Dispatches from the Drownings
Dispatches from the Drownings
Reporting the Fiction of Nonfiction
Disturbed by stories of drownings in the river behind his home in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, writer B. J. Hollars combed the archives of local newspapers only to discover vast discrepancies in articles about the deaths. In homage to Michael Lesy's cult classic, Wisconsin Death Trip, Hollars pairs reports from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century journalists with fictional versions, creating a hybrid text complete with facts, lies, and a wide range of blurring in between. Charles Van Schaick's macabre, staged photographs from the era appear alongside the dispatches, further complicating the messiness of history and the limits of truth.
Hollars's book is rich with the magic dust of history, and full of strange characters, accidents, and miracles.'--Drunken Boat
Unlike anything else you will read this year. . . . This thoroughly local tale has global implications, as the reader must consider the fact that all writing, all narrative transmission, is both 'true' and somehow less than 'true' at the same time.'--Los Angeles Review
B. J. Hollars dispatches death and dying and time and place in this new Spoon River Anthology, in this reboot of Wisconsin Death Trip. His Dispatches from the Drownings is new news. Reading, you will hold your breath. You will surface and sound again and again. You will be resuscitated and come back on now sublimely dry land transformed.'--Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Four for a Quarter
In this fascinating blend of fact, fiction, and photography, B. J. Hollars offers a chilling exploration of death by drowning in the waters of Wisconsin. Through historical collaboration and artistic collage, Hollars considers how the facts we're left with after unexpected (and unbearable) loss shape shadows from what will never be known. This book is at once a commentary on the limitations of journalism and the slipperiness of storytelling. Hollars has created a mesmerizing experience for the reader, an experiment that re-creates the way our minds piece together stories from the murky depths of what is there and what is imagined. I read this in one sitting, and I'll read it again.'--Jill Talbot, editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction
This book is at once a commentary on the limitations of journalism and the slipperiness of storytelling. Hollars has created a mesmerizing experience for the reader, an experiment that re-creates the way our minds piece together stories from the murky depths of what is there and what is imagined. I read this in one sitting, and I'll read it again.'--Jill Talbot, editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction
B. J. Hollars is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. His most recent book is OpeningtheDoors:TheDesegregationoftheUniversityofAlabamaandtheFightforCivilRightsinTuscaloosa.
