Yellow Things: A Family Operetta

“I was raging against a color she said / matter of factly / her braids consisting of an ever so slightly increasing number of strands”

Yellow Things: A Family Operetta retraces a childhood of “round and rounding days” in the Texas Gulf Coast and presses onwards into the dreamy flatlands of Ohio, potentially misremembered café encounters in New England and nameless landscapes populated by ghostly pink rabbits.

A fascination with change and repetition runs through Caroline Fernelius’ debut, which attempts – by experiment and alchemy – to uncover a string of alternate family histories, and perhaps even resolve a decades-long familial drama in the process. Yellow Things tasks itself with reconstructing memories, setting them in motion and observing as they become their own tiny worlds. 

The result is a distinctive and unwavering exploration of who can claim ownership of an experience, and ultimately of the process of writing itself.

About the Author :
Caroline Fernelius is a writer from Texas. Her poetry, short fiction, and other works have appeared in Litro Magazine, The New Southern Fugitives, Your Impossible Voice, poets.org, Storyscape Journal, Faultline Journal, Burningword Literary Journal, White Wall Review, Wax Nine Journal, and The Rialto. She is a graduate of Duke University and the University of Michigan, where she was nonfiction editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review. Of all the cafes in the world she has frequented, she is partial to Cafe Amrita on West 110th Street in Manhattan.

Review :

“Wallace Stevens seldom if ever went to Texas. And so, he has waited long in eternity to read this wonderful book, this faux operetta which is in fact a mythology of a region, a Texas unknown to anyone until now. Yellow Things: A Family Operetta is a kind of inner, symbolic theater with enigmatic stage props, mysterious presences, and acute observations of places and situations where a primordial familial fantasia is acted out, mother, father, a sister, Greek gods and unnamed interlocutors appear before us, amid exact renditions of daily life, its pleasures and sorrows. In mingling modes of speaking, narrating, and dreaming Caroline Fernelius has found an imaginative and moving way, utterly her own, of telling truths about life, Texas, and the heart.” ~ Joseph Donahue

“Yellow Things is a work of navigation through the unfamiliar territory of a family dealing, or not dealing as is also the case, with trauma. We are invited into a world of observations, through “days with no edges” and people made of “edges and corners” and the temporary relief to be found in flipping “the pillow to the cool side”. Fernelius is a master of loading the mundane and the inanimate with intent, casting a long and often sinister shadow over suburbia. Geometric metaphors, dreams and revelations unravel along a journey of self-discovery that strikes with both its daring defiance and penetrating insight. We learn what it means to disrupt our designated moulds, to refuse the implied inevitabilities of “grow[ing] up on the wrong side of relevant”. Fernelius writes from the out-of-body, the dispassionate, as the detached observer, and in doing so, releases the tremendous and often forbidden powers locked within every moment. Yellow Things is a controlled demolition, animating the stagnation of self-denial and resignation, invoking the unease of the calm before the storm. A triumphant debut demonstrating an understanding of how to amplify a desired effect through the union of formal experimentation and semantics.” ~ Samatar Elmi