Karin Hoskin, business manager at Caddis Collaborative, has been a voracious reader all her life, and she especially loves it when a friend publishes a new book. Recently, she read Inside, the World Is Orange, a book by her friend and neighbor Ellen Orleans.
Karin is a big fan of Ellen’s earlier humor books, including The Butches of Madison County. When Ellen published a memoir that dives into more serious waters, Karin was keenly interested. Karin loves memoir – she likes seeing how people get through really tough experiences in their lives – so Ellen’s new book was a perfect fit for her.
Inside, the World Is Orange is a memoir comprised of non-linear short prose and shape poems. The book moves between 1970s suburbia and a present-day assisted living facility where Ellen’s mother is dying.
When she read Inside, the World Is Orange, Karin was struck by an image of windowpanes. Speaking in her child narrator’s voice, Ellen writes, “You pull the top sheet to your chin and look at the window, divided into forty small panes…. Sometimes, when your mother reads to you on this bed…you look out this window. Sometimes, you see the outdoors as one, other times, it’s forty framed worlds. One pane holds an oak branch, another, rhododendrons. The plank seat of the swing. A slice of cloud and sky.”
When she read this passage, Karin happened to be sitting in her A-frame cabin in Roosevelt National Forest. She paused and looked out her own multipaned window. She knew exactly what Ellen was describing, as she, too, often thinks about the way individual panes frame the world she is seeing.
The windowpanes, says Karin, parallel the structure of Inside, the World Is Orange. Each of the book’s 28 short sections is its own story, but taken together the sections build on each other to create an entire world, a portrait of Ellen’s childhood and her parents’ marriage.
If you’re looking for an evocative memoir, Karin highly recommends Inside, the World Is Orange.
