Friday, August 22, 2025

PRATIK HLF ISSUE SPECIAL : NEPALESE NOVELIST NARAYAN DHAKAL's "Renegade"

 

SHORT STORY

 

NARAYAN DHAKAL

Renegade 




There were three people in the southeast corner—two men not yet middle-aged and a woman, younger still. As soon as I passed through the door, my eye fixed first on the woman among them. She was toying with mounds of soft chow mein. When my attention turned to the men, I saw that they were blissful with vodka's intoxicating heat.

I sat down on a chair near the door. The rest of the restaurant was entirely empty—like a despondent person's mind. At the counter, the proprietress was nodding off. That motion of hers looked a bit uncomfortable. Anyway, she had no interest in her duty toward the three in the corner. Business activity had not made any impact on the two waiters standing by the opening to the kitchen either. In other words, the situation created a heavy burden in my mind alone. I was stooping under its weight. My mind was despondent.

Since morning, my heart had been thudding. Why? Even I didn't know. It's like this with me sometimes. I'll be that despondent—just like a sentimental poet.

The hot weather had just ended in the city, and about a month had passed since the monsoon. Already, after four in the morning, fog had begun to waft through the alleys. There was a feeling of sharply increased cold in the interior of the restaurant. Compared to other places in the city, though, this alley remains somewhat cool even in times of unbearable heat. A cold dampness and a special kind of smell always envelop it. I've known its atmosphere for many years—I have a deep friendship with it. Whenever I have to leave the city, the intense recollection of this smell comes to me and seriously affects my nervous system. Like a character bereft of lover or wife, I become restless.

Thus, I can never sleep here in the afternoon.

But why was the proprietress nodding and waking, nodding and waking so uncomfortably? For a long moment, I was bothered by this useless question.

"Is there milk, brother?" I asked the waiter who stood mechanically before me.

"Milk?"

"Yes, milk," I said firmly.

"This is a bar, sir. There's no milk in a bar."

"No milk? Then what is there? Is there tea?"

"There's vodka, Khukuri rum, Challenger, Bagpiper."

"And what else?"

"There's also tongba."

"No dairy milk?"

"That there is not."

The other waiter, who stood near the hole in the wall that opened to the kitchen, overheard this dialogue and was smiling. He'd been around here for a while, so he knew me. But this boy was new.

"Are you new here?"

"Yes, sir."

"When did you come?"

"Just a month ago, sir."

"Ah... in that case, just bring a glass of water."

"Sir, won't you drink tongba?" said the waiter again after putting the water on the table.

"I can't drink it, this city tongba," I answered in the tones of the grousing old woman in the spice company ad.

This answer didn't have any effect on the waiter, for he was ignorant of the ad. But the waiter near the kitchen began to grin.

"Hey, cut the laugh... shameless ass," I threatened him—in a joking tone but as if serious.

After that, he sealed his lips over the rest of his laughter. The new waiter got out of there and, showing his discomfort, stood close to the old waiter. He was not understanding the city. The city is not easily understood. It takes a long time. Moreover, for the poor, this understanding amounts to a Mahabharata.

The three people in the corner were really getting into drunken displays of emotion now. Vodka intoxication was steadily awakening a sharp awareness of their manhood within the male pair, and its refraction could clearly be seen reflected in the woman. In this restaurant, such happenings are considered commonplace. The regulars here are mostly lovers who can mortgage their own honor or urban prostitutes who defy honor. Yet the restaurant owner is not as ill-reputed as the restaurant itself. In Sherpa society, setting up a hotel is not considered an immoral occupation. Furthermore, the owner is a person who, after working for some time in a social-democratic party, has just joined a Communist Party.

When the telephone's shrill bell suddenly sounded at the counter, the proprietress, who had long been nodding and waking, was scared out of her wits. She rose in a panic from the chair and rushed toward the telephone.

"Hallo!"

No sound came from the other end. Irritated, she slammed the phone down.

"Why are you dozing off, huh? Did the old man keep you up all night or what?" I said to the proprietress in a teasing way.

But she just smiled and rushed off toward the bathroom.

Amid all this, a middle-aged hill-style man carrying a cloth bag passed through the doorway. His attire of kamij-suruwal and the salt-and-pepper beard growing in anarchic fashion on his face directly gave away his identity—he was a resident of some eastern hill village. His age might even be much less than I thought. The dreadful poverty of the village and the murderous privation that the body cannot endure make anyone old before their time. So then, how could he be the one exception to this?

