The Laughing Yeti: January 2011

Monday, January 31, 2011

Pedro Ponce, On Reading

"Writers perform on the page; as readers we get to experience a writer’s performance, preserved across space and time, as live as it gets."

{Pedro Ponce is the author of Alien Autopsy, a story collection just out from Cow Heavy Books. His novella Homeland: A Panorama in 50 States is forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press.}

Friday, January 28, 2011

Ethel Rohan, On Reading

Breathing Books

"I read, and the tiny diamonds in my wedding band are thrown back on the page; one, two … eight tiny stones, tiny refractions of light. I move my hand so and the brilliant reflections vanish. Move my hand again and there they are back. There, gone. There, gone. Safely in and out.

As a girl, I didn’t own jewelry, didn’t have anything but the words coming off the page, and me right there inside the story. Safely in and out. My mother called and called, chores and mending to be done, but she couldn’t get me out of the page, out of the words, out of the story. She raised the head of the sweeping brush and brought it down on my book, my lap, and first one knee, then the second knee. Her face the most terrible cover.

Something died that day. Something I’ve yet to name. Not my love for books, for sweeping floors, for my mother. All that lives on. Invincible."

{Ethel Rohan is the author of the story collection, Cut Through The Bone (Dark Sky Books), and her second collection of stories, Hard To Say, will be published by PANK in 2011. Visit her here for more information.}

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Forrest Roth, On Reading

"During my undergraduate studies, I once remarked to a fellow English student / very good friend how I couldn’t begin to comprehend the nuances of a novel or any other long-ish work until I had read it at least twice. He gave me a reproachful, funny look. And I must give my former self a funny look, too, but without the reproach. I try to be forgiving of my past idiosyncrasies, though I don’t blame the friend now for thinking me a bit daft. Time constraints aside, I can see the big trap of this approach relating to my current predicament, among other reasons.

As I’m in my second year of English Ph.D. studies, I find most of the so-called reading I do—for coursework or a handful of comprehensive exams—is certainly not the same emphatic reading that actively engages me for another go-around (barring the off-hand chance I’ve picked up something sublime, unrelated to academics), yet I’ve acquiesced. It’s a sort of faith I may figure out what those impersonal words ever wanted from poor little me in the first place.

I recall a notion about reading for pleasure which I, and perhaps every reader, unconsciously attribute to that extra-educational plane of Youth when nothing wanted to bother us. Sadly this escape escapes me—even as a creative writer who thrives on loving diversions like other creative writers. I hope to retrieve it someday when Higher Education no longer finds me useful or vice versa. Then, I suppose, it will become the grand nostalgia I will have wanted to avoid all my life for some strange reason I keep kicking around."

{Forrest Roth is the author of a novella, Line and Pause (BlazeVox Books), Co-Editor In Chief of Rougarou, and a Ph.D. student at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. Visit him at
:: totemic :: for more information.}