

Matthew Salesses, Our Island of Epidemics

Peter Schwartz, Old Men, Girls, and Monsters

Sententia Issue 2

Claudia Smith, Put Your Head in my Lap

William Walsh, Pathologies

xTx, He is Talking to the Fat Lady

Ethel Rohan, Cut Through the Bone

I wanted everyone who entered to win. Alas. Thank you all for playing.

As a bonus, just because I'm a big softie, my daughters pulled two other names from my red cowboy boot. They dug deep. (They're still so young they think their mother's feet don't smell. I expect I have another year before I start to embarrass and disgust them.) Both of these lucky recipients will receive a signed copy of Cut Through the Bone. And the runners-up are:

Sally Bunch and Hunter Choate. Congratulations Sally and Hunter.

Hunter, Sally, if you already have a copy of my book I'm happy to send a personalized, signed copy to the giftee of your choice. Please send details.

Thanks again everyone for playing. This was fun. I'll do another giveaway soon. Stay tuned.

 

 

 

Who's Afraid of Vagina Writing?

I'd like to lock myself in a room with Goodreads for a week. I've read so many great books in the past year and I want to write about them, to spread the good word. So many books, so little time, and I've let that hugeness and those annoying Goodreads's star ratings overwhelm me.

Star ratings are hard. I prefer to discuss a book rather than rate it, but everyone else has to work with those screaming red blots, so I'll have to suck it up and play along. I'm going to take it book by book and I'm going to start with Lindsay Hunter's, Daddy's, which I just finished, having marveled all the while, and which has left me conflicted and troubled.

Lindsay Hunter's stories in this book are rich with language, with stunning images and with precise details. Much to my delight and awe, every story in this collection touched me. Every story offered something, whether it be on the level of language or character or emotion, and usually, spectacularly, all three. These stories are powerful and illuminating. It's hard to describe, but Lindsay Hunter has managed to strip away any and all layers between the reader and the stories. There's a confidence, beauty, brutality, and honesty to this collection that's gripping.

I've talked before about how troubled I felt during my MFA years at Mills College. I couldn't find any joy in reading. Zip. Zero. Nada. I was depressed, exhausted, and overwhelmed. I had a three-year-old and a newborn and no time for anything outside of mothering, least of all reading. How terrible, as a writer, to find no enjoyment in reading. How wonderful, then, in recent years to refind that love. To enjoy a book so much I don't want to put it down, so much I can't wait to get back to it. In this regard, the other two most recent titles that come to mind, aside from Daddy's, are Paula Bomer's Baby and Other Stories and Alissa Nutting's Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls.

Daddy's opens with "My Brother" and these first three sentences: "My brother tells me monsters set up shop in his closet among his Reeboks and hidden Playboys." Yeah, he says, leaning back and stroking his chin, yeah, you can't see it but something's coming for me. Big whoop, I tell him."

Reading is so personal, isn't it? When I was a girl, my mother believed monsters lurked inside her wardrobe, told me they were coming for her. So you can bet those first lines and that first story got my attention and had deep personal meaning. That said, "My Brother" is perhaps my least favorite story in the collection. In many ways, "My Brother" doesn't go as deep as the other stories, but there was enough in those first pages to hook me, and with each story that followed Lindsay Hunter reeled me right in.

Here's a line from the next story, "Scales," that shows Lindsay Hunter's keen eye and exquisite prose and which is of course even more powerful in context:

"Her spine sticks out and in the bright light of the bathroom little shadows collect under the bones."

So many of these stories are the proof that you can break all the 'rules' you want when you're this gifted a storyteller. From "Love Song" I'd be wary in my own work of using song lyrics to further a story and yet "Love Song" is a heartbreaking read, in the best way. The last page of this story literally took my breath away. I could go on and on about this book. Read this book. Shout about this book.

So why am I conflicted and depressed? There's the perhaps typical anxiety and yearning: How does my story collection compare to this? Can my stories move and affect readers anything close to this? Damn, how'd she get to be so brilliant? But it's much more and I'm not sure how to talk about it.

I don't know anyone in my life that I could hand this book to and say "read this, it's brilliant." I think it's fair to say that everyone I know and love would be shocked and disturbed by this book, and that even if they did enjoy it they'd have a hard time admitting it to the greater community: We can't like that.

When I write, there's a critic on my shoulder: You can't write that. I'm often a frigid, uptight and conservative writer. I have a low threshold for writing about the body, sex, violence, and our baser urges and desires. When I've dared break free of that jail, I've paid a great personal and emotional price.

The "You can't write that" police torment me: What if your daughters' school principal read that? Your parish priest? Your Catholic school community and your neighbors? Your daughters' friends' families? That's disgusting, my inner critic screams. What if these readers are so appalled by what I write it affects my family? One day, my daughters will also become my readers and my stories could potentially have enormous impact on them. These are real and present concerns that exist outside the bubble of our online community.What's good taste? What's vulgar? What's perverse? What's brutal-honest, brutal-beauty and brutal-bad? I'm conflicted. I don't know. I'm shook up.

