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Title: Owl in Darkness
Author: Zoë Rosenfeld
Narrator: Stephanie Tucker
Format: Unabridged
Length: 1 hr
Language: English
Release date: 04-28-15
Publisher: Audible Studios
Genres: Fiction, Literary
Publisher's Summary:
In this long short story (or novella), a writer arrives at an old manor for a six-week residency, only to discover that while there, she can't seem to write a word. The longer she stays, the more she loses her grasp on who she is and what she needs to say, until gradually, the background becomes the foreground, as the minutiae of the place she finds herself in start to loom large. In the echo chamber of her own head, the natural world and the strangers around her begin to speak to her in odd ways.
Zoë Rosenfeld is a writer and editor. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Bullhorn and Transfer, her poetry was included in the anthology New American Underground Poetry Vol. I: The Barbarians of San Francisco - Poets from Hell, her reviews have appeared in Esquire, Biography, Us, and Paper magazines, and an essay of hers was included in the anthology Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex, published by Bloomsbury. She is also the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship in fiction.
This is a short audiobook published by Shebooks - high quality fiction, memoir, and journalism for women, by women.
Members Reviews:
A story that creeps up on you like fog
Zo Rosenfeldâs "Owl in Darkness" initially grabbed me because of the premise: itâs about a writer on a writerâs retreat who canât write. I donât think fiction can get more meta than that!
Bert rents a manor in northeastern United States with the intention of escaping to an idyllic setting in which she can relax and write to her heartâs content. However, from the storyâs opening sentence, the reader gets the sense that this retreat is not exactly the romantic picture Bert had in mind: âOn her third day at the manor, day three of pinprick rain and cold mist hanging in the air, Bert grows tired of mooning at the windows, waiting for the rain to stop, and decides to head out into the wet afternoon.â Immediately the reader comprehends Bertâs early onset of restlessness and discomfort about her new surroundings.
Although thereâs not much external action, Rosenfeldâs heady, atmospheric prose kept me turning the pages. The momentum that drives this quiet yet disturbing tale is the mystery shrouding Bertâs experience: is the dreary manorâa place Charlotte Brontâs Edward Rochester would love to vacationâcausing Bert unease, or is all her unease coming from within? Bertâs despair of not having written a single word seems to grow the longer she stays at the manor, while she herself seems to become a character in a story someone else is writing.
"Owl in Darkness" also poses the question: is it true that writers are always writing, even when they donât put pen to paper? Iâm not sure how intriguing this question is to readers who donât write, but as a writer I grapple with this issue and so it hit very close to home for me. The ambivalence in which Rosenfeld cloaks the story allows the reader to decide for herself what the answer is.
I was most curious how the author would sustain an entire story on the seemingly unexciting premise that a writer canât write during her writerâs retreat. Sounds ho-hum, right? But Rosenfeldâs deft, never heavy-handed description worked on me subtly, like a time-release drug, so that the further I read, the less I could tell the difference between Bertâs gothic imagination and the reality of her surroundings.