A fantastic interview with The Missoula Independent.
Please follow link below.
http://missoulanews.bigskypress.com/missoula/badass-bitches/Content?oid=2677288
One of my favorite blogs–Largehearted Boy.
Please follow link below.
http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2016/02/book_notes_rich_14.html
An AWESOME interview with Chick Lit Central!
Please follow link below.
http://www.chicklitcentral.com/2016/01/richard-fifields-flair-for-fashionplus.html
Magpie: An Essay In NW Book Lovers
Please see link below.
Article In The Missoulian
Please see link.
A story published in The Manifest Station
THERE IS NO STORY UNTIL IT HAPPENS TO YOU Someone else is driving your car. He thinks this road is a video game, accelerates to sixty on the straightaways, slows for the sudden plunges, and your car rollercoasters and dips past reedy bogs. You step on an imaginary brake pedal. You are no tourist, you were born and raised here, you hate these roads. This road is notorious, chiseled through mountains. On your left, a steep plummet to the Yaak River. To your right, ridges rise out of sight, emerge from a mighty ditch that is a dumping ground for road kill. Not just unlucky animals, white plastic crosses are riveted to stanchions, the Montana American Legion honors every highway fatality. One million acres of national forest, this northwest corner an eruption on a topographical map. Your birthplace has been christened by drunks and geniuses: Burnt Dutch, Red Top Cyclone, Pete Creek, Lick Mountain, Devil’s Washboard. You are thankful your mother gave you a normal name. Jacob is driving, and you think you can trust him. There is no cell service here, eighteen miles from Canada, thirty from the Idaho border. This land is a secret to most people, primitive, unpredictable, occasionally vicious. This is why you left. Today is the eighth day of the eighth month of the year, and numbers are important. You started counting ten years ago, when you got sober. Jacob has seventy-nine days, and in the backseat, Carl has four years. Your drinking days were a house on fire, left you with nothing. Some days, numbers are all you have. You agreed to this camping trip, even though this place is bad luck. Your father was killed in a logging accident a few miles away, and last fall, your mother fell down an embankment and broke her leg. Shot a grouse from her truck window, slipped when she got out to claim the pile of feathers and gore. Your mother thinks she is a bird dog. You are twenty years older than Jacob and Carl, and you tolerate the rap music and the reckless driving and the photographs at every tourist trap. They need proof they are alive and sober, need to document joy, capture it like an elusive beast. Now, Jacob parks your car at the Yaak Falls. They pose for your camera, perching on the very edge of the cliff, daredevils. The river behind them is frothy emerald and shocking white; this year’s premature summer has created an unusually ferocious tumult of water dashing against jagged shelves of rock, around sun-bleached boulders. These boys in your camera lens are just as unstoppable, determined. Back in the car, the speed and the roads are making you sick to your stomach, and you distract yourself with your camera. You wish you could edit your life like this, apply a filter, crop out the tourist. When Jacob swears, you look up. The curve ahead has disappeared, the road obscured by a thick plume rising up and blooming in the blue sky. Your first thought is wildfire. Jacob slows the car from sixty and your car penetrates the curtain, a storm of dust undulates as it rushes over. Now you are thinking rock slide. Jacob pounds the brakes, swerves to find the shoulder of the road, snaps the hazard lights to flashing. Sheets of swirling earth settle and alight, revealing the highway once more. The collective breath in the car is caught, released. Waves of dirt and smoke to your left, the boughs of pines shudder. You fumble at your seatbelt; you dash from your car. The asphalt is like the surface of the moon, as your feet kick up powdery grey clouds. At the edge of the embankment, you stare down at a crash landing, a path flattened and torn through the brush. It is a twenty-foot drop, and as the veil of smoke lifts, it takes you a moment to see the pickup truck, tipped over on one side, groaning as it settles and comes to rest. You could swear the tires are still revolving. Last night, you slept next to the river, but summer had turned. By midnight, your bedding was wet with deliquescence, dew. The temperature crashed, the stars glittered sharply in the cold. You asked yourself why you came back, why you returned here. Once you were a spectacle, a specimen. You did not belong, but here you are, a boomerang. Despite your expensive sleeping bag, you sought refuge in the bunkhouse. You dreamed you were back in high school. You woke up with a knuckle in your mouth. The engine of the truck is ticking, and in books, something will soon explode. You follow Jacob and Carl, skidding down the bank, feet seeking