o f f i c i a l w e b s i t e
Author of
Homefront
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HOMEFRONT
Raw, honest, and intimate, Homefront was inspired by the author's experience during her husband's Iraq deployment.
A cab driving former English professor, an unpredictable alcoholic Vietnam veteran, an anti-war soldier, and a morbid mother in-law come together in this realistic, sensual, and at times darkly humorous semi-autobiographical tale of waiting through a war deployment. Available in paperback, and as a download at Kindle and Smashwords.
CAROL'S AQUARIUM
Stories in this collection of fiction range from fish-in-a-box ("Carol's Aquarium") to a tense prison visit ("Visiting Hour") to a hotel worker with a deployed boyfriend who breaks into the room of a soldier on R&R (Storyglossia Fiction Prize winner and Pushcart Prize nominee "They Three at Once Were One") to the most uptight couple in the world discovering earthy, passionate lust ("Mexican Blanket").
Story lengths vary from flash-fiction shortness to standard short story length, and pieces are a combination of unpublished, previously published, and award-winning fiction. Available only as an ebook at Kindle and Smashwords.
HOW TO (NOT) HAVE CHILDREN
A straightforward and humorous collection of musings, arguments, anecdotes, and helpful tips for those living, or thinking about living, a child-free life. Available in paperback and as a download.
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BUY
PRAISE FOR HOMEFRONT
"Being in Iraq sucks beyond comprehension. It only gets worse with time. I always just figured that folks back home were bored, or felt the absence of those deployed as an inconvenience. I get it, now. People so often tell the stories of soldiers at war, and thereafter in stories about protest and strife riddled with dissolution. These stories are so often event driven and formulaic they somehow miss the greater depth of the story. They don't really tap the emotion that runs deep. You gave it a soul. As a veteran, I thank you."
- Charlie Preusser, Iraq veteran
"There are many novels about war, most from the battlefield where there's page-turning tension and drama. But there are few stories written from the point of view of a loved one back home waiting, and waiting some more, not knowing if or how the soldier will return home. Perhaps that's because so few have found an interesting way to write such a story, but that has changed, thanks to Kristen Tsetsi."
- Huffington Post
"As a television news correspondent, I spent years reporting from military bases where young families and lovers were being separated by the decisions of old men. I had never had a better understanding of the agony of military separation until I read Kristen Tsetsi's haunting and lyrical debut novel Homefront. Tsetsi has illuminated this part of war with her crystalline prose and near-perfect rendering of a story about those who wait under the awful burden of not knowing an outcome. Her sentences are as true as a bullet whizzing past the ear and her dialogue has the accuracy of a recorded conversation that was perfectly eavesdropped. Love and pain is the plot of Homefront but in the hands of this talented artist they are a mighty force."
- James C. Moore, Emmy award-winning former news corrspondent and co-author of the NYT best seller Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential
"Homefront is a powerful novel about the Iraq war in which the war almost never appears, yet in which its tensions are ever-present. The novel, so skillful at plumbing the depths of doubt and the agony of fear, is equally skillful at portraying how that agony can turn to ecstasy through the redemptive power of love.Homefront is where most of us spent the Iraq war; reading it makes vividly clear that those who were closest to its combatants - whatever their politics or beliefs - suffered enormously too."
- Paul Griner, author of The German Woman
"Completely engrossing, a totally spellbinding escape into another world. Tsetsi's novel hasn't made it to the bestseller list yet, but it should be there."
- Leaf Chronicle
"One of the most powerful and brilliant books I have read in a long time. Make this the next book you read."
- Pop Culture Zoo
"The sheer accumulation of life detail and the interplay of vivid secondary characters, braided together with the transcribed correspondence of the lovers, force its readers to feel from the inside what the horror and the tedium of the homefront is like over time."
- Alan Davis, New Rivers Press
"I was hoping my plane would never land so I could finish it in one sitting. Homefront is an amazing novel of unique relationships. The character development sucks you in from the first page to the last."
- Greta Perry
"Once I picked it up, I didn't want to put it down... This is an amazing book."
- A Lifetime of Books
"Soulful. Thrilling and seductive."
- Josip Novakovich, author of April Fool's Day
"The prose is exquisite, the mood heartbreaking."
- N. Frank Daniels, author of futureproof
"I loved Jake as a character...and I loved Mia."
- Carolyn See, author of The Handyman
"When you use the word 'spare' to talk about prose, it sometimes sounds like a pejorative, as does the word 'minimalist.' It implies possibly that the writer didnt take the time. But here you get the sense that Tsetsis been careful with every word and no sentence has been wasted. A great novel."
