Contemporary Authors

• Every Kiss a War ( short stories) Mojave River Press (Victorville, CA), 2014
• Whiskey & Ribbons ( novel) Hub City Press (Spartanburg, SC), 2018

• Amazon -

  Leesa Cross-Smith is a Southern, sentimental homemaker and writer from Kentucky. She is the author of Whiskey & Ribbons (Hub City Press, 2018) and Every Kiss a War (Mojave River Press, 2014). Every Kiss a War was nominated for the PEN Open Book Award (2014) and was a finalist for both the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction (2012) and the Iowa Short Fiction Award (2012). Her short story "Whiskey & Ribbons" won Editor's Choice in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest (2011) and was listed as a notable story for storySouth's Million Writers Award. Her work has appeared in Oxford American and Best Small Fictions, among many others. Find a little bit of everything and a whole lot more @ LeesaCrossSmith.com.

• Electric LIt - https://electricliterature.com/leesa-cross-smith-is-taking-back-kentucky-82eb0b4c1eb4

  Leesa Cross-Smith is Taking Back Kentucky
  Her charming debut novel shows there’s more to the state than hillbillies, country music, and horses

  L
  eesa Cross-Smith started her writing career composing obituaries for the local newspaper. She has since changed her focus, from the departed to the fictional, but her ability to encapsulate a life in a couple of sentences still serves her well.
  Cross-Smith’s debut was the story collection Every Kiss a War (Mojave River Press, 2014). Her upcoming novel Whiskey and Ribbons chronicles the relationship between Evangeline (Evi) Royce, a ballerina, Eamon Royce, her police officer husband, and Dalton Berkeley-Royce, Eamon’s adopted brother. When Eamon is killed in the line of duty, Evi and Dalton are left to cope with their grief. Whiskey and Ribbons recounts a timeless story of love, grief, resilience, and family set against the backdrop of modern Louisville.

  Cross-Smith’s work has received Editor’s Choice in Carve Magazine’‘s Raymond Carver Short Story Contest and been a finalist for both the Flannery O’Connor Short Story Award and the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in Oxford American and The Best Small Fictions 2015, among many others. She is also the founder/editor of the literary journal WhiskeyPaper.
  Cross-Smith and I took some time to talk Southerner to Southerner about misconceptions of Southern African-American life, delayed gratification, and hip-hop in Louisville.

  Latria Graham: There’s a 20-year arc between when this story was started in school, and it’s publication with Hub City Press. Can you talk a bit more about Whiskey and Ribbon’s origins and how it developed?

  Leesa Cross-Smith: I started it when I was in college. Originally it was a simple story about a woman who was torn between two brothers/adopted brothers/best friends.
  A local police officer in my town was killed right after my daughter was born. I started thinking about his widow and how her life looked now, and felt now, and I was so touched by it just because those things always affect me but because I just had a baby and I was so dependent of my husband. I just couldn’t stop thinking about that and tying that to the story I started in college. You’re always encouraged in writing to dig into those really dark places. I was compelled to continue working on it, so it just kept coming back to me. I made it a short story, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I just kept writing it and made it a novel.
  LG: I was listening to the Spotify playlist that accompanies the book. There’s classical, there’s country, there’s the Grateful Dead in this lineup. Even the way the novel opens is musical. What does music do for you as a creative?
  LCS: I always make playlist to everything I’m working on, so it’s always been something that I do, whether I’m assigning a song to a specific character, or creating a mood. So I’ll always have something in mind to create a mood, or I will say to myself, “I want to write a story, like how this song makes me feel.”
  LG: What role did you intend for music to have in the novel?
  LCS: Originally I had no idea how to structure this novel. It drove me crazy. I would go on long walks, I would walk three miles. I would just think about it, and I couldn’t, I absolutely could not figure out how to structure it.
  While reading, I came across the idea of a fugue, which is defined as a piece of music that intertwines several different voices, some of them repetitious, and then a voice drops out. That’s exactly what I needed to do when I was putting this book together. I have their voices come together as if they’re all singing a song, and then we have Eamon’s voice drop out.
  While reading, I came across the idea of a fugue, a piece of music that intertwines several different voices, some of them repetitious, and then a voice drops out. That’s exactly what I needed to do when I was putting this book together.
  LG: Everybody thinks of Kentucky, musically, as a country music kind of place. I don’t know whether or not you agree with this, I see the state as a middle ground for music — where rock, bluegrass, country, hip-hop and blues intersect.
  LCS: We have so many dope hip hop artists here in Louisville. There’s rock, and there is a lot of bluegrass, and then there’s a lot of punk bands in the 90’s, and a lot of alternative music and stuff like that. My Morning Jacket is from here, and they’re super alternative. Kentuckians know how much diversity there is, but then people in other places, yeah they will ask if we ride a horses.
  Louisville is a big city. A lot of people don’t really know that, but in Whiskey & Ribbons, what I’m trying to show is that there’s Black people who live in Louisville and it’s wild, but yeah, they get married too. They go out to dinner, they go to work, they own businesses. There’s black people here, you know, dancing and listening to music. And they get in fights, and they have sex, and they get hungry. Eamon is a Black dude and he listens to Grateful Dead.
  LG: What do you wish people understood about the Kentucky?
  LCS: There are people here existing in that middle space. It’s just a matter of listening, which I think a lot of people don’t do, especially in this climate. So there’s a lot to say there but I think it requires a lot observation, which people aren’t that good at. It’s easier to make snap judgements, or rely on what you see on television if you’ve never been to a place — the way people think California is all about surfing.
  Stop Dismissing Midwestern Literature

  It’s time to give up the mistaken idea that the heartland is a cultural wasteland
  electricliterature.com

  LG: I understand that this may be more of a craft question, but when reading the book I realized that a lot of the power in this novel was gained by the restraint — not saying too much, letting glances and touches linger instead of spelling them out. How did you know which moments to prune and which you should allow to bloom?
  LCS: I cut everything about the kid who killed Eamon, because that wasn’t important to me. It really is just an isolated, random act of violence. There’s so many people in families that have to deal with that. They don’t have the answers. There’s no court case. The kid is also deceased now. There’s just nothing else to say. It’s just a tragedy. So that’s something I stripped down a lot and took outside completely.
  In terms of allowing sections to bloom, when I talked to my editor, I really thought really hard and wanted to make sure what we had in there were a lot of the really comfortable, intimate moments between Evi and Dalton when they’re snowed in together. I wanted it to be so confessional, and they know each other so well, but then there’s intimacy there that has not been breached out of respect. Creating that intimacy was important to me. And one other part, in terms of blooming was allowing the reader felt Evi’s jealousy and anxiety she has about Dalton potentially being in love with another woman.
  LG: I know you draw inspiration from your surroundings but what helps you keep going when you’re in a real rut?
  LCS: I’m stubborn. I am, for lack of a better word, a finisher. I feel blessed because I’m really easily inspired, if that’s a term. I’m really easily inspired. I can see a man’s cuffs on TV, or the way someone steps out of their house, or something like that, and I’ll get a story I could write from that. So it’s really not the inspiration, it’s just keeping in the flow of it that’s hard. The publishing business is designed to break you down, designed to make you want to give up. I have this desire to dig in and be like, “No, I said I was going to finish this, I’m going to finish it.” I’m okay with letting things go if I know they’re not working or something but Whiskey & Ribbons would not let me go.
  The publishing business is designed to break you down, designed to make you want to give up.
  LG: I know the internet literary community helped you with some of those moments — you’ve been very candid on Twitter about what goes into your writing and what it took to make this debut novel happen. What did the internet literary space do for you at the start of your writing career?
  LCS: The internet is how I learned. I was not a part of an MFA program. I did not have my MFA because I couldn’t afford it. And so I really just would see that people in MFA programs are reading like a craft book, and then reading a book of short stories, and I’d go and see where they got published, and I would go to those literary magazines and see if I liked their stuff there. And if they did, I would send them my stuff. And that’s kind of where I started. So I started reading a lot of what people were writing and then when I loved it, I would write them immediately and be like, “I loved this.” My husband and I started our own literary magazine. And so that really helped a lot. I made a lot of connections, and ended up connecting with the man who published my short story collection, through Whiskey & Ribbons. And so I made a lot of connections that way because then I got to spotlight people, which I feel far more comfortable doing than the spotlight being on me. I wanted to add something positive. I really do think that kind of community is what you make it.

