Water and Blood

Published by: Dzanc Books
Release Date: April 2022
Paperback: 180 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1950539437

Winner of the 2020 Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize

In Water and Blood, the nameless narrator, a survivor of abuse, tries on other women’s stories like she is trying on their clothes.

There is the nun who learns to swim decades after witnessing her biological sister’s 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 women’s stories for herself―overlapping 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.

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Praise for Water and Blood

“Julie Ann Stewart’s stories bind the reader’s attention to themselves with the vividness and strength of ‘hoops of steel.’ Are we reading fiction, or history, or a new and potent mixture of the two that in the end names and embraces its author: she has inhabited these stories, and now they inhabit her—or is it the other way around?”

— Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab’s Wife

“These are stories of trauma and grief and casual violence perpetrated upon women. Stories that the narrator re-lives and re-tells. It’s a remarkable form—storytelling as a form of resistance—and the effect is cumulative: they are stories of courage and resilience, yes, but also about the toll that such resilience takes. With prose that manages to be both lithe and modest, Stewart has conjured not just whole worlds, but whole lifetimes. A stunning collection.”

— Brad Felver, author of The Dogs of Detroit

WATER AND BLOOD

Praise for Water and Blood

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