Write Back Now! - Paperback

by Lisa Fishman (Author)

Acclaimed poet Lisa Fishman's debut novel tracks a peripatetic 1970s childhood and the uprooted friendship between girls who stay connected by mail, until they don't. It opens in a borrowed house in wintry Nova Scotia, where the adult narrator faces the first-ever border closure between her two countries. Framed by these long-separated experiences, the novel keeps almost-beginning again as the narrator tries to figure out where she will be next by figuring out where she has been previously. Along the way, a dead horse, a lost crop, a miscarriage, an extra-tropical cyclone with hurricane-force winds, and more friendships between women emerge. Write Back Now! explores the tensions between experience and loss, imagination and memory, the real and the secretly real.

Author Biography

Lisa Fishman is the author of the story collection World Naked Bike Ride, published by Gaspereau Press and short-listed for the ReLit Award for Short Fiction. Her fiction and prose have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Granta, The Rupture, Guesthouse, periodicities, Amethyst Review, The Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. A nominee for the PEN/Robert Dau Short Story Prize and a Pushcart Prize, Fishman has published eight poetry books, most recently One Big Time; Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition; and 24 Pages & other poems, all on Wave Books. Her work is included in Best American Experimental Poetry, The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral, Fence Books' Not for Mothers Only and other anthologies; it appears in Jacket, jubilat, Volt, American Letters & Commentary and other journals. With roots in both Montreal and the Detroit area, Fishman is a dual citizen who divides her time between Eastern Canada and her Wisconsin farm. Write Back Now! is her first novel.