We Imagined It Was Rain

by Andrew Siegrist

Hailed by ZZ Packer as “a master of tone, detail, and imagery”, Andrew Siegrist’s debut collection We Imagined It Was Rain is a love song to Tennessee. These loosely connected stories are imbued with tenderness, seriousness, and a deep understanding of the human spirit. A young man moves to the mountains and builds an heirloom chest in the wake of his son’s death; a town official must make the decision to execute a circus elephant; two siblings help their father commit suicide; a preacher picks up the pieces of his ruined church, and his marriage, after a devastating flood; locals share stories of the girl with eyelashes so long she can braid them. Siegrist demonstrates careful attention to the smallest moments, to the rain on a windowpane, to individual mementos passed down through generations, in this far-reaching and thoughtful collection.

We Imagined It Was Rain is the winner of our 2020 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize.

Genres: Short Stories, Southern, Fiction

196 pages, Paperback

First published October 12, 2021

About the author

Andrew Siegrist is a graduate of the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. His debut collection of stories, We Imagined It Was Rain, was awarded the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize and published by Hub City Press in 2021. His work has appeared in the Mississippi Review, Arts & Letters, Greensboro Review, Pembroke Magazine, South Carolina Review, Bat City Review, Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Nashville, Tennessee.

Reviews

[Gabby Wood · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved reading this compilation of short stories by a local Nashville author. The stories were incredibly intertwined in ways that had me so excited.

[Marlin Barton · Rating 5 out of 5]

We Imagined It Was Rain is a beautifully written collection of stories that continually mines the very real lives of its characters while it simultaneously explores the mystery and the mysteriousness that life offers all of us if we’re paying attention. A great debut for Andrew Siegrist. I highly recommend the book for anyone who loves short stories.

[Danny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. It's got an elegiac bent--every story is being told after the fact of a loss or a death or a personal tragedy. But it's almost whimsical in the details, or at least idiosyncratic. And I'm jealous of how comfortable the author is with storytelling in the Southern idiom. As a lifelong southerner, I have some connection to the land but I'm too filled with cynicism about it to feel comfortable telling stories that aren't more damning. These stories aren't damning, but they are realistic about human relationships.

[Linda CH · Rating 5 out of 5]

LCH Read

[Wilson Koewing · Rating 5 out of 5]

Siegrist writes some of the most gorgeous prose I've ever encountered. This book is a love letter to his home state of Tennessee. A must have addition to any reader of American Southern writing.