• The Rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2018/03/the-rumpus-interview-with-leesa-cross-smith/

  By Accident and On Purpose: A Conversation with Leesa Cross-Smith
  By Monet Patrice Thomas
  March 26th, 2018

  Leesa Cross-Smith’s story of Evangeline, a classically trained ballet instructor, her ill-fated cop husband, Eamon, and his best friend, Dalton, was almost twenty years in the making. And yet, her debut novel Whiskey & Ribbons seems timeless. It will fool you into complacency, in the manner of a cozy blanket and a warm fire, but the human motivations and desires at play are not, of course, what they seem.
  Cross-Smith is an unabashed homemaker, mother of two, and co-editor with her husband, Loran, of the well-respected online journal, Whiskeypaper. She’s also the author of a short story collection, Every Kiss A War, a writer for Oxford American, and an avid user of Twitter. It was in that space that I knew of her well before the book deal was inked.
  On the morning of Martin Luther King Jr. Day she and I spoke about what it takes to come back to a story and characters after a time away, how she’d want her book to be framed in the world as a black writer, and how her Christian faith influences her writing.
  [Don’t miss a special Rumpus signed giveaway of Whiskey &Ribbons by Leesa Cross-Smith, available through March 31! Details here. – Ed.]
  ***
  The Rumpus: I know you were stalled on this novel for a long time. Wasn’t it originally a short story?
  Leesa Cross-Smith: It was originally published as a short story. When I first got the idea of making it a novel, I felt really overwhelmed by it and thought, There’s no way I can do this, so just let me just try to make it into a short short story. Yeah, it had a lot of forms.
  Rumpus: You stopped working on it and then came back to it. Why?
  Cross-Smith: I killed Eamon halfway through and I had a writing mental breakdown. I don’t mean an actual breakdown, but more like the writer’s mind breaking down. I literally stopped and cried into my hands. I’d never killed a character before. I didn’t know how to feel.
  So I stopped. It was shortly before September 11, 2001, and so I was completely drained. What could I write about? The world was ending. What’s the point? And so I could not even write it at all. It wasn’t an important thing in my life; I was taking a semester off college and I needed to go back, finish, and graduate.
  Rumpus: So what happened?
  Cross-Smith: In 2010, I was trying to put together a collection later. I spent all that time in between raising my kids and getting them into school. I didn’t really have time to think about writing, but when I did come back to it, I liked the idea and I wondered what would happen if I just tried to wrestle with it a little bit.
  Rumpus: I love Eamon deeply. If he existed, I would make a pass. But we either canonize or we condemn the dead. We either forgive their faults or that’s all we can remember about them. So how did you decide to tell the truth about a person who, in the beginning of the story, we already know is dead?
  Cross-Smith: That was really tough. He’s not perfect. He’s not the best to his ex-girlfriend. He gets out of that relationship in a garbage way. He could do better. When I got a blurb from one of my favorite writers, Bonnie Nadzam, she wrote that Whiskey & Ribbons was about good-hearted people. That, to me, felt like such a gift, because that is what I tried to do. Especially in our culture, everyone likes to say “this person is trash and “this person is an angel.” But what about the people who are like all of us: they mess up sometimes, but can be super-amazing. Not perfect, but really good-hearted.
  Rumpus: Let’s talk about the kindness of secrets. Eamon and Evangeline have this unspoken agreement that they don’t talk about many aspects of his job as a police officer. Does Eamon’s intentional shielding of the danger inherent to the job make his death even more unbearable?
  Cross-Smith: I originally had a section of the book about the kid who killed Eamon. In one draft, I wrote his name and in another draft I had a scene where Evi [Evangeline] had to avoid the kid’s family. But then I talked to one of my editors and I decided to take that out completely. It’s just a random act of violence and that’s where I wanted to leave it. There’s so much the family members of victims don’t know. They don’t know what the perpetrator was thinking. They have no idea why it happened. That’s why I didn’t write in whether or not Eamon was taken to the hospital or if he died on the scene. It didn’t matter, because it wasn’t a mystery that he was murdered, which is why I tell you in the first sentence he’s dead. It’s true that there’s so much Evi doesn’t know. But we do get to see Eamon as a lover, as a friend, and as a soon-to-be father.
  Evi clearly knows that he has a dangerous job. She knows that he puts his life in danger every day. For me, how I thought about my marriage before I got pregnant was very different from the way it was when I got pregnant. Once I got pregnant, I saw my vulnerability, and I started thinking about things like life insurance. Evi, too, is a realist.