purchase in the slide of shale, the knots of knapweed. You read enough non-fiction to know that this is an emergency. The boys are already at the truck, and they are shouting, but your eye is caught by something in the bushes. He rests in a copse of white pines, the smaller trees bending, crushed with his weight. Facedown, he floats inches off the ground, the brush has bent but not snapped. He is eleven, maybe twelve feet away from the truck. Distances are not your thing. He moans. His shirt is yanked up beneath his armpits. He is overweight. The white collar bunches flat against the back of his head. His exposed back is raked with a field of thinly bleeding scratches. His stomach spills out on both sides of his blue jeans. You see a trembling there, respiration. You speak to him. You speak in dialogue you have learned from books. Everything is going to be okay. Hold on. Don’t move, Sir. Help is on the way. You have read this before. Sir. They always say Sir. You leave the man, and step over broken glass. You are wearing flip flops, inappropriate shoes for a first responder. At the truck, the windshield is gone, remnants of safety glass intricate as lace, but the filigree has frayed. Loose ends of string catch the light. You peer closer. It is human hair. There is a man in the driver’s seat, hung in the air, eye level. He is sideways, and his seatbelt strains as it keeps him from crashing down. Suspended, he stares through you. Jacob scrambles up the embankment to flag down any passing cars, to send someone to find a landline, a phone to call 911. Carl’s face is blank, and you watch as he crashes through trees, traces the perimeter of the accident. He is looking for more bodies, but that is something you cannot say out loud. The driver wears the same white button down, and you repeat dialogue someone else has written: Sir, help is on the way. You can feel the quotation marks coming out of your mouth. The driver blinks, belches green vomit. Dazed, he tugs at the seatbelt, the vomit sliding down the corner of his mouth. Gravity pulls it to earth. You watch his hand fumble for the clasp, and you hear yourself screaming Don’t do it, don’t do it, but he bursts free, crashes down the length of the cab, comes to rest in the passenger seat, face mashed against the window. There was another passenger, but he performed a magic trick, a disappearing act. Spray of gravel, as an expensive SUV brakes on the shoulder. You can see Jacob speaking to a woman on the passenger side, and you do not have time for small talk. Find a fucking phone. Imperious, this is your crime scene. You grew up with a police scanner, and it was another member of your family, squawking and squelching twenty-four hours a day, chatter from logging truck and semi trucks. Your mother was a volunteer dispatcher, and you know it could take another twenty minutes for a phone to be found, and another half an hour for help to arrive. The man in the trees moans as you return, the low keening of an animal in misery. His body shudders, the white flesh shakes. Everything is going to be okay. Hold on, Sir. Don’t move. Your mind disassociates, takes nervous, frantic flight. You think about character development, you realize that you are not a sympathetic narrator. You recalibrate, and focus on your ankles, welted from the whip of tall grasses, scratched from low scrub brush. This is manly. But then you stare down at your painted toenails, in your cheap flip flops from Old Navy. Even your toenails are gay, and you are not cut out for a rescue. Your hummingbird mind flies. You lower yourself, your bare knees rest in a patch of red clover. You crane your neck until you are nearly touching his shoulder. You wait for sounds of breathing, or wheezing, or another moan. But you are distracted by his jowls, puffing out from his face, fleshy, red, carpeted with white stubble. You can smell beer sweat, urine. You know this odor well. The seat of his blue jeans is soaked, his belt loops empty. An overweight man should always wear a belt. You can’t seem to stay here. Your hummingbird mind flutters rapidly, you wish to remain in air. You do not want to light on reality. Times like this, you wish your life is just a rough draft. Before your tenth birthday, you learned where to hide. You found safety in words, you crawled inside trashy novels and stayed there. You learned to see your small town as fiction, a terrifying book that was happening to somebody else. Now, you write novels for a living. But no matter how much you pretend, there is no story when it happens to you. You hear another vehicle above, Jacob shouting, but you will not take your eyes of this man. You feel that it would be more bad luck. Doors heave open, and the air disquiets with a ding ding ding from the car’s interior. Behind you, a small avalanche as two women negotiate the cruel slope of the embankment. Voices. They heard it on the police scanner, help is coming, and don’t I know you from high school? This is all noise. If you keep watch, this man will be fine. The woman stands