“ . . . there’s nothing eternal about the darkness of a single night and nothing more certain than that that darkness will not last forever—the dawn always comes, even when we don’t want it to or aren’t ready to see its brutal light.”
–from the title story of Certain Dawn, Inevitable Dawn
This debut collection of stories revolves around themes of art and violence, gender and love, childhood and isolation. The stories do not claim to offer answers, but are explorations of the questions we live by; how men and women see the world and each other differently, how they envy and love, destroy and evoke each other, how the psychic experience of violence—whether that of victim or perpetrator—leaves its mark, how chance reeks havoc on even our best moral efforts.
Certain Dawn, Inevitable Dawn was published by Woodley Press in December 2010 and was a nominee for the 2011 Thorpe Menn Award for Literary Excellence given by the American Association of University Woman.
Excerpts from the book can be found on this website on the “Writing” page.
Praise for Certain Dawn, Inevitable Dawn:
I invite you to read these stories, stories that shimmer from dim corners few dare to go—a cornfield in a nightgown, a nurse on a perilous road after dropping an infant, a fallen priest’s murder remembered in “prisms of light and shadow revolving in the treetops, silver leaves clattering in the wind,” the title story’s murderess who tells her own near-death story, and the wry narrator from the “wings” of art who abjures her boyfriend’s niggling hypocrisies—all corners of consciousness, all places true art speaks from. Here is one of the most original and engaging voices of our time. Come close to these fearless stories. As the narrator of Haas’s “What My Father Taught Me” discovers, “[I]f I could learn not to fear the dark I could learn not to fear anything.” Such a brave debut!
–Wendell Mayo, author of B. Horror and Other Stories, In Lithuanian Wood, and The Centaur of the North
I was completely taken in by this collection as these short stories that revolve around death travel in the territory between experience and the psyche—haunting hospitals, truck stops, bedrooms, and the wilderness they inhabit. The narrative space within these stories blurs the line between writer and reader, the forgiven and the condemned, he and she, and me and you. Tasha Haas knows how to pace a story, to slip the reader in with a nudge and cling. I was left questioning my assumptions about Fiction, as the different lenses in each story trumped what I thought I knew about being human.
–Dennis Etzel, Jr., Co-Managing Editor of Woodley Press
Haas’s work here is intoxicating, and even when her stories appear like brutal, fiery wrecks along the road, we cannot keep from slowing down and looking. What we see might be grisly, but we can only hope we engage with that scene before us with understanding and love and grace, and really look and see, and have that kind of vision Haas does.
–Kevin Rabas, author of Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano and Bird’s Horn