Ethel Rohan On Reading

"I read, and the tiny diamonds in my wedding band are thrown back on the page; one, two . . . eight tiny stones, tiny refractions of light. I move my hand so and the brilliant reflections vanish. Move my hand again and there they are back. There, gone. There, gone. Safely in and out.

"As a girl, I didn’t own jewelry, didn’t have anything but the words coming off the page, and me right there inside the story. Safely in and out. My mother called and called, chores and mending to be done, but she couldn’t get me out of the page, out of the words, out of the story. She raised the head of the sweeping brush and brought it down on my book, my lap, and first one knee, then the second knee. Her face the most terrible cover.

"Something died that day. Something I’ve yet to name. Not my love for books, for sweeping floors, for my mother. All that lives on. Invincible."

Godspeed, Cut Through the Bone

It's a small, strange feeling to be typing this last post for this month. I'm taking Friday and Monday off for the holidays, and I hope you all do as well, and enjoy the weekend, whether you're particularly patriotic or not.

I have to admit, I'm not sure I've ever gotten to spend so much time with a book since college, and am not sure I've felt as intimate with a bundle of pages in the 5 years now I've been out of school. Looking over the past month, I can't help but make that comparison.

I'm hardly a professor, but what I feel like has happened here in the past month is reminiscent of what used to happen back at Ball State, when we'd spend a few weeks as a class close-reading some book. One class in particular taught by Patrick Collier about Modernist literature of the early 20th century, was structured much the same way. We spent 2-3 weeks reading a novel, coming to class every MWF, and discussing it at great length, reflecting, responding.

But what else has happened here I never found in any class, and perhaps it's due in large part to the openness and vulnerability of Cut Through the Bone, of Ethel's writing, that allowed us to get away from such a clinical, critical approach to the reading. We bared our own bones here this last month, and I'm truly grateful you've all followed along and taken part in the discussions and shared all you've shared.

I have to admit, I had apprehensions leading into the launch of The Lit Pub. Molly and I put a lot of work and thought into this whole endeavor, Molly especially, and with any grand baby like this, there's always the fear of flop and failure. But I don't feel failure in the slightest. Looking back on this month, I see nothing but light.

So thanks to everyone for getting so involved in this, for sharing what you've shared. I've been amazed at the sheer vulnerability of everyone here, and the smart answers to hard questions, and the grace in hard subjects. Thanks so incredibly much to Ethel for being so active in the conversation, and all the ways she helped to push and promote not just her own featured book, but all the work by Molly and Mike this past month at TLP.

I'll be back next Wednesday with a new book (hint: it's from a Chicago press), and I hope we have just as excellent a time with that book as we did with Cut Through the Bone!

Happy holiday weekend everyone! Eat some beer brats (or veggie shish kababs if you're not of the carnivorous persuasion) and enjoy some summer sun!

Story Focus: "The Long Way"

This past weekend driving to a party in the countryside just outside of Indianapolis, I was in a mood to be moved by music. I sang loud, I drummed the steering wheel, I grew goosebumps along the skin of my arms. Feeling nostalgic, I put in the CD of my old band No Heroics, Please (yes, we used a Raymond Carver reference as a band name, yes, we were nerds).

NHP still stands to this day as the best music I've ever been a part of creating. Even 5 years later, I can still listen to these songs, still feel the quiet expectation building in my chest as each song swells and rolls into itself, still feel the pride of orchestration prickling along the pores of my forearms. I wish that band had had a chance.

Ten years of my life I spent playing in various bands to various levels of success. I know well "The Long Way," that constant hope and reach for elusive dreams. Putting in the hours at the fret board, sweating in tiny carpet-walled practice spaces, figuring out the Tetris game tactics of packing your band's gear into the back of a van or trailer.

NHP was born out of the dissolution of another band when our drummer and singer quit. The remaining members, Matt, Louis, and myself, all wanted to keep playing together. I forget how we hooked up with Trent on drums, but I'll never forget how he left us. We could each hold a decent tune vocally, but were honest enough with ourselves that we couldn't carry a mic, so we decided to keep it instrumental.

From the first song we wrote, we knew who we were, we knew where we could go. We believed in that first song enough to write a 2nd, and a 3rd, and so on.