near you, explains who she is, and why you should remember. You do not acknowledge her, remain crouched. You are a dog who refuses to leave his master. Eventually, she joins the chorus fretting over the driver, and it seems they all have the same pages. Blue jeans. You study his blue jeans. The back pocket barely contains a wallet, the folds reveal edges of dollars or receipts or Moneyball tickets. Leather, at least an inch thick. How do straight men sit on such things? You count to one hundred. Your mind wanders before you get to twenty, and you hear chickadees, meadowlarks, starlings. You prop your elbows in a pile of dried needles. You listen. You think there is a sigh. A quiet exhalation. Here is the tourist you cropped from the picture, shaking your shoulder. The women cry out, declare it a miracle. He is a doctor. Handsome. This is a plot contrivance in the second act, but you will take it. You rise to your feet. The doctor in still wearing his swimsuit, and he asks you questions you cannot answer. Checks vitals, requests items from his black duffel bag. Thankfully, Carl is there, trustworthy Carl, and he helps the doctor roll the man on his back. Now you see his face, and it is the face of every man from your small town. The words finally leave your mouth, but the doctor has plugged his ears with a stethoscope. He was moaning. He was moaning. You wring your hands, fully inhabit your character: Panicked Gay #1. The doctor is moving too slowly. This is foreshadowing. The doctor stands, his shorts still wet from the river. He hangs the stethoscope around his neck. He stares at you, steady. This must be his bedside manner. The doctor believes this man is your relative. He’s gone. Another line from another book. He speaks to you evenly, and you nod to let him know that you understand. You back away from the man in the trees. Now he is the body. Minutes ago, he’d served as the subject of a sentence. Now he is just an object on which to hang adjectives. You know you must take notes, because you always take notes. Red badge on his white shirt, sewed on, threads frayed, one corner of the embroidered cross peels away. VFW. The t-shirt underneath is yellowed. He looks like the man who bats twelfth on your softball team. He is older than 50, and younger than 80. This is a man who spent money on his grandchildren, and not on his teeth. The pores on his nose are enormous, his eyes amber in the corners. Cheeks are red with broken blood vessels, ears downy with white hairs. There is no blood on his face. Someone in the chorus shouts about helicopters. More cars arrive, none with sirens. The body is missing a shoe. At the end of a chapter, a sad-faced cop will eventually find the other cheap sneaker in the weeds. The truck is surrounded by people, but twelve feet away from them, you are alone with the body. Twelve feet that might as well be a mile. You crouch, and you are apologizing to the dead man. I’m so sorry. Your mother raised you with manners. You stare into his eyes, and you want him to be staring skyward, but death has left him wall-eyed. He is looking many places at once. This will not do. You want to slide his eyelids down, be the character of the priest. You stop yourself, because you don’t want anybody to catch you being a weirdo. Twelve feet away, orders are barked, trees snapped by bare hands to facilitate a rescue. Things erupt all at once, all for the survivor. Highway Patrol, two volunteer ambulances. The bystanders are ordered to make room, and you hate them all. There is a crowd now, thirsty for action, collecting around the crust of the asphalt. Perhaps they do not have satellite television. Something exciting has finally happened in the Yaak. The most exciting thing since the last car accident, probably a week ago. Twelve feet from the dramatic rescue, and you and the body are ignored. Your fists clench. You stand with a dead body, but both of you are ghosts. There were days when you thought this place would kill you. There were days when you thought you should just kill yourself. Some people whispered behind your back, but in a small town, most people just came right out and said it. When you finally got out, you found another kind of isolation in the bottle. Towards the end, you drank by yourself in a trailer house because no one else could stand you. You could not stand yourself. In the last ten years, you found something beyond fight or flight. You found surrender. The real world is made of moveable parts that you cannot control, and it is far easier to let somebody else drive your car. Here is his hairy stomach, the pelt of a white rabbit. White shirt, white hair, no external injuries. He died, rattled from the inside, bones and organs displaced, a snow globe shaken. What was knit together inside him now floats, confetti. Standing there, your hummingbird mind determines that this would be a really dramatic photograph. More sirens, and you watch his body tremble as the leviathan vehicles rumble in, smelling of diesel. Capable men who deserve capable descriptions