Jenny Ruth Yasi has lived and sailed for over thirty years from a small island off the coast of Maine. In her twenties, she recorded and toured New England and also France as a singer songwriter and storyteller, but when she got busy raising her children, training dogs, growing food, working on the family boat and testing herbal concoctions, she rarely left the island and focused on writing. Over the past few years Jenny's short stories have won The Richard Carbonneau prize for short fiction from Stone Coast Writer's conference, and been anthologized (in Women Behaving Badly, and also in Liberation Literature). Her self published collection of Home Remedies and Recipes from Peaks Island, with their funny successes, failures, and hope of changing the world, is being revised and updated for re-issue this spring. Like most islanders, Jenny is an expert at cheap thrills and loves to share what she knows. She substitute taught for many years at the island school, loves to swim, sail, dance, play guitar and perform stand-up comedy. You can see some of her stand up comedy, hear her music, and check out her dog training AND her duck training videos on http://www.youtube.com/user/yasijenny.
Jenny's formal education was through the University of Maine, Stonecoast writers conference, Vermont College of Norwich University, and through self-designed studies in behavior science and character development with some of the best animal trainers in the world. She blogs at www.jennyruthyasi.blogspot.com, and also www.jennyruthyasi.com, and on Facebook.
When Jenny does travel she is interested exploring community more than tourist sites. The Whole Stunned World, set between Boston and Burma, was a novel that required extensive research, and thousands of miles of travel. Jenny's perspective on the world was profoundly enriched and enlarged through her interviews with Burmese government in exile, former political prisoners, refugee intellectuals and their children building communities in exile, in jungles. It took a decade to write.
In 2012 Jenny and her husband found an old sailboat in Puerto Rico and sailed it home to Maine with one dog aboard, now are getting ready to sail around the Atlantic, probably departing Portland harbor in August 2016, crossing to the Azores. In preparation for their departure she is completing her many writing projects, including a collection of short stories which will be ready for publication this spring.
“A stirring political drama about upheaval in Burma and the emotional consequences wrought for generations.”
– Kirkus Reviews
BOOK REVIEW
The Whole Stunned World
BY Jenny Ruth Yasi • POSTED ON June 3, 2010
A stirring political drama about upheaval in Burma and the emotional consequences wrought for generations.
Yasi has been publishing short stories for years, but this is her first book-length effort. The story begins in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1999 with a moment of acute emotional epiphany: Eleven-year-old Burmese-American Bobby finally discovers that the man who raised him is not his biological father. His real father, a pro-democracy poet, has been missing for years in war-torn Burma; he’s now presumed dead. Bobby’s mother, Gurney, a native Burmese photographer and activist, tearfully confesses his genuine patrimony, and she’s forced to confront a Pandora’s box of painful remembrances. The narrative quickly vacillates between Cambridge and a tumultuous Burma in 1988, deftly juxtaposing the nation’s frightening turmoil with the heart-wrenching agitation Bobby’s mother and her cadre of friends and family suffered. Complicating this visceral tinderbox is the possibility that Maung Naing, Bobby’s biological father and Gurney’s lover, may be alive somewhere and still working with forces opposing the military junta. While much of the work is propelled by dialogue, Yasi’s prose can sometimes strike elegiac notes: “They brought her something to eat, sometimes dried fish in the rice, but not lately. Gurney watched the guard’s face. It was in itself, a square, hungry face. It’s easier to look at a face, to forgive what you see, than to forgive broken ideas.” Dedicated to the Burmese people, the work is a ringing testament to the nation’s modern struggles, especially timely given its recent political transformation.
A complex tale that adeptly balances history with personal drama.
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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