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.
About the Author :
Lisa Fishman is the author of the story collection World Naked Bike Ride, published by Gaspereau Press and short-listed for the ReLit Award for Short Fiction. Her fiction and prose have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Granta, The Rupture, Guesthouse, periodicities, Amethyst Review, The Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. A nominee for the PEN/Robert Dau Short Story Prize and a Pushcart Prize, Fishman has published eight poetry books, most recently One Big Time; Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition; and 24 Pages & other poems, all on Wave Books. Her work is included in Best American Experimental Poetry, The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral, Fence Books’ Not for Mothers Only and other anthologies; it appears in Jacket, jubilat, Volt, American Letters & Commentary and other journals. With roots in both Montreal and the Detroit area, Fishman is a dual citizen who divides her time between Eastern Canada and her Wisconsin farm. Write Back Now! is her first novel.
Review :
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
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