We believed so much in those songs, we went right to work booking a tour. We knocked out a couple decent live recordings of our first 2 songs, posted them on MySpace, and spent an entire summer doing what needed to be done: hours upon hours planning the route and booking the shows, designing t-shirts and stickers and other merch, writing enough songs to make an album and getting them recorded, designing a decent looking DIY packaging for the album. Hours. Hours.

We booked an entire tour on 2 shoddy live recordings...having never played a single show. How we believed.

And so did our girls. It's only in reading "The Long Way" (unfortunately not published online, but available in Cut Through the Bone) that I really understand the grace and understanding that each of our girlfriend's (wife in Matt's case) had to get through that summer with us. And ultimately, the grace they had when the tour exploded from the inside, when Trent announced just before the first show of the tour that his girlfriend was being kicked out of her house, pregnant with his child, that he was sorry, but would have to go back home after that first night.

There's more to the story, as there is with any story, but it's unimportant here.

What's important, is how after No Heroics Please, neither Matt nor myself went on to do any other music. Louis played a bit in other bands, and still might. I'm not sure. I've not talked to him in years. But, for myself, the implosion of NHP was a sucker punch from which I've never been able to fully regain my breath. I hardly play guitar anymore.

What's important, is there are a lot of Ways. It isn't just confined to the music industry. The Long Way exists for any endeavor a person believes in and is passionate about. The Long Way for you may be writing, painting, acting. It doesn't even have to be an artistic pursuit. You may be trying to make partner at your law firm. Maybe running for a government office. I've seen The Long Way in a couple friends trying and trying to conceive a baby. I've seen The Long Way in a friend trying and trying to keep his veins clean. My Way now is no longer music, but I have my Ways.

What's important, is you never stop walking The Long Way. If you do, that's when you might as well call it a life. You might switch Ways, but don't stop walking. And if you find someone to walk with you, recognize what you have in that, because looking back at it, I had no idea what I had then until Ethel showed me.

Cut Through the Bone: An Interview with Ethel Rohan

I feel like at this point, Ethel Rohan needs no introduction here at The Lit Pub, so I'll just make with the love here and give you the interview, raw and uncut.

You write as someone who seems pretty intimate with loss. What’s your relationship with loss? Are there specific moments in your life you use to fuel the imagery and pathos in these stories in Cut Through the Bone?

I don’t consciously write about loss or any other subject matter. When I write, I don’t structure or plot and never know where I’m going. I follow the words and am always grateful whenever those words lead to a story I feel good about.I’m constantly surprised by the stories that come out of me and in awe of the writing process and creativity in general. At some point in the revision of every story, I ask of the work, “why would I write you?” It isn’t until I realize why each story matters to me personally that I can even hope to ‘finish’ the work and make the stories matter to others. I do feel intimately familiar with loss and have come to realize I’m everywhere in Cut Through the Bone in that I “know” what it is to have lost loved ones and lost parts of myself.

Obviously there’s lots of talk about the themes of loss and absence in this collection, but as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve taken from it more a theme of what is gained in the space left by that absence, space as a metaphor for possibility. Do you feel there’s too much focus on the loss and not what there is to gain?

The insistence on the loss and darkness in this collection was at first intriguing and instructive to me. Now I feel somewhat frustrated by the narrow focus on loss and darkness in the collection. I think the best writing goes into a dark place and brings out some key knowledge and meaning into the light. Readers’ resistance to suffering in fiction fascinates me. It can’t be that we’re so fragile or unconscious? So why does it seem that many can’t handle the truths—however hard-hitting—that fiction can deliver?

I’d go so far as to say the reluctance to acknowledge darkness and suffering in life and in literature angers me. What’s to be gained by denying truth and turning a blind eye to what’s difficult and painful in the world? Why, I wonder, is darkness and suffering so much easier to accept, even revered, in film and on TV versus in writing? I’m confounded by that. It’s one thing if someone feels traumatized by what they read, or there’s some fault with the work, then by all means stop. But to turn away and give up on stories only because they look hard at pain, suffering and life’s difficulties, I don’t understand that. Too many look away from sadness and suffering in literature and in life, and it’s wrong. Yes, absolutely, reading for escapism and entertainment has its value and its place, but our art cannot be limited to such narrow, irresponsible lenses. Art should mirror life and we shouldn’t look away from its harsher images and truths. There can be no change without disturbance and no gain without struggle.