break through the line of rednecks, but there is no applause. In the book, this is the denouement. Next comes the extraction scene, cutters and spreaders, the Jaws of Life. You have become a secondary character. But you will not leave, you will among the white pines and mountain ash, slender aspens that might as well be props. A dead body and a traumatized gay man—somehow the scene has been stolen from both of you. Heat rises on your neck, hives burst to life across your chest, and your cheeks blaze in fury. The bystanders do not deserve to gawk, and you angle yourself in front of his feet, but blocking the body is impossible. The crowd has spread as far as the mile marker sign. Number Seventeen. The sun dips lower, hovering over the high shelf of mountains in the west; summer nights begin to abbreviate in the month of August, and on a quieter night, you might think about what is coming, the weather just ahead. Heavy equipment shrieks to life, hydraulic scissors, sparks. The capable men don welder’s masks, attack with crowbars and sledge hammers. The truck is cut apart. Jacob and Carl chatter with volunteer firemen, and you know this has become an adventure for them, another story to tell. The dead man and his white shirt glow as the light in the sky changes, the strange saturation of dusk. The very last words the man heard were spoken by you. Your voice is high pitched and irritating, feminine, and you fear that you may have ruined his remaining thoughts on earth. Now a volunteer from the ambulance brushes past. You have time to look at your watch. An hour has passed. The volunteer is a woman, thick and strong as her crew cut. Under her arm a white bundle, and she shakes it open, snaps and flicks until the corners are square, as if this is laundry day. The white sheet billows in the air and sinks into place, drapes over the curves of the body. You can no longer see his eyes. Crew Cut grasps both of your forearms, and pulls you away. You twist your neck to get one last look. As you crest the embankment, Crew Cut offers you orange juice, a blanket. You know you are shaking, but you refuse. You can’t feel your feet as you cross the highway and find the only refuge, behind an ambulance. You need to sit down, but it turns into a collapse, and the gravel cuts your hands. Finally, there is blood. For the first time in years, you want a drink. During the last hour, you forgot you were a smoker. Now, you fish for the crushed pack and a lighter, and you chain smoke and you pray. These are things you learned in recovery. The helicopter approaches, and sparks fly from your third cigarette. You don’t care about the dry forests. You don’t care about a forest fire. You cup the cigarette with one hand and pray for the man under the sheet. The helicopter lands on the highway, and the rotors pick up the dust that blankets the road, the pieces of earth dislodged in the rollover. You lose time, close your eyes until the helicopter is aloft, and the survivor takes a flight of his own. You think about the man that landed so far away. Twelve feet, but the kind of distance that can never be measured. Now, he is a story. There is an ending.
http://themanifeststation.net/tag/richard-fifield/
A very generous review from The San Francisco Book Review
How do you make amends to an entire town when you’ve burned every bridge that leads there? Rachel Flood doesn’t have all the answers, but she is determined to answer that question and heal herself along the way by heading back home to small town Quinn, Montana. The shadowy figure of Frank, Rachel’s unknown father, passes away and leaves Rachel his trailer home and a charming and flamboyant twelve-year-old neighbor named Jake. Almost falling down around her ears, the trailer is representative of Rachel’s path to healing and forgiveness. Jake will be the best help she could have hoped for, because Jake needs someone to care about him too, and help him learn that being true to yourself matters. Rachel takes Jake under her wing as his best protector and friend, and Jake helps Rachel remember what having a good friend means. As forgiveness in the town progresses, so does the restoration of the trailer home. But Rachel Flood is a 12-step alcoholic determined to make amends to everyone she wronged, including her mother, Laverna Flood, almost the entire population of Quinn, and the women on her mother’s softball team, The Flood Girls. The women in the town who’s marriages she ruined, the shame she brought to her mother and her closest friends leads to many tears and name calling when Rachel is drafted by her mother to play softball. Laverna also demands her daughter work at the bar she owns, aptly named ‘The Dirty Shame’. Literally one of the best books I’ve read in years, The Flood Girls and the town of Quinn, have planted themselves firmly in my heart and won’t be leaving soon. Superbly written by newcomer Richard Fifield, this book should be given to everyone who might need a reminder that sometimes you can go home, and there are many roads that lead to forgiveness.
