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.

The amazing Justin Sirois’ amazing book Falcons on the Floor is available for pre-order.

We ask him some questions.

Michael Kimball, Adam Robinson, Double Dagger, Dan Deacon, Joseph Young, Mary Pulcinella, Chris Toll, Joan Sullivan, Shaun Preston, Jamie Gaughran Perez, Margaret Gebauer, Rupert Wondoloski, and Peter with the Moustache all make cameos.

Enjoy!

Alan Rossi’s story, “Blackberries,” appears in Issue 15. Here he discusses the story, the fruit, and tells us not to take field trips.

“Black or white, it didn’t matter, they were all pale.” Do you think this relates to an innocence, a lack of experience?

I think that’s a really cool way of seeing it. I can’t say exactly what I meant by this line because I don’t remember writing it. I remember seeing it many times when I was again looking over and working the thing, but I don’t remember writing it. I see it as, yes: that these little beings haven’t been out in the world. Maybe better: they are in the world but don’t know it. They are in the world but asleep to it.

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One Time All I Wanted is Dark Sky’s first ebook-only title. I sat down with One Time‘s author Nicolle Elizabeth over a series of emails to talk about Interpol, brake stands in front of crowded porches, and holding grudges.

Could you introduce me to One Time All I Wanted?

I wanted to say as much as I could, in as direct and economically simplistic a way for each piece included. I looked at each piece as its own separate short story.

Is there a particular order to the recollections in the book?

Yes and no. When I was writing it, I wonder if one memory or story led to another linearly but then later, as is sometimes the way with sentences in my longer pieces, I’ll be like, in the middle of something else, and look up and think, “Oh wait I forgot to add something,” and then another sentence will come. I often write short stories only after knowing the first sentence. I then will think on that one sentence for like, a really, really long time. A year maybe. It’s like meditating on something in a way. Then I build and write or deconstruct and edit from there. From an ordering standpoint, some of the pieces were moved around a bit from the Dark Sky editors, and I trusted them entirely, and am glad that I did because I feel like they treated me like I was this really fragile thin glass snowglobe in transit, like, they respected and cared and tried to help me harvest drafts which could be as could as they could be.

What made you choose to write this book?

Actually, I didn’t. I was in the middle of this moving process involving selling my house, and I was relocating down south for a semester and starting this new job and completely alone and I kept getting lost while driving and sometimes I would go back to my apartment, and I would write these first person memory perspective posts on my Facebook page. Some were true some were complete exaggerations. I have this really odd way of processing things, I always have, and sometimes I have to re-work them out while writing. Not always, sometimes it’s not essay, it’s straight fiction. But for example like let’s say I was carrying home a tray of water bottles from the grocery store, maybe the way I would express this would come out in my head something like, “Walked for centuries, melting snow in water jugs. Neck carries the weight,” or something. So I was posting these things, I think because of what I was going through, as a way to comfort myself in memory, and honestly as a way to amuse myself. Then like, a hundred people a day would like these mini stories. I got notes from four different publishers asking if I would submit some of them individually or as a series and I was like, “Sheesh guys, I dunno.” really it was comforting in a way to hear that other people were taking comfort in my misery or something. Then Brian Carr from Dark Sky messaged me and he asked, “What are these?” and I answered him, “They’re Facebook posts,” and he said, “These are more than that. Write me one hundred of these.” I then went through the process of archiving them over the three months I had been writing them out, and then began to write them out deeper, and go in and edit some, and what I started to realize was, “Wow if this is actually my life, what a sad girl I am.” I told him yes I would, for him I would, and then when I got to one hundred I sent them to him as a book, and we all began to edit.

Have you done this style of writing before?

Sort of. When I was in 8th grade I wrote a short fiction story, which was around six sentences or so, about each of my friends and then distributed them at the lunch table to each friend. They were “my artistic vision through observation.” Nobody talked to me for a week. I went through this repetition phase of linked flash pieces while working on a chapbook in 2006 and this writer I was working under said to me, “Oh you have got to read Joe Brainard.” She was right, I totally was writing like him and didn’t even know he existed. Then I participated in this. Then I wrote this, and here we are. I mean I wrote other stuff too but these are the similar ones I guess.

