In her collection of stories, Yes, No, I Don’t Know (2026, Cornerstone Press) Kathryn Gahl gives us characters teetering on the sharp edges of life.
A woman married forty-nine years not sure how much longer she can stand it. A young woman who wonders if maybe this time the man she meets at a bar will see her for who she really is. A young man who sees something he can never unsee. A woman in prison who cannot find forgiveness. A father trying to care for his daughter despite unbearable pain. And others for whom longing and hope is too often met with disappointment.
Gahl’s central question seems to be, “How long can we bear a thing before it rises to a moment that will change everything forever?”
At times Gahl’s taut prose echoes the pulses of hard desperation, agitation, and aggression. At other times, scenes are soft and expectant, refreshingly so. Gahl gives us situations that are complex and messy, resisting easy resolutions, but always real. Life in Gahl’s stories is at once ordinary and gritty, and we wonder how characters will emerge whole, and yet they do. Joy, like humor, comes in brief doses, but life is like that too. Sometimes there’s nothing one can do but laugh.
Franz Kafka wrote that we “ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?”
Startling, heartbreaking, and often agonizingly close to our own grief and fears, Yes, No, I Don’t Know asks us to confront life at its most elemental. Surely Kafka would approve.
Disclaimer: Kathryn Gahl is my friend. I am also the editor and publisher of her beautiful volume of poems titled The Velocity of Love, which I urge readers to read if they haven’t already.