Poet, Writer
Elizabeth Kirschner has published six volumes of poetry, including MY LIFE AS A DOLL and SLOW RISEN AMONG THE SMOKE TREES. She’s also published an award winning memoir, WAKING THE BONES and a debut collection of stories titled BECAUSE THE SKY IS A THOUSAND SOFT HURTS.
Across decades, she’s taught at many universities, including Boston College where she taught almost all genres of Creative Writing, workshops, Poetry Studies and Lit Core. She also served as a Poetry mentor in Fairfield University’s low-residence MFA Program, at Carnegie-Mellon and the University of New Hampshire where she earned her graduate degree.
Currently, she’s faculty with Lasell College. A Master Gardener, she lives in Blue Hill, ME.
Learning to Hit My Mother
Stories of Calamity
A clear-eyed and necessary account of how violence insinuates itself into characters living liminal lives in the purgatorial world of Ontario, Illinois, Learning to Hit My Mother is a collection of connected stories that all possess a unity of place—and characters so compellingly human that they promise, with an almost unflappable certainty, to possess the reader.
Pit, a girl at the onset, is savaged by her mother, who goes at her with her hands, heart, and even a baseball bat because her husband—Pit’s father—has had her. This demented triangulation forms Pit. Throughout her life she is drawn to misfits—like her friend Bean, who ultimately steps in front of a train. From these inauspicious beginnings ensues a whole delectable slew of stories; stories full of meaty, fragmented souls—Lou, Edgar, Twink, Leesa, and Pit’s son, Sam; stories whose quiet intensity will capture fans of Sherwood Anderson and Clarice Lispector.
Championed by language that is jarringly precise, Learning to Hit My Mother soars in its visceral portrait of the monstrous as located in what might be called the sublimity of the ordinary. Haunting, unputdownable, and gripping, each story galvanizes with thought- provoking prose that hits each and every cell.
Books
“In her debut collection, “Twenty Colors,” Elizabeth Kirschner offers a splendid chronicle of exiles and reprieves, a chronicle in which vision operates at the extremes of materiality, upon the flesh of everything.”
-Donald Revel, Denver Quarterly