Voltage

I can see a braid in that place we see without eyes. The braid is made up of strands that are the writers of the 12th Annual Cork International Short Story Festival. The braid is enormous and endless. Pulsates with light. Terrifying if it wasn’t so beautiful. This braid can tease and caress and choke. Can hold down, raise up, and hurl any which way. It can sail through air, the jumprope, and bite deep, the whip. Braid can work its way inside you. Fill you up till you’re squirming, gulping, enraptured. Till you’ll never be the same. Braid is velvet. Is barbed wire. Is brave. Braid is a weave of mystery and genius.

__________________________

Ed: This is an installment in a series of posts by Ethel Rohan, dispatched from the Cork International Short Story Festival, which takes place this week in Cork, Ireland. To coincide with the festival, you can purchase a copy of Ethel’s book, Cut Through the Bone, for 50% off the retail price.

__________________________

Shiny-Toothed Jaws — 9/16

Last night, the Cork International Short Story Festival drew its first breaths and pounded its mighty fists. The Festival began with Helen Dunmore in interview, after which she read a touching short story centered on masks, deception, and hiding. Coincidentally (but there are no coincidences, are there?), these latter themes also carried through into the second and third reading of the night. Helen Dunmore is prolific and in person she’s as elegant, interesting and charming as her prose.

Next, Orfhlaith Foyle read two excerpted stories from her latest story collection, Somewhere in Minnesota. Her stories and delivery were mesmerizing and I’ve never before enjoyed an author read from his/her writing in quite the same way. For all her tininess and nervous introduction, Orfhlaith is a lion. Her stories grabbed my spine, vertebrae by vertebrae, and shook me with that pleasure-pain that’s hard to articulate. If you haven’t already: Go, find Orfhlaith’s work now and read her power, put your head inside her shiny-toothed jaws. I know I can’t wait to go there again.

Peter Murphy, John the Revelator, ably rounded-off the litlush evening and then we adjourned to Boqueria (Bridge Street, Cork) and a night of excellent service, delicious tapas and thick, sweet red wine. I enjoyed time with Siobhan Fallon, You Know When the Men Are Gone, Tania Hershman, White Road and Other Stories, Orfhlaith Foyle, Somewhere in Minnesota, and the Frank O’Connor Award shortlistee, Suzanne Rivecca, Death is Not an Option, Clare Wigfall, The Loudest Sound and Nothing, and many others. I wanted to dance with these women’s minds. To hold their writing hands and marvel at the magic and the mystery of what they imagine, articulate and make.

Frank O’Connor maintained the short story had at its root loneliness. I think the root of the short story goes beyond loneliness to fear. We write as we live — afraid of what we do and don’t know. Right now, though, I’m not afraid. I’m exhilarated. The mood is high in the Metropole Hotel, Cork. We are here to celebrate and showcase. The book is alive. The short story is sublime. Writers are turning out their insides.

__________________________

TORPEDOES — 9/14

I write from Dublin, Ireland. Little begins in Ireland without an arm around the weather so let me draw her in close, my hand on her shoulder, and say that today she’s lovely, enlivened by a rich transfusion of blue, a face with the understated yellow of turnip and warm welcome in her hair.

I’ve been awake thirty hours crooked and am drunk-tired. I flew from San Francisco to Dublin via Atlanta. In Atlanta airport I purchased a green salad. Chlorophyll is sun is greens is sun. Mid-graze, I discovered a dark gray pigeon feather amidst the limp lettuce and mess of mandarin slugs. My stomach wanted to punch someone.

Tomorrow I journey from Dublin to Cork via train to take part in the Cork International Short Story Festival. Trains make supernatural wails. The soul-screech of metal. Perhaps it’s the relief that comes from believing these hulks of locomotion can’t suffer that’s so exhilarating. I love travel on the train, the sense of torpedoing through the world.

I want to take you with me to the Cork International Short Story Festival. I will be your house and you can look through my windows and walk outside my door. At night, you’ll come home to me again and we’ll whisper out our day and lie down together and hold each other. People will Twitter and Facebook about a house in Cork, right there in the midst of the International Short Story Festival, that looks just like ME and how it’s peopled with YOU. We’ll get visitors too, mostly writers with flecks of stars in their irises, and we’ll all rejoice together in our carnival of words and menagerie of worlds. In my house, there will be many moments.

You’re invited.