Hayden's Ferry Review

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Staircases: THE DOCK: March 2015

HFR: This piece has a wonderful tendency to juxtapose humor, the mundane, and tragedy. In one moment, we're with the quirky Fox-Neck, or on the phone with a family member, and in the next we're looking at the great-grandmother's skin like crumpled paper. What do you think the importance is of shifting tones in this story?

EB: The most significant scenes from my own life—and most people’s lives, I think—are riotous with feeling. Not just one. Chaos invites a certain kind of manic alertness and the antenna goes up, jerking us in and out of emotional stations. Where there is predicted pain, I think we become receptive, eager, for a different feeling. The shift is a survival instinct. I think the narrator’s erratic experience of death in this story is just one version of everyone’s. What we all notice, say, project, ignore, what we tune in and out of, shift between, is the way we protect ourselves from the permanence of loss. From a craft standpoint, the tonal shift can wake readers up and keep us ready for the next jolt, but it only does that because we want that turn in life.

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What My Father-in-Law Says - THE DOCK: August 2014


Happy August! Enjoy this poem from our author of the month, the talented David Ebenbach.

HFR: What responsibility do you feel in presenting these flawed but very empathetic characters in the form of a poem?

DE: I'm glad you asked about responsibility. I think we writers could talk more about the issue of responsibility in our work---responsibility to our readers, to our loved ones, to our characters. In all those cases I think we need to approach the people with empathy and a readiness for compassion, an expectation that people become more complicated the more we know them, and an awareness that our writing can affect people for better or for worse.

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