  Rumpus: So, I remember when Brit Bennett’s The Mothers came out, and people talked about it in terms of it being a black story. But when I read it, it felt like a universal story. I think black writers aren’t allowed to tell a story without it being put into a category—
  Cross-Smith: They never are!
  Rumpus: I never really lingered on who’s black and who’s white in Whiskey & Ribbons. That’s not anything I ever lingered on. How would you have the book framed?
  Cross-Smith: Bonnie Nadzam had said the book is defiant in all it doesn’t say. And I love that! I don’t mention race very often. But I wasn’t being intentionally defiant. I’m just black every day. Evangeline and Eamon are just black, so Evangeline is not going to take a long look in the mirror to say, Look at my skin. She’s going to go and make herself some tea.
  I think this is revolutionary and defiant in a culture that’s craving these books to make me, the reader, feel I’m immersed in this whole other world. But is it really that revolutionary to write a black woman simply making her tea in the morning? Without mentioning her race? She’s dealing with grief and love and lust and jealousy—are those not completely human emotions, completely divorced from the color of our skin? My agent and I talked about this a lot. Is this going to be shelved in African American literature? I definitely want it to have African American on the list of things you’re going to say about this book—because I’m African American and so many of the characters are African American. But I think if someone is going to the bookstore and is like, Let me curl up with an African American novel, because I want to be completely immersed in a black city with black culture and black art, they would pick up Whiskey & Ribbons and read a book with Grateful Dead and Marshall Tucker Band.
  Rumpus: But that’s a stereotype, right? To assume otherwise?
  Cross-Smith: For sure. They’d pick up my book and go, Oh, Phil Collins? And then would look at the front and look at my picture in the back and be like, What kind of book is this? So I don’t want to be misleading. I think of it as literary fiction. I’m fine with it being called African American literary fiction. But I think to frame this as a story about a black community is misleading because I can’t tell you how many people have read it and said, “Oh, I didn’t realize they were black.” White people have picked up this book and they just read right past it, because they don’t think about it. There aren’t all those stereotypical cues people look for, like, Is it in Detroit? Or New Orleans? How am I going to know it’s a black book?
  Black people are everywhere. They live in Kentucky. They’re police officers and play piano and own their own businesses and write and read and are mothers. I mean, I can’t believe I have to keep saying that.
  Rumpus: It’s interesting when you talk about white people reading the book and reading past the characters’ race, and their default is white. But when I go to read a book, I actually do a lot of mental work of parsing out what I think the race of the person is and if it even matters before I decide. It’s about where you’re coming from when you come to a book.
  Cross-Smith: I’ve found that white writers really want to give you those cues, so what they’ll do is make sure the person is blonde. They want you to know she is blonde. I can’t tell you how many books I’ve picked up and she’s blonde. So then, if she’s blonde, we have to take from that she’s beautiful, right? It doesn’t matter what she looks like, if she’s blonde, she’s beautiful. So then we get it—she’s white, waspy. There’s so many cues and I’m, like, you can relax and let me read this book.
  I’ve found little things can confuse people. There’s a part in Whiskey & Ribbons where Evi blushes and it confused people. But, of course, black people blush. It’s just a matter of how much you can see it. So then it made me wonder if people would read that and think, Oh, she’s white. But no. It’s weird to mention a character’s blackness in the first sentence.
  Rumpus: Right, because that’s what we do—we walk around saying we’re black every five minutes. Right before I got on this call I told myself I was black.
  Anyway, let’s talk about male friendships. I don’t think, in American culture, we allow men a lot of things, but one of the things we truly don’t allow them is affection for other men, physical touch with other men—a lot of the things we allow women in friendships that doesn’t become categorized as romantic. Can you talk about how writing Eamon and Dalton’s friendship took shape?
  Cross-Smith: I was trying to present this relationship where you have these men who grew up together and they are absolutely crazy about each other. They are truly in love with each other. And it does come up that they used to have problems in school over it. People would tease them. And Dalton was very comfortable with it, while Eamon took it more to heart. These two men love each other and hug each other and have seen each other cry without fear that it means something else.
  I’m speaking from an American point of view. I can’t speak to what it’s like in other countries, but even some of the guys I know here don’t sit next to each other in the movie theater. They have to sit a seat apart. But I love the idea of these really intimate friends. There are times I even mention they feel like the same person. They’ve known each other forever, like David and Jonathan from the Bible. So when we get to the point where Evi and Dalton are spending more time together, it’s a natural thing because they’ve already spent so much time together. And it really makes Evi examining her feelings for Dalton easier, because Dalton has so much of Eamon inside of him.
  Male friendship is explored sometimes in raunchy teenage movies.You’ll have these dudes who do everything together and talk about girls together. And that’s how it was in high school. I knew guys who had intense friendships where they talked about what they were wearing and which girls to date, but in public you don’t hug once you get a certain age, and you can’t say “I love you.” But Eamon and Dalton are confident dudes and they’ve worked on this relationship.
  Rumpus: I know you’re a self-identifying Christian and that’s something you’re proud of. I, on the other hand, am not anymore, but I was raised as one and I’ve often read books that are marketed as Christian lit. And at some point in those books, there’s always a message that comes down from God. I don’t know that you have a direct message, but I did feel a kind hand in the background. And I wondered how your faith impacted this book.
  Cross-Smith: My faith plays a part in every single thing I write. One of the biggest compliments I got for a short story, which was about a higher power, was that I wasn’t being preachy. I never want to be preachy. It has such a terrible connotation.
  My father is a preacher and he raised me without being preachy. My faith is in my work; it’s such a huge part of my life and heart. So I take into account my characters and their spirituality, or even their lack of spirituality and their lack of connection to God. In this book, I’m very specific about Eamon and Evi meeting at a church. Evi volunteers at a church. She’s very much a Christian. But being in a church doesn’t mean all kinds of things don’t come out of that. There are no perfect people. So it was easy for me to incorporate Evi’s hope in life after death, her hope in Jesus, her hope that Eamon is in heaven. She can believe that he knows her and his son are doing well on Earth without him. So that was on purpose, but I also wanted to be sure they were real people. Real sinful people who were struggling.
  So there is colorful language in the book, there are sex scenes and sometimes when we’re in their heads they have thoughts that aren’t always perfect. They don’t sit around praying all the time. And even when Evangeline is praying, she’s angry and cursing in a prayer. I try to show the complications of faith. Christianity really gets boiled down to political parties, which is very false and not at the heart of who Jesus actually is—a holy living God that I believe in and who is living inside of me. That’s always coming out of me and my work. By accident and on purpose.
  So this book wouldn’t be under the category of Christian lit, because there’s cursing and sex scenes, but it was 100% written by a Christian writer. Whether someone wants to sell it in their Christian bookstore is up to them. It is a book about Christians.

  Monet Patrice Thomas is a poet and writer from North Carolina. She has an MFA from the Inland Northwest Center for Writers at Eastern Washington University. Her work can be found online at places such as Hobart Pulp, Word Riot, and Split Lip Magazine. Visit her website or find her on Twitter. More from this author →

• Salon - https://www.salon.com/2018/03/31/the-soft-burn-of-whiskey-and-ribbons-talking-to-leesa-cross-smith-about-her-debut-novel/

  The soft burn of “Whiskey & Ribbons”: Talking to Leesa Cross-Smith about her debut novel
  “White writers aren’t constantly asked about their whiteness; men aren’t usually asked about their maleness”
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  Erin Keane
  March 31, 2018 8:00pm (UTC)
  Leesa Cross-Smith's debut novel "Whiskey & Ribbons" (Hub City Press), which came out earlier this month, was one of the season's most anticipated books, judging by the wave of advance positive buzz in outlets ranging from Entertainment Weekly and Southern Living to Chicago Review of Books and Refinery29. Cross-Smith, who Roxane Gay has called "a consummate storyteller," has earned every rave. Set in Louisville, "Whiskey & Ribbons" tells the story, in three braided voices and timelines, of ballet dancer Evangeline, who becomes a widow and a mother pretty much at the same time when her husband Eamon, a police officer, is shot and killed in the line of duty as she approaches her due date. Eamon's adopted brother and best friend Dalton, a classically trained pianist and bike shop owner, steps in to help Evangeline raise baby Noah while grappling with his own family-of-origin issues.
  In their post-Eamon life, over one long snowed-in weekend, Dalton and Evangeline try to untangle their complicated dance of desire and grief, to figure out what a shared future could look like with their other half missing. Music is one of Cross-Smith's passions — fans of Sturgill Simpson will recognize her as the author of this amazing Oxford American cover story from last fall — and "Whiskey & Ribbons" is told in the shape of a fugue, which pulls double duty as a shaping metaphor.