Off The Shelf features an essay I wrote about one of my favorite books–Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age Of Miracles.
I’m now at the age where time is a villain in a horror movie. Time is frightening to me—hours lost at bad dinner parties, seconds stolen in conversation with dullards. I’m a control freak, and time is the biggest and baddest of beasts, mysterious and confounding. In real life, it is terrifying to navigate the collapsing tunnel of aging; some days sprint by, some days I am bitten by nostalgia and overwhelmed by sadness. Published in 2013, Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles is a sneak attack of a book that deserves to be read. Ostensibly, the plot hangs on a bit of science, but don’t let that scare you away: the earth’s rotation has slowed, days extended by fifty-six minutes. The main character is a perfectly imagined twelve-year-old named Julia, but this is not young adult fiction. Not at all. Walker’s particular genius is in stitching together a towering Frankenstein out of something as tiny as minutes. The Age of Miracles is the scariest book I have ever read. Some people read apocalyptic fiction because they like to imagine how they would survive—I already know the answer to that question. (When the zombies come, I will eat nine boxes of Benadryl and binge-watch Dynasty until my heart stops.) The Age of Miracles was so frightening because the apocalypse begins as an annoyance, like a lipstick that has melted. Walker’s greatest device is that the end of the world comes incrementally, almost casually, and each turned page winds the reader just a little more tightly. There have been several books that I could not put down, but there has never been a reading experience that caused me to pace in laps around my house, the novel held tight to my chest, clutched nervously like a string of pearls. The beauty of this book is how Walker flips it. Suddenly there is too much time, too many hours of daylight. For most people, this would be a luxury. All that sun added an extra level of panic for me; the book takes place in California, where you can already grow avocados in your front yard year-round. I live in Montana, where we do not tan. Walker’s book gave me the opposite of seasonal affective disorder; her harrowing descriptions made me long to read the book underneath a black parasol. Time is most frightful to me when viewed from a vantage point. Walker writes at a distance—the dread of Julia’s day-to-day life is only heightened by the author’s masterful control. It would have been an easy choice to make Julia shrill, whiny. Walker writes Julia so delicately that her first love and subsequent heartbreak don’t seem like distractions from the mayhem; they only serve to softly echo the destruction of the world around her. I actually called my mother after finishing The Age of Miracles, seeking solace. When I hung up the phone, I unconsciously checked my watch. Instantly, all of the horror returned. That is the testament of a damn fine book. Karen Thompson Walker has written a modern classic. I don’t want to be coy, but The Age of Miracles is well worth your time. – See more at: http://offtheshelf.com/2016/01/the-age-of-miracles-by-karen-thompson-walker/#sthash.kRh8DgVa.dpuf
A really great write up and review from Generationgbooks!
I had to find an image for this book, since it’s not out until February 2, 2016. Whoever’s image I stole, I apologize. I was not attempting to thieve someone else’s pic of the advance, but I don’t have an image of my own, so the Internet had to supply me. I hope this is the final cover. It’s perfect for the book. For that kid on the top wearing the headphones? is one of many hearts in this book. How did I find out about this one? Back and forth correspondence with my literary Queen, Ms Wendy, over at Simon & Schuster. In between requesting millions of titles coming out, she asked if I had read or heard of this book. I had not, and she said she was sending it. The last book Wendy used that wording with? “All The Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr. Those who know me know how THAT ended up- I STILL talk about that book to anyone who walks into that store and hesitates over buying it (Note: Don’t hesitate- DO IT!). It’s on my all-time list of books that changed my life. That’s how that worked out. I have a strong hunch The Flood Girls is going to be on a list. I don’t know the