![]() ![]() Her hair and her breath, her pillow, those candy cigarettes, ring pops, licorice. I wanted to sing all those songs from all those terrible movies. I wanted her babble about dinosaurs, all of the names and all of their faces crayoned into the wall. I wanted her giggling at the antics of squirrels, her stories of alien abduction. Would I have to wait until Cora was reborn? How long would that take, and should I look for her younger? Pull her from cribs or from strollers? All I wanted was to hold her hand, stop seeing her lifeless, stop seeing that stain in the road. “I ordered you fries.”Īnd the one who called me Auntie Grandma.Īnd the one who could manage the Honda’s sticky buckle herself.Īnd the one who sounded right, knew all the right movies, but had dark curly hair. “I’m so sorry,” I said, over and over, “I’m so sorry,” while the car dragged itself back to the fire lane in front of Target.Īnd the one who ordered French fries but wouldn’t eat them. And she did.Īnd there was the one who cried, and of course I returned her immediately. “Go back.” And when she didn’t, I realized I had to let go of her hand. “Look at that pink car,” I said to the girl. “Orange,” Cora used to say, “look at that. Asked no questions, did not count off-color cars in the parking lot. Not the right age or hair color, not the tea olive smell of her skin. The second one wore a green coat with fur around the collar and looked nothing like her. We kept a sense of humor and play about serious subjects moments of magical realism added to the mood and movement of our collaboration. Characters got closer and closer to the core, but never quite grasped what happened - to each other, to themselves. We moved around, rather than through, the central violent gesture illuminated in the title story. Our aim was to leave some of the book’s mysteries unsolved, but to allow our readers access to each character’s emotional reality. Rather than plot out a conventional novel, we decided to work in experimental forms, chain-smoking story to story, linking each character’s narrative to the next through a pack of candy cigarettes. True Ash began with the title story, which left both of us wanting to know more about the characters and world we’d created together. An understanding that through shimmer of heartache is the only way to come to terms. These stories began concurrently from a place of hurt and a place of power, a place of deep love, commitment. True Ash began as a way to honor connection, the lost, and find some truth, perhaps. The landscape obfuscates even what it reveals. Dust rises and settles and we lift our shades to see if that will make the landscape clearer. The red desert rocks hide the truth of the bodies they have swallowed, shimmer, the heat’s sorrow, close down the shadows at midday. The rare tree sways in the distance, yellow tussocks of rothrock grama, dry grass, but the horizon stays clean of mustangs. We pull over to the side of the road to watch for wild horses, which we were told to find here. She is Professor of English at Western Washington University. ![]() Recent BLP titles include With Animal, co-written with Kelly Magee, and Human-Ghost Hybrid Project, co-written with Daniela Olszewska. In 2014 she was awarded the Philolexian Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement by Columbia University. Nonfiction editor at Tupelo Press and freelance editor/manuscript consultant, she teaches at Western Washington University.Ĭarol Guess is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including Darling Endangered, Doll Studies: Forensics, and Tinderbox Lawn. Other books include poetry collections Money for Sunsets (Lambda Literary Award finalist in 2011) and Waiting Up for the End of the World: Conspiracies, flash fiction collection Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake, long poem / lyric essay hybrid The Green Condition, and fiction collaboration Your Sick. Colen is most recently the author of What Weaponry, a novel in prose poems. Also, our Big Moose Prize for the novel is currently open to early bird submissions. Have a manuscript you think we’d like? During our November Open Reading Period we are looking for poetry (chapbooks and full-length collections), short fiction (again, both chapbooks and full-length collections), novels, novellas, nonfiction (CNF, biography, cultural studies) and translations from German. This will be Elizabeth’s second book with Black Lawrence Press and Carol’s fifth. Colen & Carol Guess, co-authors of the short story collection True Ash, due out next summer. These manuscripts came to us through our open reading periods and our 2017 Hudson Prize. This month we are celebrating the titles that we’ve acquired in the past six months. ![]()
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