We live in dark, difficult times and I don’t want my work to add to the suffering, I want my stories to acknowledge, confront and examine suffering in the hopes that we can alleviate it.

I love the idea, thank you, of “what is gained in the space left by that absence, space as a metaphor for possibility.” If we’d only look into the dark more often so we can set it afire and try to recover the missing more often, the world would be a better place.

I tried to start a community collaborated interview with you earlier this month, but it didn’t really take off. Molly posed a great question though that I wanted to be sure was asked here: “Ethel blogs a lot about her mother. If she’s willing, I would like to know more about what’s happening in her life. She is so willing to share a touch of the detail, the suffering her mother is going through, but I really want to know what Ethel’s going through . . . maybe for no other reason than to send her virtual hugs.”

At some point, I accepted that everything I write leads back to my mother. I resisted that truth for a long time and it’s something I tried to rid my work of. However, my mother and our complicated relationship both feed and haunt my imagination. When I was a child, my mother and I warred much of the time and we both hated and desperately loved each other. She was mentally ill and I was angry and scared and wanted nothing more than for her to be well, but she never recovered. My mother’s still alive (in her twelfth year of Alzheimer’s and recently diagnosed with uterine cancer) but she’s been long gone. Her absence and great suffering are among my demons and it’s because of her I write. Writing gives me somewhere to put the pain and fear and yearning. Writing offers me opportunities to heal.

It’s been interesting to have read first these stories in Cut Through the Bone, which no doubt had plenty of editorial review during the publishing process at Dark Sky Books, and going back to find earlier versions of these stories published online so I can link to them from my Story Focus posts here, allowing people who haven’t gotten the book yet to read the story. Particularly, I noted a lot of changes in “More Than Gone,” where you were a bit more liberal in your word count and description, whereas in the collection, your language is a lot more sparse. What has your growth been like as a writer, developing this bare-bones language that’s prevalent in your work now? Has the editing process at Dark Sky contributed to that voice?

I think my publisher, Kevin Murphy, would agree that there was little editorial input from Dark Sky on this manuscript. When I first submitted the collection, Kevin rejected the manuscript, essentially saying, “it’s not there yet.” Kevin encouraged me to work more on the stories and to resubmit. Thus motivated, I tried to be merciless with the work and studied every story and word for its worth. Over the course of months, I re-worked the collection and then sent the manuscript to Kevin O’Cuinn, my compatriot, fellow writer, and fiction editor at Word Riot, for his input and feedback. In response, Kevin provided excellent comments and edits that helped me get these stories where they needed to be.

During my MFA at Mills, Victor LaValle always said we should, “know our weaknesses as writers and police against them.” Some of my writing weaknesses are repetition, over-writing, flowery language and sentimentality. These bad habits appear in my first drafts and in revision need to be eradicated. Sometimes, butchering my stories and getting them to that better place can be especially hard because I love description and emotion. I’m still struggling with knowing what are bad habits and what are my style and voice. I want to rid my work of the former, but not the latter. Just as recently as this week, Matt Salesses of The Good Men Project hacked away at a story I submitted and made it so much better. This was an important lesson and reminder that those weaknesses are still clear and present dangers in my work and I need to be ruthless against them. As writers, we are forever students.

You had some really fantastic things to contribute to the discussion regarding men’s vs. women’s literature. Where do you see the future of literature in this regard? What would your ideal publishing/literary atmosphere be in regards to gender?

I’m very optimistic about the future of gender and race equality in literature. Thanks to the excellent marriage of the internet and the printed word, we live in exciting literary times and things are only going to get better. As women writers, readers, and buyers we’re raising our voices and harnessing out collective power. Some of the direct results of that activism and clout are increased visibility for, and accessibility to, the widest and most equitable range ever of writers, voices and works. We also have independent publishers to thank for the exciting state of literature today. Indie publishers are proving to be innovative, risk-takers with their fingers very much on the pulse of writing and works that matter. Indies are committed to excellence and inclusivity in writing and are fast becoming industry leaders and groundbreakers.

You just recently had a new book released by the illustrious PANK, Hard to Say. Can you tell us a bit about this book?