He stood a moment near the counter, confused. The proprietress had still not returned from the bathroom. After glancing around for a moment, he began to look toward the rear of the restaurant. It was a very spacious place, this restaurant. It's possible that there's not even a library in the city that could hold so many people.

He first looked toward the corner. Then, acting a little ill at ease, he came and stood near me.

"Have a seat, why stand?"

"Where might Comrade Lakpa be?"

"What Lakpa?"

"Isn't this his hotel?"

"Ah... Lakpa Sherpa. Is your home around Taplejung too, or what?"

"Yes. It won't do for me not to find him."

Exhibiting great innocence, he began to look into my face.

"I haven't seen Lakpa today either. Ask the proprietress when she comes. Sit down a moment though. Rest yourself."

 After my urging, he was compelled to sit.

"So then, what business have you come to Kathmandu for?" I opened up the bundle of questions.

"I came to meet Comrade Navin."

"Who's Comrade Navin?"

"Now, what to say! That's the name I know. During the Panchayat regime, he worked secretly in our district. He stayed many times in my house too. A very good person he was. I too did much service. The police were searching for him. I heard there was an order to shoot on sight. How many times he had to shit and piss inside the room! Without any disgust, I would empty his chamber pot. But now, where is he...?"

"That was many years ago, though. It's already been nearly a decade since the Panchayat fell. Now, who can arrange for you to meet the one you call 'Comrade Navin'? Who might even remember that name from the underground days?"

He was greatly encouraged by my response. Rushing with happiness, he said, "What, do you work in the Communist Party too?"

Seeing him preparing to rise from the chair, I said, "Don't rush, don't rush."

"What level of the Party do you work in?"

"I'm not a Party worker. Until some days ago, I was a correspondent for a private-sector daily newspaper. Now, having been tossed out, I'm unemployed."

After that, he looked depressed.

"But still, I'm very interested in politics. Because of my profession too, I was compelled to know a lot about it," I said, intending to intervene in his gloom.

"Then you don't know Comrade Navin, isn't that so?"

"Why are you searching for Comrade Navin? Is it to get jobs for your children or what?" I asked, thinking he'd already passed the age for holding a position himself.

"They're not children capable of holding a position, mine aren't, sir."

After answering, he looked extremely sentimental. In a moment, like a saturated clay water pot, his eyes glistened with wetness.

Why was he so emotional? My heart refused to enter compassionately into the tangled events. I was in no way ready to make him suffer more by picking at his wounds. And then, too, why carry another's pain at a time when my own heart was as irregular as the pendulum of an old clock?

"If you want to meet Comrade Navin, go to the Balkhu office. Maybe in the Party's old records—who this Comrade Navin is, I mean," I politely advised him.

"I went there. Yesterday morning, before it had even struck seven, I arrived. The office wasn't open. After waiting around for three hours, it finally opened. But the soldiers and office workers sitting there said, 'There's no one called Comrade Navin here, and not in our old records either.'"

 

***

Saying, "Maybe in some other party," they sent me away. "I only knew him."

"So, haven't you asked the comrades of your district, 'Who is he, Comrade Navin?'"

"No one gave a good answer. Now, Comrade Lakpa may know about this matter; otherwise, it can't be discovered from others. Only here, there's one last hope."

"Isn't Lakpa a newcomer, though? What might a new member, of all people, know about old matters? Who might even remember that old history now?" I expressed my doubt again.

Finally, after such a long time, the proprietress returned to the counter. The middle-aged villager rose and moved toward her.

"Where's Comrade Lakpa, sister?"

"He left for da district, first t'ing in da mornin'," she answered in the Sherpa style of speaking Nepali.

"Headed for the district? Now disaster has really struck!" Like a traveler whose dream had been lost, he let out a sigh.

"Yesterday was da Contact Front 'lekshun, he sed. He won in da President, I hear. Feasted all night. Sang songs. And t'en, firs' t'ing in da mornin', off to da hills."

The villager again became baffled and began distractedly looking outside. After puzzling for a moment over whether or not to leave, he came over to me once again and, sitting down, said:

"Why does the Mahakali Treaty have to be done? Who knows? I wanted to hear it once from the mouth of Comrade Navin. But now, who can say where he is?"

