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An excerpt from “Learning the Color of the Sky: An Interview with Rolf Yngve” (fiction,’12) published at Fiction Writers Review:
Learning the Color of the Sky: An Interview with Rolf Yngve
To say that Rolf Yngve has taken an unusual path to his first book would be an understatement. Yngve first took up fiction as an enlisted man in the U.S. Navy in the 1970s, and marshaled his talents enough to end up in Best American Short Stories in 1979. Then fiction slipped out of his life as he worked his way up to Captain, only to force its way back onto his radar.
The stories in Yngve’s debut collection, Dog Watches (Saddle Road Press), feature characters locked in battle with forces they can’t control or understand. One expects death to be close at hand in a combat story full of enemy guns blazing; but in Yngve’s work, it’s still there in the shadows even while the ships he writes about are (at least ostensibly) at peace.
Physical death can come from a small boat launching rocket-propelled grenades, from a carless move in a storm, from a mistaken wandering in the bowels of a ship, or from the fed-up tiredness of a self that doesn’t know its purpose on earth. Psychic death can come from lying, from telling too much truth, from holding onto unprocessed memories, from reliving guilt too many times.
One way or another, that grim truth is never far away when you’re on a warship at sea, and this imbues Yngve’s prose with a haunted whisper of omnipresent danger that makes Dog Watches such a strong collection. Behind the veil of military uniformity sit forces of destruction and self-destruction, and Yngve’s hand is always on that veil, pulling it back for us to take a look.
Interview:
Steven Wingate: I’m very curious about the time between your early foray into fiction in the late 70’s and the writing you’ve done since you retired from the Navy. Did you keep your writing practice going while you were working your way up in command, or did it sit dormant? Did some changes to your writerly self—unseen, internal developments or reconfigurations—happen during that time?
Rolf Yngve: Not dormant, but not moving either. And it wasn’t so much the Navy that made me stop going forward. I worked on the fiction pretty steadily until the mid 1980’s. Then a strange thing happened: a wonderful, early marriage to a passionate reader and writer ended, and I found myself unable to read fiction or poetry of any kind. I even remember that last novel, still only halfway finished, a splendid Richard Bausch title, The Last Good Time.
I still wrote. But—this is true—trying to write fiction without reading fiction is like drinking without water. All the work from those days shows the lack of reading, the lack of thinking like a writer. I still have boxes of failed manuscripts lying around in a closet like sedimentary rock.
By the mid-1990’s, I had found another family, married another great reader, and the sound of it all started to come back when a former teacher, David Kranes, took a look at some of my work and encouraged me to start thinking like a writer again. Forward another decade, and the stories of Dog Watches began to come, along with a couple of failed novels, a few memoir pieces, and another clutch of stories less fertilized by the Navy experience. But I had started to read again. Everything.
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An excerpt from “Night Divine” by Samantha Hunt (fiction, ’99) published at The Cut:
Night Divine
Elves leave messages for my kids. Sometimes it seems like the elves have been drinking. I bet they get jolly come December with the end of a year’s labor in sight. I know I do. The elves write, “Ganymede, Jupiter’s ginormous moon, is named for a prince kidnapped by an eagle.” Or the elves write, “There’s 22,000 pounds of cheese in a tunnel in New York. That cheese does not belong to you, kids. It’s Nacho Cheese.” Odd facts. Rotten jokes.Usually there are no gifts involved. The elves are frugal, like me. I’m not interested in raising monsters.
I can foresee the questions that might swarm around this elf tradition, like: Is Santa so unfair he sends messages to only my children? Or you might wonder: How do the elves get to my middle-of-nowhere house each night? Here are your answers: Santa, in harmony with the whole wide world, is unfair. My kids haven’t had a dad for two years. If you want to trade elf messages for a father, you got it. Second answer: The elves don’t have to get here. Santa employs local, seasonal help like any department store. Which probably only triggers more questions in this economy. Does Santa pay a living wage? Can I get a Santa job too?
But zip it. Please. Questions chip away at belief in stuff and we are trying to believe in stuff. It’s Christmastime.
An excerpt from “Interstate” by Kate Lister Campbell (fiction, ’18) published at Salamander:
Interstate
We play games in the backseat, the children and me. Is it bigger than a breadbox? Smaller than a house? Everyone’s a good sport before lunchtime but, by afternoon, our minds are tired and the games become more brutal.
“JXQ!” yells Hugh, as a car passes us on the right. He reaches across me in the middle seat to pinch his brother, James. You get a pinch for any license plate that starts with the same letter as your name. This plate reads MZ7 but James is too short to see it. I catch Hugh by his wrist.
“Quit cheating.”
“Ow, jeez,” he says, slumping away from me.
