Sarah Rose Etter - A world where characters are kept close but viewed from behind things, such as glass and chicken masks

Sarah Rose Etter, Tongue Party, Caketrain, 2011.

"This stunning debut collection of ten short stories by Sarah Rose Etter was the winning manuscript in the 2010 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Deb Olin Unferth."

“Tongue Party is astonishing and unexpected and one of the finest books you will read this year. Etter’s stories are beautiful and wildly imaginative and at times disturbing in dark, elegant ways. The women in her stories are strong and they are desperate, often in positions where they have to sacrifice far too much of themselves. And yet, through Sarah Rose’s masterful writing, they become brave and defiant and like the stories themselves, absolutely unforgettable.” —Roxane Gay

“Tongue Party is fiction for we who are hungry, for those among us who ache, who crave, who have appetites that cannot be sated, who have holes in their hearts that will not easily be healed. In each of these short tales, Sarah Rose Etter reminds us that it is not just what we are afraid to lose that will come to define us, but also the strange methods by which we cover over that loss, once it has come to pass. With fiercest compassion, a sharp wit, and unflinching prose, Etter delivers not only what it is that we are wanting but also the ways by which we need, by which we are always, all of us, needing.” —Matt Bell

“I love Etter’s world of universal desires that drive each story into unexpected places, to koala tides and tongue parties. It’s a world bursting with the need to be both someone and no one, where characters are kept close but viewed from behind things, such as glass and chicken masks. Each word, each moment surprises. It’s a wondrous thing.” —Randall Brown

“There are stories that show you the way things are, and ones that show you the way things might be, and then there are stories that tear you apart and build different things from the pieces. You might be happy with some of them, but I assure you, you won’t like them all. Sarah Rose Etter isn’t a writer; she’s a witch, and this is a house and storm of spells.” —Ben Loory

“Each small story is like sliding in skates over an ice pond—overhead beauty, victorious shouts, still soul, gigantic bravery.” —Deb Olin Unferth

"There is a particular scene in HBO’s Six Feet Under when Claire Fisher is in art class and her professor, Olivier, is raving about how sensual sensation is the most reliable gauge for evaluating a work of art; he insists that if a work of art makes you sick to your stomach, you know it’s good. I was reminded of this scene several times while reading Sarah Rose Etter’s chapbook Tongue Party.
Tongue Party plays on our most visceral emotions—hunger, fear, disgust, want for love. Etter’s narrators are all desperate for something, desperate to keep what they need or lose what they can’t bear to own. The tragic imagination of the young narrator in the opener, ‘Koala Tide’, was the most stunning aspect of the story. She was hungry enough to be colonized, she wanted enough to invent, and many of us have been, even as we grow up and old.
'Want to get some ice cream tonight, kiddo?” he asked. “For the sunset?”
Eating ice cream and watching the sunset was my father’s favorite thing to do.
“Okay,” I said.
My father turned and walked back toward the blanket.
I was lying about the sunset and the ice cream. I knew once the koalas came, things would be different. I wouldn’t want to leave my koala home alone so soon. It would have to come with us, or else I would have to stay home and tend to it.'
I knew once the koalas came, things would be different. I knew once I got into college, things would be different. I knew once I came out, things would be different. Whatever follows that sentence is an elegy to how unmoored our imaginations can be. Things, of course, were different, after the koalas came, but as always, we were fabulously wrong.
I did have two small reservations after reading Tongue Party—I felt that ‘Koala Tide’ was bit of a weak opener, despite it being mostly lovely. ‘Womb Peck’ follows ‘Koala Tide’, which I would say is the weakest story in the collection. It was also full of great writing, but it left me cold. Does every story have to get my heart punching; does every story have to switch on the skittering furnace inside me? Of course not, but I do make note when one doesn’t.
What I love most about Etter is that she’s a literary sniper—these brief fables are single shots to the dome. She needs no more than a page or two to bring you to your knees. My favorite story, the titular ‘Tongue Party’, which I originally read in this magazine’s virtual pages, embeds all those primal feelings into the reader—I felt sticky, queasy, starving from the narrator’s hunger, fear, disgust, want for love. Be forewarned if you have high blood pressure or palpitations—this story will do things to your heart.
'The room starts sizzling with something, a vibration I’ve never felt before. The air gets hot and the oxygen gets rare. The musk of their bodies takes over my lungs. The fear in the back of my throat tastes like blood or copper pennies.
“We’re doing this all at once!” one man yells over the heads of the other men. I can only see his bushy eyebrows.
I look across the bar to my father’s face, bloated and red. “There’s enough to go around!” he yells, sounding desperate, protective, so much like a father that tears come and mingle with my makeup, creating a burning ring around each eye.'
This frenzy, this captivity, these hungry men, this barely controlled pleading—this is the soul of Etter’s stories. She takes you into this disturbing world with her phrasing; she takes you to a place that is a rabbit hole, a witching well, an unframed mirror. I could go on and on about every story in this striking debut, from the disturbingly beautiful ‘Men Under Glass’ to the elegantly suffocating ‘Cake’ to the almost-slipstream tragedy of ‘Husband Feeder’, but I don’t want this to turn into a ten-thousand word screed. Sarah Rose Etter’s Tongue Party is a brave book from a writer who I’m certain will go on to release a plethora of even more bewitching tales." - Dawn West

