In 2012….
my son turns five
he graduates from preschool
he goes to kindergarten
I turn 45 and vow to focus on my health
I celebrate my ten-year wedding anniversary
my first novel debuts
my first short story collection debuts
I vow to run more, to read more, to eat less, to eat more
I finish my thesis and finally receive my MA in English Literature
sometimes I am sad
sometimes I am happy
I am loved, I love
Someone hurts my feelings
I hurt someone’s feelings
I am intimidated
I face my fears
Sometimes I am lazy
Sometimes I stay up too late
I seethe over a passive-aggressive comment
I watch TV
I worry about global warming
I become outraged by political commentary
I read a book that makes me cry
I make a new friend
Someone dies
A child is born
Wishing you all the best in 2012, good people of Earth!
+ books, Echolocation, Ellen Meister, Engine Books, fiction, literary, Myfanwy Collins, novel, Pia Ehrhardt, writers
Joy to the World
Has been an up and down sort of time for my family. As already noted, we lost our beloved pet recently and on top of that we’ve all been sick. And yet, there is so much to celebrate. That we are together. That we are whole. That we love one another.
And yesterday, all of the blurbs for my book came in; joy to the world, indeed! I’m truly grateful to these writers who have lent their names to my book. Thank you!
“Myfanwy Collins tells a deep and resonant story about people she loves, and along the way shows us how to love them as well.” —Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedweller
“Fearless, elegant, and accessible, Echolocation is literary fiction at its best. With heartbreakingly beautiful prose, Myfanwy Collins tells a gripping and tender tale of broken souls yearning for wholeness. These are characters who will stay with you long after you turn the last page. It’s a dazzling debut!”
—Ellen Meister, author of The Other Life
“Myfanwy Collins has the goods. It’s that simple. Echolocation is about love in all its magnificent slipperiness; it’s about how secrets bind us rather than rend us; it’s about the endless series of personal reinventions we call a lifetime. And these are things we had all better be thinking–and reading–about, if we plan to try and get out of this alive.” —Ron Currie Jr., author of God is Dead and Everything Matters!
“Myfanwy Collins’ debut novel calls to mind the grim and radiant work of Daniel Woodrell. From page one, I was chilled by the landscape, caught up in the trouble, and riveted by these women of northernmost New York who slam back together and figure out how live with what’s missing.” —Pia Z. Ehrhardt, author of Famous Father and Other Stories
“A moving and delicate novel, tracing the poignant destinies of women who long for a home they never had.” —Laila Lalami, author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Secret Son
“Get ready to fall madly, sadly in love with the fiction of Myfanwy Collins.” —Benjamin Percy, author of The Wilding and Refresh, Refresh
And then there is this beauty–give it a listen:
Yesterday, we lost our friend. January 12th, 2002 was not the day he was born, but the day he was reborn. It was the day we brought him home from the shelter and our beautiful friendship began. He was one of the great loves of my life. Today, I wrap myself in a womb of grief. Good bye, my friend. I will love you forever.
Isidore Mirsky, the narrator of Paul Lisicky’s gorgeous novel The Burning House, desperately wants to be a good man. He loves his wife. He loves where he lives. He wants to do good work. He wants a purpose. He wants to be good. The problem is that Isidore doesn’t really know who he is anymore outside of his lusts and fears and indiscretions. Indeed, it seems he has lost the ability to function in the moment.
Even as he feels his wife, Laura, falling away from him into illness, he also pushes her away–out of fear, and, ultimately, lust. The one person who brings Isidore back to life is his sister-in-law, Joan. It is as if the two women are halves of one perfect woman for Isidore–a person who has never existed and can never exist.
Told in gorgeous, hypnotic language, we follow Isidore through his travails and hope that he will come back to living within the moment, which he does. For in the end, after all seems lost, it is Isidore who is found as he listens to his wife sing once more:
So she lets go and gives voice to everything coming at her: the love on the way, the love left behind. And good health. The possibilities. What more could a good man want? And how very nice for the weary traveler, who’s had enough of the same old thing, who could stand a little refreshment every now and then.
It’s a beautiful book. Read it.
