Write Back Now!
Write Back Now!
By Lisa Fishman
Acclaimed poet Lisa Fishman’s debut novel tracks a peripatetic 1970s childhood and the uprooted friendship between girls who stay connected by mail, until they don’t. It opens in a borrowed house in wintry Nova Scotia, where the adult narrator faces the first-ever border closure between her two countries. Framed by these long-separated experiences, the novel keeps almost-beginning again as the narrator tries to figure out where she will be next by figuring out where she has been previously. Along the way, a dead horse, a lost crop, a miscarriage, an extra-tropical cyclone with hurricane-force winds, and more friendships between women emerge. Write Back Now! explores the tensions between experience and loss, imagination and memory, the real and the secretly real.
Details
Details
1366Books (1366Books)
978-1-77849-062-0
200 pages |
Couldn't load pickup availability
Reviews
Reviews
In five short chapters, Fishman leaps across time and geography, friendships and age, domestic life and livelihoods, girlhood and womanhood, death and birth—from fishing communities to farming communities, linking and separating two countries. The episodes are brief and unadorned, but there is lyricism in the gaps between them; the ‘negative space’ is eloquent. This collection of remembrances is both detailed and generalized, and at the end you feel you have traversed great expanses of time and place. This is a text for our time.
Kristjana Gunnars, author The Silence of Falling Snow
Write Back Now! is an experiment in how writing can coalesce time, space, and forgotten feelings that echo in the body into one. This minimalist, self-reflective prose, written with a gentle touch of poetry, is the kind of writing that makes one want to write.
Sheung-King, author of Batshit Seven
Lisa Fishman’s Write Back Now! is a quiet wonder, documenting all the invisible ways that place transforms us. Magnetic, poignant, and constantly inventive, each new page presents a sublime discovery that deftly interrogates the relationship between memory, our ever-changing inner selves, and the shifting states of the natural world.
Joe Meno, author of Book of Extraordinary Tragedies
Learn More
Learn More
Awards
Awards
About the author
Lisa Fishman is the author of the story collection World Naked Bike Ride, short-listed for the ReLit Award for Short Fiction. Her fiction has appeared in The Fairy Tale Review, The Rupture, Guesthouse, Flash Boulevard, and Jerry Jazz Musician. A nominee for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and a Pushcart Prize, Fishman has published eight poetry books, including One Big Time; 24 Pages & other poems; Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition; The Happiness Experiment; and Dear, Read. Her poetry is anthologized in Best American Experimental Poetry, The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral Poetry, The Ecopoetry Anthology, and Fence Books’ Not for Mothers Only. With origins in both Montreal and the Detroit area, Fishman is a dual citizen who divides her time between Wisconsin and Eastern Canada. Write Back Now! is her first novel.