WINNER OF THE NOEMI PRESS BOOK PRIZE IN PROSE! (To be released in October 2019)
Almonds Are Members of the Peach Family explores what happens inside a family, a culture, a body when violence goes untreated, embedding itself in flesh and collective memory.
Almonds is a book, fiber arts exhibition, and performance. Blending oral history, scientific findings, public record, memoir, photographs, song, and ephemera, it centers upon the making of an heirloom crazy quilt (a form of scrap quilting) that meditates on the effects of intergenerational trauma and the myriad ways gender violence passes from one body to another. First-hand accounts of domestic abuse, war, rural poverty, migration, alcoholism, and severe disability in four generations of one mountain-dwelling family across two continents are embroidered onto fabrics and into fractured narratives (a textual approach to scrap quilting). The quilt itself, pieced together from conventional and unconventional textiles, and the documentation of its making are an inquiry into the ways trauma is and is not assuaged by the repetitive rituals of domestic work and handicraft.
Almonds Are Members of the Peach Family explores what happens inside a family, a culture, a body when violence goes untreated, embedding itself in flesh and collective memory.
Almonds is a book, fiber arts exhibition, and performance. Blending oral history, scientific findings, public record, memoir, photographs, song, and ephemera, it centers upon the making of an heirloom crazy quilt (a form of scrap quilting) that meditates on the effects of intergenerational trauma and the myriad ways gender violence passes from one body to another. First-hand accounts of domestic abuse, war, rural poverty, migration, alcoholism, and severe disability in four generations of one mountain-dwelling family across two continents are embroidered onto fabrics and into fractured narratives (a textual approach to scrap quilting). The quilt itself, pieced together from conventional and unconventional textiles, and the documentation of its making are an inquiry into the ways trauma is and is not assuaged by the repetitive rituals of domestic work and handicraft.
This project has been made possible with support from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Excerpts were first performed at Luna's Poetry Unplugged in Sacramento, California, with special thanks to Frank Andrick and Art Luna.