I couldn't understand at all whether this villager was wounded by or glorified the Mahakali Treaty. I even asked a couple of questions to figure it out. But he just kept on reciting, "Comrade Navin, Comrade Navin..."

"So long as I don't hear Comrade Navin's reasoning, how can I set out my own opinion?" Suddenly riled, he hurled this answer at me like a projectile.

"You just carry on and on, saying 'Comrade Navin, Comrade Navin...' At some point, that secret name of an underground party leader will have been lost amid the ruins of the underground times. Where within that party are you going to come across it now? And how long are you going to race around like this, as if insane, trying to get a certificate saying whether the Mahakali Treaty was right or not?"

"Forgive me. I'm not in agreement with your views. Comrade Navin is the name of a god who resides in my soul. We were together during much hardship, many crises, and many great difficulties. He is a witness to my poverty and terrible hunger. How could Comrade Navin, a strong advocate of democracy, nationalism, and the people's livelihood, so easily forget Taplejung's poor peasant, Haribhakta Karki, in that way? If you'd been in that situation, you'd think this way too. Understand?"

Finally, I found out his name—Haribhakta Karki. He was very agitated. His eyes, which had been brimming a while ago, were glistening again. Then he became very silent and, resting his elbows on the restaurant table, bowed his head and began to ponder.

"Does Comrade Navin have no existence at all then, in this country?"

The noise from the southeast corner began to increase again. Of the two men, the short, fat one looked very agitated. He was performing various shenanigans to show off that he was a big-time businessman of the city. But from his staged display, you could tell he was a land agent earning money hand over fist—like he'd just won the lottery.

The main activities he had just embarked on were to jump up, go over to the counter, make a phone call, and then, returning to his place, carry out a concerted campaign to win over the woman who was there. This time too, he rose and made his way to the counter. And just like before, he started punching the English numbers stuck to the telephone.

"Hello!"

What the answer was, I didn't know.

"Listen up. Put a lock on those three phones. Don't let anyone make a call. All kinds of useless sons of bitches come to make calls. Unemployed idlers make me furious. Son of a bitch penny-pinchers... Understood? Today I may not make it there. The plan is to go to Dhulikhel or Nagarkot around evening. If yesterday's client comes, tell him to come at 10 o'clock tomorrow. Oh—and those phones—don't let anyone touch them."

After saying that much, he returned to his place.

"Sons of bitches, can't make two cents of profit."

"Instead, coming around to make phone calls, they just make a nuisance of themselves. See how it is, love?" he added after sitting down cross-legged and massaging the woman's shoulders.

The other man who was there looked a little more polite than the short, fat one. His entire activity consisted of nodding his head. As I watched, they finished off half a bottle of vodka and moved on to another quarter.

"Sons of bitches carry on like it was their own father's wealth. In the final analysis, I'm not their father though, am I now? Or how is it?"

The other man and the woman didn't express any agreement with his outburst. Perhaps that burned him up, for at that moment, he shouted:

"What, you two don't believe it either? Eh Gope, you don't believe it either, or what? You ass, you've been to my office a thousand times!"

The woman definitely didn't like Short-and-Fat’s vulgar manner. She signaled with her eyes to the one called 'Gope' to get up from there. In the same way, he signaled to the waiter to bring the bill. There was about a peg left in each of the two men's glasses.

Short-and-Fat was in favor of sitting for a long time yet, so he said, "What's the rush all of a sudden? Our car won't come before five o'clock, isn't that right? Why sit around making unnecessary small talk? In the meantime, come over to my office one time. Going here and there, doing this and that, it'll be five before we know it."

"What's that I hear—I made unnecessary small talk? You son of a bitch, Gope, what unnecessary small talk have I made? Did I talk about the Mahakali Treaty?"

"Who said you talked about the Mahakali Treaty?" said the polite man, trying to smooth things over.

But Short-and-Fat paid no attention. Playing the classic drunkard, he said, "Let it be damned—Mahakali, Sahakali."

Haribhakta, who had been sent into depression by our previous conversation and had been sitting with his face down on the table, started up. He began peering toward the corner.

In the meantime, after dropping money on the bill the waiter had presented on a plate, those three walked out of there.