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  With her husband Loren, Cross-Smith founded and edits the literary journal WhiskeyPaper. Her first book, the 2014 short story collection "Every Kiss a War," was nominated for the PEN Open Book Award after being a finalist for both the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Iowa Short Fiction Award. She is also a baseball fan and — Jonathan Franzen, take note — a birder, both consummate novelist pursuits that require a certain level of comfort with slow action, meticulous note-taking and occasional brushes with magic.

  For a while, the debate between "MFA or NYC?" delineated the two acceptable environments in which emerging writers could expect to build a career. Cross-Smith, who calls herself a "Southern, sentimental homemaker and writer from Kentucky," took a pass on both. "I couldn't afford an MFA program and wasn't willing to go into debt to do it," she told me. "So I made my own path by writing, submitting, reading, reading and writing, and writing and writing some more."
  "I have an English degree and took a lot of creative writing classes in college, but after that I just started writing and reading. I'd read essays about 'stealing' MFAs because they made me laugh," she added. "I researched where writers I admired were getting published. I spent a lot of time reading literary magazines."
  Salon caught up with Cross-Smith during her book tour to talk about writing a non-political novel, "bad" Christian art, first novels and more.
  I’m always interested in how first novels come into the world. Can you talk a little about the lifespan of the manuscript before it had a publication date?
  Although I got an idea to write a story/play/screenplay about one woman loving two men back in 2000/2001, I didn't get serious about making it a real thing until around 2010 when I wrote the short story. I couldn't stop thinking about it, kept returning to it, wrote three or four books in between to avoid trying to figure out how to structure it until around Spring 2016 when I finally finished it.
  The book’s action revolves around grief and how to go on living after loss. But it’s also a profoundly uplifting story. How important was achieving that balance to you?
  Super-important! I couldn't and wouldn't have written it if I hadn't been able to find a way to infuse it with some sort of lift and hope. And I so admire people who keep on keeping on when the world and their circumstances shatter them completely. I wanted to write a story that dealt with people working through their grief in a real way, people who are holding on even when it would make perfect sense for them to give up or at least want to give up.
  Love triangle stories — even gentle ones like this one — can be controversial among fans. Is there a #TeamEamon out there arguing that Dalton and Evangeline should remain platonic out of respect for his memory? Is anyone pulling for Cassidy, Dalton’s bike shop crush, in this story? Did you always know when you were writing how their story would end?
  I'm not sure about the #TeamEamon thing but my guess would be, probably? And people have mentioned to me how much they love Cassidy, which is sweet. I love her too! My dad really loves Cassidy, which is so cute. I did always know how their story would end, but I didn't know every little bit about how I was going to get there.
  Something that really stood out for me about your characters is the role religion plays in their lives. Evangeline and Eamon meet at her church. God is an active presence in their lives, and yet not a source of trauma. And I think that’s rare in literary fiction. Can you talk a little about the role Christianity, church and religion play in the lives of your characters, and why it was important for them to have a foundation of faith?
  Thank you, because I consider this a high compliment! I speak and write often about growing up a PK — a Preacher's Kid. My dad is a Southern Baptist preacher and my faith has always been a bit easy for me. I love Jesus and feel very confident in saying that boldly because it's true. And I reject the idea that “Christian” art or music or books have to be bad. There's that connotation because so often, that stuff is so bad! But the thing is . . . it should be good! It should be the best. And while I won't say my book is a “Christian” book because that can mean so many things, and so many of those things are wrong, but there are Christians in my book, and I'm a Christian writing the book.
  I wanted my characters to be as real as possible about everything and that includes their faith. Evi prays and curses. She easily expresses both her frustration at feeling abandoned by God and the hope of one day seeing Eamon again in Heaven. Eamon and Dalton are good, flawed men who grapple with sin and what being a “good” man means. Writing about Christian characters living their lives, their struggles and hopes in a non-political way felt a bit radical and was important to me to put on the page because like you said, it's sometimes rare in literary fiction. Everyone's a cynic and Christianity is easily made fun of or scoffed at because of the sometimes ridiculousness of “American” Christianity and because people are people and there's so much hypocrisy in the world. But none of that changes who Jesus says He is. And I reject all of that negativity anyway. So do my characters.
  This is a story set in Kentucky, about black and biracial main characters, built around the death of a police officer, at a time when gun violence, race and the role of police in cities are all highly charged subjects. But "Whiskey & Ribbons" is a personal story, a family story, a love story. It’s not, at least in any traditional sense, a political narrative. Have you had to talk about that choice a lot?
  And on a related note, are there expectations that people have for your book, or for you as an author, that you find surprising, or frustrating, or are even relieved by?
  I have ended up talking about the fact the the book isn't a political book quite often and I don't mind it! It's not a political book. I've had several people tell me they were relieved to discover that. There are a lot of brilliant writers and activists telling those stories and telling them well. That's not what I'm doing.
  As for expectations, there's always the idea of whether my book can be white enough for white people or black enough for black people, but I also reject that and those pressures. Black writers don't need permission to write books that don't focus on race and neither do black women. White writers aren't constantly asked about their whiteness; men aren't usually asked about their maleness. I'm pretty hardcore about rejecting those things. I just won't entertain them. I write what I want to write, how I want to write it. I'm not waiting around for people to catch up. Who has the time?
  Much of the way the state’s literary tradition is perceived, both outside of the region and within, is rural, but “Whiskey & Ribbons” is a Louisville story, a city story. Do you feel like a Kentucky writer?
  I do feel like a Kentucky writer, simply because I'm from Kentucky. Born and raised. This is home. I never considered setting this story anywhere else. Setting it in Louisville was important to me because I don't get to read books set in Louisville very often. There are books that mention Louisville and Actor's Theatre or Churchill Downs, etc, but I wanted to keep the story here because I'm here. And some of my favorite writers, like C.E. Morgan, Crystal Wilkinson, Silas House, they're Kentucky writers. I'm drawn to Kentucky writers because they feel like home — the cities, the farms, everything in between. All of it.
  One thing I love about “Whiskey & Ribbons” is the role music plays in the characters’ lives. They feel it deeply, and Dalton plays piano and Evangeline dances. Did you have a writing soundtrack?
  I did! There's a lot of yacht rock on it. A lot of Phil Collins, Sade, Otis Redding. Power ballads. Grateful Dead. Marshall Tucker Band. Fleetwood Mac. A lot of ballet warm-ups and piano music. Mozart, Chopin, Debussy, Bach. My soundtrack is about 15 hours long!
  Music, like sports, is a frequent subject in your work. What were you not an expert in that you had to learn about to write Dalton, Eamon and Evangeline?
  I had to learn things about police work for Eamon. I had to learn about fugues for the structure of the novel and about classical piano pieces for Dalton. I had to learn a bit about bikes because Dalton owns a bike shop. I also had to remember what it was like to have a six-month-old baby for Evangeline because my kids are so much older now that I'd practically forgotten!
  The title of the book, “Whiskey & Ribbons,” refers to a toast the characters make. Does that have an origin outside of the book or is it original to this story?
  I chose "whiskey and ribbons" simply because I like the words. And I liked thinking about men as the whiskey and women as the ribbons. Originally it wasn't a toast, they were just words Eamon liked and would link together, but then my sweet girlfriend Sarah suggested that it should be a toast, something Eamon would say when they drank whiskey, and I loved that idea so much I made it real.
  Because bourbon rightfully plays a wonderful supporting role in this book, I need to know what your favorite bourbon is, and how you like to drink it. And does the book have a signature bourbon drink?
  I don't drink it often, but I do love Maker's Mark. I also like Four Roses. Bulleit. And I like it neat. I don't mind a little ice if it's super-hot out. If the book had a signature drink, that's what it would be: Maker's Mark, neat. Preferably on a snowy night by the fireplace.
  What’s next for you? What are you working on now?
  I'm always working on something! More short story collections, more novels — both YA and adult. I have a country romance novel I'm working on, too.

