Bodies of Water
Marylee MacDonald
Type: Beta project
Genre: Literary, short story anthology
Word count: 80,000
Warnings: Swearing
Bodies of Water moves across four continents, finding in each body of water that mirrors human life in the act of deciding. A blind man learns to see again. A widow negotiates with an Amish carpenter. A wood turner waits thirty years for a stolen Bible to come home. Precise, compassionate, and luminously written, this is a collection to savor.
Bodies of Water collects fourteen stories from a writer who has spent a lifetime paying attention. The settings range from a nursing home in suburban Illinois to a Greek fishing dory in the Ligurian Sea, from the Ore Mountains of East Germany to the banks of False Creek in Vancouver. The characters are equally various: firefighters and phlebotomists, art dealers and wood turners, a Haitian nurse’s aide, a Bosnian refugee, a ventriloquist’s dummy buried in a California garden.
What connects them is water — and what water has always represented in human life: danger and sustenance, memory and forgetting, the boundary between the life you have and the life you might have chosen. Each story places a character at that boundary and watches, without judgment and with great precision, what they do next. Some jump. Some surface. Some reach for the phone. All of them are unforgettable.
Marylee MacDonald is a writer and retired carpenter. Her short stories have been widely published in literary magazines. She has won the Barry Hannah Prize, the Jeanne M. Leiby Chapbook Award, the American Literary Fiction prize, and many others. She is the author of Montpelier Tomorrow, a novel, and also a memoir, Surrender.
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