last time I read a book like this. It would have had to be back at the gig before this one, but that was a Joshilyn Jackson book. This reminded me of that, meets Fannie Flagg, meets an episode of Six Feet Under and Coyote Ugly, with some League of Their Own meets Roseanne. I have no other way of describing this. I think I already have some of the parts cast, so maybe they’ll make a movie of it that Hollyweird doesn’t screw up… . Anyway, I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this book and can’t wait until I can sell a ton of it next year. I’m going to tell you that if you’re a Nicholas Sparks fan, you won’t love parts of this, because it’s a realistic look at a dark, not quite normal town called Quinn. Think of the dark side of town life. And a host of ladies who are not your happy-go-lucky townfolk. And a book-smart kid who’s trying to be who he is, but surrounded by family that refuses to address his individuality and threatens to completely whitewash his personality. What a book. What a book. WHAT A BOOK. Quinn is no normal town. The Flood Girls are no normal softball team. Jake is no normal 12-year old boy. Rachel is no normal recovering alcoholic. When the book begins, Jake is mourning the loss of his next door neighbor, who has just passed on. He’s a 12 year old boy who has a flair for fashion, reading Jackie Collins novels, and watching the goings on around the town from his lounge chair on top of his trailer. His mom Krystal has a newborn baby, is a nurse, and is married to Bert, the town alcoholic and emotional bully who resents Jake and thinks nothing of showing his authority with fists and mean words when he doesn’t approve of Jake’s actions, clothes, pretty much anything. Jake does his best to hide things from Bert and stay out of his way. In the meantime, we have The Dirty Shame, the town dive bar run by Laverna, a tough as nails woman who also runs the local softball team, The Flood Girls. Laverna suffers no fools anywhere, and she busts her hump. Her tough exterior hides a heart that’s been broken so many times that she just plain gave up and turned into a hard-knock single woman. Her daughter Rachel, from whom she’s estranged, heads back to Quinn, 20 years after she left in a cloud of bloodshed, murder, and rage. Rachel’s in AA and doing the 12 steps. She’s determined to come back and make amends to everyone she did wrong- including her estranged mom. Turns out, in a strange twist of fate, that Jake’s next door neighbor is Rachel’s dad and Laverna’s ex. Rachel inherits the Money Pit that was his trailer, and she and Jake build a touching, close friendship in which she encourages him to be who he is, and not to let Bert quell his natural impulses. Rachel tries to rebuild her relationship with Laverna, but she has a team of tough ladies surrounding her with a protective air- the softball team. Laverna tells her she has to work the bar because she’s lost one of her girls temporarily, and then a bar fight takes out Laverna with injuries. Rachel’s now stuck working for a long time. She continues to make her amends, including taking right field on the team for Laverna, despite the fact that she sucks at it. Time goes on, and the girls on the team slowly accept Rachel. The townspeople begin to slowly accept Rachel. Jake gets a job doing statistics for the team, and Laverna begins to slowly find her unorthodox way of forgiving her daughter. But NOT before hell breaks loose in every possible way. The end? Bawling my eyes out. But beyond that one event that turns the novel upside down? An overpowering message of redemption, humility, humanity, and the wonder of love in all its forms. As well as tough, gritty, salt of the earth ladies who take no shit. And you have easily, my 1st favorite book of 2016. Get your ass out there on February 2, 2016 and buy this book!!! PS- For those who give a rat’s ass…..if it got cast as a movie, here are a few of my casting choices. You can come by and call me crazy if it happens and my cast pics are all off. I only picked a few of the main characters. Laverna-Roseanne Barr. Rachel-Jennifer Lawrence. Jake- Joseph Gordon-Leavitt (that guy has serious acting ability AND a baby face. He can so pull off playing a 12-year old boy). Bert-John C. Reilly. Reverend Foote-Robert Duvall. Black Mabel- Kathy Bates. Krystal- Katey Sagal. Athena-Jennifer Coolidge. Tell me how off I am! 🙂
So honored to be chosen by Shelf Awareness!
