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Tag Archives: Ethel Rohan
Plumb the Depths
In Act I of Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman is growing increasingly upset at his lack of accomplishment. At sixty years old, he is working on commission, he can’t manage to pay his bills without borrowing money from his neighbor, and his son Biff is working odd jobs on ranches out West, directionless. Willy bemoans the current state of life to his wife, Linda. He has been working his entire life and it has all added up to nothing. Even when they finally pay off their house, there will be nobody to live in it, to which Linda replies, “Well, dear, life is a casting off. It’s always that way.”
Few writers understand this truth better than Ethel Rohan in her collection of stories, Cut Through the Bone. In each story, Rohan explores characters that have spent their lives gathering husbands and lovers and children and limbs and then losing them one by one. Rohan explores each loss deftly… Continue reading
Hard To Say by Ethel Rohan
I began reading Ethel Rohan’s Hard to Say (PANK 2011), a slim volume of very short fiction, with very little exposure to her previous work. I’m not sure what I was expecting from those fifteen little stories, but it’s fair to say that I was unprepared for just how deeply I would be affected by them. Spread over fifty-three pages, they document a tale of life in an Irish Catholic family, and although each story is an individual, they have been deliberately ordered so as to run in chronological order, taking you from the narrator’s birth to her new life in the US and her struggles dealing with the emotional turmoil of a dying mother. Continue reading
Interview: Ethel Rohan
Your piece in the September issue of Emprise is so full of empathy for the man about to jump. It’s one of the things I love not only about this piece but your work in general; you have such compassion for your characters and this seems especially rare today when so many writers write in a more detached style–even the narrator is often alienated from him or herself. Do you think it’s important as a writer to care about your characters? And if so (or if not), why? Do you find stories working or not working because you do or don’t identify with or empathize with the people in them?
I do think it’s important to care about our characters. I also think care is complex and can run the range anywhere from the intention to honestly render our characters (be they lovable, despicable, or whatever) to flat out worrying for them, suffering for them, and even falling in love with them.
However, I don’t usually go into a piece with any conscious bias or particular sense of the characters I’m about to meet and how I will feel about them. Essentially, I enter the work blind, open to what will unfold.
More and more, I find the stories that don’t work are those where the characters and their dilemmas don’t interest, perplex, surprise, and move me. Continue reading
