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Cloud Diary
In the world lovers create for themselves, it’s the simple images and quiet gestures that linger in memory. A silent moment together on a bench, a hand loose upon a table, a voice carried across a crowded room.
Doug is quiet and aimless when he meets Sophie, an extravagant, excitable artist. They live together on box wine, ramen and peanut butter until their world is fractured by violence. Eight years later, they rediscover each other as Sophie approaches a startling decision.
Cloud Diary is Doug’s story about Sophie and the shattering, transformative nature of intimacy. In considering the ways our histories can both scar and rescue us, it reminds us that the past is never simply the past.
“A delightful and accomplished novel. Cloud Diary is a winning blend of metaphysics and box wine, of sticky-floored dive bars and lofty artistic passions. Steve Mitchell renders love and mortality with precision and without sentimentality. Nuanced and compassionate, Cloud Diary is a tribute to the ever presence of the past, and how it might help us become whole.”
-Michael Parker, The Watery Part of the World, Everything Then and Since
“With his spare, delicate sentences and poignant observations, Steve Mitchell takes us deep into his characters, and, in turn, into ourselves—into our own past loves and romantic longings. This story of Doug and Sophie is more than just the experience of being in love—it’s about the deep roots and long tendrils that love can leave for all of us. Cloud Diary is a powerful story that is both beautifully crafted and deeply felt. Holy fuck, I love this book so.”
-Frances Badgett, Contrary Magazine
“A beautiful, bittersweet novel about first love—how it forms us, how it settles in us and lingers, consoling us even to the end of our days.”
-Kim Church, Byrd
Doug is quiet and aimless when he meets Sophie, an extravagant, excitable artist. They live together on box wine, ramen and peanut butter until their world is fractured by violence. Eight years later, they rediscover each other as Sophie approaches a startling decision.
Cloud Diary is Doug’s story about Sophie and the shattering, transformative nature of intimacy. In considering the ways our histories can both scar and rescue us, it reminds us that the past is never simply the past.
“A delightful and accomplished novel. Cloud Diary is a winning blend of metaphysics and box wine, of sticky-floored dive bars and lofty artistic passions. Steve Mitchell renders love and mortality with precision and without sentimentality. Nuanced and compassionate, Cloud Diary is a tribute to the ever presence of the past, and how it might help us become whole.”
-Michael Parker, The Watery Part of the World, Everything Then and Since
“With his spare, delicate sentences and poignant observations, Steve Mitchell takes us deep into his characters, and, in turn, into ourselves—into our own past loves and romantic longings. This story of Doug and Sophie is more than just the experience of being in love—it’s about the deep roots and long tendrils that love can leave for all of us. Cloud Diary is a powerful story that is both beautifully crafted and deeply felt. Holy fuck, I love this book so.”
-Frances Badgett, Contrary Magazine
“A beautiful, bittersweet novel about first love—how it forms us, how it settles in us and lingers, consoling us even to the end of our days.”
-Kim Church, Byrd
226 pages, Paperback
Published May 15, 2018
5 people want to read
About the author
Steve Mitchell
3 books7 followersSteve Mitchell is an award-winning writer and journalist, published in december magazine, Southeast Review, storySouth, Red Fez,The Tishman Review, and Contrary, among others. His novel, Cloud Diary, was published by C&R Press. His book of short stories is The Naming of Ghosts from Press 53. He is a winner of the Curt Johnson Prose Prize and the Lorian Hemingway International Short Story Prize and has been nominated a number of times for the Pushcart Prize. He has a deep belief in the primacy of doubt and an abiding conviction that great wisdom informs very bad movies. He’s co-owner of Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, NC. where he lives with his partner, writer Deonna Kelli Sayed.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 18, 2019
This book is so many things! Engaging, deep, difficult, suspenseful, mysterious, but most of all, it’s beautifully written and a story well told about people I grew quickly to know and care for. Steve Mitchel writes about a unique relationship, what is gained and what lost when difficulties arise, and how sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. He captures the flavors of a certain style of artist community in a medium size city. The deft descriptions of this lifestyle early in the book truly offer a glimpse into a rarefied world. The story, as it unfolds and turns, remains grounded in this world.
April 18, 2019
“All these people I’ve been, I am still. They’re dolls nested inside me, uncovered or cracked open by a scent, a song, a glimpsed gesture or face; whatever illuminates a memory for an instant.”
With writing like this, Steve Mitchell hooked me on page one and held me transfixed until the end of CLOUD DIARY.
Doug and Sophie are in love. But an unsurmountable tragedy unravels their love and scatters them. Years later another tragedy reunites the pair in an even deeper, more meaningful way.
CLOUD DIARY is gut-punch moving and often even painful to read, but Steve Mitchell’s mesmerizing prose is the kind that makes other writers cry, ”Damn, I wish I’d said that!”
With writing like this, Steve Mitchell hooked me on page one and held me transfixed until the end of CLOUD DIARY.
Doug and Sophie are in love. But an unsurmountable tragedy unravels their love and scatters them. Years later another tragedy reunites the pair in an even deeper, more meaningful way.
CLOUD DIARY is gut-punch moving and often even painful to read, but Steve Mitchell’s mesmerizing prose is the kind that makes other writers cry, ”Damn, I wish I’d said that!”
February 24, 2019
Full disclosure: I know the author / he’s from my city. You should still read this book if you like literary fiction.
The story of Sophie and Doug contains extraordinary circumstances at times, but completely realistic ones. It’s full of beautiful observations of ordinary things, seen through the emotional lens of human experience. The characters are vivid figures, understandably inadequately prepared to face tragedy. Not that they’re unlikeable — quite the opposite — but these are human beings with virtues and flaws, who don’t always react heroically, and need to move forward with both guilt and courage.
The story of Sophie and Doug contains extraordinary circumstances at times, but completely realistic ones. It’s full of beautiful observations of ordinary things, seen through the emotional lens of human experience. The characters are vivid figures, understandably inadequately prepared to face tragedy. Not that they’re unlikeable — quite the opposite — but these are human beings with virtues and flaws, who don’t always react heroically, and need to move forward with both guilt and courage.
November 28, 2019
This book covers several tough issues - love lost, self evolution/reflection, how true are our memories, love realized, assisted suicide, … My book club was fortunate to have the author Steve Mitchell speak with us. Fascinating book.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews