This debut essay collection is inspired by the grief Maddie Norris experienced in the wake of her father’s death from cancer when she was seventeen. Norris uses a medical lens to examine the anguish that followed and likens mourning to wound care.
These linked essays examine grief from different angles, resulting in a multilayered exploration of why, contrary to popular belief, keeping wounds open is the best way to care for them physically and emotionally. Norris approaches the narrative through various topics—the investigation of body preservation, the history of skin grafts, and a deep dive into physical pain—all of them related to how she carries this fundamental loss.
By centering on the importance of mourning (a long-term practice frowned upon in Western culture), the essays unsettle conventional wisdom as the text pushes against the stereotypical notion of “letting go” and “moving on.” The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays thus unpacks the question: What happens when, instead of following steps prescribed by those outside loss, we let ourselves dwell in grief?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maddie Norris is the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work appears in Guernica, Fourth Genre, Territory, and Essay Daily, among other publications. Her essays have won the Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction from Ninth Letter and have been named as notable in Best American Essays. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.
ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER
Lindsey Deloach Jones holds a BA and MA in English from College of Charleston and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Seattle Pacific University. In 2021-22 she taught as the Writer-in-Residence at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities. She currently teaches writing online and in-person via WRITESHARE, the writers’ network she co-founded in Upstate SC, and for places such as Creative Nonfiction Magazine. Lindsey previously taught literature and fiction writing at Clemson University and served as Editor of Emrys Journal and Edible Upcountry.
Among other places, her essays have been published in Split Lip, Motherwell, Paste, Pigeon Pages, Brevity Blog, South Carolina Review, and Salvation South (as well as forthcoming in under the gum tree). She is a recipient of the VanderMey Nonfiction Prize, and an essay nominated by Pigeon Pages was recently a finalist for Best of the Web.
As a writer who often locates herself inside the tension between seemingly opposed forces—the spiritual and the practical, the mysterious and the mundane, the Mother and the Artist—Lindsey is interested in intersections. She likes to write herself out of (and occasionally into) tight spots. In this spirit, she writes a Substack called Between Two Things.