The hardscrabble town of Quinn, Mont. (population 956), serves as the backdrop for The Flood Girls, the first novel by Richard Fifield. He sets his story in 1991, and his grasp of the intricacies–and often oppressive nature–of small-town life shine through the perspective of Jake Bailey, a precocious 12-year-old fixated on polyester leisure suits and motorcycle leathers, along with pop culture of the times: the music and persona of Madonna, the books of Jackie Collins and the soap opera drama of Erica Kane. Jake’s eccentricities make him a misfit, but also a perceptive observer–especially from his rooftop hangout where he seeks refuge from his family and spies on who is “having affairs with the UPS man, who was eating too much when they thought nobody was watching, who was stealing checks from mailboxes.” When Jake’s neighbor Frank–“the shyest person in Quinn”–dies, Frank’s estranged daughter, Rachel Flood, a once-notorious boozer and floozy, returns to Quinn nine years after her high school graduation. She comes to claim her inheritance, which consists of Frank’s dilapidated house trailer plagued with black mold and his 1978 Ford Granada. Rachel, a blonde bombshell, had once been “hell-bent on destroying herself, and she had mostly avoided collateral damage. She had never killed a family of four while drunk driving, had never left a baby to freeze to death in a car while drinking at a bar in the middle of winter. She was a relatively good person, had only broken hearts and occasionally the law.” Against the advice of her Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, sober Rachel sets out to redeem herself and make restitution for her past. It’s a tall order, especially when she tries to make amends with her mother, Laverne, the crude, unforgiving owner of the Dirty Shame, one of two local watering holes. The pub employs a crew of brash, sharp-tongued barmaids–with names like Martha Man Hands, Red Mabel and Black Mabel–who moonlight on the bar’s softball team, the Flood Girls. When Laverne is injured in a gun fight, Rachel, in her quest for redemption, gets roped into taking over the Dirty Shame in her mother’s absence, and reluctantly enlisted to play for the Flood Girls, who are in search of a winning season. Will Rachel’s former neighbors, coworkers and friends continue to hold grudges and make her life miserable? When Rachel befriends Jake–the record-keeper for the softball team, who is also the team’s “heart” and “good luck charm”–he helps Rachel claw her way back into the fold of the backwoods little town she thought she had escaped. Caustic wit, absurd plot turns and an ensemble cast of riotous characters infuse this outlandish yet moving novel about the hard-bitten bonds of community. –Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines Shelf Talker: A Montana town is turned upside-down when a reformed outcast returns to claim an inheritance and make amends for her sordid past.
http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=2673#m31089
A starred review from the amazing folks at Publisher’s Weekly!
In Fifield’s excellent fiction debut, alcoholic Rachel Flood returns to her hometown of Quinn, Mont. (pop. 956), after a nine-year self-imposed exile, coming back to atone for her teenage behavior—out-of-control fighting, drinking, and promiscuous sex. Her mother, Laverna Flood, is the hard-boiled, vulgar owner of the Dirty Shame, a bar where mixed drinks are too much trouble to make and fistfights are encouraged. Rachel and Laverna haven’t spoken since she left. Rachel’s unexpected appearance is not welcome, but she is determined to complete Alcoholics Anonymous’s 12-step program, to make amends and redeem herself. Fifield has created a colorful, quirky, and amusing cast of small-town characters. Rachel’s best friend and protector is Jake, her next-door neighbor, a sensitive and worldly 12-year-old, who is also a snappy dresser and likes to do laundry. Barflies Red Mabel and Black Mabel and gas station cashier Martha Man Hands also become friends, but only after Rachel is forced to play on her mother’s wacky and winless softball team, the Flood Girls. This hilarious and profane story takes a tragic turn at the end, revealing just how fragile love and friendship can be. Agent: Jenny Bent, the Bent Agency. (Feb.)