- SPR
"Through several sharply-drawn supporting characters and scenes of daily life in a military town, the reader is drawn deeply into Mias psychological disconnect from her unwanted reality. Homefront reads like a long-form haiku written by Charles Bukowski in collaboration with Ann Beattie; almost every paragraph is a stand-alone gem of insight and observation."
- Rick Shefchik, journalist, award-winning columnist, and author of Green Monster and Amen Corner
"If there's a war on (and, these days, there's usually a war on), I want to be reading about it. I appreciate first person accounts, either fictionalized or not, and Kristen Tsetsi's Homefront is a worthy new entry in this category."
- Levi Asher, Literary Kicks
"[Tsetsi's] solid, seamless and detailed writing has the power to bring us into each scene."
- Sonia Reppe, Bookpleasures
"An intensely intimate and affecting story...I was 100 pages into Homefront before I looked up from the book."
- Steven McDermott, Storyglossia
"This is a thoughtful and elegant book; the writing immersive, evocative ..."
- the PODler
"Often forgotten amid yellow-ribbon bumper stickers and Welcome Home ceremonies, Kristen Tsetsi's Homefront renders love and the very capacity to love as casualties of war, all in prose glittering with humility, humor and incisive detail."
- Benjamin Buchholz, Iraq veteran
PRAISE FOR CAROL'S AQUARIUM
"There isnt a bad story in the bunch ... Ms. Tsetsi keeps the emotion well restrained, everything is very deliberately masked with order and calm resolve, the author preferring to let the shadows do all the wailing. ... This is the sort of narrative voice I like in short fiction. The themes are very pointed, and the writing is confident enough to deliver the emotional payload like a blow to the chest with a knife-blade."
- Cheryl Anne Gardner, POD People
BACK
Television:
WSMV-TV Channel 4 (NBC), "Better Nashville," Aug. 13, 2009
Monthly Publication:
Military Spouse Magazine, December 2009
Newspaper (print and/or online):
Huffington Post, Oct. 12, 2009
Stars and Stripes, Sept. 1, 2009
Leaf Chronicle , Aug. 9, 2009
Messenger Post, April 30, 2007
Democrat and Chronicle, June 10, 2007
Rochester Insider, July 13, 2007
Radio:
Navy Homefront Talk, August 26, 2009
Navy Homefront Talk, July 15, 2009
GI Radio, June 16, 2009
With WKMS's Mark Welch, June 5, 2009
The Faith Middleton Show, Dec. 3, 2007
Blondie and the Viking, Sept. 27, 2007
Army Wife Talk Radio, Sept. 6, 2007
Online Publications:
Essential Writers, June 17, 2009
SPR, Jan. 9, 2009
Storyglossia, Nov. 28, 2006
Biography
Kristen Tsetsi is one of the founding members of Backword Booksand the author of the semi-autobiographical novel Homefront, the short fiction collection (e-book) Carol's Aquarium, and How to (Not) Have Children. She was raised in Germany and received her MFA from Minnesota State University Moorhead.
She is a former reporter, former cab driver, and a former instructor of playwriting, screenwriting, expressive writing, and college English. Currently, she edits the literary journal American Fiction.
Kristen Tsetsi's writing has appeared in a number of publications, and her award-winning short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
More:
CONTACT
Q & A
LINKS TO MORE OF KRISTEN TSETSI'S WRITING
SHORT STORIES
[Many of the stories below appear in Carol's Aquarium,
along with previously unpublished fiction.]
Print Journals
2002
Red Weather Magazine "Me and My Lover"
"The Fittest"
2004
Red Weather Magazine "The Girl Next Door"
2006
Red Weather Magazine "This is How I Tell You"
They Do Exist!: Anthology of "But for Gloria"
Award-Winning Short Stories
RE:AL, Summer/Fall Issue "To My Daughter"
Storyglossia Fiction Prize "They Three at Once
Were One"
Online Journals
2005
The Midtown Literary Review "In the Wheatfield"
Expository Magazine "The Nature of Things"
Opium Magazine ** "Burn Everything but the
Heart."
Denver Syntax "The Departure"
Storyglossia "Miss Neurosis"
-- It's not like we live in a novel with Fabio glistening on the cover. It's not like he happened to crash-land on some farmstead owned by an old farmer and his beautiful, single, young daughter with long, blond hair and trim thighs and a lilting laugh that delights Dan to his core, the way the romance novels say it happens. It's not like she has heaving breasts.--
*** "They Three at Once Were One"
Pindeldyboz "Serial Behavior"
Right Hand Pointing "Seasonal Tourists"
Edifice Wrecked **** "Becoming an Oates Girl"
-- He left, he later sighed, because she was too perfect. (She didnt argue the impossibility of being too perfect.) He flipped her hair, said, "Thick and bouncy!" He spat in her eyes. "They sparkle, for Christs sake!" But also, she was too optimistic, too chipper about goddamn everything.--
Story Garden 7 "Carol's Aquarium"
"Mexican Blanket"
"Fate, or What Have You"
2007
Denver Syntax "Visiting Hour"
-- She tucks her hair behind her ears and looks around. There are seven tables in all, half of them being used. I only know Kevin. The rest I don't talk to and they don't talk to me. "You scared, in here?"
