REVIEW of Elizabeth Rosen's Survival Skills
Plus Five Questions with the author!
WHAT'S HAPPENING
Survival Skills is a collection of seven stories featuring everyday domestic moments about characters whose lives are anything but ordinary or cozy. There’s no such thing as just cleaning out a parent’s home or sitting on a dock getting high with a sibling. There’s always something more at play. A sick spouse. Abuse. Unexpected Pregnancies. Life. As need collides with want, each character carries their full self into these stories that unfurl and stretch before us with the complexity of chrysanthemum blooms. This is intricate and beautiful storytelling.
WHAT WE LOVE
Elizabeth Rosen has a phenomenal gift for dropping the reader straight into the thick of a complicated situation and making us instantly invested in her characters. These stories hum. The prose feels lived in. The dialogue, necessary and natural. Restraint is the name of the game in these tightly woven stories about intimate relationships. What is not said is often as important as what is. And while sticky situations open the door to these stories, the quality of character work compels us forward. There’s a driving sense throughout the collection that for all our dysfunction, there is profound beauty in our desire to make things better. That small moments—of humor, of escape, of memory—are what we’ve got, for better or worse. This sense makes Survival Skills feel cohesive and personal. A simply excellent read.
FAVORITE QUOTES
“That stoned and star-filled night in July had inspired me to go inside to write a terrible poem about the universe and how big it was and how small we were and something about how nature was where we got our real education, not a classroom. At the time, I probably thought I was some kind of Thoreau, which I could see now wasn't just sour grapes but also proof that I didn't deserve to take up space at some college.”
“Is it bad that this kind of headline—'Great White Shark with Red Mouth Washes Up on Beach in Rare Incident’—is what gets me through the day?”
“He would drop off consciousness with the gracelessness of a four-year-old doing a cannon-ball, entering sleep with a loud splash of breath, sinking after some initial flailing into a gentle, rhythmic snore.”
BOOK DETAILS
Survival Skills can be purchased here.
Published by Sand and Gravel. The volume is 4.75”x 5.5” and is 49 pages long with acknowledgements. The book is handmade with an old-school double-staple binding.
FIVE QUESTIONS WITH ELIZABETH ROSEN
A story’s origin always fascinates us. What’s your process for dropping into a new piece? For a story like “Noisy Miner,” which is a complicated story about a backyard nuisance and a family’s history, did you start with character or was it birds that sparked your attention?
It started with the birds. I have Australian family and my sister-in-law told me a story about trying to scare the Noisy Miner birds away from their backyard. It turns out the solution is an uncomfortable one if you’re a bird- and animal-lover. The larger story is really about that: the paradox of having to do uncomfortable things you’d never ordinarily do to keep yourself safe.
The story “Endeavor” weighs in just over 100 words, yet like all great micros, it punches far above its weight. How do you think about story compression for pieces at this length?
I’m still learning about what makes a good micro. With some of them, the ending seems inevitable, like we’ve been working up to it right from the beginning, and those seem a little easier to compress, since once you have that ending, you can return to the beginning and begin to ruthlessly cut. You can see how that sort of micro is a cousin to the traditional short story. But sometimes I think the really killer micros, the ones that make it a genre unto itself, are the ones that totally surprise me at the end with some kind of leap I just didn’t see coming at all. I’m thinking here of something like Sarah Freligh’s Welkin winner, “Outside a Vet’s Office: Boston, 9/1//2001.” That dissonance is what makes a micro really memorable, and I don’t have the faintest idea how to do it.
Your stories are often about two or three characters, all of whom are holding on to a big story. It makes us mindful of how we’re all just histories walking around interacting in real time. How do you see this idea playing out in your work?
I love this question! Thank you for noticing that. The fact that we’re all just walking around wearing masks for the larger world is one of the things that most interests me about people. Almost no one is just who they appear to be, and if they are, they tend not to be that interesting. So, yeah, I’m always interested in a character’s secret history.
What are you working on now? What’s piquing your interest creatively?
I just finished a chapbook about this very thing. I honestly don’t know how to classify it, but it’s got an otherworldly character whose job is to place secrets, and the linked stories are about the people who are carrying those secrets.
Your bio on the back of Survival Skills mentions you’re a lover of ghost-hunting shows. (Nice. We love a good haunting.) Say more!
Horror is my “fun” read. The love of ghost-hunting shows are an extension of that. I haven’t seen one that convinces me, but I know so many people in real life who have had a paranormal experience that I love to think about it. I’m very happy to watch someone else get scared in the dark, though.
BIO
Colorwise, Elizabeth Rosen is an autumn. Originally from New Orleans, she now lives in small-town Pennsylvania where she has learned to appreciate snow and colorful scarves. She still wants her MTV, and has the T-shirts to prove it. Her stories have appeared in journals such as North American Review, Baltimore Review, Pithead Chapel, Los Angeles Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Flash Frog, and Gargoyle. Some have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net awards. Her story “Maw Maw’s Cheese Balls” is the 2026 winner of the Raleigh Review Flash Fiction contest. Find out more at www.thewritelifeliz.com.
SOCIAL MEDIA
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