• Medium - https://medium.com/@theoffingmag/q-a-with-leesa-cross-smith-author-of-little-doves-a653ba583d88

  The OffingFollow
  http://theoffingmag.com is an online literary magazine that publishes risk-taking work by new, emerging, and established writers and artists.
  Mar 19

  Leesa Cross-Smith [image: a woman with dreadlocks wearing red glasses and laughing]
  Q&A with Leesa Cross-Smith, author of “Little Doves”
  Leesa Cross-Smith’s “Little Doves” was published in The Offing’s Fiction department on March 5, 2018. Q&A conducted by Bix Gabriel, Editor, Fiction.
  Donate to The Offing! Our Patreon supporters received early access to this Q&A with The Offing contributor Leesa Cross-Smith, and receive other perks as well. The Offing pays our contributors, and we appreciate the help of all of our supporters in sustaining our work. If you are able, consider donating to The Offing today, whether one-time or monthly.

  Bix Gabriel: First of all, I love that you wrote about sex and desire, and need in the domestic space and natural world-scape. How did this piece and the choices you made come about?
  Leesa Cross-Smith: When I started this piece, I was thinking about willful submission and the giving over of self…physically, spiritually…the different ways that can look. I was thinking about both the dangers and pleasures of those things, tied together. That choice, those choices we can make or not make, over and over again. I wanted the piece to read almost like a fever dream, a dreamy, almost indefinable space of no judgement or expectations.
  BG: Related to the question above, sex for women, can be a threat and it can also seem inevitable, i.e. not as much of a choice. Can you talk about your decision to portray women desiring and enjoying sex, without the raunchiness that often accompanies women taking control over their sex lives/bodies.
  LCS: [Most] women (absolutely) desire and enjoy sex and it’s easy for me to talk about that, to write about that. All the women I write about enjoy sex with men who are good in bed. I shy away from raunchiness because I’m a pretty reserved person in general. I can write about these things, but also, I blush easily! I start the piece with “We want him to” because I want to make sure the reader knows from the v beginning that consent is taken care of. They want him to. That’s the sexiest start.
  BG: First-person plural is so hard to pull off! But it works so well here. How did you arrive at this POV?
  LCS: Thank you! I only thought of it in first-person plural. I don’t think I could’ve written it any other way. It always felt like a group to me. A collective. Eve, every woman, all of us. Everything is happening to all of them at the same time. There’s no singling out, but then again, they’re allspecial, all singled out…together. And I love the first-person plural here because I think/hope it lends itself to mystery. Who are they? Who is he? Who is/are we?
  BG: Reading Little Doves is like falling under a spell, the language is so hypnotic. What influences your writing — music? poetry? other writers?
  LCS: I was hoping for that so thank you! I wanted to repeat things, to reassure the reader in such a small space that these are recurring things/days/nights. Rituals. I’m influenced by so many things! For sexy-summer-California-dreaminess like this, it’s Lana Del Rey or The Doors, that kind of stuff. Sylvia Plath is one of my favorite writers when it comes to just, true lush beauty on a sentence level. I like how Frank Ocean songs make me feel. I love the art Donald Glover creates, how he has no limits. Sufjan Stevens. Father John Misty. So many! The lists of plants in “Find the River” by R.E.M. “Serious moonlight” in this piece is because of David Bowie. “Holy hyssop” refers to a desire to be clean…both physically and spiritually. I’m a Christian and the Bible/my faith infuses my work a lot. And some other secrets/specifics I won’t tell.
  BG: Your book Whiskey and Ribbons is out tomorrow! How exciting! Congratulations! Where can people buy it? And how did you approach writing a novel versus shorter pieces like this, or other stories?
  LCS: Thank you! Whiskey & Ribbons is available directly from my publishers and everywhere books are sold! And if a local indie bookstore doesn’t have it in stock, please do request it! It’s important and helpful for them to hear that readers want them to carry it.
  I’ve always written both longer works and short fiction and I approach them the same way now. I get more instant gratification from flash fiction, although I don’t always write it quickly. But I can see the finish line more clearly than I can with a novel, yes! With a novel, I definitely do a bit more planning but in general, when I write, I don’t plan too much ahead. I just sit down and write. And I sit there and sit there and write and write and write until I get it done or take a break and try again later.
  BG: What do you find most difficult in writing — could be discipline, craft, whatever? How do you deal with it?
  LCS: Finding the time to do everything I want to do, probably. I’m a workaholic, something I’m trying to chill out about. I don’t have issues with discipline. And in the past, I had issues with feeling like a phony or like everyone else knew something I didn’t but I don’t feel that way any more. I can’t say exactly what happened to fix that or exactly when it occurred but wow is that a blessing. I’m focusing on the blessings from here on out!
  Leesa Cross-Smith is a homemaker and the author of Whiskey & Ribbons and Every Kiss A War. http://www.leesacrosssmith.com/

• Split Lip - http://www.splitlipmagazine.com/single-post/2017/12/07/From-the-Writing-Desk-Of-Leesa-Cross-Smith

  Real World: Editors -- Episode 2, Part 1
  May 25, 2018

  From the Writing Desk of: Dave Housley
  May 23, 2018

  Just One Thing with Alicia Cole
  May 21, 2018

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  Over the next couple months, we w...