Hard to Say is a tiny collection of fifteen linked stories set largely in Ireland. I’m heartened by the excellent response thus far to this little book because these stories are personal and painful, and I agonized over whether or not I should publish the book. Unlike Cut Through the Bone, where I feel very much hidden inside the stories, in Hard to Say, I feel very much exposed and it was difficult to find the courage and get the necessary distance to tell these stories right and well. Only time and readers will tell if I succeeded in the latter.

Hard to Say is an apt title and I’m still coming to terms with the little book being out in the world. It’s deeply encouraging and rewarding that readers are moved by these stories and I feel buoyed by how many readers and fellow writers have found the work meaningful and worthwhile. To expand on the idea above regarding the opportunities in spaces, I’m excited about the new spaces that have opened up inside me now that I’ve gotten the stories in Hard to Say out of my insides and onto the page, and I look forward to finding out what can be gained in their absence.

Lastly, what’s next for you/what are you working on now that we can look forward to? Have you had any recent publications you’d like to share that our readers can check out?

I have a third story collection I’d love to see published, one that both my agent and I agree is best suited to an indie publisher. I’ve also finished a novel manuscript that I’m about to send off to my agent. It’s a novel I’ve worked long and hard on now over the course of nine years and I’m crossing every body part I can, hoping it’ll at last get to be in the world.

*   *   *

You can find more of Ethel's recently published work in the Highlighted Stories section at her website's Published Works page.

Story Focus: "Gone"

Yesterday, I did Father's Day. Babies are everywhere in my family right now. My sister-in-law is in town this month with her 1 year old. My other sister-in-law is 6 months pregnant with their first. My cousins just welcomed their 3rd into the world last month. Babies. Everywhere.

I will never understand a woman's body. You ladies. You can build another person inside of you. You realize that, right?

I mean, I get it. Sperm. Egg. 46 chromosomes. Embryogenesis. Trimesters. All that.

But, I mean, that's a tiny human splitting and piecing and splitting and piecing itself together inside your bellies. And your bones turn soft. The baby moves around inside of you, through your skin, you can make out feet, elbows, heads. You talk about your bodies unabashedly; you discuss what they crave, where they hurt, what is swelling and stretching.

I think about all this, and my mind reels. I am at once amazed and terrified. I think about all this, and I think about what I wrote earlier in the month about the artist in the story "Gone" in Cut Through the Bone:

“Gone” reads like a retelling of Robert Hass’s classic “A Story About the Body,” in which a woman reflects on the loss of her breasts to cancer, and bares herself to an artist attracted to a body she knows he does not understand.

Have you ever read "A Story About the Body?" If not, you should. It's a quick read, only a few hundred words. Go ahead and read it. We can wait.

Read it? Okay. I just wanted to make sure. There's no quiz, nor am I really going to make any comparisons beyond what I already have. I just wanted to make sure you'd read it.

Onward.

In "Gone," which I unfortunately couldn't find published online for those who don't yet have the book, a lady stares at herself in a mirror, traces scars along "the memory of [her] breasts" and another scar vertical down her belly, which I'm guessing is from a hysterectomy. She gets a phone call from an artist, Jason, who frequents the diner where she works, telling her that he has drawn her portrait, that he wants to show her. Her insides churn, feeling invaded, "he'd no right to draw me without my permission, to take from me like that." This lady, who has already had so much taken from her.

He insists on coming over, and she flees to her neighbor's, where their colicky baby is hurling fits. She encourages the bedraggled mother to take a break, have a shower while the narrator does what she can to soothe the baby. She coos and hums into its soft smell, its harsh shrills, and this line--holy damn this line breaks me--"His large, bald head pushed and rooted at my prosthetic bra and his greedy grunts turned frantic. I had only my baby finger to offer. The force of his suck hurt and frightened me, could rip my finger right off."

The baby quiets, the mother returns refreshed, and she reluctantly goes back to her home, where Jason is waiting on the doorstep. She invites him inside where he shows her his drawing, and she says, "It's not me." In the final lines, which I don't want to reveal verbatim here and lessen the sparse, cool wonder of them for those who've yet to read them, she bares herself to him, and he marvels and marvels with his pencil.

