The Writer’s Center welcomes authors Ethel Rohan and Jeannine Ouellette for a discussion about their new books, the writing life, and the themes their works share.
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Ethel Rohan is an award-winning essayist, novelist, and short story writer. Her latest book In the Event of Contact won the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize (May 18, 2021). Rohan has published widely, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Irish Times, PEN America, Tin House, and Guernica. Born in Dublin, Ireland, she is a longtime San Francisco resident and member of the Writers Grotto.
Jeannine Ouellette is the author of the memoir The Part That Burns (Split/Lip Press, 2021), the children’s book Mama Moon, and several educational titles. She has worked as a writer and editor for regional and national magazines and has served as the nonfiction editor for Orison Books and reviewer for Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her fiction, creative nonfiction, narrative journalism, and poetry have appeared in numerous publications. She is the recipient of a Curt Johnson Fiction Award, Proximity Essay Award, Masters Review Emerging Writer’s Award, two recent Pushcart nominations, as well as awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Medill School of Journalism. Her work has been praised by Joyce Carol Oates as “simply beautiful, precisely imagined, poetically structured, compelling, and vivid.” Jeannine serves as a mentor for the Association of Writers & Writing Program’s Writer-to-Writer Program, teaches with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, and is the founder and director of Elephant Rock, an independent creative writing program in Minneapolis. Jeannine earned her MFA in fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is working on her first novel.
About the Books
In the Event of Contact contains fourteen gripping stories set in Ireland, England, and America. Stories from a singular survivor voice that chronicle crises of contact, various forms of injury, and characters making surprising bids for recovery. Among them, a scrappy teen vies to be the next Sherlock Holmes; an immigrant daughter must defend her decision to remain childless; a guilt-ridden woman is haunted by the disappearance of her childhood friend; a cantankerous crossing guard celebrates getting run over by a truck; an embattled priest with dementia determines to perform a heroic, redemptive act, if he can only remember how; and an aspirational, angst-ridden mother captains the skies. Amid backgrounds of trespass, absence, and necessity, the indelible characters of In the Event of Contact seek renewed belief in humanity and the remains of wonder.
In her fiercely beautiful memoir, The Part That Burns, Jeannine Ouellette recollects fragments of her life and arranges them elliptically in order to see each piece as torn and whole, as something more than itself. Caught between the dramatic landscapes of Lake Superior and Casper Mountain, between her stepfather’s groping and her mother’s erratic behavior, Ouellette lives for the day she can become a mother herself, and create her own sheltering family. What she does not know is how the visceral reality of birth and motherhood will pull her back into the body she long ago abandoned, revealing new layers of pain and desire, and forcing her to choose between her idealistic vision of perfect marriage and motherhood and the birthright of her own flesh, unruly and alive. This is a story about the tenacity of family roots, the formidable undertow of trauma, and the rebellious and persistent yearning of human beings for love from each other.