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  From the Writing Desk Of: Leesa Cross-Smith

  December 7, 2017

  Pictured:
  1. Our cat, Mindy. But we call her Mimi. She loves sleeping and warm things. I do most of my writing on my made-up bed.
  2. My newish MacBook with Badlands + Blue Ridge Parkway stickers. My old one broke prettymuch at exactly the same time I sold my novel. Life, right?
  3. A California mug of rooibos tea. I drink a lot of rooibos tea and I love California.
  4. The current manuscript I'm working on.
  5. An ARC of my debut novel Whiskey & Ribbons because I like looking at it/having it around.
  6. My Kindle.
  7. My hoop earrings.
  8. Some Post-Its.
  9. Pen.
  10. My heating pad. I love my heating pad. I have a relationship with my heating pad.
  11. My twinkle light lantern. I hate overhead lighting! I only like natural light and lamps and candles and salt lamps.
  12. My window. So I can get some sunlight, see the trees, watch the squirrels and birds, etc.
  13. My favorite soft, stripey blanket

  Sounds like:
  1. I aggressively listen to Bach's Cello Suites
  2. Also, Father John Misty's I Love You, Honeybear album
  3. Also, the soundtrack to Far From The Madding Crowd

  Not pictured:
  1. All the books on my nightstand. My Bible. Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Monroe, Gwendolyn Brooks, Eve Ewing, Samantha Irby, Elizabeth Ellen, Diana Gabaldon, Silas House, Dana Johnson, Lydia Davis.
  2. My lipglosses, coconut oil, my bottle of Chanel No 5 Eau Premiere, pens, pens, pens, highlighters, some more earrings. Two other manuscripts I'm working on. A copy of the Kentucky Music issue of Oxford American because I wrote an essay about Sturgill Simpson that's in there and he's on the cover!
  3. All the inspiration I have hanging on my walls: Lana Del Rey, Harry Styles, Misty Copeland, Serena Williams, Jim Morrison, Kip Moore, Sufjan Stevens, Aaron Tveit, postcards from my girlfriends, photobooth pics of me and my husband, pics of me and my husband on our honeymoon in New Mexico, the congratulations this is happening email from my literary agent re: selling my novel, some paper cranes, some drawings from my kids, etc.
  4. Our Lady of Guadalupe candles/figurines
  5. Hanging on the wall: a cow skull with gold horns
  6. More twinkle lights
  7. My oil diffuser: lavender + lemon + one drop of patchouli
  8. My weighted blanket, some more blankets I knit
  9. My light therapy box
  10. Some baseballs
  11. My air filter
  12. Pictures of my babies
  13. A painting by Jeremy Okai Davis that was the cover of my short story collection Every Kiss A War
  14. A poster by Ron Davis for my reading at Wild Fig Books in Lexington, KY
  15. My alpaca lamp
  16. Books & books & books & books

  ****

  Leesa Cross-Smith is a Kentucky girl, a homemaker and the author of Every Kiss A War (Mojave River Press, 2014) and Whiskey & Ribbons (Hub City Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in places like Oxford American and Best Small Fictions, among many others. She is the founding editor of WhiskeyPaper and can be found @ LeesaCrossSmith.com.

• Leesa Cross-Smith Website - http://www.leesacrosssmith.com/

  Hi y'all!
  I’m Leesa Cross-Smith, a preacher’s daughter from Kentucky. An INFJ, a highly sensitive person, an empath. I am Southern and sentimental and easily startled. I love Jesus and being peculiar. Bind my wandering heart to Thee. I’m God’s little creature, a homemaker, a wife, a mama & a writer of fictions. I love my bearded husband & our little babies & stuff like: kindness, coziness, hygge, knitting, cowboys, making pies, ornithology, tomboy style, Birkenstocks, being a Hufflepuff, haberdashery, DMB, The Avett Brothers, Jason Mraz, Kip Moore & Kip Moore's tank tops, Bon Iver, Sturgill Simpson, Father John Misty's hands, Father John Misty dancing, Father John Misty pulls up to the Chateau Marmont in a rented Hyundai, Caleb Followill’s voice, One Direction, Keri Russell, Matthew Rhys, Liev Schreiber’s speaking voice, Donald Glover, Otis Redding, "Try A Little Tenderness," "Africa" by Toto, California, Lana Del Rey songs/vibes, Miranda Lambert, all JuNk GyPsY everything, The Civil Wars, Ella Fitzgerald, Cher, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Chanel No. 5, Jax Teller, hands-in-pockets Jim Halpert, Ben Covington, Jess Mariano, too many tv shows (but I really love The Crown, The Night Manager, Poldark, Mozart In The Jungle, Doctor Foster, Stranger Things and Superstore right now. Felicity, The Office, New Girl, Sons of Anarchy, Lost, Friday Night Lights, Gran Hotel, Happy Endings and Graceland are my oldskool/forever favorites.) mumblecore, the soothing ritual of my skincare routine, Glossier, Into The Gloss, flower waters, rose water, clementine + honey, the names of flowers/plants + lyrics to "Find The River" by R.E.M.: ocean storm, bayberry moon...bergamot and vetiver...of ginger, lemon, indigo, coriander stem and rose of hay, all lavender everything, "Stand By Me" by Ben E. King & "I Hear A Symphony" by The Supremes, "The Middle" by Jimmy Eat World, truly enjoying KUWTK, Wilco, words words words words words, period pieces, A Bigger Splash, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jane Austen, Harry Potter, musicals, Hamilton and #hamiltrash, Leslie Odom singing "Wait For It," Sufjan Stevens, Fiona Apple, Stevie Nicks, Stevie Nicks + Lindsey Buckingham staring @/singing to each other, Zazie Beetz + Zazie Beetz's hair, Charlie Hunnam, Matthias Schoenaerts, Michael B. Jordan, Timothée Chalamet, shine shine shine, Jamie Dornan's nose, JFK Jr., reading abt the Kennedys, the Royal Family, Cillian Murphy talking/smoking, military dramas, crime family dramas, Chief Hopper/Chief Hopper smoking, Winona Ryder/Winona Forever, Jonah + Amy on Superstore, Nick + Jess on New Girl, Winston Bishop + Prank Sinatra + classic Winston-Cece's mess arounds + how much everyone on that show truly loves one another, Jake Johnson + Jake Johnson's onscreen kisses, Misty Copeland, ballet, Loretta Lynn’s Honky-Tonk Feminism, Thelma & Louise, Reality Bites, Harry Styles’ hair, Aaron Tveit singing and dancing and existing, Phil Collins, country/bluegrass music, Grateful Dead, Bob Marley, sk8boarding culture, roller skating rink music, the 90s, Star Wars, Grease, Bathsheba Everdene + Gabriel Oak, skee ball, cacti, swimming in the ocean, southern living, farms, backyard vegetable gardens, composting, yoga, walks in the morning, walks after dinner, reading everything, rooibos tea all day, the Outlander series, the Green Bay Packers, Aaron Rodgers' Hail Marys, Derek Jeter’s jump throw, Bryce Harper’s hair, Kevin Kiermaier’s eyes, Mike Trout’s toe tap, Maxwell Scherzer's bright blue eye and Maxwell Scherzer's dark brown eye, Steph Curry’s jump shot, baseball and basketball and football + my tv + me watching it, #sportsemotions, Kentucky, Nashville, New Mexico, Mason jars, cardigan sweaters, winged eyeliner, trashy jewelry, simple/intentional living, minimalism, quiet, hippie music/stuff & basically anything that is awesome.
  &
  My debut short story collection Every Kiss a War can be purchased here! (Mojave River Press, April 2014)
  My debut novel Whiskey & Ribbons can be purchased here! (Hub City Press, March 2018)
  I am represented by Kerry D’Agostino @ Curtis Brown, Ltd.
  I’m co-founder/editor @ WhiskeyPaper.
  I write a column called THE GLIMMERING HUSH for Oxford American: The By and By.
  I write a TinyLetter called KITCHEN MUSIC.
  I write a Beat called LINE DRIVE @ Real Pants.
  I’m a contributor @ Enclave.
  I write MY WEEK IN BASEBALL over @ Medium.
  My Facebook author page.
  My public Instagram.
  My Goodreads author page.
  My Directory of Writers listing over @ Poets & Writers.
  EMAIL: leesacrosssmith AT gmail DOT com.
  [Official author photos by the gorgeous Mickie Winters.]
  SEE ALSO:
  1. Tumblr (brightlywound/where I reblog things like pictures of knives clipped to pockets/baseball games/sparklers)
  2. Tumblr (leesacrosssmith/list of my publications, recent & forthcoming)
  3. Tumblr (everykissawar/mood board for my book)
  4. Tumblr (whiskeypaper/our literary magazine)
  5. Twitter (@leesacrosssmith)