"Anyone at all will be like that after drinking," Haribhakta politely commented.

"It's not everyone who's like that after drinking—it's renegades who'll be like that. Understand?" A bit agitated, I expressed my own reaction.

"Renegades? Who are you calling a renegade? What were those renegades?"

"Yes, among the crowd of renegades, those too were one kind of renegade. Renegades of '96."

I didn't know if Haribhakta understood this talk or not. He was stymied by his own inner turmoil.

"Well then, I'll be going too. If we meet again one day..."

Waving his hand, he walked toward the counter, took leave of the proprietress, and exited.

After that, I was alone in the restaurant. My solitude made the environment all the more uncomfortable. The waiter, who had just arrived from the hills, seemed uneasy about me not ordering anything. He came over again and started to whine:

"Won't you drink tongba, sir?"

"No tongba. If you can bring it from outside, I'll have a glass of milk."

Just as before, I gave a withering reply and, taking a stale newspaper from my bag, began to read.

Now the waiter was really confused. With a befuddled expression, he headed for the counter where the proprietress sat. But just like before, the proprietress was once again participating in the national program of nodding off.

Translated from the Nepali by Mary Deschene & Khagendra Sangraula


Nepalese novelist and political activist Narayan Dhakal has published various books, including Pretkalpa, Peet Sambad, Shokmagna Yatri, and Brishav Vadh, among others. He lives in Kathmandu.


Also Available on Amazon, Flipkart & Daraz



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Thursday, August 21, 2025

Pratik Book Review: Memory, Family, & Loss — McKenzie Lynn Tozan reviews Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas's new collection, "Handful of Stallions at Twilight"

 BOOK REVIEW


McKenzie Lynn Tozan

Memory, Family, & Loss

With echoes of Sylvia Plath, Robert Creeley, Michael Burkard, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and of course, Robert Bly

 



Every time I step into the work of Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas, I feel like it is a blessing, though I know the poet, the narrator, and the poems inside are too humble to admit as much. Rather than point to her own deftness, her own ferocity in the face of the craft, Stevenson Grellas will invite you in for a cup of coffee or tea, biscuits, teach you how to fall in love with Robert Bly, and reminisce about a life lived. She’ll be that friend, too, who will ask about your day, and mean it, and she won’t shy away from the harder subjects of loss, prolonged grief, and even illness and suicide. These poems are gentle and kind but never shy, and while it’s figurative, the coffee is strong enough to carry us through, always hot, still steaming in our hands.

 

Stevenson Grellas is a frequent, welcome visitor to the subjects of memory, family, and loss, but these tough topics never go stale, predictable, or complacent when in her hands. Rather, her latest collection, Handful of Stallions at Twilight, leans unapologetically into the fragility of life and its suddenness. Just two pages into the collection, “Before Tomorrow Came” (2) offers the metaphor of being thrown a curveball, and I think this collection largely hinges on that premise: the concept of being thrown a curveball, navigating sudden change, missing what once was, and never even knowing when that curveball might come. Many poems here gesture to the suddenness of loss, like the narrator and her mother planning for a wedding in “August Bride,” everything beautifully and perfectly arranged, “and then she died” (83), leaving the narrator in a whirlwind, trying to reconcile after-wedding bliss with gut-wrenching, soul-skewing grief. Many poems, too, follow the trail of grieving something or someone who was lost too soon, too suddenly, too sadly—a beloved pet, a child, a literary editor, a father, and of course, a mother.

 

In “The Haunting” the narrator confesses: “Someone once asked if all my poems were about my mother. / Yes, I said as if there was a way to write without her / showing up, as guilt, as love, as tenderness” (56), and I believe this is the second of three hinges in the door of this work: the poet’s call to her mother, the perception of her mother through memory, and even Mother Earth. The mother is painted imperfectly, as every mother understandably should be, with her mistakes, her stubbornness, her nuances, but the collection resoundingly follows a narrator seeking her mother through the echoes in her life in which her mother still resides: a facial expression or turn of a hand that resembles her, an object that was once hers, a reflection that could just as easily be her as it is the narrator. And heart-wrenchingly, the direct foil for the search of mother is the finding of father, the sneaking reminders throughout these poems of a young narrator’s discovery and the lingering imprint of what that discovery was, what it meant for the family, how it was left unspoken, a “family secret / we were too ashamed to share” (44). Like the fond memories of the narrator’s mother, there are endearing ones for a father who could not cope, particularly the saving of innocent animals and gently carrying them back home in “Abandoned” (81-82) in a way he could not be.

 

Because, despite the dark corners of these poems, Stevenson Grellas never forgets to highlight the fragile beauty and the little glimmers of hope, found in and around the lost things. Life still has beauty and wonder despite grief—perhaps even more so because of it. Refreshingly, these glimmers can be found in the smallest of things: a sweater, a joke, a dress, a stunning bird, and flowers (so many flowers). I found myself frequently thinking back to Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s The Language of Flowers while reading this collection, due to Stevenson Grellas’ impressive vernacular and gesturing to such a range of species, and it made me think of the variety of messages these flowers carried—the chrysanthemums, petunias, and more—not to mention the memories tied to them through the gifting and planting of them.

 

There’s a gentle reminder, too (the third hinge in the door), of the importance of giving back to each other and to our planet: giving back to the bees, the birds, our loved ones, Mother Earth. In “If My Death Could Be a Whale Fall” (2), “Imagine” (8), and “In the Line at Starbucks” (11), and in many more—though particularly these three poems—Stevenson Grellas addresses the importance not only of giving back but creating a sense of legacy. “If My Death Could Be a Whale Fall” imagines a world where the narrator’s body would sink like a whale to the lower throes of the ocean, creating an offering to the bottom feeders, while the narrator in “Imagine” pictures herself as an old woman, feeding the birds, and her memory and hope living on in their feathers (pun intended, thanks to Sylvia Plath). Finally, “In the Line at Starbucks” captures that sweet moment of our days simply made better by a covered cup of coffee and paying it forward to the next person in line. Though there is grief and loss in this collection, it’s a call, a bird song, a wind chime, and even whale song to look at life as a blessing, to see beauty in the daily things, and to be kinder to each other—and it’s a call we can all hear if we’re willing to listen.

 

With beautiful echoes of Sylvia Plath, Robert Creeley, Michael Burkard, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and of course, Robert Bly, Handful of Stallions at Twilight gently and truthfully navigates heartache and loss but equally challenges the reader to go into the beyond where hope resides. No matter how much she might encourage us to look back over our shoulder, Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas always eventually takes us to that place beyond.

 

Handful of Stallions at Twilight

by Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas 

Publisher : Finishing Line Press, 2024

Print length : 98 pages

ISBN-13 : 979-8888386026





McKenzie Lynn Tozan
is a poet, novelist, essayist, and the Editor-in-Chief of Lit Shark Magazine and The Banned Book Review. A Midwesterner now living on the coast of Croatia, she holds an MFA in Poetry from Western Michigan University. Her work has appeared in Rogue Agent, Whale Road Review, The Rumpus, Green Mountains Review, and the anthology Global Perspectives on the Liminality of the Supernatural. Her short horror story collection What We Find in the Dark and her novella Black As Black are forthcoming from the Shiver Collective in 2025.





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Sunday, August 17, 2025

Call for Submissions – Pratik Magazine: The Wolf Special

 

Call for Submissions 

The Wolf Special

                               Johanna Mueller


Wonder. Awe. Fear. Amazement. 

Hatred. Love. Admiration.

Wolves—among the most beloved, misunderstood, and mistreated creatures on Earth—haunt the global imagination. They prowl through our myths, legends, fairy tales, horror stories, and dreams. Some see them as spiritual guides, others as terrifying beasts.

Wolves run for miles without rest. They give gifts to each other. They howl not just to communicate—but to call us back to the wild within ourselves.

As apex predators, their hunting precision is breathtaking—sometimes brutal. Yet they display astonishing devotion: feeding the elderly, raising pups together, living by codes of care and cooperation.

Why, then, this love/hate relationship between wolves and humans?
Why the campaigns of extermination? Why the fascination?

Since the discovery of fire, wolves have circled our campfires. They were our first companions. Today, only one gene separates the wild wolf from the dog curled at our feet.

 

We Want to Hear Your Wolf-Voiced Stories.

 

Pratik Magazine invites submissions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, visual art, and photography for a special issue dedicated to wolves. Let these majestic beings stir your creativity.

