Books

CONFUSE THE WIND

Publication date: June 25, 2024 with Vine Leaves Press

Synopsis

As a skyscraper engineer, Jonathan Brooks, has always believed that a skyscraper is either made correctly or incorrectly, and all problems have solutions. He has yet to learn that people are made differently. When his son Theo fell ill with encephalitis at fourteen months old, he and his wife Carly were devastated to learn that Theo’s setbacks would be long-lasting, possibly permanent. Theo is now seven years old and not yet walking or fully verbal, and Jonathan and Carly are living apart. The broken family’s world is upturned by the arrival of Aimee, a complicated young Irish woman who begins working as Theo’s nanny in ways Jonathan does not trust. But as Aimee brings about new advancements for Theo their bond grows, until Aimee’s own personal crisis rocks the family and shows them all a new way forward. Confuse the Wind is a book about our human interdependence and how we desperately need one another to survive and hopefully thrive.

Praise

“Every parent encounters some chasm between the ideal child they imagined and the actual child they are raising. With aching honesty and profound generosity, Rachel Stolzman Gullo delivers a beautifully written novel about one family traversing that divide and learning to love one other, not as they might be but as they are. The result is a deeply humane novel that lingers long after the last page is turned.” 

– Gayle Forman, New York Times bestselling author of If I Stay

“Confuse the Wind is a heart-wrenching, deftly told, story, that reminds us that sometimes you have to break a thing before you fully understand how it works. Rachel Stolzman hands us the broken pieces of a family, and the glue to put it back it back together again, shard by jagged shard. Bring your hankies. You’re going to need them.”

– Colin Broderick, author of Church End

“Poignant, brave, and utterly gorgeous. Just when I thought I knew where this compelling novel would go, I was proven wrong. Read this book. Then read it again. You won’t be able to put it down.”

-Amanda Boyden, author of I Got the Dog and Babylon Rolling

“I read in great gulps, wanting to see just how Jonathan and Carly and Theo and Aimee would withstand the gusty headwinds brought by Theo’s devastating childhood encephalitis and its aftermath. Gullo has written a love song to love itself, as sturdy and astounding a thing, it turns out, as a well-designed skyscraper, built to confuse the wind.” 

-Amy Hassinger, author of After the Dam

THE SIGN FOR DROWNING

2ND EDITION PUBLICATION DATE: DECEMBER 15, 2023, 7.13 BOOKS

PRACTICE DYING

Publication Date: June 1, 2018, BINK Books

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Synopsis

On the cusp of turning 30, Jamila has achieved the hard-earned ability to live her life as an I, not a we. But this elusive achievement is thrown off when she falls in love with Salam, an Indian pastry chef and writer, temporarily in New York City. Salam is the first person besides her twin, David, with whom she longs to be paired. Their romance is passionate but doomed, and Jamila’s suicide attempt as the affair breaks apart calls David back to New York to ensure his sister’s safety. David is going through his own personal and spiritual crisis while he helps Jamila. At the age of eight, David started down a path apart from anyone else he knew, the path of a devoted Buddhist, and eventually takes the vows of a bodhisattva. He miraculously gains access to the mentorship of the 14th Dalai Lama. In his late 20s, he wanders around the Himalayan plateau of Sichuan Province, Tibet, ignoring the instructions of his lifelong mentor to enter a monastery there. Instead, he obsessively follows a self-immolation survivor who he longs to connect with as desperately as his sister wishes to connect with Salam. The twins’ reunion in New York coincides with a devastating trend of self-immolations in Tibet and the Dalai Lama’s own conviction that he must alter Tibetan Buddhist tradition in an unthinkable way if the culture is to survive at all.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Excerpt

Prologue

We slept, one back against another’s chest. Our chins hooked over each other’s shoulders and our arms wrapped around one another. We pushed to find more space. Sometimes a freed foot or hand would find its own orbit to move about in, for an hour or a day or a week, only to get pinned again, stuck in the tangle. A distant sun sometimes glowed with illumination, and we could see each other, or parts of our own bodies, in silhouette.

We were awakened from our slumber by a rippling current. Our bodies shoved backwards. Our arms rose like wings. The back of one head pushed into the other’s face. Startled, we opened our eyes. We saw only in shadows, but we sensed another presence, as delicate as a seahorse. For the first time, we felt fear.

