This week’s other featured book, “Quiet City,” by Susan Aizenberg, can be found by scrolling down below this post, along with the First Tuesday Replay. Or, click the author’s name on our Author’s page.
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THE BOOK: The Owl That Carries Us Away.
PUBLISHED IN: 2018
THE AUTHOR: Doug Ramspeck.
THE EDITOR: Ben Furnish
THE PUBLISHER: BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City)
SUMMARY: In the title story of The Owl That Carries Us Away, the young protagonist finds a possum skull in his back yard, washes it with a hose, carries it into the house, and sleeps with it in his bed. Only later does the reader come to understand how the skull connects to a recent near-tragedy in the household. In other stories, a newly-married woman imagines that mushrooms are growing from her husband’s body, a funeral director is robbed by a teenage boy outside of an NFDA convention in Chicago, a woman with memory loss falls back in love with her abusive dead husband, a child comes to believe that his father is a bear, and a woman absconds with her sister’s baby and envisions a life for them in Florida. Winner G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction.
THE BACK STORY: Years ago my daughter found a possum skull in the woods behind our house. She washed it with a hose then left it on the retaining wall. A few days later, a creature must have run off with it, for it was gone. But that one tiny event has had a remarkable impact on my writing. The title short story features a boy who pets a possum skull like a cat. And my poetry collection, Possum Nocturne, includes several poems about possum skulls. I’m not sure what this obsession says about me as a writer . . . .
WHY THIS TITLE?: In the title story “The Owl That Carries Us Away,” the boy with the possum skull dreams one night that an owl chases him through a field, sinks its talons into his back flesh, and carries him away.
WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? The Owl That Carries Us Away is comprised of 29 fictions: a mixture of traditional stories and flash-fiction stories. These are quirky, dark fictions. If our brains are ice-cream cones—with the most primitive parts of our brains as the bottom scoop—this collection is meant to appeal to that scoop.
REVIEW COMMENTS:
“That Ramspeck is a prize-winning poet shows in this accomplished collection, winner of the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction: the language is grittily lyrical and each story in the moment. In one piece, the narrator says, ‘I see that my sons are wild creatures, feral boys in the backyard,’ and that beneath-the-surface sense of nasty brutishness surfaces throughout. A boy relentlessly pursued by a bullying older brother nearly drowns him, then wishes he had; ‘his brother will be lying in wait, will never forget this.’ A young woman is delighted with her new husband yet finds his presence, his very body, intrusive. And in the particularly affecting opening story, a boy who treasures a possum skull, a great sense of comfort to him with his father ill and his life lonely, is devastated when it’s destroyed by a would-be friend. Memory matters, too; a man finds his wife’s clothes ‘dangling their remembrance around him,’ while the father watching his sons is defined by the moment long ago when his brother drowned. VERDICT: Excellent reading for those who value meditative, beautiful storytelling.”—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal, starred review
“Ramspeck’s debut collection abounds with flawed families, tense confrontations, and unlikely moments of grace. In these stories, Ramspeck traces the emotional fallout from failed and imperfect connections. The threat of violence hangs over the proceedings: When recalling his first love, the narrator of ‘Slippery Creek’ recalls her disapproving father revealing his gun. ‘He almost smiled, as though he thought I might appreciate the gesture,’ the narrator notes—and that blend of implied violence and unexpected emotion serves as a template for much of what follows . . . These precise and resonant stories chronicle humble lives and unspoken traumas, making for a subtle and moving reading experience.” — Kirkus Review
“Doug Ramspeck’s The Owl That Carries Us Away offers twenty-nine stories that deal with disappointments, childhood traumas, and tragedies, among other themes. The author presents his worlds in ways that often don’t outline the why’s in neat little bows. Instead, the stories present themes and ideas that demand their readers to feel the emotions. The Owl That Carries Us Away is a collection of stories that will leave no one unmoved.” — Evgeniya Monico, New Pages
AUTHOR PROFILE: Doug Ramspeck is the author of six collections of poetry and one collection of short stories. His short fiction has appeared in Southwest Review, Iowa Review, Narrative Magazine, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, South Carolina Review, and many other journals. He is a two-time recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, a finalist for the UNT Rilke Prize, and the winner of the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Fiction. A professor at The Ohio State University at Lima, he teaches creative writing and literature. Married to Beth Sutton-Ramspeck—a Victorianist and Harry Potter scholar—Ramspeck lives in Lima, Ohio. A grown daughter, Lee, teaches third and fourth grades for a Montessori public school in Charlotte, North Carolina. Other members of the Lima household include Siri (a dog named for Sirius Black from the Harry Potter series, not for the virtual assistant), and Reggie (a cat named for Regulus Black). His author website can be found at https://dougramspeck.com/
AUTHOR COMMENTS: The blog on my author site includes meditations on inspiration, on writing quickly and writing slowly, and on the pros and cons of book contests. I have been both a judge and a winner of some of these contests, and I write about how to improve the odds.
SAMPLE:
There was a picture book Cole liked that told the story of a mother who had a child with accordion-like wings on his shoulders, tiny wings that would carry him into the air if his mother wasn’t careful, sometimes bumping against ceilings or tree branches or clouds. It wasn’t clear to Rachel how much her nephew understood about the story, but he sat in her lap on the bus while she was reading it, touching his little fingers to the page, making sounds that might or might not have been words. Rachel had been terrified of getting caught earlier when she had bundled little Cole in a blanket at her sister’s home, had carried him from the house while the parents were asleep, had walked the half mile to the bus stop. She had worried that, at a minimum, the boy would start fussing for his mother, but it hadn’t happened. He was a beautiful child, everything she’d always hoped for. He was small as a miracle, a perfect child with pudgy legs and cute pudgy cheeks and his first tiny teeth fighting through.
LOCAL OUTLETS: Indiebound https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781943491131.
WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: BkMk Press http://www.newletters.org/bkmk-books/the-owl-that-carries-us-away, Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Owl-That-Carries-Us-Away/dp/1943491135/, Barnes & Noble https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-owl-that-carries-us-away-doug-ramspeck/1128433406?ean=9781943491131.
CONTACT INFORMATION: https://dougramspeck.com/
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 