We seek work that:

·       Explores the natural history of wolves worldwide.

·       Revisits myths, fairy tales, and urban legends featuring wolves—across cultures and geographies.

·       Invents new myths and legends. Subvert the known. Reimagine the wolf.

·       Examines the interactions between wolves and humans, hunters, governments—our ancient dance of fear, admiration, and destruction.

·       Considers what wolves might teach us about loyalty, survival, freedom, and family.

·       Let your voice be part of a centuries-spanning dialogue that merges the sacred and the contemporary.

·        

Submit your work and become part of the pack.

 

For more information:

https://pratikmagazine.blogspot.com/

https://whitelotusbookshop.com/product-category/pratik-series/

Deadline: [ 30 Oct, 2025]
Contact/Submission Email: [pratikmagsubmissions@gmail.com]

We look forward to your howls.

 Editors







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Sunday, August 10, 2025

PRATIK HLF/NYWW SPECIAL HIGHLIGHT: ARMENIAN POET HAYK SIRUNYAN'S POEM. "CONFESSION"


HAYK SIRUNYAN



Confession

 

What there is, 

I call love, 

Because 

Your eyes are two lamps, 

Lit with the oil and wine of my words. 

 

Because 

Your brows melt frost, 

And your gaze is an ancient tale 

About a summer morning. 

 

I call it love as well— 

The scribble of my hand, 

Helpless before your image— 

Errant, wild, and mad. 

 

And this unparalleled bewilderment, 

I call love. 

 

This is how I love— 

Fainting, faltering, 

And I do not know how to turn the world around… 

 

…And so, I speak to you in sparks, 

Like a burning hawthorn, 

Like a burning hawthorn… 

 

Come, let’s mend the world with love, 

My choice, my chosen one… 

Come, let’s mend the world with love.

 

Translated from the Armenian

 

 

 

Distinguished Armenian poet Hayk Sirunyan has recently released Leave Me Here, a powerful English translation of his selected works, bringing his evocative verse to a wider international audience. Known for his lyrical precision and deeply human vision, Sirunyan has been a vibrant voice in contemporary Armenian literature for over two decades. In 2024, he represented Armenia at both the New York Writers Workshop and the Himalayan Literature Festival in Kathmandu, where his readings and discussions drew acclaim for their emotional depth and cross-cultural resonance. His work, translated into multiple languages, continues to bridge Armenian literary heritage with global poetic traditions.

 

 

 

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Distributed in the United States by Itasca Book Distribution: https://itascabooks.com/ Distributed in South Asia by Nirala Publications, India: https://niralapublications.com/product-category/pratik-series/  In Nepal by White Lotus Book Shop, Kathmandu: https://whitelotusbookshop.com/product-category/pratik-series/

 

 

 

Wednesday, July 16, 2025

UPCOMING PRATIK RED WHEELBARROW POETS SEGMENT: DONALD ZIRILLI'S "IF THERE IS AN OCEAN IT IS HERE"


The Red Wheelbarrow Poets

 IN PRATIK MAGAZINE

 

DONALD ZIRILLI

 

 

IF THERE IS AN OCEAN IT IS HERE

 


I borrow Spring and All

with a bookmark already in it,

after the new introduction

by C. D. Wright.

 

I move the bookmark

to the red wheel barrow

before I give it back.

 

I go to the high school graduation

of my eldest niece. She is tall,

and in that blue gown,

papery.

 

I hug her but I should be

shaking her hand,

but that’s too like good-bye,

but so is holding on.

 

 

Donald Zirilli was a finalist for the James Tate Prize and a nominee for Best of the Net and the Forward Prize. He edited Now Culture and is on the board of Red Wheelbarrow Poets, Inc. His poetry was published in The 2River View, Anti- poetry magazine, ART TIMES, Nerve Lantern, River Styx, and other periodicals and anthologies. His chapbook, Heaven’s Not For You, was published by Kelsay Books.

 

The Red Wheelbarrow Poets is a collective of poets based in Rutherford, NJ, the hometown of the beloved American poet and doctor, William Carlos Williams.




