THE BOOK: Inside Ball Lightning.
PUBLISHED IN: 2020
THE AUTHOR: Rainie Oet.
THE EDITOR: James Brubaker.
THE PUBLISHER: SEMO Press (Southeast Missouri State University Press), founded in 2001.
SUMMARY: Inside Ball Lightning is a book-length memoir in verse that follows changing relationships in the poet’s immigrant family around the years of their grandmother’s death. The book traces the childhoods of three siblings, full of competitive chess, Gameboys, ghosts, ESP, and ball lightning. The book looks back across generations, as parents’ childhoods merge with the poet’s, and looks forward into the continuing implications of the family’s immigrant experience. Inside Ball Lightning attempts to reconcile terror and love, nostalgia and pain. THE BACK STORY: Why did you decide to write it? How long did it take to write? Whatever you think might be of interest.
I could not understand why I felt so haunted, especially between the ages of 8 and 15. I needed to write about what I was haunted by.
One of the things about haunting, for me, is that it’s always magnetic. There’s a part of me that wants to be haunted. That needs it.
This is at once an exploration of what haunted me as it is an exploration of what I took from being haunted.
On top of that, my relationships with my family underwent massive change during this time. We moved closer, moved apart, moved closer, moved apart, like planets in orbit around a sun. The sun was my grandmother’s ghost.
The book took about four years to write, although the central 12-poem sequence, “No Mark Spiral,” wrote itself in the span of two weeks. Four years. Two weeks. The book came about in fits and starts. Writing it was engaging, fully, with what haunted me. Trying to let it go, to give it peace. Sometimes the ghost was stubborn to hold on, sometimes grateful for the chance to leave, and sometimes pissed. But the book got done.
And I grow older. I forget many of the things I wrote about here. Only, some part of me remains haunted. Some part of me was turned into a ghost. It haunts me. It travels back in time and haunts this book.
WHY THIS TITLE?: When I was a child, my parents warned me about ball lightning. I never saw one, but my dad did. It is a ghostly and a real phenomenon. This book is inside ball lightning, inside the liminal space that shouldn’t exist but does. Inside ball lightning, the real blurs with the imagined, and things that never happened happen, and things happen again and again. Ball lightning orbs have often been confused for ghosts. Inside ball lightning, the ghost animates the sphere. It moves erratically, a wisp in the darkness. It can, at any time, explode.
WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? This book is at once mysterious and real. Like lightning that appears for only a flash and then is gone, a childhood passes. But time threads a childhood with grief. Sometimes the lightning gets warped and threaded too, and it becomes ball lightning. An orb that floats through the rooms for a long time. This book is like a bolt of lightning turned into a ball—a memento of childhood, a searching investigation into hauntedness, and an intergenerational reconciliation.
Also, regretfully, few narrative-in-verse books exist. This book is one.
REVIEW COMMENTS:
“With Inside Ball Lightning, Rainie Oet has it all. Dramatic reach and psychological depth. Humor that will knock you down, and tenderness that will float you genie-like above your seat. An extraordinary display of poetic power, and this year’s must-read new voice.” —Mary Karr, author of The Liar’s Club
“In Rainie Oet’s Inside Ball Lightning, the displacements of migration and loss are caught within in the rippling lens of childhood. Here, memory’s prose is shot through with the lyricism of a dream-state, pulsing with strange luminosities—glow watches, ghost cams, Geocities sites, a flash of lightning caught in a microwave. This is an ambitious debut, wrought with care and an eye for the surreal in the everyday.” —Franny Choi, author of Soft Science
“To enter the Inside of Inside Ball Lightning is to listen to a startling voice—or is it to be startled by a listening voice? A voice like a perpetual aside in a play written by dusk and the sensation of salt granules on the tongue. This is a voice that declares, ‘I’m like a cloud with a hole for a mother.’ And asks, ‘What if your clothes were connected to your body by millions of little worms?’ These poems are the feeling of a question left dangling in the air. Time here is particular and peculiar, infused with pop culture, with immigrant forms of (not-quite) knowing. One poem’s Digimon epigraph perhaps best encapsulates the collection: ‘One of the strange monsters had a strange light hit them in a strange way, which changed them into another strange monster.’ What strange and welcome company, this book.” — Chen Chen, author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities
“Between grief and beauty exists a dwelling space. What is it? In these lines haunted by elegy, yet uplifted by the lyric, Oet sees and names our longing for transformation. The gone beloved is named directly, is seen everywhere up close: ‘You are fog / on the hand mirror, wind / through the highway.’ This is, perhaps, the fate of the elegist, to mourn and to see with clarity: ‘You are the moth inside the lightbulb, fluttering.’ This is beautiful work.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
AUTHOR PROFILE: I’m a nonbinary trans lesbian monster, currently stomping through Los Angeles. I play a lot of board games and watch a lot of horror movies. I live with my partner, the amazing Ariel Chu (read her work at ariel-chu.com), and our cat Skipper, in an apartment that is always filled with light even though you can’t see the sun from any of its windows. Oh! I also write picture books and other things for younger readers. I’m represented by agent Abigail Frank of Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. I have other narrative-in-verse too. There’s Glorious Veils of Diane, published in 2021 by Carnegie Mellon University Press, a novel in verse about a missing, blood-obsessed girl who is God to everyone in her family. And also Porcupine in Freefall, a Calvin and Hobbes style elegy featuring a talking porcupine. Last but not least, I have a video essay on YouTube about monsters, transness, and joy. You can check everything out at rainieoet.com.
AUTHOR COMMENTS: Inside Ball Lightning came out literally at the start of COVID and I never had a chance to promote it. Although COVID continues to rage, I’m really grateful for this chance to promote the book.
SAMPLE:
Fermata (first published in Colorado Review)
WHERE TO BUY IT:
Buy the book: http://www.semopress.com/books/inside-ball-lightning/
– https://bookshop.org/books/inside-ball-lightning/9781732039957
– https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Ball-Lightning-Rainie-Oet/dp/173203995X
– https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/inside-ball-lightning-rainie-oet/1132224860
PRICE: $15.00.
Contact me:
– https://www.rainieoet.com/contact-rainie
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 