Willow Springs Books is thrilled to announce that Jaclyn Watterson’s Ventriloquisms, 2016 winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, has officially released today, Oct. 1st!
“One of the great joys of being an avid reader of fiction is coming across a writer who makes you question the ways you have read stories in the past. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s like discovering a sixth sense, a new way of bearing witness and processing the world. Such was the surprise and delight I felt reading Ventriloquisms,” says Alexis Smith, judge of the 2016 Spokane Prize.
Ventriloquisms has been referred to as “harrowing, subversive, and gorgeously provocative,” (Melanie Rae Thon), “completely unafraid of the visceral,” (Tim Parrish) and “serious, hilarious, and highly recommended” (Stacey Levine). Watterson’s collection questions our conceptions of embodiment, family, and community through surreal vignettes, including a world where women are converted to infants (“A Baby Is a Dreadful Thing”) and a sequence where people’s bodies are converted to papier-mâché (“Ruby Jones and The Soup”). This evocative, imagistic prose ultimately weaves, in Seqouia Nagamatsu’s words, “emotional resonance, memory, and sisterhood… into every line.”
Jaclyn Watterson is left-handed, vegetarian, and of choleric temperament. She gardens in fair weather on a small balcony and makes her home with the novelist Michael Shou-Yung Shum and several feline companions. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Spectacle, New Delta Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Birkensnake, The Collagist, and several other venues. Jaclyn holds a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Utah. Ventriloquisms is her first book of short fiction.
To order your copy of Ventriloquisms, click here!