Jane Ashfelt (2014) Saltwater.

Jane wrote a few stories on Abctales. Here is a link to one http://www.abctales.com/story/ashb/boat-trip-3

Needless to say, after getting a coveted cherry she went on to win numerous awards and to have her short-story Saltwater Project published. The theme is water. I’ll not give the plot away, but in her first story in the collection Róisín, the younger sister of the narrator, follows up with her own story, about growing up in an Irish backwater.  The denouement is stunning. What makes it interesting is Ashfelt switches points of view, so that for example, Eímear and Róisín’s mother, looking out the window, wondering where her daughters are, and why they’re so late, is the narrator. This is an approach only usually used in novel-length writing. ‘Outer Bank Riptide’ has that novelistic feel about it. Listen to how it begins: ‘The beach smells so hot and dry and salty you’d think summer will never fade, and yet it’s August so it can’t stay like this forever. Can it?’ Short stories don’t begin like this. It’s one of the rules (well, my rules). It’s all setting, no story and it asks the reader to indulge the writer by asking him/her to answer a question, where the answer is in the story title. And it addresses the reader, as a fellow conspirator with the use of the universal ‘you’. It switches locations from TV Station, Manhattan to Creek, Albermale Sound and sunspots in between and it switches narrators.   When the wind blows the story will rock. A love story with a dog. What’s not to like?  

Comments

CM, I am going to read it. And thanks a million for your blog on Rodriguezsmiley            Elsie

Go for it elsie.