http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-4767-9738-0
A FABULOUS review from one of the best bloggers in the biz–Seattle Book Mama
If Fannie Flagg worries that she has no heir, she can relax; Richard Fifield is here. The Flood Girls is his brilliant debut, and you have to read it! Fifield will cut out your heart and feed it to you with a rusty spoon, and he’ll make you like it, too. Hell, he’ll even make you laugh through it. I got the DRC free via Net Galley and Gallery Books in exchange for an honest review, and I’m going to read it a second time before I archive it as I am supposed to. This is only the second time I have done so after hundreds of galleys have come my way; that should give you a measure of how impressed I am with this title. From his arresting first line to the deeply satisfying ending, I was completely bound up in this book, only setting it aside as a reminder to myself to delay gratification and make it last a little longer. In the end my e-reader had 177 notes and marks, and every single one of them was there to highlight outstanding imagery, a passage in which yet another character was developed, a place in which he had shown us something important while saying something else, or a place in the text that was drop-dead funny. I would guess the last of these accounts for 100 of those 177 notes. Let’s start with the premise: Rachel Flood has returned home to Quinn, Montana after many years away. She is here to make amends. It isn’t easy: “A small town never forgets, or forgives.” It’s a tough town, full of people that have survived dozens of harsh 6 month winters. Its people are abrupt and sometimes rude; they don’t suffer fools here. Rachel’s sponsor has assured her that she doesn’t have to move back to Quinn to make amends; she isn’t here to do penance, after all. Offer the amends and then, whether or not they are accepted, hit the road! But for several reasons, not all of which Rachel understands herself at first, she chooses to stick around, and it isn’t easy. Ultimately, she is cornered into playing in the outfield of The Flood Girls, the local softball team sponsored by the mother she has wronged. She becomes a friend and mentor to Jake, a quirky twelve year old with a fondness for fine fabrics, wardrobe and design, and an intolerant right-wing Fundamentalist stepfather. Perhaps the most technically impressive aspect of this work is the way Fifield differentiates a very wide cast of characters. I cannot think of any other novel among the 151 books I read and reviewed over the past year in which there were so many characters that were juggled so deftly. When I put down the book, I did a quick finger count of how many characters I could actually name and identify without looking. I stopped at 21, and I didn’t try long or hard. Every single one of these characters, most of whom are wonderfully eccentric, stood out in my mind, apart from two small groups (the silver miners and the Sinclairs) that are treated as such in the text. It isn’t only the eccentric characters and the small town setting that makes me think of Flagg’s masterpiece, Fried Green Tomatoes; it is also the message. Fifield wants us to know that intolerance will kill us. It is only by accepting and celebrating one another’s differences and quirks that we become part of the human family. We must learn to help and rely upon each other, because we are all we have. That said, The Flood Girls shares Flagg’s spirit, yet it is not derivative, but wholly original. You don’t have to like baseball to enjoy it. This hilarious, engaging new novel is for sale to the public February 2, 2016. Very conservative evangelical Christians won’t enjoy it, and it wasn’t written for that audience anyway. It is highly recommended to everyone else. This book will be talked about, and you’ll want to be in on it from the get-go! Put this one at the top of your list.
A starred review from Kirkus!
A prodigal daughter returns to her hometown in Montana to make amends; mayhem and hilarity ensue. When Rachel Flood returns to Quinn, population 956, moving into the ruined trailer bequeathed her by her father, the reception is cool. Her mother, Laverna, who owns a bar called The Dirty Shame, is “surprised that her daughter had shown up to claim the inheritance. Laverna thought of Rachel the same way she thought about the time her appendix had burst—sometimes things could come from inside your body and suddenly betray you, nearly killing you.” And that’s one of the more positive reactions. Growing up in Quinn, blonde, beautiful Rachel was the town slut, blamed for countless divorces, a murder, and a robbery. Nine years later, she’s gotten sober in Alcoholics Anonymous and returned against her sponsor’s advice to make amends. The trailer she’s inherited is next door to her former best friend, Krystal, who’s now shacked up with a horrible, damaged man named Bert, their baby, and Krystal’s older child, 12-year-old Jake. Young Jake is debut novelist Fifield’s finest creation, his outfits and obsessions (Madonna, Jackie Collins, Erica Kane) laid out in loving detail. “He dressed in satin pajamas, lime in color, and…sprayed his quilt with a bottle of Lady Stetson perfume, another thrift store find, the contents stretched with tap water.” Other characters include Black Mabel and Red Mabel—”While Black Mabel dressed to instill fear, Red Mabel would just as soon punch you in the face”; Buley Savage Connor, a morbidly obese, 60-year-old thrift store proprietor; Rocky Bailey, her 30-year-old boyfriend; Martha Man Hands; Jim Number Three; and packs of lesbian silver and talc miners. Several of the above play on The Dirty Shame’s women’s softball team, whose 1991 season defines the arc of the tale. It includes bar fights and AA meetings, a parade, a wedding, and a black bear, all of which Fifield juggles beautifully until the ending, which feels both inevitable and wrong. Read it anyway. The Wild West earns its name all over again in this lovable chronicle of small-town insanity.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/richard-fifield/the-flood-girls/
Hip Hop Show–Traff The Wiz
Such an honor to direct local talent! My second (and probably last!) directing gig.
Link to media
A Maze In Greys–Traff The Wiz
The first hip hop video I ever directed. Enjoy!