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For today's stop, author Keith Rosson discussed drinks, and shares a brief excerpt in one of the stories that make up this collection. Check it out below:
DRINKS
In “Brad Benske and the Hand of Light,” the final story
in my collection Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons, the titular character goes out
to a bar. Brad Benske has been brooding and isolating for months after his wife
has left him to join a doomsday cult. He has a goiter – possibly stress-related
– growing on his face, and he can’t stop obsessing over it. A lawyer on
embarrassed sabbatical from a respected corporate firm, Benske’s gone to a bar
on a whim with a man who has come to his door claiming to be with the Water
Bureau. The two men strike up an odd friendship after the latter comes to
collect on a bill from the former. Consider it a testament to Benske’s grand
loneliness that when the Water Bureau guy – Cameron – invites him out to see a
Swedish black metal band, Benske says yes.
An excerpt:
The show is at a bar across town. Cameron pays. I feel
underdressed and old: Denim and leather abound, and nearly everyone is wearing
a black shirt with a band logo that is pointy and indecipherable, barbed wire
brought to heaving life. I buy drinks from a solemn bartender with Cut Here
written on his throat and by the time the band starts, I’m intoxicated and the
music is so loud I can feel my ribs vibrate. I haven’t drunk in a long time.
Cameron is headbanging beside me, and someone is pushing against me, and my
cocktail, somewhat expensive, is sloshing down my shirt. The music is a sea to
get lost in. It’s like a world being born. The singer’s face is painted in
white greasepaint and he points at us and yowls and we scream back in response.
I yell until something in my throat threatens to crack and still I can’t hear
myself. It’s lovely, really. It’s a lovely way to get lost.
After the band stops, Cameron and I drink some more, and
he buys a shirt with the band’s barbed indecipherable logo on it. There’s a
picture of a wolf’s severed head beneath the logo, and he makes a grand gesture
of gifting it to me. I put it on right there over my other shirt.
By now the crowd has thinned, everyone pressing
themselves into booths or going out onto the patio to smoke cigarettes and yell
at each other. I lift my cocktail – something called a “Norwegian Fuck Cloud”
that annoyed the already annoyed bartender when I asked for it - and take a sip
and bellow over the jukebox, “My wife left me! For a cult! Nine months ago!”
Cameron frowns and nods. He’s put his baseball hat on
backwards at some point. “That’s intense!” he yells.
What could possibly be in a Norwegian Fuck Cloud? Who
knows. I certainly don’t, though I imagine it’s served in a tall glass. It is
blue, choked with ice, semi-opaque. Has a straw and a turquoise umbrella moored
to the rim. A few NFCs in a row will lead you to become that person in the bar,
the one trying to climb on someone else’s table and take your shirt off,
demanding chicken strips or world peace at the top of your lungs. And it’s these
dichotomies – Benske as a powerful man ordering a frivolous, colorful thing; Benske
as a once-virile man now feeling emasculated; Benske as a once-successful man
with a thing growing on his face, painful and poisonous and the size of a
walnut and still growing – that is the basis of Folk Songs. Two things in
collision. Two things that stand out in stark relief when placed beside each
other. A folk song; a trauma surgeon. An exhausted middle-aged lawyer; a
greasepainted black metal vocalist; both yowling at the top of their lungs and both
finding freedom in it.
Folk Songs is also replete with addicts and alcoholics. Many
scenes take place in bars. People in various states of sobriety and
non-sobriety populate many of the tales. It is, surprisingly to me, a book that
many consider to be about the painful scar-worn valleys of addiction, at least
in part. I didn’t plan this when writing the collection, but I’ll admit I find
myself drawn to characters that struggle with chemical dependency. I appreciate
the struggle inherent in moving past such things. Writing about addiction seems
to encapsulate so much of what we’re all going through. Not that every reader
is an addict of something, but it’s a microcosmic way of writing about struggle;
the isolation, the backsteps, the regrets. And also, yes, as someone who grew
up amid addiction and violence, I have a tremendous amount of empathy towards
people struggling to kick or those neck-deep in the wreckage of their lives. I
like writing about criminals and people struggling to move from point a to
point b with very limited options. When I write them, some readers call these
“crime” stories, other people call them “literary fiction.” I’m fine with
either. In “Baby Jill,” when the Tooth Fairy struggles with the mortality and
frailty of the children she helps, that is a dichotomy too, and she has become
addicted to her own mortality and the trappings inherent in it: She smokes,
obsesses over the internet, etc. Or “The Lesser Horsemen,” when three of the
Horsemen of the Apocalypse are sent on a team-building cruise as a way of
boosting their frayed morale. Again, these can be considered “fabulist” stories
or pieces of literary fiction.
It’s all about that dichotomy. The Tooth Fairy checking her
email. Pestilence playing foosball and doing trust falls. Or the lawyer, once
tight-buttoned and proud and closed off, drinking the toxic blue drink and
spilling his guts at a bar.
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Released 2/23/21
Collection | Speculative Fiction | Magical Realism | Literary
With Folk
Songs for Trauma Surgeons, award-winning author Keith Rosson delves into
notions of family, grief, identity, indebtedness, loss, and hope, with the
surefooted merging of literary fiction and magical realism he’s explored in
previous novels. In “Dunsmuir,” a newly sober husband buys a hearse to help his
wife spread her sister’s ashes, while “The Lesser Horsemen” illustrates what
happens when God instructs the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to go on a
team-building cruise as a way of boosting their frayed morale. In “Brad Benske
and the Hand of Light,” an estranged husband seeks his wife’s whereabouts
through a fortuneteller after she absconds with a cult, and in “High Tide,” a
grieving man ruminates on his brother’s life as a monster terrorizes their
coastal town. With grace, imagination, and a brazen gallows humor, Folk
Songs for Trauma Surgeons merges the fantastic and the everyday, and
includes a number of Rosson’s unpublished stories, as well as award-winning
favorites.
BUY LINKS: Meerkat Press | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
