There is a city in Florida called Jensen Beach. It’s named for a Danish pineapple farmer who established a plantation on the Treasure Coast in the mid-nineteenth century. People have been telling me about Jensen Beach my whole life. “I know,” I usually say when they do, “I’ve always wanted to visit.”

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My first book is coming out in two months and I’ve been thinking lately about which parts of it I’ll have to answer for, which parts my family and friends will recognize and question me about. Which parts are true, which parts I’ll have to own as true even if they aren’t. I wrote a book full of fathers and children and marriages that are once just like my own and nothing like my own. Truth is an odd thing. I wonder if I even know what it means.

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To all of you in or around St. Paul, Minnesota – Saturday, April 21, Seth Berg, author of Muted Lines from Someone Else’s Memory, will be reading in the third-annual Great Twin Cities Poetry Read at Hamline University. There will be readings from over 30 poets, each reading a single poem. If you don’t have plans, you should be there. If you have plans, you should find a way to be there. Your friends will understand.

What: Third-annual Great Twin Cities Poetry Read
Where: Hamline University in the Kay Fredericks Room, Klas Center
When: 7:00 pm, Saturday, April 21
How Much: Free, open to the public

An excerpt from Justin Sirois’ Falcons on the Floor appeared in Issue 13 of Dark Sky Magazine. A brief yet exciting blip of fine writing. In those few pages, he beautifully described a woman in an abaya riding on a rickety tractor toward two Iraqi young men, one of whom was severely dehydrated. I did not know anything about the novel as a whole, but the excerpt read like a short story. It was focused and intriguing and I would have been satisfied with just that. Now, having read the novel, I am relieved that I did not settle for just the excerpt. It was but a hint at the wonderful flavors that would prove to be a very satisfying dish.

At its core, Falcons tells the story of Khalil and Salim, two young Iraqi men who flee Fallujah on the eve of the first siege of the city, but the story unfolds through masterful language (provided in part by the book’s collaborator, Iraqi refugee, Haneen Alshujairy), revealing a multi-layered story of perspective, friendship, and loss.

I hesitate to call this a brilliant first novel. It is a brilliant novel. Sirois demonstrates a succinct mastery of active language that manages to strike a lyrical cadence. The prose is poetry at times.

What’s down there?

The black water says nothing.

Mute leviathans – stripped of pigment and devoid of conscience. The croon hungry, kindles as knives. And the river knows we’re here too. Sons of the river and sons of Baghdad, we’re here, and I know the drops leaking out of our armpits and eyelids were once molecules of the river. It smells us as we float, knowing our bodies belong to its ancient body. It won’t hesitate to swallow us whole.

At times the dialogue and action move so fluidly and with such grace that it feels like he is retelling a personal experience, or like he stumbled upon such a story, which just happened to take place on the eve of the sieges.

There are three ways to approach this book – though, if you choose to keep a singular view, you will limit yourself and miss out on a well-crafted story. You can take it as a war story (a neutral approach to a war story) that demonstrates the emotional and friendly ties that carry on despite the apparent violence. You could also separate the themes of friendship, love, and loss entirely from the sieges and you would still feel Sirois crafting a solid plot while pulling strings inside you. I say that the best way, the third way, to approach this book is to combine the two and let the intended story unfold. Don’t limit Sirois’ ability.

It would have been easy to take a story focused on the eve of the first sieges of Fallujah and construct from it a soapbox of sorts and stand on top of it and scream. But Sirois handles the story with delicate, yet seasoned hands and lets it live in the moment.

One interesting aspect of the book is the change in perspectives. The book opens with the story of an unidentified character telling of pining love and teenage awkwardness. The story is brief and leaves you, at first, unsure about its place in the rest of book. This becomes increasingly apparent as the proceeding pages tell the story of Khalil and Salim. However, the perspective shifts again from third-person omniscient to first-person as the book moves to the “Selected Word documents of Salim Abid.” The book then returns to the third-person omniscient before ending on the perspective of a U.S. soldier, perhaps the same character from the book’s opening chapter.