Convocation in Chicago
+ books, fiction, flash fiction, literary, PANK Little Books, short stories, short story, small press, writers
Hard to Say, by Ethel Rohan
I do believe that Hard to Say, a painfully beautiful linked collection of stories by Ethel Rohan, will leave you as speechless as it did me. The book begins with a young woman whose own desire not to speak her family’s many secrets chokes her. It is not until she envisions herself speaking, through a dream of bloodletting, that her stories are set free.
Long kept hidden away in the narrator’s secret spaces, the stories burst onto the page with confessions of wrong doing–both that which is done to the narrator and that which she does out of necessity and survival and desire. Indeed, the book reminded me of the first time I went to confession. I remember being disappointed because the priest was not in a booth as I had anticipated. Instead, we sat in a small room together, nearly facing each other. I could not possibly tell him all of my sins face-to-face. Instead, I told him those I thought he could most easily swallow. Had I been able to speak freely in a dark booth, away from his eyes, I might have told the truth as the narrator does in these stories.
While all of the stories moved me, the one that broke me was the final story, “Mammy,” which is peeled back to the first word and possibly the final word any human being thinks or says and that is a name for mother: Mammy, Maw, Ma, Mummy, Mommy, Mama, etc. The narrator, leaving her ailing mother in Dublin as she flies back to the US, watches a documentary about girls’ circumcision in a Ugandan village. She is on the plane and her thoughts are, obviously, with her mother, as are mine while I read it. I have been on that plane, flying back and forth to and from my sick mother, wishing for relief from the anguish of it all. And then the final lines which pierced me deep in my heart and continue to:
Then, on the plane, from the TV, those girls’ cries from that hut in Uganda, calling their mothers, Mammy, Mammy, Mammy. Cries that stabbed me, that should have cracked the earth.
It’s a gorgeous book. Read it.
At the heart of Roxane Gay‘s devastating debut collection, Ayiti, is truth. Whether a language is shared or a language divides, what it offers, when spoken with strength and authority, is an opportunity to share the truth. There is a connection to the desire for truth from the title of the book, which is the Haitian Creole for Haiti, to the final words, which are about more than language. The final words are about that which is beyond language. That which we all share: a desire for love, a release from fear, a necessary need for freedom.
Each of the stories within this book is a slice of heartache and of truth, but the one that struck me most was the one at the very heart of the book–both its physical center and its spiritual center–and that is, “In the Manner of Water or Light.” From the very first words, I was swept into a dark, puzzling, and beautiful world:
My mother was conceived in what would ever be known as the Massacre River. The sharp smell of blood has followed her since.
The Massacre River is both the taker and giver of life. It offers a baptism in blood. And as important as the river is to the players in the story, it is also the keeper of their secrets:
The ugly details are trapped between the fragments of our family history. We are secrets ourselves.
Indeed, “we are secrets ourselves” is at the core of the stories within these books. It is as if each is a confession whispered into a deaf ear, or, conversely, a secret bursting forth, no longer able to be contained, screamed loudly from the tallest mountain, “You will hear me!” These are secrets that need telling. It is in telling and sharing the secrets that people are set free:
I had pictured the river as a wide, yawning and bloody beast, but where we stood, the river flowed weakly. The waters did not run deep. It was just a border between two geographies of grief.
If you had never read anything else Roxane Gay had written, you would certainly know from these stories that she is a truth teller, which she is. She does not hide her face or turn away from that which people do not want told. Ayiti is a brave and beautiful book, filled with truths that need to be told. Read it.
It seems an oversimplification to say that Patricia Henley’s gorgeous new short story collection, Other Heartbreaks, will break your heart. But it will. It will break your heart again and again but you will come back to it, begging for more.
You will come back because this is what love it about. The thrill of attraction, the comfort of togetherness, the razor’s edge of disintegration. Love is, in fact, a heartbreak the second it begins because within that second what you know, but do not dare voice or even allow yourself to think, is that someday love will end. Either you will stop loving or the other person will stop loving or, worst of all, one (or both) of you will die.
Patricia Henley knows all of these things about love and these are the gifts that she generously offers us with her stories. And she gives us these gifts with great skill, with great humor, and with a great deal of empathy. She is, in short, a master.