I wonder if Lindsay Hunter found it an act of courage, an act of faith, to publish some of the more raw and graphic of these stories? "The Fence," for example. I wonder the same of Paula Bomer and Alissa Nutting. Maybe it's my Irish Catholic upbringing, maybe it's that I live in a conservative community, maybe it's fallout from childhood trauma, but there are some places I can't go as a reader or a writer. Hunter, Bomer, and Nutting all took me places in their stories I didn't think I'd ever dare venture and their brilliance kept me there, rewarded me. However, it's a fine balancing act, for them, for me. These stories disturb, but in the best possible ways. Lesser writers might just disturb.

Maybe I'm in the wrong life. Maybe I'm a coward.

Fantastic (Chap)Book Bundle Giveaway

Just when you thought the season of gift-giving was over. I'm about to offer one lucky recipient a fantastic bundle of (chap)books. These books fall under one, two or three of the following categories: "Books That Deeply Affected Me," "Books That Made Me Feel Mediocre as a Writer," and "Books That I Hate to Give Away."

To the books listed below, I will also add a signed copy of Cut Through the Bone that the lucky recipient can keep or gift. What do you have to do to receive these books in the mail? Simple. Please tell me the final sentence I read in this previously UNAIRED trailer for Cut Through the Bone.

Please DON'T submit answers in the comments section. Answers should be emailed to me at ethelrohan@gmail.com. I'll accept answers until 12 midnight PST on Thursday, January 6th. Then my daughters will pull the lucky winner's name from a hat, shoe, bag or whatever and I'll announce the lucky One here on Friday, January 7th.

Rusty Barnes, Breaking it Down

Molly Gaudry, We Take Me Apart

Sean Lovelace, How Some People Like Their Eggs

Matthew Salesses, Our Island of Epidemics

Peter Schwartz, Old Men, Girls, and Monsters

Sententia Issue 2

Claudia Smith, Put Your Head in my Lap

William Walsh, Pathologies

xTx, He is Talking to the Fat Lady*

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Good Luck!

*This one may already be a priceless collector's item.

Broken

I love Christmas, but not New Year. As a child, as I remember it, Christmas was the most special part of the year in our home. Easter, when we got new clothes and a small chocolate egg each, was a close second.

Christmas, a certain aunt and uncle gave our family a box of sweets and our dad's boss, Mr. Kennedy, the bar owner, gave us a tin of biscuits. This was bounty of Willy Wonka proportions. There were also new clothes at Christmas and of course presents from Santa and gifts, however small, exchanged amongst the siblings and from us to our parents. On Christmas Day, we all ate together and there was a feeling of plenty — another marvel.

I have zero recollections of New Year's from childhood. However, I also have no recollections of my family ever celebrating any of our birthdays. I don't think we ever did, but I might be wrong. I could poll my family to get their take, but that never goes well.

I do remember that I started celebrating New Year's in my late teens, that  it was about going to the disco and being drunk and getting that slow dance with a certain someone and oh if only getting a date with him too. I can tell you that even if I got the dance and the date everything about New Year's was always disappointing and never lived up to the hype.

I am an anxious person and, sad to say, have a history of dreading things more than looking forward. I was always that girl waiting for the next kick in the head. Thankfully, I've  healed and continue to heal and everything's not so scary any more.

Yet I'm still not a fan of New Year. On so many levels, this is the strongest and most content I feel going into January 1st. On other levels, with food and other crutches, I've regressed. My life is a constant struggle, a constant balancing act. All I can tell you is that I keep trying. I also take care of my sensitive little self as best I can. For me, that means keeping New Year's as low key as possible. In recent years, I've slept through midnight and enjoyed that more than any New Year's Eve party I ever attended.

As I look back on 2010, on the writing front, I've had a wonderful year and I'm so thankful. In a composition notebook, I keep record of every submission I send and rejection and acceptance I receive. I've had the same composition book for ten years. I sent my first submission on November 15, 2000 to  Zoetrope: All Story. A decade, friends, a decade. Eight years of rejection. Pages and pages and pages of entries with red lines through them, enough to paper my office. Seriously. The shift started in 2008 and has rocketed in recent months. That girl who always got kicked in the head, who expected to continue to always get kicked in the head, cannot believe her luck.

But it's not all luck, is it? Alongside the girl who was beaten down, there was always me holding her, nursing her wounds, saying it's going to be okay. We deserve better than this. We're going to make it.

In 2011, I want to keep mothering that broken little girl inside of me until she's all better. I want to keep making it.

 

Happy Happy, All

I wish you all the very best of the Season. Thank you for reading this blog, especially my regulars who comment, email and cheer me on. I hope you know how very much it means to have you on this journey with me. Your words buoy me every time.

I wish all of you all things bright and wonderful today, tomorrow and always.

 

Do Ask, Do Tell

I admit when I first received invitations from editors etc. to interview I felt elated.

As more and more of these invitations come in, thank you, I feel less elation and more anxiety. I worry I don't have enough time to do the questions justice, that I don't have anything new to say, that I'm not interesting.

However, and I hope you'll agree, it seems interview questions are like story questions and thankfully, thus far, there's lots and lots to write and I'm always surprised and delighted by the answers that result from the questions posed.

My latest interview went live today over at The Story Prize blog. Thank you, Larry Dark.

And as always, Thank you for reading.