"I was wondering if Sarah Rose Etter was being ironic in her opening of the first story, Koala Tide, as she seemed to mimic certain Hemingway devices, especially the use of the word “very.”
“The sun was very big and very hot that day.”
“The sky was very blue.”
“Fred wore blue swim trunks and had a very hairy chest.”
But then Etter took us away from this tone, spun us into something detached, this Koala Tide, tide of actual Koalas or again a euphemism or local jargon or objective correlative or perceptive lens of a child during that age, that Bildungsromanian blur, where childhood bleeds [emphasis on bleeds] into adulthood, where pain is introduced as possibility, where we learn not only are adults not Gods, they are slow, aging, stupid, stumbling sub-gods, mumbling who-knows-what into their lipsticked cans of warming beer? This story is evocative and disturbing and badass. You can read it here, and should.
Pabst Blue Ribbon’s appearance is usually a gold yellow; depends on what kind of light you’re in. Like damp corner of bar trough, it might shimmer like a cow’s fat pupil. Or on the front steps at dawn it will be a bit darker. And certainly if you are on a downtown Memphis balcony consuming the sun during midday, you might get a feathery saffron, like with your pal Jennifer’s big scarf look. But mostly gold.
Tongue Party is divided into two parts, and so much of this is about men/women, like maybe how we consume one another, like maybe relationships, or how we force each other to “eat” each other. In compromise you are, by rendering and cough, going to do something you’d rather not. These things accumulate. It seems to me that PART ONE the female is put upon, forced to do a thing, often erotic (and PART ONE is where we will locate the Tongue Party). PART TWO the woman character often takes control, with wit (or more so true intelligence), with an understanding of the power of the mind. In Men Under Glass (which sounds like the name of a band), a woman picks up “Tim, Brad, Tom, Sean, Mike.” She then leads them home and locks them downstairs, behind glass:
'It is bullet-proof glass, thick like ice, dustier than frozen water, murkier. It splits the basement in two, clears a room.'
Once she has them locked in glass, the woman takes full control. And Etter takes full control of language. She seems to use word-twist-and-play to add layers to her immediate situation. In this scene, the woman is at work.
'At work I write their names in the margins of my day planner: Tim Brad Tom Sean Mike.
During meetings I think of their gestures, the way they read the books I painstakingly picked. Affection seeps from my heart to my limbs, making me moist between the legs.
“Cassie,” the work people ask, “do you have the monthly reports?”
“I do,” I say, holding forth a sheet of last month’s numbers transposed into this month’s template.
“We’re holding steady,” the work people say.
“Very steady,” I say.'
I like the words I do here. The word painstakingly. The word, steady. Relationship words, bent and rent to new effect. Names of men, lists really, numbers to be transposed.
In Chicken Father, a man in a chicken mask says:
'Ha Har lehkes cun chold
translated by his daughter to:
Her hair looks like spun gold.'
Words as not what they mean. Not in a man’s mouth, not in a woman’s. Not in our language. Not as words. The book ends on two structurally interesting texts, Cures, and the rising action and yet another spiraling turn into devouring: Husband Feeder.
This book is an odd look at relationships, a bit of mirror, a bit of shattered mirror glass, I mean to say a sharpened edge that might just hold our own face.
Speaking of faces, the mouth-feel and drinkability of Pabst Blue Ribbon is out of this world. I could sip 42 cans in a night easy, as long as I eat a good meal and stay hydrated and toss 32 into my eyeballs. Ping Pong players say it’s good for drinking competitions. People who volunteer for psychological experiments are more mentally stable than those who do not. Sometimes sea birds will see the heat waves rising off the street and just fucking dive right in. Etc."- Sean Lovelace