Tuesday, July 15, 2025

PRATIK BOOK REVIEW : Tonga, Tessa & Kathmandu : Tim Cooney on Kristina Prater's debut novel Tessa Eyes On The World

 

BOOK REVIEW

Tonga, Tessa & Kathmandu

Tim Cooney on Kristina Prater's novel Tessa Eyes On The World



Tessa Eyes On The World, a debut roman รก clef novel, tells a tale about impermanence and change through the striking tragedies and joys of an unconventional extended family. Tessa, the eldest of four siblings from one mother and two fathers, is born with a conscious awareness to help others and the planet. This emotional bearing leads her to different parts of the world, including Mexico, Guatemala, Tonga, and Nepal. While trekking in Nepal, she witnesses the trafficking of young women sold off by Nepalese families. Profoundly affected, she vows to fight poverty and abuse, and studies Buddhism to understand the suffering she encounters.

In 2006, Tessa was killed by a shark (true event) while serving in the Peace Corps in Tonga.

The many people Tessa had touched during her short life were shaken by the loss of this young woman who excelled in academics, athleticism, and art, and who was on her way to do great humanitarian work.


Through her eponymous character, at life’s critical seam, Tessa reflects, “Then I was looking up from below at the surface of the water as I was pulled down. I saw the pale, distant, distorted disc of the sun, a froth of bubbles, my flailing arms and hands…”

Author Kristena Prater (aka Salodius Byrd), her mother, fashions the beginning backdrop of her fictional casting of real events in Aspen, Colorado, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, during the 1970s. During those freewheeling, counterculture times, she started Aspen Mercantile, a vintage and contemporary clothing store. Her shop became a popular hangout for beautiful local women in old-time lacey dresses, spirited hippy men and itinerant turquoise dealers. Among other adventures, she sailed to Tahiti and later became a successful New York model, before becoming the mother of four children.   

Prater effectively employs a narrative of fleshing in the lead character of Tessa through her challenges as a Peace Corps volunteer deployed in Tonga and through the eyes of her family’s correspondence. Tessa questions her homesickness and the dynamics of those close to her, far from her Santa Fe home. In the second part of the book—as if tilting a hologram picture to reveal another picture—we then see Tessa’s life through her mother Viva’s eyes, Prater’s veiled persona. Such an image brings to mind a poetic Grateful Dead lyric: “In another time's forgotten space, your eyes looked from your mother's face…”


Through shifting family dynamics, Tessa manages to nudge her many relatives toward higher awareness and the importance of helping others. Each evolves during their brief time with Tessa, especially after her life is abruptly cut short in Tonga by a dramatic force of nature that inspires her family to sift their lives to cope with the grief. After Tessa’s death, Viva—who has already endured a car accident that left her son paraplegic—goes on to process the accumulative grief for her whole family as only a mother can feel, and, subsequently, the death of another child.

What is profound here in Prater’s telling is the resilience of a mother who survives and transforms, even as her heartbreaks compound. In finding tools to bear emotional loss, she writes: “When I am afraid, I move in and out of my body. My family and I keep ourselves busy, diverting our attention to the muscle memory imprinted in our bodies of something missing: our daughter, our sister, our friend. We wanted to pretend we were a regular family rather than people changed through continual shocks. We built bridges across the caverns of loss.”


Yet, Viva gathers herself up and decides to follow Tessa’s path and do what Tessa hoped to do. Retracing her daughter’s emotional journey, Viva returns to Tonga and to Katmandu, Nepal. In Tonga, she meets the Tongan royal family and discovers that her daughter’s death has become a legend. She also meets the young man who tried to rescue Tessa and finds that the two were developing a close bond. In Nepal, she visits a home for abandoned children and the Saving Women Foundation, where Tessa had earlier connected. Returning home to Santa Fe, Viva embarks on a life of giving more and needing less.

This is a good book for a book-reading group to discuss emotional learning, much of which is digested by the author in her introductory poems before each chapter. Tessa Eyes On The World can be purchased on Amazon.com in either Kindle, hardcover or paperback.


Tessa Eyes On The World, a novel

by Kristina Prater

Bright Communications LLC,  2024

Pages : 304,  ISBN-13 ‏: ‎978-1958711781

Available on Amazon




Tim Cooney is a writer and freelance journalist working for Aspen Journalism (aspenjournalism.org), a nonprofit investigative journalism newsroom that reports on environment, water, social issues, and history. He is a retired professional ski patrolman and has spent his life in the Colorado mountains.