Water and Blood

Dzanc Books

Water and BloodAuthor(s): Julie Stewart\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Dzanc Books, United States\nImprint: Dzanc Books\nISBN-13: 9781950539437, 978-1950539437\nSynopsis\nWinner of the 2020 Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize\n\nIn Water and Blood, the nameless narrator, a survivor of abuse, tries on other womens stories like she is trying on their clothes.\n\nThere 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.\n\nOut 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 th.