BEWARE THE TALL GRASS, by Ellen Birkett Morris EXCERPT
We are delighted to feature this excerpt from BEWARE THE TALL GRASS by Ellen Birkett Morris!
BEWARE THE TALL GRASS
Beware the Tall Grass weaves the stories of the Sloans, a modern family grappling with their young son Charlie’s troubling memories of a past life as a soldier in Vietnam, and Thomas Boone, a young man caught up in the drama of mid-60s America who is sent to Vietnam. Eve Sloan struggles as a mother to make sense of Charlie’s increasing references to war, and her attempts to get to the bottom of Charlie’s past life memories threaten her marriage, while Thomas is challenged with loss and first love, before being thrust into combat and learning what matters most.
EXCERPT
I’ve been here before, dreaming myself
backwards, among grappling hooks of light.
True to the seasons, I’ve lived every word
spoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare?
Confluence by Yusef Komunyakaa
Eve
Charlie was here. For a moment my connection to him was visible. The cord pulsed with blood, then went still. The doctor clamped it, tied it off, cut it. A twinge echoed deep in my belly. He pulled the blanket over me, and the nurse swaddled Charlie.
I watched the nurse through the glare of the fluorescent lights, the air scented with a strange mix of blood and commercial cleaners. Charlie seemed so far away, like an untethered astronaut, the thin cable connecting him to the mothership severed. This is Ground Control to Major Tom. I’d wanted this my whole life, but now I was wondering what the hell we were doing. Dan smiled at me, and I smiled back, feeling shaky inside.
The nurse handed Charlie to me. I ran my fingers across his small hands. I unwrapped the blanket and rubbed his small belly.
“What’s this?” I pointed to a small brown oval on the left side of his belly.
“Birthmark,” said the nurse. I had a flash of sadness. I had imagined him as a blank slate, unmarked by life. I pushed the feeling away, looking into his small eyes, stroking his fine hair.
“May I?” Dan asked. He held up his cell phone to get a picture.
“Really, right now?” I put a smile on my face and looked down at Charlie. Dan’s phone pinged as people texted congratulations. We were connected to friends by the ether, connected to Charlie by blood. It was strange that in that moment I felt singularly alone thinking about my hopes for this tiny person, his small weight against my heart in a room pulsing with activity.
Our brick bungalow was in the middle of a quiet street in Falls Church. In houses all around ours, families were sitting down to dinner, going over the details of their day. As dusk deepened outside the window, I held Charlie, admiring his face, willing him to coo. I counted his vertebrae with my fingers, silently making a wish for each one, thirty-three in all. One, may he be healthy. Two, may he be free from pain. Three, may he feel treasured . . .
I felt like I was the first person to ever experience this. Everything about him fascinated me. Charlie had a tiny nose, big eyes, and downy blond hair. When he looked at me, it wasn’t with the soft focused stare I expected. His gaze had depth. He looked like he’d already seen things worth talking about.
Dan sat beside me on the couch.
“Look at his eyes. He looks like he’s thinking of something sad,” I said.
Dan looked over and ran his finger lovingly across his son’s cheek.
“We expect kids to be pure and innocent,” said Dan. “A guy I work with from Russia said they say ‘on vsyo znaet.’ It means ‘he knows everything.’ Or maybe he just has to poop.”
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Ellen Birkett Morris’s novel Beware the Tall Grass is the winner of the Donald L. Jordan Award for Literary Excellence, judged by Lan Samantha Chang, and will be published on March 15, 2024 by CSU Press in March 2024. She is the author of Lost Girls: Short Stories, winner of the Pencraft Award and finalist for the Clara Johnson, IAN and Best Book awards. Her fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Antioch Review, Notre Dame Review, and South Carolina Review, among other journals. She is a winner of the Bevel Summers Prize for short fiction. Morris is a recipient of an Al Smith Fellowship for her fiction from the Kentucky Arts Council.
Morris is also the author of Abide and Surrender, poetry chapbooks. Her poetry has appeared in The Clackamas Literary Review, Juked, Gastronomica, and Inscape, among other journals and in eight anthologies. Morris won top prize in the 2008 Binnacle Ultra-Short Edition and was a finalist for the 2019 and 2020 Rita Dove Poetry Prize. Her poem “Abide” was featured on NPR’s A Way with Words. Her essays have appeared in Newsweek, AARP’s The Ethel, Oh Reader magazine, and on National Public Radio.
Morris holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University-Charlotte. She attended the Kentucky Women Writers Conference on fellowship and teaches creative writing at The Virginia Piper Center at ASU in Tempe, Arizona and The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, Kentucky. Morris has spoken and taught at the 2018 Antioch Writers Workshop, 2019 Kentucky Women Writers Conference, 2022 Writer’s Block Festival and 2022 Louisville Book Festival.
Website: https://ellenbirkettmorris.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ellenbirkettmorriswriter/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/birkett_morris
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ellenbirkettmorris/
Pinterest:https://www.pintrest.com/ellenbirkettmorris/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellenbirkettmorris
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“In this beautiful novel, two stories separated by half a century intertwine to create an indelible narrative of peace and war. In the throes of his first loss, young Thomas joins the Army and travels to Vietnam, where he is propelled toward his fate. Decades later, in another time and place, Eve and Daniel welcome their infant son and resolve to set aside their own family ghosts. But is it possible to release the past? Can powerful experiences of love and death ever be forgotten? Through surprising and suspenseful turns, Beware the Tall Grass explores the evocative mysteries of time and memory.
-Lan Samantha Chang, Jordan Prize Judge and author of The Family Chao and Hunger.
“I was captivated by the intimate style, the gentle and graceful writing. The story reminds me of an epistolary novel in the way this intimacy intensifies the gripping suspense of the story. Ellen Birkett Morris is a writer to watch.”
-Bobbie Ann Mason, author of Dear Ann and In Country
“A young man’s coming-of-age in 1960s Missoula, and the fields of Vietnam; a young family’s struggle many years later to understand the deep-hidden trauma of their young son; Ellen Birkett Morris’s compelling debut novel, Beware the Tall Grass, explores the invisible, inexplicable connections of our souls across time and space. Masterful and deeply moving, Morris engages our hearts and challenges us to accept, and embrace, the transcendent nature of our being.”
-Tara Ison, author of At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf
“Morris’ first-person protagonists with their haunted names, Eve and Thomas, jump off the page into our own sense of reality: each of them, like ourselves, must deal with emotional baggage while trying to create a new reality: a family filled with trust and love.”
-Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab’s Wife, Four Spirits, Adam & Eve
“The past and the lives lived there are never really gone. They haunt the present in Ellen Birkett Morris’s novel, Beware the Tall Grass. Written with a sure hand and a clear eye, this novel is a story of two families—one that suffers a tragic loss and one that endures. Two fast-paced storylines come together in a memorable end in this moving story of a mother’s love.
-Lee Martin, author of the Pulitzer Prize Finalist, The Bright Forever
“This debut novel is mysterious and lucid, rich and poignant, as Ellen Birkett Morris creates two sets of memorable characters and follows them in gripping stories about love and loss, family and parenthood, with real war as their backdrop, and pain and redemption as their resonant outcomes.” -Fred Leebron, author of Out West, Six Figures, and In the Middle of All This
“A new mother head over heels in love with her infant son 2005; a U.S. infantryman fighting for his life at Ia Drang in Vietnam in 1965– how these two narratives connect is the first of several mysteries that Ellen Birkett Morris invites us to explore in Beware The Tall Grass, her heartfelt, luminous new novel.”
– David Payne, author of Barefoot to Avalon
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing
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