It's this same marveling I feel when I consider the female body. And it's not in a sexual way that I marvel, but simply wondering at the whole human mystery of us. Sometimes when I'm around babies, I make the joke, "Babies are weird, man. They're like little humans." It gets a laugh. But really, there's a lot of truth under the humor. Babies amaze me. Humans amaze me. Bodies amazes me, the way they bend and fold and wrinkle, the way they tear and mend and heal.

It's this amazement I see throughout "Gone," how the narrator marvels at herself in the mirror, at the force of the baby's hunger, the mother marveling at the narrator's ability to quiet the baby, at Jason's initial artistic rendering of the narrator, and the final wonder in the pencil, dancing and dancing.

The Metaphor Is Closer Than You Think

I have a painting in my apartment. It looks like this:

I like this painting for several reasons: its simple lines and muted colors. How the only, even vaguely, bright shade in the entire work is the red of the woman’s small, down-turned mouth. It is a sardonic, sad red—not bold, not celebratory.

Mostly, though, it’s the woman’s eyes that get me—eyes not unlike those in other Modigliani paintings, but wider—as deep and dark as two caves, so black they look dead. Or they make the woman look like she herself is dead. This is what haunts me about this painting. I can’t decide if she is metaphorically dead (emotionally dead, dying, stricken, etc.) or actually dead. A ghost.

I feel this is the painting Ethel Rohan would paint if she could. This dark image of this woman. It’s not just that, like the lines in the painting, Rohan’s writing is clean—though it is most certainly that. There is nothing unneeded in her prose, no word that is not doing something, if not two or three somethings. Tight. But it is more that the metaphor in this painting—showing a woman as actually dead to indicate an emotional/metaphorical death—is one that Rohan herself would use.

In the short story “Makeover,” the protagonist, a wife and mother, has a wild woman inside of her chest who wants her to wear tight, racy clothing and sing and dance. The woman gets excited when the protagonist satisfies her “wild” desires: “While she sang, the woman in her chest danced, spun and spun.” The metaphor is clearly wrought: Sometimes women (and men) feel as though they have a different version of themselves inside themselves that is trying to get out. It is a version that one’s family and friends might not, and probably do not, appreciate, as this is not the mother, wife, friend, etc., with whom they’re familiar. In “Makeover,” the woman’s family protests until she acquiesces, returning to her normal behavior, leaving the woman inside of her chest clawing and shrieking, unhappy.

Another character, the protagonist of “Shatter,” lives a broken life. She has a shitty job, a mediocre marriage, probably a drinking problem, and a sister with whom she doesn’t have a close relationship. Throughout this two-page story, nearly everything around this woman literally breaks—glass jars and the grocery bags she packs full at work. These objects break and others constantly threaten to break. What in a longer, more diffuse story might serve as a motif becomes the story’s central action and metaphor. In this way, Rohan makes the elements of her fiction work harder, accomplish more, than they might in another author’s hands. Her images nearly always work double—serving literal and symbolic purposes, pointing towards the tangible and intangible.

In the titular and final story of the collection, a masseuse gives a massage to a man whose leg was amputated after a motorcycle accident. This physical loss can be seen as visually representing the absence of the masseuse’s son. The last time she touched her son, “held him for any length,” was in some distant past. Throughout Cut Through the Bone, Rohan identifies the many ways in which her characters’ loss and struggle might manifest physically in their worlds. In fact, this last story feels like a metaphor of the collection itself. Like the woman who massages the air where the man’s lower leg used to be, throughout the book Rohan works in spaces defined by their emptiness, what was once there but is no longer. All those people and things that leave indelible, palpable marks in their absence.

Like that painting on the wall? In a month, a man will come and take it, because it is his. He’ll take some other things that belong to him too: a sleeping bag and tent, a 1977 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and a small wooden rack that holds magazines. I want to keep the painting, all this stuff, but none of it is mine. I feel that if this were a Rohan story, these objects would take on a life of their own—the woman in the painting would sprout legs, the books would flap their pages like wings. If this were a Rohan story, these objects would slowly disappear, piece by piece, long before anyone comes to take them.

What Is a Man's Literature?

There's much ado right now about the books I should be reading. I say this particularly as a man, having all the proper parts and such, whatever that has to do with my reading preferences.