"It’s no surprise that Philadelphia writer Sarah Rose Etter won Caketrain Journal’s 2010 chapbook competition for her collection of short stories, Tongue Party. Though the volume feels thin in your hand, don’t let this fool you; the collection is packed full of gorgeous, jarring stories.
Many of the pieces are narrated by Cassie, the literary love child of Kelly Link and a post-modern Laura Palmer. Cassie’s fraught relationships with the men in her life – her father, her lovers, her husband – give the collection its central theme. Most of the men suffer some form of neurosis: an unspeakable fetish, a massive case of pica. In her attempts to care for them, Cassie becomes a woman who gives everything, until the madness of her emptiness becomes a mantra – "I am a wife, I chanted, I am a wife until the knife went dull, subsided." Cassie is willing to endure unto the bitter end, to find herself on the receiving end of a Tongue Party gone wrong. Cassie is both strong and weak. Other women appear infrequently; mothers figure only by their absence, either emotional or physical.
Though Cassie has little left to celebrate, readers have plenty to delight over. Etter’s writing is taut, often poetic in its examination of the depths into which devotion might plunge us. One story, "Cures," describes a nine-step process to grieve the passing of a loved one. Number six advises, "Place it in a purse or satchel. At social events, unlock the clasps. Speak only of ache. Put it on a silver platter. Pass it around on a tray of quiches. Let it enter the mouths and minds of everyone in party clothes. Ruin the best things."
Thankfully, Ms. Etter has saved the best things for us to read. Her images are gristly, half-disturbing reminders that stick with you long after the delicious meal is over. Her stories throb with an energy that might keep you up at night." - Blythe Davenport

"Tongue Party opens and closes with scenarios that might seem familiar to a reader of contemorary fiction: a family vacationing on a beach and an intimate note of matrimonial sacrifice. Expectations are upended at every turn, however: in the eight stories contained in this chapbook, Sarah Rose Etter explores and dissects familial relationships. More specicially, she reassembles them in configurations that are at times horrific yet emotionally recognizable. Many of the stories begin along familiar lines and slowly ebb into something surreal or even horrific — figuratively or literally.
Some of what unsettles about these stories are literally chilling: the sight of rotting bodies, the despair and ramifications ensuing from a loss of control. Some of the horror is ultimately rooted in compulsion: the mask worn by a grief-stricken man in “Chicken Father;” the raging hunger experienced by a suburban husband (and the effect it has on his wife, from whose perspective the story is told) in “Husband Feeder.” The endings here are sharp, and Etter effectively evokes some previously-unknown underlying truth to the world, a secret everyone else is privy to.
There’s a visceral quality to these stories that sometimes calls to mind the work of Brian Evenson. Etter’s plainspoken prose makes the horrors that unfold much subtler, and some of the images that arise from these stories — the climax of “Koala Tide,” for one — are searing. Ultimately, Etter makes this territory her own: consider the charge of the title story or the surreal seductions of “Men Under Glass.” In both, Etter’s work evolves in unexpected ways, triggering a host of contradictory sensations, and boldly establishing her voice." - Tobias Carroll

"When I first received Sarah Rose Etter’s Tongue Party in the mail, I knew nothing about it other than it had won the 2010 Caketrain chapbook competition. In hindsight, I’m extremely glad I knew nothing about this collection, because watching each beautiful, terrifying, utterly bizarre story unfold is part of what makes reading this cohesive collection so enjoyable.
Reading each story is a delightful trip down the rabbit hole. Many of the female protagonists live in worlds ruled by the dizzying logic of nightmares, struggling against situations beyond their control. In the title story, the protagonist must attend the tongue party, because, well, she must. While later we learn more about the relationship between the narrator and her father (one of several characters who abuses a position of authority and trust), the narrator never stands up and says, “No, I will not attend the tongue party.” The tongue party is as central to her reality as going to the DMV is in ours, and through it, we are able to experience the rawness of her fear and her desire for love. In fact, at no point does any character question the reality they find themselves in; like dreams, we don’t realize something is amiss while the dream is happening. And because Etter builds each world with such detailed, logical precision, we as readers don’t question what is happening either.
But each story is more than just a central conceit taken to its logical conclusion. All of the stories examine those base, fundamental desires that drive us—lust, hunger, despair, addiction. In “Koala Tide,” the first story and tone-setter for the entire collection, a young girl is waiting for the koala tide: “I knew once the koalas came, things would be different.” Etter skillfully evokes the certainty inherent in childhood that things will be better tomorrow only to crush the young narrator (and the reader) with the knowledge that grown-ups are often disappointing assholes and adulthood can be a terrifying reality. In “Husband Feeder,” a husband’s appetite rages out of control, and he eats everything in the house, until the wife performs the ultimate sacrifice to satiate his hunger. While some of the endings are not terribly surprising (the previously mentioned story’s ending was apparent by the second page), the joy of reading these stories comes from the total and complete immersion into each world coupled with Etter’s controlled, restrained style. Most of the sentences are deceptively simple, well-constructed gems that allow the central emotional core of the story to emerge, raw and wet.
By the time I finished the slim, seventy-nine page volume, I wanted more. My only consolation is the knowledge that this will not be the last collection from the extremely talented Etter." - Melissa Reddish

