Ann S. Epstein writes novels, short stories, memoir, essays, and poems. Please use the links or site menu to go to the HOME PAGE; learn about her NOVELS, SHORT STORIES, MEMOIR, ESSAYS, and POEMS; find interesting facts in BEHIND THE STORY; read REFLECTIONS on writing; check NEWS for updates on publications and related events; see REVIEWS; learn about her END-OF-LIFE DOULA credentials and services; and CONTACT US to send webmail.
I’m pleased to share that my short story “Housewidow” was accepted by The Woven Tale Press, scheduled to be published in their Fall/Winter 2021 issue. In “Housewidow,” set during the post-WWII housing shortage, a third-grader’s world is upended when her family is evicted after her father’s uncharacteristic outburst against their demanding landlady. Read more in SHORT STORIES.
My Amazon and Goodreads review of Ever Rest: A Novel by Roz Morris (Rating 5) – Moving Past the Refrain of Loss. In Ever Rest, Roz Morris forges an unlikely alliance between rock climbing and rock music to create an absorbing novel about an outsized figure whose life shaped people’s identities and whose death leaves them hanging off a cliff, teetering over an emotional abyss, and grasping for an artistic foothold. Twenty years before the book opens, rock star Ash perished while he and his bandmate Hugo were climbing Mt. Everest. Ash’s body was never recovered, leaving his girlfriend Elza, Hugo, and another band member Robert, equally lost and bereft. Grief counselors use the term “ambiguous loss” to describe the absence of a loved one when there is no body to offer definitive proof they have died — they may have disappeared in a disaster, never come home from school, or not returned after running an errand. The book’s central question is whether recovering Ash’s body will allow those who revolved around him to move past the refrain of his death to compose new verses for their own lives. As a fiction writer myself who balances multiple points of view (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I admired Morris’s deft blend of perspectives, which provide insight into those driven by their obsessions and the loved ones they in turn drive to anxiety and despair, exasperation and confusion. Her impeccable research into music-making music and mountaineering ground this soaring novel in both worlds. The memorable characters in Ever Rest will remain on readers’ playlists long after the book’s last peak is summited and its final note is sung.
“If being a vamp meant that men like those at Paddy’s would snort and leer at me, I was no longer sure I wanted to emulate Theda Bara” (On the Shore). In this WWI coming-of-age novel, a young girl in a Lower East Side tenement in 1917 looks with distaste at the drunks stumbling out of a nearby saloon. Three years later, from 1920 to 1933, prohibition would be the law of the land in the U.S. But in Russia, the government sale of vodka had been banned in 1914. Ten years earlier, the Japanese had easily overcome the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War because the Tsar’s troops were too inebriated to fight. So, although a third of the government’s revenues came from the sale of vodka, Tsar Nicholas II banned it when the country entered WWI. Anger over prohibition from peasants, workers, and the military was a contributing factor in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which brought down the Tsar’s empire. Read more about On the Shore, a touching immigrant tale that spans time, place, and culture in NOVELS.
“Writing human beings as ‘characters’ is chief among all sins of the memoir writer. Unfortunately, it’s painfully easy to turn people into flat characters in a format so focused around recoloring the past” (Meagan Shelley, “In Search of a Third Dimension: On Characterization in Memoir,” The Writer, August 2021). Fiction writers can fall into the same trap, creating cardboard villains or cloying saints who lack complexity. My favorite challenge as a fiction writer is to make an unsympathetic character interesting — not necessarily likable, but humanized with a range of emotions and behaviors. To do that, I must first empathize with them. Finding that empathy can be harder for the memoir writer whose opinions of a person or event are fixed. Waiting before writing offers a solution. Time and distance allow the memoirist’s perspective to widen and become more flexible. More thoughts about writing at REFLECTIONS .
Doing a cowardly or hesitant revision is like swiping a rug with a rag. It merely stirs up the dust, which then settles back down, slightly rearranged. A courageous or bold revision is taking the rug outside and beating it until the dirt falls away and the yarn, repaired and rewoven, shines. More thoughts about writing at REFLECTIONS.
“I don’t believe in bad ideas, just bad execution” (actor and writer Issa Rae). When it comes to my own writing, I believe in both. No idea is inherently bad, but it may be bad for me. How do I know? My interest soon fizzles; the well of characters and scenes dries up well short of a quarter-cupful. Or I park the thought in my idea folder, but months or years pass without it beckoning. I don’t delete it; it may eventually call. It is likely a good idea for someone else. But I accept that it’s a bad idea for me, for now, maybe forever. Bad execution, on the other hand, IS inherent to the creative process. Which is why we revise, seek feedback, and continue to polish the work until we do justice to an idea that takes hold of us and won’t quit. More thoughts about writing at REFLECTIONS.
“I have to have a thousand bad ideas before I can get to a good one” (writer and director Aaron Sorkin). Every creative person can attest to the truth of Sorkin’s pronouncement, although we hope for fewer missteps before we find our footing. The notion of wading through the bad to arrive at the good is one impetus behind the advice to write every day. If you write infrequently, it can take a long time for a good idea to emerge. Odds are, you’ll have given up before then. Worse, if you wait for inspiration to strike, you may never begin. But if you trust that a gem is buried in the mud, you’ll slog through until it shines. Save and polish it. Then slog on, bypassing more bad ideas and collecting good ones until the piece is complete. More thoughts about writing at REFLECTIONS.
My Amazon and Goodreads review of Girl A: A Novel by Abigail Dean (Rating 5) – Dodging Shadows from the Past. Girl A by Abigail Dean is the indelible story of the aftermath of extreme child abuse on a family of siblings, told from the adult POV of the second oldest. Thirteen-year-old Girl A, the identity given her in the initial police report, is the one who escapes from the house where she and her six siblings are held hostage by their parents, leading to the release of the others, their father’s suicide, and their mother’s incarceration. Although we learn the horrors of their imprisonment, the novel’s focus is on how the surviving children reintegrate into society, with varying success. As a fiction writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I was impressed by the earthly complexity of the almost other-worldly characters Dean creates. “Survivor” is the term applied to a person who emerges from a trauma, alive. But the word is less a noun than a process, a fluid state that ebbs and flows as the individual steps forward while dodging shadows from the past. Although Girl A (Alexandra, or Lex) is the narrator, she initially tells us more about the siblings she reconnects with after the death of their mother than about herself. Perhaps that’s the point. If Lex survives only by running from herself, how can she possibly tell others who she is? Is she a reliable observer of her siblings, or is her view tainted by distorted memory and blocked by the walls she has erected? We do eventually discover the illusion Lex must maintain to sustain her fragile existence. Extreme as this falsehood may seem, acts of denial enable us all to survive after pain we would otherwise find unbearable. Even after closing the book, readers will be shadowed by Girl A.
