December 2, 2017
Personal icon Lidia Yuknavich writes about my new novel A LONG CURVING SCAR WHERE THE HEART SHOULD BE: “Wikswo peels back history to image, lyric, and the body so viscerally I felt my skin shiver. Under the belly of the south where its very sex sits, the women in this story bring themselves back to life.”
The novel is a semi-memoir, hybrid novel with photographs that explores the conjectural and factual legacies of my mixed-race queer family in the 1930s Virginia rural heartland outside Charlottesville, Virginia. Lidia’s own work is fearless in its examination of life at the crossroads of marginalization and liberation, which is the very essence of my novel.
The book can be ordered wherever such things are sold, but if you choose to divest in the corporate marketplace you can order directly from the publisher here. Paperback is slightly cheaper, but the hardback has paper that makes the photographs sing.
This book was supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, the Lynchburg City Cemetery, Yaddo, the Theo Westenberger Estate, and other funders but my gratitude extends to my relatives and the storykeepers in Virginia, South Carolina, and Tennessee who have kept the light in the window burning for those of us who draw our heritage from the marginalized, obscured, yet vital inhabitants at the margins of a bigoted culture. We will overcome.