All in all, such points of view give Sirois principal command of the story. He exists silently as creator, carefully guiding your imagination through layers of internal struggle for each character and how these struggles unite them. He captures the vulnerable youth and fragility of pining love, the strength of friendship, and the way all can ultimately be lost.

Ethel Rohan, Cut Through the Bone, has experienced a busy few weeks with interviews and conversations popping up across the online literary community. Good news, good news. Take a look at these interviews and get to know Ethel, where she’s been and what she’s working on, a little bit better.

Here is her interview in Used Furniture Review:

UFR: First, do you consider yourself a writer? For you, what does that term mean, exactly?

Ethel Rohan: Strange how tricky that little term is: writer. Yes, I do consider myself a writer. Really, it’s a label to facilitate convenience of classification, much like woman, mother, Irish, and so on. The terms help identify and tell some of a person’s story. The bigger story, and truth, behind the term is different for all of us. The written word is my center. Yeah, I’m a writer.

UFR: Your new book, Hard to Say, was recently released from PANK. Can you talk about this book a little? How would you describe it?

Rohan: Hard to Say is a collection of fifteen linked short-short stories that draw heavily on my Irish childhood and some of my worst memories. As I wrote these stories, though, I worked hard at distancing myself from the book’s narrator and her surrounding cast of characters. This felt critical to the fiction and the worth of these stories. Often what actually happened kills a good story.

UFR: What’s so distinct about your stories, I think, is that they’re so honest. When you’re writing a story, how do you find that honesty, that true to life quality? As a writer, how would you describe your voice?

Rohan: I’ll jump first on the last part of this question, if I may. I recently received the following story rejection that I admit amused me: “The story is interesting and strong in the end, but there are several sentences that are awkward or don’t make sense.” Any editor who has ever worked with me knows I’m open to criticism, revision and taking hard, long looks at my work for where I’ve erred and where I can improve. That said, this rejected story is one that fellow writers and editors in my lit group reviewed and supported. I believe in this rejected story and think it very much captures my voice and my writing rhythm. I always write to my own rhythm, lyricism that’s especially evident anytime anyone hears me read my work. I’m also aware that my voice and style can appear awkward and confusing to others. This is the constant struggle for artists, I think: How to stay both true to our unique voice and open to reality checks about the quality and value of the work, particularly in the face of complaint, confusion, and rejection.

I like that you find my stories honest, thank you. That’s not something I consciously do when I write though. Another aside, if I may. A few years back a friend gifted me with a weekend writing retreat in Napa County. While there, I wrote and read from a story where a character mercy-suffocated her dying, demented mother. The following morning at breakfast, another writer confided that after I’d gone to bed the others debated until deep into the night whether the story was fiction or memoir. I didn’t know whether to feel flattered or horrified and spat some of my scrambled eggs. I always write out of a place deep inside my characters, and ultimately out of a place deep inside me. I think readers respond to the honesty of that depth of emotion, and of showing ourselves, in my stories.

UFR: Returning to Hard to Say, the stories revolve around a girl and her family. Did you as an author ever find yourself identifying with the character, or characters? That’s to say, as a fiction writer, how close do you allow yourself to get to your subject matter?

Rohan: It’s quite funny that Hard to Say is such a little book because the personal toll of putting these fifteen short-short stories out into the world has proved enormous. I don’t think I’ll ever write out of myself in the same way or from the same place again. Many of the stories contain actual events and traumas that I’ve never spoken about to anyone. As I mentioned above, I worked hard at gaining distance in the telling of these stories and I very much wanted the work to be fiction versus autobiography—because of my terrible memory, because of a desire to protect others, because of the often limits and dullness of ‘actual events.’

As I wrote these stories I tried to remain outside of the characters and above the scenes, recording everything as it unfolded. To protect myself from reliving past traumas, yes, but also to serve the stories better. I’ve seen many stories ruined by an author who insists on sticking with what ‘really happened.’

As a fiction writer, I allow myself to get very close to and deep down inside my subject matter. I’ve learned, though, that it better serves the work (and the author!) to risk this intimacy with more fully fictionalized subject matter.