The presence danced lightly in the waters and then swift as an undertow, it vanished. Alone again, we knew something was happening. Our arms treaded slowly through the water, fending off the wake.

We slept hard after the disturbance. A few more weeks rolled by with barely any changing of positions. More light penetrated from outside, more sounds that made an echoing ghostly song. Then there were days where it was harder to sleep because we were pressed for space, so cramped that the slightest movement by one awoke the other, finally leading to our birth into the big world.

Chapter 1 Jamila

For the first eight years of my life I was a we. My world and David’s world were the same. I didn’t foresee that change would come. I didn’t know that twins eventually led their own lives.

We were always referred to as “the twins.” Our thoughts commingled in our heads before a word was uttered, and we spoke the same words together. Only one of us needed to speak. “We’re tired now; we want something to drink; can we play outside?”

So when David began to have thoughts I had no access to, to dream of things I’d never dream of, and to travel to unknown places to receive teachings I’d never learn, I wasn’t ready. When David found his calling, he seemed to find a new twin in the world, and I was suddenly without one, blindsided. No longer moving through life in synchronicity with David, I felt I’d lost an eye, turned deaf in one ear.

As we grew up I more-or-less learned how to say “I,” but not without moments of utter failure, when I felt like an un-whole person, a half of something. Still, I did have my own existence, a woman who was born a twin, but lived alone.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

