Water and Blood

(Paperback)

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Winner of the 2020 Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize
In Water and Blood, the nameless narrator, a survivor of abuse, tries on other womens stories like she is trying on their clothes.

There is the nun who learns to swim decades after witnessing her biological sisters drowning in the Ohio River. The rape victim whose deathbed statement is interwoven with the imagined voice of the rapist. The young girl who is sent to stay with her alcoholic grandfather while her parents care for a sick child.

Out of scraps of reclaimed history and imagined memories, the narrator creates a garment of womens stories for herselfoverlapping the seams between fact and fiction, doing what women do: cleaning and restitching the wounds of trauma, making a life with the things that are left over after everyone else has taken what they need.

Author Bio

Julie Ann Stewart earned an MFA from Spalding University and has published stories in Good River Journal, Litro Magazine, PoemMemoirStory and Punch Drunk Press. In Sophie Speaks, Stewart explores the challenge of balancing creative and family life as she recopies Anna Karenina by hand as did Sophia Tolstoy for her husband. Now that their seven kids have flown the coop, she and her husband migrate between Indiana and Michigan.