  AUTHOR BIO:
  Leesa Cross-Smith is a homemaker and writer from Kentucky. She is the author of Whiskey & Ribbons (Hub City Press, 2018) and Every Kiss a War (Mojave River Press, 2014). Every Kiss a War was a finalist for both the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction (2012) and the Iowa Short Fiction Award (2012). Her short story “Whiskey & Ribbons” won Editor’s Choice in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest (2011) and was listed as a notable story for storySouth‘s Million Writers Award. She was a consulting editor for Best Small Fictions 2017. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, Best Small Fictions 2015, The Rumpus, SmokeLong Quarterly, Little Fiction, Wigleaf Top 50, Longform Fiction, Carve Magazine, Synaesthesia Magazine, Paper Darts, Hobart, Pithead Chapel, Gigantic Sequins, Folio, American Short Fiction (online), Midwestern Gothic, Juked, Word Riot and many others. She and her husband Loran run a literary magazine called WhiskeyPaper. Find more @ LeesaCrossSmith.com and WhiskeyPaper.com.

• WABE - https://www.wabe.org/leesa-cross-smiths-debut-novel-whiskey-ribbons-fugue-narrators/

  Arts
  Leesa Cross-Smith’s Debut Novel ‘Whiskey And Ribbons’ A Fugue Of Narrators
  Kevin Rinker • Mar 27, 2018

  Leesa Cross-Smith spoke to Lois Reitzes about her debut novel "Whiskey and Ribbons" on "City Lights."
  Credit CREDIT COVER COURTESY HUB CITY PRESS; PHOTO CREDIT MICKIE WINTERS

  Sponsored Content

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  26:57 | Play story Add to My List
  “Whiskey And Ribbons,” the debut novel from Leesa Cross-Smith, uses three separate narrators to tell their collective story.
  The narrators include Eamon, a police officer, now deceased; Dalton, Eamon’s brother; and Evangiline, who was married to Eamon and recently gave birth to their child. Cross-Smith explains to City Lights host Lois Reitzes that when she set out to write the book, she wasn’t quite sure how to structure the book.
  “I ended up structuring it as a fugue,” she says. “Which I came to find out, was to a composer, to write it as a piece of music, which means to take three voices and one of the voices drops out.”
  Music did not simply inform Cross-Smith’s writing process, but rather plays a specific role in the lives of each narrator.
  “Evangeline is a ballerina and so music would always, always be important to her,” the author says. “And then we have Dalton who’s a classically trained pianist, his mother was a concert pianist, and it just comes easy to him. He’s just good at it, it something he does, he doesn’t even do it professionally, he’s just good at it.”
  On the other hand, Eamon just loves to listen to music.
  “I really was specific about having him love, like, 80s, 90s yacht rock…having him love, like, Phil Collins and Sade and Elton John and Billy Joel,” Cross-Smith says.
  And while the narrators are black and bi-racial, Cross-Smith didn’t set out to make race at the forefront of her novel.
  “When I was growing up, any time I wanted to read a book that had a little black girl on the cover or even mentioned a little black girl, the book was only about civil rights, was only ‘she was living in Birmingham,’ was only about Martin Luther King, it was only about slavery ‘she was a little slave,” she says.
  Cross-Smith acknowledges that books focused on race are important, but that simply wasn’t what she set out to write in “Whiskey and Ribbons.”
  “I’ve been black my whole life, but also I just want to read books too. And there’s a lot of black kids that just want to read books…just books and it doesn’t have to be about race.”
  Leesa Cross-Smith’s debut novel “Whiskey and Ribbons” is available now.

Cross-Smith, Leesa: WHISKEY & RIBBONS

Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Cross-Smith, Leesa WHISKEY & RIBBONS Hub City Press (Adult Fiction) $27.00 3, 8 ISBN: 978-1-938235-38-2
A debut novel about loss, grief, family secrets, and the unexpected sources from which people take solace after unbelievable tragedy.
Cross-Smith (Every Kiss a War, 2014) follows three characters, alternating among their interlinked stories as they struggle to get on with their lives in death's shadow. We find the widowed Evangeline Royce snowed into her house six months after the death of her husband, Eamon, a police officer who was killed on the job. Eamon's lifelong friend Dalton Berkeley-Royce is with her, helping take care of her infant son, Noah, who was born 16 days after his father's death, and she's wrestling with guilt over her developing attraction to a man she'd previously thought of only as a friend. Dalton is also grieving Eamon, who was as close to him as a brother. After his mother committed suicide while he was in middle school, Dalton was adopted by the Royce family; he never knew his biological father. When Eamon died, Dalton swore to protect Evangeline and Noah; he struggles to fulfill that duty while coming to terms with a revelation about his own history and relationship with Eamon. Meanwhile, Eamon's ghost haunts the novel's proceedings both figuratively and literally. He narrates his own life and death from beyond the grave, providing crucial background on the tortured history he shares with Dalton. The structure--modeled after the musical conceit of the fugue, or a melody that is developed via interlocking parts--is an inspired way to tell what is otherwise a simple story. Beyond the tragedy of Eamon's death and the will they/won't they tension of Evangeline and Dalton's relationship, not much actually happens. Instead, the novel is content to circle around the complexities of memory and family history on its way to a revelation that falls a little flat and is occasionally marred by clumsy prose.
The intricacies of the grieving process are revealed in this sensitive novel.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Cross-Smith, Leesa: WHISKEY & RIBBONS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461523/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0f74b1b9. Accessed 27 May 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461523

• Foreword Reviews
  https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/whiskey-and-ribbons/
  Word count: 353