UFR: Your first book of stories, Cut Through the Bone has garnered a lot of attention, and was even on the Long List for the 2010 Story Prize. Did you write the book with any sort of expectations in mind?

Rohan: I first wrote the stories individually, without thought of a collection. When I write, my expectation is to deliver the best story I can. It was only when I’d published over eighty stories and recognized the persistence of several preoccupations and obsessions in my work that I realized I had enough material to gather into a cohesive collection, a best of my best at that time, if you will.

UFR: There’s clearly a long, amazing history of Irish literature, and Irish-American literature too. Do you consider yourself to be part of that tradition? If so, why? If not, why not?

Rohan: Honestly, as an emigrant, I often feel caught between cultures. The Irish no longer consider me theirs and Americans don’t consider me red white and blue. It’s whom I consider myself to be that matters, though, and I believe myself to be this very fortunate hybrid of both cultures. When I write, I tap into something very deep inside myself and at that core I’m Irish. Maybe it’s that I write from my beginnings, my anam. I’m fierce in my celebration of Irish and Irish-American literature, both its legacy and its contemporary largesse, but I can’t think about that staggering treasure trove when I write—it would be paralyzing.

UFR: As a writer, what are you trying to explore? What are asking? What are you looking to find?

Rohan: I am trying to explore us. I never plot or outline when I write. Never. I simply start and I am always grateful for—and astounded by—where the words take me. I always look to find the best story I can tell.

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Here, David Hoenigman from Word Riot interviews Ethel:

How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

My upbringing sometimes felt like riding a naked wild horse, with only its harsh mane to hold onto. I’d get so afraid on those gallops I’d let go of the horse and hit the ground hard. I can still sometimes hear the clop of my childhood and feel the build of hooves till they’re pounding.

When and why did you begin writing?

Sometimes a bruise is so lovely you don’t want it to go. Often, the worse the injury the more spectacular the bruise. It can feel good to press and squeeze a bruise, even though it hurts. No two bruises are the same and their range of shapes and colors seem limitless. Sometimes bruises disappear but they remain. Our bodies and minds are a brutal beautiful collage of the memory of bruises. Bruises, like stones, are never silent. As a child, I wrote to put bruises on the page. I still do.

Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

I’d rather drive tacks through my palms than intend to have a message in my work that I want readers to grasp.

What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work?

That my stories are too familiar. Bananas are familiar too, but each is unique and fascinating. Banana skins are green, yellow, spotted, brown, and black. Banana flesh is yellow-white and spined with brown-black. In bunches, bananas are a sun, bouquet, bowl, band of creatures–each with a single black eye. Alone, a banana is a brooch, hairband, mustache, slice of jaundiced moon. Bananas are hard and soft, smooth and ridged. Part-peeled, a banana is a flower. Fully-peeled, a banana is an albino slug. We haven’t yet invented the language to describe the taste of a banana. Bananas, like everyday stories, are sometimes mistaken as ordinary.

What projects are you currently working on?

I’m in this cave so long now with a short story collection titled Goodnight Nobody and a novel titled Kisses With Teeth, I’m crusted with bat droppings. Won’t some terrific publisher somewhere please turn these manuscripts into real, hold-to-my-chest books and let me out of the foul dark.

In his “Introit,” Thomas Lynch writes, “If the English master, Auden, was correct, and ‘art is what we do to break bread with the dead,’ then the Irish master, Heaney, was likewise correct when he suggests that ‘rhyme and meter are the table manners.’”

I’m sure Lynch fully understood the truth in these quotes as they relate to The Sin-eater: A Breviary, but these words perfectly set you up for Argyle and his hunger for iniquities. In the book’s twenty-four poems, Lynch not only breaks bread with the dead, he guzzles their beer. This may seem an irreverent gesture, for Lynch only half listened to Heaney’s words. These poems do not rhyme and are written in what Lynch himself calls an “imprecise pentameter.” Lynch seems to have forgotten his table manners, and rightfully so. However, the language, the overall layout of the book, is “suited to the brief meditations and reliance on numbers and counts that were part of the churchy rubrics.”

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