We Imagined It Was Rain

August 30, 2021
In his debut collection of loosely connected stories set mostly in Tennessee, some of which draw on local folklore, Siegrist shows a remarkable ability to evoke the missing pieces in his characters’ lives. As the title suggests, water, in all its variations, is central to these tales of lost love, memory, and transformation. In the haunting
“Heirloom,” Cole, who has lost his son and moved to a cabin in the woods, meets Tia, a young woman who tells him about a coffin full of water buried in the hills. At the end of the story, she lures him into the dark forest where he can smell the “heavy scent of salt from a buried sea.” Rae, a young woman in “Beneath Dark Water,” lives in fear of her physically abusive boyfriend, Darcy, a heavy drinker. In “Shouting Down the Preacher,” a man has lost his wife and his calling to infidelity, and blames himself when his former church floods. Even in the midst of the author’s piercing look into the human heart, however, there is humor, albeit dark. “Elephants” and “How to Hang a Circus Elephant” are connected stories about Mary, a rogue elephant who has to be shot, hanged, and buried. Her tusks, rumored to be visible aboveground, give the town an odd notoriety. With their universal themes, Siegrist’s folkloric stories have plenty of appeal.

September 1, 2021
A slender collection of 16 interconnected stories set in and around a rain-soaked mountain town in Tennessee. In this tender and pensive debut, the legends of sylvan, hard-luck (and fictional) Cleecey's Ferry connect its residents across time, age, and station of life: a girl who roamed the woods, blinded by eyelashes so long they hung in waist-length braids; a doomed circus elephant that still haunts the collective memory more than a century later; a drowned town hastily abandoned that sleeps under the waters of the reservoir lake; and the Rainpainter's colored sheets that hang between trees in the frequent downpours. In "Whittled Bone," a father collects curios to re-create scenes from his runaway daughter's dream journal. In "Satellites," a son gathers prescriptions using an invented back injury so he and his sister can assist their terminally ill father with his suicide on the night a satellite will fall back to Earth. After the death of his young son, the father in "Heirloom" flees in secret to a lonesome cabin, where he befriends the local crows and builds a mysterious box based on plans outlined on a series of left-behind postcards he finds in a drawer. In "Elephants," two boys visit the grave of Mary the Elephant, who was executed when a long-ago circus came to town, with Mary's demise then portrayed in minute detail in "How To Hang a Circus Elephant." (A warning to the curious that, yes, Mary's tale is based on true events.) Transformative loss and fragile hope permeate these stories, which are filled with gentle, stoic, and fractured masculinities, eroding memories, dead-enders and last-chancers, widowed fathers, lost children, and dead, dying, and otherwise departed mothers. Though all proceed at a fairly homogenous drift-down-the-river pace and are suffused with an alluring but rarely variable eccentric Appalachian melancholy, author Siegrist's atmospheric, fluid, and merciful prose proves irresistible. Moody and bittersweet: Save it for a literal rainy day and read in one sitting.

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