THE SIGN FOR DROWNING

Publication Date: 2008, Trumpeter Books

Synopsis

When Anna is eight years old she witnesses the tragic drowning of her younger sister at the beach. While her parents frantically search the waves for their child, Anna watches alone from the shore. Desperate for hope, Anna begins silently communicating with her sister, begging her to resurface.Anna’s family emotionally breaks down in the years following the drowning. In her grief and loneliness, Anna develops the belief she can communicate to her dead sister through sign language.As an adult, Anna makes her living working with hearing impaired children, and she develops a close bond with a deaf foster child she works with, Adrea. As Anna makes the momentous decision to adopt Adrea, she is driven to face her conflicted desire to hear her daughter speak and she is forced to delve into the connections between Adrea and her own, lost sister.Anna’s journey takes her from New York City to France to the coast of Cape Cod. When Anna experiences an unexpected and painful loss again, she risks repeating history and becoming lost in her grief. Anna finds she must venture back into her painful and also beautiful history in hopes of finally embracing her future with Adrea. The Sign for Drowning is a story of loss and healing that explores the frailty of family bonds, the limitations of language and the ephemeral beauty of life. Excerpt   Prologue My father and Carla towed the yellow inflatable boat carrying the girls into the water. The low tide held them far out, bobbing in the small waves. The girls were both five years old, born just a week apart, my mother and Carla having met in a birthing class. Every day my father took the girls out in the rubber raft, some days two or three times. My father held the boat behind where Megan was sitting. Carla stood behind Bonnie. I know the inexplicable behavior of the sea-when the tide seems to push up against the shore and the undertow slips out like a fluid carpet toward the ocean’s vast center and the whole sea heaves its chest. When the waves fattened and heightened, Dad motioned Carla to push out farther, beyond the break. He guided the boat, seeking the solace of the rolling hills that the ocean offers anyone who can penetrate its crashing shoulder. We were girls, with lungs, not gills. But I was in no danger. I stood in the dry sand, watching. Megan wore a navy blue bathing suit with a sailboat on it. I remember her skinny arms and muscular legs, slow brown eyes and long lashes. She had a beauty mark on her right cheek and a matching one on her right buttock. I remember that. My mother was on the shore with me, making a home movie of the girls, Dad, and Carla playing in the big surf. I looked at Megan’s and Bonnie’s upturned faces, smiling expectantly at the down-crashing wave. I heard Megan squeal. My mother bumped into me with her camera. We both laughed at their predicament. The wave came down without question or hesitation, unbidden, naturally. When the three of them surfaced, both Carla and Dad had their hands on Bonnie’s streaming body. Surfacing, my father looked as ungraceful as a human out of his element. He threw his head back, cleared water from his blinking eyes. Carla was gasping. From the shore we noticed first; Megan was not in the boat. For several long seconds after Megan vanished, with the camera’s eye, my mother searched the surrounding water. She filmed until she realized that she was still holding the camera, realized that Megan was truly underwater too long. It is obvious in my mother’s movie that Megan is gone, as though the camera, the viewer, the audience, were omniscient. I was the first to fully realize that Megan was under the waves. I was watching Carla, her hands wrapped under Bonnie’s arms, gripping her child’s chest, looking to my father in disturbed confusion. It was Carla’s expression that finally alerted my father to Megan’s absence. In our home movie you see his eyes frantically jump to his hands. It registers. He’s holding Bonnie’s small calves, not Megan’s. Then he grabs for his own thighs, as if he might be on the warm beach, Megan safe in his lap. Now the camera starts scanning the surrounding waters. You can feel the panic in the rapid pacing of the churning waves. In actuality the ocean had calmed terrifically, as though satisfied. Dad and Carla started clapping the water around their bodies. My father shouting, “But she can swim! She can swim!” The film heads into its epilogue of drifting sand. As my mother drops the camera, it turns lazily, falling downward, and there is a brief framing of the cloudless sky before the camera comes to rest. The film ends with many minutes of sand. It is not motionless; the wind is blowing grains in front of the lens. One of Megan’s and my favorite beach games was to stand at the tip of the shore, where each creeping wave could only lap around our toes and halfway up our heels. We loved the way the wet sand sucked at the bottoms of our feet. As my mother charged into the ocean, I was acutely aware of this sensation. I was immobile. On the nape of my neck, fine hairs standing up, thin skin raised in bumps. The water looked too strong. Hands in fists, I dug my nails into my palms, drew my fingers up to my face. In the soft flesh below my eyes, I pressed my nails, making deep crescents. My sister was lost underneath. Burning juice rose from my stomach, scalded my throat. I was eight years old. I was afraid for her and for myself. The guilt began immediately as I felt the ocean pull at my feet, the same way it pulled at my sister. I knew that I would not be able to move, that I would remain on the beach, mute and watchful. I believed at this time that if I stood perfectly still and did nothing but concentrate on Megan’s appearing, I could will her back from whatever depth. It was then that I began speaking to Megan without words. My mother beat the surface of that great body of water, as if enough force would cause it to relinquish her child. Megan did make contact, a final touch with Carla. This part I always omit when recounting Megan’s death. It seems too cruel and impossible. Suddenly Carla was yelling, “I’ve got her!” She glanced at Bonnie, who was holding the side of the raft. Carla peered into the opaque water, and dove under. We above shared an eager relief. Of course she’s okay. This was only a terrible scare. Carla emerged, her face shattered, humility. She immediately dove again. My mother howled. Carla surfaced a minute later; Bonnie raised her arms toward her and whimpered. Carla moved back toward the boat. “She brushed against my leg.” Then she clutched her own baby. My parents began diving and surfacing, diving and surfacing. Carla held Bonnie, both crying and visibly shivering. It was then that I realized I was holding my breath. Good, of course; as long as I can hold my breath she’s still alive! Then my last hope was not to breathe and to wait for Megan. I stood there bursting in my head and chest, knowing that Megan could not hold out this long. Racked with choking, I knew that I had failed. I stood breathing on the shore. As my mother had seen through the camera’s eye, I saw what was happening through Megan’s eyes. With her eyes open, Megan knew which direction was the surface, was air. But she couldn’t raise her body out of the gripping current while being tossed one way and another. She saw the surface. She saw the green-gray water and the sun coming through the water, illuminating particles. For a brief moment she saw Carla’s pale leg, pivoting nervously. The current even forced her against this sturdy leg for a moment, and then tossed her back even farther. Her eyes never closed, she kept them open, focused on her life. I saw what she saw. And all the while, seeing the sun’s rays, the sloshing surface, feeling the push and pull of the undertow, the salty water going down, there was silence. The silence lay heavy over all the sensations, heavy and calming. Her arms reached for us, cried out for us. She kept her mouth shut against the water. She motioned to the retreating figures of the boat, her father’s legs, all of it, until she couldn’t anymore and closed her eyes to the silence. We remained there. The ocean moved back into its own low sleepful state.