Where do you begin when you develop new characters? Physical characteristics, personality, plot? What comes first and how do you go from there? Sometimes I’ll just catch a blip of a situation out in the world, or read something interesting, and it snowballs from there. Layering, thinking, editing, cursing, rewriting. Who knows? It starts with a little of kernel of an idea and goes from there. – that connects some of them with my novels as well.įrom where do you get your ideas for your books?

Some of the stories are loosely interconnected, and there’s some world-building going on – geography, place names, etc. Is there something special about the book you are currently promoting that you want everyone to know? Your inspiration maybe? A fun hidden fact? An advocate of both public libraries and non-ironic adulation of the cassette tape, he can be found at .Īnd now, an exclusive Interview with Keith Rosson His short fiction has appeared in Cream City Review, PANK, Redivider, December, and more. His debut story collection, Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons, was published in February, 2021. Keith Rosson is the award-winning author of the novels The Mercy of the Tide, Some City, and Road Seven.

With grace, imagination, and a brazen gallows humor, Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons merges the fantastic and the everyday, and includes new work as well as award-winning favorites. 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 the returning soldier in “Homecoming” navigates the strange and ghostly confines of his hometown, as well as the boundaries of his own grief. 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. With Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons, award-winning author Keith Rosson once again delves into notions of family, identity, indebtedness, loss, and hope, with the surefooted merging of literary fiction and magical realism he’s explored in previous novels.

The mercy of the tide by keith rosson