Overjoyed to share that my first novel, “Ohio & West,” has been (self-) published! A labor of love and lots and lots (and lots and lots and lots) of lessons learned, I owe so much of where I’m at now to this work, both in terms of writing and my own personal journey. If you’ve got the time and a few dollars, I’d truly appreciate your support!
Here’s a quick summary…
An American coming-of-age story for a new age, Ohio & West chronicles one broke, unemployed millennial’s begrudging move back home.
Somewhere within the endless search for a real job—whatever that might be—the narrator’s far more tangible work at a nearby restaurant quickly becomes the singular means of diverting mom and dad’s well-intended concerns, as well as the narrator’s own negativity and boredom.
Through the juxtaposition of the quiet kitchen in their parent’s home and the one in the restaurant down the street—something like an unknown universe full of vibrant yet so often unsettling characters—not to mention a romantic life working only in fits and starts, the narrator manages to gather some understanding of certain truths regarding place, privilege, and happiness.
And a short excerpt …
It’s the blood that draws me back, the bright, brutal red welling up into a tiny dome, so vital and invigorating and disgusting—it’s all I can do not to lick my knuckle clean. Instead, I return my attention to the knife in my hand and the brown sack next to me, overflowing with half-frozen baguettes I’m supposed to be cutting on a bias, the itch in the skin over my heart, the product of my new—and yet not new, definitely not new, at least in that I was surely not the first employee to wear it, so maybe new-old but ultimately new only in that I had just received it this evening—black button-down shirt with the restaurant’s emblem embroidered on the breast pocket, not to mention the definitely new cut on my knuckle, so full of the beating of my heart, as all around me is shouting and movement and chaos though it’s not bleeding all that badly, at least not really, but watching the single red trickle, like a gentle weeping, I wonder if I should find gloves or a band aid or tell someone or scream for help and I cast about, searching once again for the person who was supposed to be training me or a means of escape but instead I just wind up watching through the pass as the cooks joke and shove and curse and arm sweat away and keep moving always moving never not moving, one shoving past the others to reach for a tall oven with something like French doors and yank it open, a suffocating heat filling every inch of the kitchen so swiftly that, even from here, even from five, maybe ten feet away, protected as I am by the tall metal barrier with the little cut-out rectangle of space that was the pass, the sweat that had already collected between my shoulder blades begins immediately to race down the length of my back, pooling at the top of my underwear as the cook, wearing a dirty t-shirt and checkered pants under a food-stained apron, brandishing a pair of tongs as though they were an extension of himself, pulls a tray out of the oven and drops it with a disgusted crash on the low table next to me.
Calvin Setar 