“i spent an entire year skateboarding to work across the Williamsburg bridge while listening to Interpol’s “Turn On the Bright Lights” on my head- phones because even though bro dude preppy sports types seem to love that album, it was a really good album.” This really is a good album – favorite song?

Right? It is such a great album. It got all this attention from the strangest pop amalgamation but who cares it was a great album. What this piece is about, really, is that I had moved to New York to go to school for more writing and to be a writer in New York instead of in my random notebooks, and you know what, a lot of it was a really tough experience for me. I wasn’t happy. I was broke, I didn’t really fit in, I was working three jobs and taking two hour long subway rides from the ghetto in Brooklyn to get to campus, which was in basically a different state. Everything in my life was a disaster. I felt like I was losing parts of myself instead of learning them. So, I would skate over the bridge, and listen to sad melodramatic music and feel terrible for myself. I love the entire album and I think I was listening to it in a way I found particularly miserable and humorous because to me when someone says the words “Turn On The Bright Lights” I think of someone waiting for something to happen, asking for change. “She swears, I must pray for the female,” etc.

One entertaining aspect of the book is the mix of fiction and reality and wondering which is which as you read. What made you decide to include both?

Well thanks Seth, that is so nice to hear that you believe all of these. I’m told fiction is best if people are actually buying it.

“one time i learned how to say, “build a bridge and get over yourself,” in ten languages. i then spent time thinking about the architectural integrity of different bridges. there were things to take into account, such as materials used, such as climate, such as landscape, such as tradition. some bridges have water running under them and some don’t.” Is the water under these bridges standing or nonexistent?

Oh no, I’m a grudge holder. I’m working on that though, more water for all. More forgiveness.

What about the two bridges you walked across to tell someone to leave you alone?

I am the queen of making an asshole out of myself to tell someone to stop making an asshole out of me.

There’s an honesty in what I imagine to be some of the fictional “recollections” that makes me wonder if, on some level, everything in the book is true. Is this accurate?

I’m really moved that you’re thinking that.

“one time i thought i’d impress a guy by doing a brake stand on my bike when riding up to the party house because he was out on the front porch but i ended up falling over and his girlfriend came running out to help me. she looked really beautiful in the streetlight. her hair smelled like coconuts.” How was the party?

It was awful I ended up drinking too much and getting carried by my friend back to his apartment where I then puked in his stairwell while his roommate tried to make out with me and then when I went back to the party house in the morning to get my bike from the front fence it was locked up to, someone had stolen only my fender. Who does that?

If the “i” in each of these stories is you, is the “you” in them the same person? Is the “you” even a person?

The “i” for sure is me, and i have been in a lot of these situations, by the way, in one way or another, to clarify your question about truths earlier. The “you” is a lot of different people. I think each you is a different person, maybe.

Tell me about the town square and the fiery torches.

Oh honey one time I was on this treadmill and this scary lady I’ve never met before goes I’ve read your writing I know everything about you then she was levitating above me on the treadmill and making the buttons go faster and I was like I am falling someone please help me and then all these people were like we hope you die.

Brett DeFries’s poems appear in the fall Web issue of Dark Sky Magazine. Here, Brett gives us a brief look at Ezekiel, talking seeds, and why heaven may or may not be polluted water.

Could you introduce me to Ezekiel?

As a collection, Ezekiel is a book length poem series. As the speaker in the collection, Ezekiel is someone nearly unable to cope with every day sense experience. Color is sometimes ecstasy and other times hell. Ezekiel is a victim of hauntings, and dogs are allergic to him. He is friend to Simon, son to his mother, client to Sasha, and burden and lover to Monica. He often confuses one relationship with the other, and sometimes he forgets his roles altogether.

Why is heaven “a dirty bowl of water?”

I’m not sure it is, and neither is Ezekiel, though if we were dogs, we might believe such a thing. From my own observations, though, I can say that as water is revealed to (some of) us, it is not the purity it stands for. If heaven is a revelation of world in time—and why not—then heaven is not remote from terror or soil or drought or spit. Instead heaven is worsened or improved by what populates it.

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