"No way. This is fascinating. I've never been to a prison before." She leans across the table. "Is it like it is in the movies?" Her eyes are all big. She wants me to say yes.--
Edifice Wrecked "Eating Eternity"
Paperwall "For Rent"
Tryst3 "An Agate in Cool River"
Six Sentences "Killing People is an Art,
he said"
"Trial Separation"
"The Start of Resentment"
2008
Six Sentences "Things You do for Love"
"Criminals Today"
ARTICLES/COLUMNS
1997
The Fargo Forum Other Views: "Human Body
Should Not be Unmentionable"
2000
High Plains Reader "On the Road: Cassleton"
"On the Road: Downer"
"On the Road: Comstock"
"On the Road: Wolverton"
Writers Weekly "Success is Relative"
Women's eNews "She Almost Lost Her Way on
Weight Loss"
"Married Without Children..."
Overdue Karma "Tide is in..."
Women's eNews "Innocent 'Kissing' Book Offers Date
Rape Tutorial"
Journal Inquirer "They're Not Kidding: Childless
and Loving Every Minute of it"
Journal Inquirer "Clearing the Air: a first-time visit
to the Church of Scientology"
Journal Inquirer "Dehumanizing women in
advertising"
Journal Inquirer "Write On: The ups and downs of
self-publishing"
Journal Inquirer Lifetime's Desperate "Army Wives"
Journal Inquirer (op-ed) "The Rape Trail: America doesn't
get it," by Kristen J. Tsetsi, Stacey
A. Silliman, and Laura F. Alix
Journal Inquirer "Implants: A Complex Decision"
PRODUCTIONS
Theatre of the Invisible Guest, 2000 "Girl on a Swing," One-Act
"Gun in the Corner," One-Act
Short Film, Fargo Film Festival, 2000 "The Fittest," Adaptation
Martin Jonason, Director
____________________Awards/Prizes___________________
(Asterisks correspond with starred stories listed above)
* Finalist, Scribes Valley Short Story Contest, Nov. 2005
** 1st Place, Voodoo Flash Fiction Competition, Jan. 2006
*** 1st Place, Storyglossia Fiction Prize, Oct. 2006
- Pushcart Prize Nominee
- Million Writers Award list of notable stories, 2006
**** 1st Place, Edifice Wrecked Flash Fiction Competition, Oct. 2006
Other award(s):
Robert Carothers Distinguished Writers' Award, May 2000
[Click here for an unusual interview conducted by authorPhilip Persinger]
I've seen your name/your book in connection with Backword Books. What's that?
Backword Books is a collective of indie authors whose novels have, without the benefit of having a traditional publisher, proven themselves with the most important audience: readers and critics. Some have even achieved wide media coverage. While not opposed to traditional publishing (and, in fact, we're in favor of it), we recognize indie publishing as viable option and strive, through our collective, to make known that good self-published work IS out there. For more information and a list of Backword Books' books, click the link above. Each of us has a book on Kindle, as well. (BW members include R.J. Keller, Chris Meeks, Henry Baum, Andrew Kent, Bonnie Kozek, Eddie Wright, and myself. So far. We're growing.)
Where did you get the idea for Homefront?
Experience. My husband deployed to Iraq for a year, and I started writing Homefront several months after he came home.
Do you have a sequel published or on the way?
No sequel. Homefront tells the story I wanted to tell, and it ends at the end.
Who is your favorite fictional character?
Ethan Allen Hawley from The Winter of Our Discontent.
Do you have a blog?
"A Little Office in a Little House" can be found here.
What advice do you have for people who take writing advice?
It's all outlined here.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
OPERATION E-BOOK DROP
An ever-increasing number of writers are joining this effort to send free e-books to troops deployed overseas. If you would like to learn more, either as someone who knows a deployed troop or as a writer who would like to participate, click here.
SEND CARE PACKAGES
... EVEN IF YOU DON'T KNOW DEPLOYED MILITARY
This website tells you what will be most useful to deployed troops and how to send a package to random service members overseas.
Visit USVIA, an organization founded by combat veteran Howard C. Romans III, for more ideas.
BOOKS FOR SOLDIERS
A soldier support site where volunteers send letters of support and "Care Packages for the Mind" to deployed military members of the US armed forces. Items often requested are books, dvds, video games and relief supplies.
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KRISTEN J. TSETSI
Copyright (c) 2010 Kristen J. Tsetsi
