M.Evangeline - marlenaevangeline.com

The star of M. Evangeline’s “The Whiskey Eaters” is the language that gracefully weaves its way through this collection of stories of modern-day wranglers (“wranglers of consciousness,” that is). The prose is poetic and powerful and also a little bit like the abundant whiskey drinks found in the stories: edgy, substantial, something to be savored. Author Evangeline, who studied literary theory at California State University, San Bernadino and poetics and modern fiction at the University of Alabama, serves up a bit more than two dozen offerings, including such standouts as “Midnight Plums,” a dark tale of a schoolboy who is strangely late for dinner, “The Ride,” a breezy essay about sex and Harleys, and “Cowboy Poetry,” which includes the following passage:

“But at the moment, the fresh apple pie, and something in the poetry of late afternoon caught their attention, and a shared grin crawled up both fresh faces, landed in their eyes, twinkled there like prairie stars. Right then, right between those twinkling prairie stars, a swirl of afternoon wind riled up my ankle length skirt, twirled the gauzy fabric into a ferris wheel twirl, dazzled my skirt around me like country-bright lights: a haze of cardinal-red and canary-yellow and mountain-bluebird whipped together in a carnival of whirling colour. My waist blond hair glimmered into the wild blowing fabric, and I danced a wild little dance trying to balance that wind-blown pie. We all trembled there in that moment, like three two-stepping rhymes crowded into the same open air seat, rising the over the crest of a sparkling ferris wheel. The three of us. The two cowboy poems and me.

Stories in “The Whiskey Eaters” revolve around the community of Wilson, Wyoming, but there is universal appeal here as well —for hope, despair and desperation are visitors to the doors of everyone. While the book will not find favor with all readers, it is nonetheless a delight to relinquish an appreciative grin here and there as Evangeline’s literary magic unfolds.

Jackson Hole News: Review

Angus Thubermeyer

The Whiskey Eaters
REVIEW JACKSON HOLE NEWS

“Whiskey isn’t for everyone. Whiskey eating appeals to a smaller group. So, too, the desire for The Whiskey Eaters, a collection of short stories about workers culture in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, may be an acquired taste. Marlena Evangeline’s first book, The Whiskey Eaters, may first seem inaccessible. As she tours the bars, restaurants, characters and consciousness of behind-the-blitz Jackson Hole — drawing from her own lengthy tour of duty in the Wilson underground — the author shucks convention. Evangeline constructs, spells and punctuates English the way her characters live life. She rides one word into the next, creating a succession of images resembling a Jackson Hole waitress’ busy day.
Readers race through stories as if following characters who spin through morning coffee, grab their Croakies on the run for breakfast, squeeze all from a day of untracked powder skiing, rush a cocktail on the way to work, learn the specials, criticize the tips, then close down the Coach in a pre-dawn blur. Along the way they meet a town full of characters — carpenters, skiers, dealers, anglers, drunks, mothers, vagabonds, who are the muscle of the valley. The ones who make it operate.
And along the way, Evangeline’s quirks become irrelevant as her language melds with her subjects’ actions. Her tone and style match her subject as if there were no more appropriate method to tell of her community.
The Whiskey Eaters is a quick trip though 25 years of the Wilson Dream, that perfect life we covet at the Rocky Mountain resort. On the way, we brush past the gifted and the garbage, the driven, the drunk and the doomed.
Evangeline’s stories range from the dream-like tales to the documentary. Long-time valley residents will recognize several of her protagonists. Others are shrouded, familiar only because of a single trait of idiosyncrasy.
Ultimately, Evangeline is successful in reproducing the fabric of her world. Here, as she waits tables, she ponders the mundane and the philosophical, linking the two in a swirl of thought.
“The sign says if your order isn’t up, don’t stand in the pass-through and , that if you ignore the sign, there will be consequences to pay. What the sign doesn’t know is that I’ve paid my consequences, paid time and again, and if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be standing in the pass-through, waiting for a porterhouse steak, medium rare, garlic potatoes and sauteed vegetables to serve to the hungry middle aged couple in the dining room, maybe almost my age, maybe older, hard to say , may own body refusing its age, mostly still holding the muscle, an aged prime cut, telling, but distinct, showing perhaps, in defeat, a different kind of hunger. Consequences cannot be managed, arranged like the table setting, forks, knives, plates, but like most managements these dits think they control consequence like some sort of religious consecration as if management were some sort of high f-ing priest of the business world, chanting managese like hail Marys, asking employees to bow to their particular machine like modern pilgrims, smile, bow, consecrate themselves in the money machine.”
The Whiskey Eaters is an inside look at a tribe whose history to this point has been only oral. Evangeline has preserved a portion of that heritage.