Usually there are one (or sometimes two) stories within a collection that I feel I must push myself through; not so here. Each story was as skillfully wrought and humane as the next. The book is perfectly bookended with two examinations of family’s dealing with loss and.
The first story of the book, “Rocky Gap,” totally knocked me out. The setting is a family reunion at a campground. Innocuous enough, or is it? What we all know about family is that usually when we come together as adults there are many past wounds lingering in the shadows. Same here for this family which is coming together for the first time since the death of one of the sisters. At the same time that the the protagonist is mourning for her lost sister, she is also mourning for the loss of her partner as she watches their relationship disintegrate. And yet, through all of this sadness, there is beauty. One sees a way forward. No matter what, June will survive.
The final stories are a tale in triptych of the March family, within which there is an examination of the parents falling in and falling out of love all leading to the heart of the story, the daughter, Sophie, who has lost her young husband to random violence. Indeed, it is within Sophie story that I found the echo from many of the other stories and that is the biggest heartbreak–the one of love lost too soon. I was reminded so keenly of Gabriel and Gretta in the final scene of “The Dead” where he knows that he can never (and could never) replace the love his wife has lost. It is the same for Sophie; while her heart is opening up again, it may never again be as open as it was with Luis. As it is for many of the other characters within “Other Heartbreaks”–they may be heartbroken but they are not broken. They are not dead. They live and as long as they live, there is hope.
+ books, Echolocation, Ellen Meister, Engine Books, fiction, Myfanwy Collins, novel, Victoria Barrett, writers, writing books
my novel, ECHOLOCATION, available for pre-order!
Absolutely thrilled and delighted to announce that my novel, Echolocation, is available for pre-order here: Echolocation
here’s the first beautiful blurb:
“Fearless, elegant, and accessible, Echolocation is literary fiction at its best. With heartbreakingly beautiful prose, Myfanwy Collins tells a gripping and tender tale of broken souls yearning for wholeness. These are characters who will stay with you long after you turn the last page. It’s a dazzling debut!”—Ellen Meister, author of The Other Life
If you’re like me, when you finish the brilliant new chapbook Wild Life just about every other page will be dog eared. From the prodigal brother eating watermelon in the dark, to the Payless shoe store clerk who may or may not be a child abductor, to the couple with the new bed, you will turn the last page of this book and feel as though you have entered a truly beautiful and brilliant mind. And that mind belongs to the book’s author, Kathy Fish.
Fish’s wry humor, keen vision, and deft language will leaving you laughing one minute and crying the next. She is not manipulative with her words. She does not scream her stories. She does not thrust them down your throat. She offers them to you quietly. She offers them to you as a whispered prayer. In fact, what she does is trust you with her unique and precious gift.
Take, for example, “One Purple Finch” a gentle and unexpected love story that is utterly complex in its beautiful simplicity:
He would make pancakes for her, with berries and honey. And she would life the hem of her skirt. And she would build him a fire. And he would make her a card, drawing a picture on the front, of trees and one purple finch. And they would look at each other at the end of the day and say now what should we do? We should be friends forever and hold each other’s hands and tell each other when we have something stuck between our teeth and trade anecdotes and say oh you told me this before but I love hearing you tell it, so tell it to me again. And you should untie my sneakers when I am weary and I will wear the silky aquamarine robe when you want me to.
All of the pieces in this book moved me in some way, but the one that will not ever let me go is “Spin” which is about a mother and her young child. As a teacher tries to get the mother to “redirect” her child and teach him how to conform to a certain way of learning, she remembers her past life, mourns her imagined present, and learns to live in the moment and the successes that seem small, but are immeasurable. I would argue that this story will push its way into even the hardest heart and that once the reader gets to the end, he will understand this mother’s heartache and her incredible love:
When she finished, she found him lying flat under the sofa cushions. She wondered if she was supposed to unbury him. She sat on the floor and leaned in as close as she could. She felt the boy’s breath on her face. It smelled like apples.
“Hello in there,” she whispered.
This book is a gift and I hope you will read it.
myfanwy collins 