"Have you ever had that rare feeling that you were thinking about something that you had never thought about before? Oh, you haven’t? Then be prepared to be enlightened.
While there are a million books out in the world that can magically capture your mind, let’s face it – there are at least an equal amount that try too hard and miss the mark. As a college professor, I come across many insightful, inventive books that are nothing short of lame.
Not what you thought I was going to say, right?
Well, Sarah Rose Etter is the Queen of Deception, but in a very, very good way, my friends.
I think it is only fair to give you the full Etter Experience. (Yes, it’s an experience.)
Where to even begin? The cover seems like a practical start to this impractical book. It’s creative with a massive dash of mystery, yes? It certainly catches your attention, which is exactly what was hoped to be accomplished, no doubt.
Next, the logistics. In this two-part book, there are short tales – four per part, to be exact. It must be said, books comprised of short tales that are magically intertwined, in ways that I cannot explain, are awesome. I recognize that the word awesome is not the most scholarly, but it certainly fits the bill.
In the first short tale, Koala Tide, the reader is in a more realistic frame of mind. As the story carries on, the senses are affronted with the unrealistic, which is rejected at first. You think, “there is no possible way this can be happening!” At which point, you have no choice but to continue reading. Etter holds the reader captive, helpless – reading in disbelief.
##I looked down and all around me were rolling piles of eye- less, dead koalas. All of their faces had the two deep holes, the veins slapping against the sand as their heads hit the beach. ##
Undoubtedly, there is that brief moment of incomprehension. How can that possibly be? This thought is also followed by a google search: “Koala Tide.” Because, surely that could not have been purely part of a person’s imagination? That could not have been made up by the mind of the author, right?
Wrong. And, that sets the tone of Tongue Party. That tone being disbelief, imagination, and all of those dirty things in life we do not allow ourselves to think. But, there is beauty in the ugly, which is why the reader continues.
In the rest of the book, Sarah Rose Etter does not disappoint. You go on a journey through the strangeness of love, family, pain, and darkness.
Through the darkness, Etter writes with an unexpected elegant, lightness that keeps you on your toes. It’s like nothing you have ever read before.
THE PROVERBIAL BOTTOM LINE:
If you are looking for the run of the mill, light-hearted short stories that you attribute to your childhood, immediately step away from this book and run. far. away. It isn’t for you.
But, if you are looking for something extraordinary that will make you contemplate things you never knew you wanted to, pre-order Tongue Party by the lovely, frightening Sarah Rose Etter. Go on, give your brain a tongue party – you know you want to. It has our seal of approval." - A Little Tete-A-Tete

"I recently had the pleasure and privilege of hearing Sarah Rose Etter read the title story from Tongue Party, and now that I’ve read the book that story feels like the pivot point of the set. “Tongue Party” forces us, through an incredible turnabout midway through, to wonder about the implications of telling a story straight versus telling it through filters of metaphor and fantasy and suggestion, and to ask which story is “real.” I don’t want to spoil that powerful turn by explaining it here, but as perhaps the most literal, entirely realistic moment of the book it became a lens through which I read the rest, always aware both of the strange surface (eg, a father wearing a chicken mask to cover his grief, kidnapped dates locked in glass rooms, or a tide of washed up koalas) and of wondering what “real” experience such strangeness distorts or obscures. That made for exciting, provocative tensions between reader, writer, and text.
The strongest of these stories suggest a larger world their characters inhabit, rather than a discrete, contained storyworld. “Chicken Father,” for one, complicates grief both within a family and socially at once, and “Husband Feeder” takes what in plain description might sound like too literal an image of consumption to take on the richness it eventually does through complications of gender, wealth, and culture. If anything, I would have liked to see that aspect of the collection pushed further, because a few moments felt like doors opened but not quite stepped through. Not because the stories lack anything as they are—far from it—but turning questions asked of the domestic onto other spheres, too, might have added another dimension.
“Koala Tide,” for instance (and fair warning, bit of a spoiler), uses dead koalas washing ashore as the jarring, monkey’s paw-esque fulfillment of childhood desires. It’s a terrific story, building up then subverting readerly assumptions and expectations several times in its course. The koalas seem arbitrary as an animal, chosen perhaps for their cuteness or for the sound of their name, but koalas are also real, and endangered, and geographically specific, so a story about heaps of them dead on an ambiguous shoreline has implications beyond the aesthetic. Not that the story should be “about” endangered species or koala ecology or anything so didactic, but perhaps questions raised elsewhere in the collection about the realistic and the fantastic could have been engaged to ask not just how we use metaphor to make sense of experience but also where our particular metaphors come from and why our choice of them matters in a reader’s world as much as a character’s (particularly, perhaps, a reader who tends toward ecocritical reading and is a little obsessive about animals as metaphor. Ahem.)" - Steve Himmer

Excerpt

Sarah Rose Etter: Tongue Party (story)

Sarah Rose Etter: Womb Peck


Jamming their broken feet into skates: Sean H. Doyle talks to Sarah Rose Etter

Interview by Jen Michalski

Sarah's Web page