Elise lies behind our heads on the wide stretch of felt beneath the Cadillac’s rear window. She’s small for her age, a runt in the womb who somehow survived while her larger sister didn’t. She plays her own silent games with the passengers in the cars behind us, laughing at gestures we can’t see. When she’s bored, she crawls down over my shoulder and climbs into the front seat between her mother and father. Grace pulls Elise’s hair into a tight ponytail. Edward lifts her hand onto the wheel and pretends to let her steer. James, Hugh, and I squirm, wishing we had Elise’s freedom.
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An excerpt from “Weights and Measures” by Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) published at Shenandoah Literary:
Weights and Measures
The racehorse crossing the line shining clean because he never had to see another step in front of him, kicking back mud, who the viewers never for a moment had to consider in a position that wasn’t first—that’s how he thought of himself. I always came out ahead, he said.My grandfather, who we are burying. In one-hundred-degree heat, the flowers sagging, sweat stains swagging the underarms of every shirt, logging trucks thundering by on the highway, waving their scrappy flags, not of triumph, on oversized loads of felled trees.Not in seconds, feet, or furlongs—by any measure others share—would he have been determined a victor. But he would have fixed his eyes on the proud parts of the day with the focus of the honor guard come to give the military salute, firing guns in unison, folding the flag from his casket crisply, with a ceremony of utter certainty. The confidence with which some move through the world (particularly men, white, of a certain generation)… I am uncomfortable in the most basic element of existence, my flesh my dress bunches against. But he fought hard to stay in his skin, no matter how it wizened.For some horses, who do have mud flung in their eyes, it is a mercy, in that it blinds them to their place, to the finish ahead. We lower his body into the red clay. […continue reading here]
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An excerpt from the poem “My Black Friend” by Edward Porter (fiction, ’07) published at Miracle Monocle:
My Black Friend
I don’t have a black friend, that is to say, a Black friend, an African American friend. It was the TV the other night that got me thinking. A commentator, a professor at the university, an African American woman, was saying that the problem was that so many white people let themselves be isolated.
“How many white people say they’re not racist, but don’t actually socialize with African Americans, have never had African Americans in their homes?”
I had to admit, that was me. The professor’s voice was full of anger, of outrage. Although we’ve never met, I felt her anger attach itself to me. That seemed only right. It was the truth. She was speaking to me. She knew who I was.
I’m a middle-aged single white woman who lives in a small city in the Midwest. We don’t have many black people here. I work at a bank, taking care of the database. The bank has no black employees. In the downtown where I work, not many of the businesses have black employees. The black people I see are usually either janitors or the homeless. Obviously, that fact in itself is witness to the racism we struggle with in this town.
Given my actual situation, it’s difficult to think about being friends with a homeless person. I know I shouldn’t be limited that way, but I am. If I were friends with a homeless person, white or black, then I would essentially have to take care of them. It’s too unequal.
I could be friends with a janitor though. I’m not better than a janitor just because I write code for a database. I would go to a janitor’s house. I would have a janitor to my house for dinner. If the janitor at my bank was black, perhaps I could strike up a casual friendship, over time. I’d notice something about him, maybe the ball cap of a team from a faraway city and ask him about it. That would give us a start. Then, eventually, I could ask if he wanted to come over for dinner. […continue reading here]
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An excerpt from “the way a flock of black birds sets off in one large wave” by Leslie Contreras Schwartz (poetry, ’11) published at The Missouri Review:
the way a flock of black birds sets off in one large wave
if a black flutter
of bullets takes the universe of my child / friend / neighbor family
away
just lay my body down in a field
let it waste let only the birds
remember my body and let my child’s name
be contained only in their unreachable
flight
because no one will deserve to say his name, not one person, […continue reading here]
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Congratulations to Robin Rosen Chang (poetry, ’18) for winning first place in the Poet’s Choice category of the Oregon Poetry Association’s Fall 2018 Contest. Below, an excerpt from her winning poem, “Dream: At the Beach.”
Dream: At the Beach
They were sitting at the edge of the ocean, my mother and Eve, digging for mole crabs. Amphipods. They’re prehistoric, my mom says, like horseshoe crabs. Look at their exoskeletons. Like little armored torpedoes. Or drills. Their legs tunnel them backwards into the sand.
Eve catches one, holds it between her finger and thumb, examines its tiny alien face. Its eyes. Planted at the end of two stalky appendages, next to their antennae, my mother said, trying to teach Eve, like she’d done with my kids and me, unaware Eve already knows.
Watch out for gulls! When I was still married, one tried to steal a fish right from my husband’s hand. Then they’re looking for tiny coquina clams, shiny pink and purplish-gray ones, each with its tiny muscled foot burrowing it, before the next wave. […continue reading here]
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2018-12-13 15:00:062022-02-25 17:11:362018 Fall Contest: Poet’s Choice, 1st Place Winner– Robin Rosen Chang (poetry, ’18)
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