Edmund White Award Finalist and Pushcart Nominee, Cut Away by Cathy Kirkwood expertly entwines the lives of three characters struggling to understand the meaning of identity and its seeming mutability.
First there was the pure desert silence in which the quietest voice spoke in dry, still air–one which took me over completely in the coming years and became the driving force of the novel. Then there was the surge of women, exhausted frmo their lives, yet full of intense, focused energy. The waves of their hope and labor buoyed me up, threw me on the shores of my doubt, gnashed my teeth, brought me to my own grief, courage, determination. In short, the women of AROHO reminded me what it is to write. If we are writing in our truest voice, we are never sure where we are going. It is dangerous. What we have to give is as naked and fierce as the desert sun. We find our way through these shared experiences–the connections that led me to grad school at Goddard College and then to my amazing publisher Eloise Klein Healy at Arktoi Books were all rooted, one mysterious way after another, back in that beginning at AROHO. At AROHO, I leapt–alone, as we must, and in complete community.
–Cathy Kirkwood