You see, evidently, Esquire Magazine seems to think it does, having recently released their list of 75 Books Every Man Should Read. It's chock full of what you'd expect it to be chock full of: Bukowski, Carver, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Vonnegut, Hemingway, et alii. And what's really making news is that it is particularly devoid of names like Woolf, Shelley, Atwood, Plath, et aliae. Not even Harper Lee made the list. In fact, the only female on the whole damn thing is Flannery O'Conner.

I was glad to see Jezebel respond with their own list, but just as perturbed that it was titled 75 Books Every Woman Should Read. While not quite as devoid of male writers as Esquire was of females, still only 3 males made their list. And, I know, I know. Jezebel's list was made in direct response to Esquire, so there should be some expectation that they'd offer approximately 75 amazing female writers to provide some balance, but I think Brian Carr puts it best of at Dark Sky Books's blog:

"Why the polarization? Why the exploitation of emotions? Attention: as long as people pander to the edges there will be no advancement. It’s as American politics works today. Affirmation less than information. Enrage rather than engage."

Which is exactly what happened. Over at HTML Giant, Roxane Gay came out swinging.

"Esquire is a men’s magazine so it makes sense that a reading list they curate will reflect certain themes and biases. What’s troubling though, is the implication that men should only read literature written by men, that men don’t need to bother with books written by women, and of course, that the only great books are those written by men. What other message can we take from a list where seventy-four books are written by men and only one is written by a woman? Women writers are being done a disservice but the far greater disservice here is to men. This list not only perpetuates the erasure of great writing by women, it cultivates the erroneous and myopic notion that men only want to read a certain kind of book. If I were a man, I’d find this list insulting."

And, she's right. I probably would feel insulted, but somewhere along the way, I've developed some sort of thick skin. I'm not easily insulted, and to be honest, rather than rage, I felt a sadness. I supposed what I see in this list, in a disheartening and probably naive way, is a reflection of myself, an ease of forgiveness. Just last January, after putting on a reading here in Indy that included a line up of all males, I took a good, hard look at the titles on my Vouched Books table: 23 titles in all, only 2 of them by women.

I didn't even realize it while it was happening right in front of me.

I guess I'm saying I can relate, and what saddens me most is Esquire probably won't do what I did and make an attempt to balance the scales. It was easy for me to replace some of my titles with new titles by female writers. But, even if there are people working at Esquire who would like to, there's likely too much hubris throughout the editorial staff to do anything to make this right.

Of course, I don't even have the answer of how to "make this right?" Sure, they can re-release a more balanced list, but there are greater issues at stake here, to which I can't begin to pretend I have any answers.

I wonder if Esquire knew, whether it was their intention to have an all male list sans Flannery. I assume it's in large part pandering to their audience. I mean, their teaser description for The Grapes of Wrath is simply, "Because it's all about the titty." I assume it's in large part the intention to get men to read at all, to provide something of a starter list for a man who doesn't already love the word, and should that man choose at random, he's much more likely to develop a taste for books starting first with one of these more brutish books, and maybe it's their hope these men would branch out from there. But Roxane is right: whether intentional or not, it is sad and unfortunate the implied assumption that it is not necessary for a man to read female writers (except Flannery), that a man wouldn't fall as much in love with reading were he to first read The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood) or To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee).

I guess what bothers me most is the idea of "a man's literature." That a man would (should?) be most drawn to a literature that is tough--literature that might contain the phrase "muscular prose" on its jacket copy, literature about fishing, drinking, blue collars, hunting, etc.

I think about Cut Through the Bone, written by Ethel Rohan who is very much a woman. Of course it's not going to be on this list. It's less than a year old, too untested to list among so many classics, and well, let's be honest, I'd be surprised if anyone at Esquire has even heard of Cut. But, I wonder how the Esquire-man might respond to a book like CTTB. I would be talking out my ass if I tried to guess; I am not an Esquire-man, nor am I particularly interested in becoming one.

I want to believe Cut would be welcomed like a prodigal child. I want to believe in the Esquire-man, that maybe a book like Cut could speak to him, that he could see something of himself in these narrators similar to what he could see of himself in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Mostly, I want to believe this man, or any man, doesn't need a fistfight to find himself.