  Whiskey and Ribbons
  Leesa Cross-Smith
  Hub City Press (Mar 6, 2018)
  Hardcover $27.00 (272pp)
  978-1-938235-38-2
  Whiskey and Ribbons is an absorbing delight, illumined by richly described relationships and thoughtful explorations of life’s central questions.
  The tale of a young police officer killed in the line of duty, Whiskey and Ribbons is an engrossing, warm, and moving look at family, friendship, loss, and love.
  Eamon and Evangeline are a young couple living in Louisville, Kentucky, and expecting their first child when Eamon is shot and killed on the job. Dalton, Eamon’s adopted brother and a close friend of Evangeline’s, moves in to help her cope with this loss and care for her infant son. The point of view alternates between the three adults, moving back and forth in time to before and after Eamon’s death, covering Eamon and Evangeline’s romance, Eamon’s fears about his job, Dalton’s feelings about his adopted family, and more.
  Cross-Smith writes each of these characters with depth and makes each one equally engaging. Eamon’s chapters capture his fears for Evangeline should anything happen to him. These sections contrast beautifully and heartrendingly with Evangeline’s descriptions of her grief. Dalton’s own complex romantic relationships provide a contrast to the steadiness of Eamon and Evangeline’s love. Frances and Cassidy, Dalton’s two love interests, come to life as fully realized characters as well, and Dalton’s ambivalent feelings about meeting his biological father provide a satisfying subplot.
  The plot is simple and develops slowly; it is not the main source of this novel’s satisfactions. Instead, it’s the novel’s emotional truths, particularly as major life events are grappled with, that hold attention. The novel ponders some of life’s most pressing questions: what makes a family, what parents and children deserve from each other, what makes a good marriage, and, most of all, how to cope with grief and loss.
  Leesa Cross-Smith’s Whiskey and Ribbons is an absorbing delight.
  Reviewed by Rebecca Hussey
  March/April 2018

• Englewood Review
  http://englewoodreview.org/leesa-cross-smith-whiskey-ribbons-review/
  Word count: 1094

  Leesa Cross-Smith – Whiskey & Ribbons [Review]
  December 14, 2017 — 0 Comments
  26 59 0 85

  The Mundane, Vital Details of Life

  A Review of

  Whiskey & Ribbons:
  A Novel
  Leesa Cross-Smith
  Hardback: Hub City Press, 2017
  Buy Now: [ Amazon ]

  Reviewed by Meghan Florian

  Whiskey & Ribbons, Leesa Cross-Smith’s first novel, is a love story folded inside of a love story. It is a novel about grief, about family, about how we hold one another together when everything falls apart.

  The character at the heart of the novel, by my reading, is Evangeline, who goes by Evi, but the story is told in three voices – Evi herself, her deceased husband Eamon, and Eamon’s best friend Dalton. In the hands of a less skilled storyteller, the book’s multivocal structure might be unwieldy or confusing, but Cross-Smith deftly moves from present to past and back again, from voice to voice, inhabiting and revealing each character with melodic grace. She begins the book with these definitions, framing the narrative:

  Fugue: Late 16th century: from French, or from Italian fuga, from Latin
  fuga ‘flight’, related to fugere ‘flee’ and fugare ‘to chase.’
  Fugue: [music] a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or
  phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up
  by others and developed by interweaving the parts.
  Fugue: [psychiatry] a state or period of loss of awareness of one’s identity.

  Indeed, the book delivers on all of these meanings – characters alternately fleeing and chasing after one another and their own feelings, an interwoven melody, a meditation on loss, love, and life. Cross-Smith’s novel shows that who we are is inseparable from the lives we build together, from the loves and losses that make us and break us.
  “I was a widow,” Evi says in the opening chapter, “a word so ghostly and hollow, a word that should’ve been a palindrome but wasn’t, those w’s with their arms stretched wide, begging for mercy.” This line was the first in the novel to move me to tears, and not the last – not nearly. Evi begins to narrate her life in present day Louisville, Kentucky, where she lives on without Eamon, raising their baby boy Noah with Dalton’s help, with this image, this metaphor that isn’t, of a palindrome, the same forward and backward, as if she’s stuck inside. And she is stuck, stuck in her grief, in a life she didn’t plan for, inside the house on the snowy weekend when the book’s present unfolds.
  We go back, then, and meet Eamon, meeting Evi: “When I met Evangeline worked security at the megachurch, and yes, it was as glamorous as it sounded,” he tells us. He’s a police officer; he has a girlfriend. But he meets Evi, and everything shifts, love at first site. As the story unfolds, Eamon shows us the past, Evi the present, and Dalton the in-between, until gradually his inbetween catches up to Evi in the present, as the book moves toward its emotional conclusion – Eamon’s death, which we know is coming, Evi and Dalton learning whether and how one can ever “move on” from such heartbreaking loss, their shared love for Eamon bonding them in complicated, blessed ways.
  Cross-Smith is brilliant from a craft perspective — structurally, the book is artfully built and moves with ease from voice to voice, carrying the reader deep into the emotional lives of the characters. They say that easy reading is difficult writing, and there’s no doubt that the story that flows so seamlessly from the page has been labored over and perfected. On the sentence level, Cross-Smith’s turns of phrase and unexpected descriptions feel like little presents, perfectly captured moments unwrapped chapter by chapter, keenly felt and generously shared. “I was nine months pregnant with our son Noah,” Evi says, relaying the events of the day Eamon died, “Me, a full-bellied cashew in our windows-open bedroom, our summer bed,” and I don’t know what strikes me more, the intensity of the story of loss I am sinking into, or the clearness with which I can see that cashew shaped pregnant belly. I love a good sentence, and Cross-Smith is a wordsmith.
  In addition to the technical skills the book exhibits, though, I found myself amazed by the ways Whisky & Ribbons is so lovingly wrought. The details, the finely crafted sentences, bring to life a world that I cared for more that I have cared for a fictional world in quite some time. I came to know Evi, Eamon, and Dalton and their interrelated lives. When Dalton scoops Evi up off the floor where he finds her, collapsed after the news of Eamon’s death, and describes her keening, my entire body reacted. I felt that grief, thought of my own moments of loss, as well. Yet even when the book moved me to tears (often), I loved being in the world Cross-Smith has created, loved these characters she brought into my world, wanted the best for them, longed for their healing and joy. “I was one person before all of this and now that person is gone” Evi thinks. “Grief is horrifyingly personal. Grief is horrifyingly generic.” And perhaps that is what Cross-Smith has rendered so clearly, that particular, personal experience that so many of us somehow share. The way grief changes us, and the truth that you can’t go back to who you were before no matter how much you miss that person and that life.
  The heart of the book is in the way Cross-Smith expresses the mundane, vital details of life; the intimacy with which we come to know Evi and Dalton, especially, conveyed through whiskey and ribbons, drinking and dancing, playing and weeping their way through their days. I want to be their friend; I want to stroll into B’s, Dalton’s bike shop, to pick up some spare parts, and ask how Evi is doing. I want to swing by and take Noah for a walk so Evi can have a moment to herself. I want to believe with them that they can survive this loss, and Leesa Cross-Smith shows me that they can.
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  Meghan Florian is the author of The Middle of Things: Essays (Cascade Books, 2017), and teaches writing at William Peace University. You can find more of her writing at meghanflorian.com.