Review of Dots & Dashes in The Military Spouse Book Review!
I met novelist Andria Williams a number of years ago, when we spoke together on a panel women writing war at the annual AWP Conference; Andria and I were the two “milspouses” on the panel, both of us Navy wives. In addition to being a terrific fiction writer, Andria also runs the cool and necessary site, The Military Spouse Book Review which, as the title indicates, features reviews of books that are either written military spouses or that might be of interest to military spouses.
Andria has always been really supportive of my work (you can read a review of Stateside here and a review of The Arranged Marriage here). This kind of generosity shouldn’t be taken for granted. All of this is to say I’m particularly grateful that Andria is now featuring a review of Dots & Dashes over at The Military Spouse Book Review. And, even cooler, the review is written by another wonderful military spouse writer, Alison Buckholtz, author of the memoir Standing By: The Making of an American Family in a Time of War. Here’s a little excerpt from Alison’s review:
Nestled amid these revelations are implicit communications with another audience: readers who are military spouses themselves. As a Navy wife, I can attest to the electrifying feeling of seeing my own situation represented so honestly and fully in print—in poetry—for the first time. Stateside was a revelation, allowing me to place my experience within a larger literary and historical context while showing me that I was not alone.
I first met Alison Buckholtz a long time ago too. She had given a reading as part of an author’s roundtable at my parents’ synagogue, and my mother acted as a kind of matchmaker to introduce us. In those days, there were only a very few men and women producing what might be called contemporary war literature about America’s 21st century engagements overseas, and the number of milspouse writing about being “married to the military” was an even tinier group of people. Alison was the first other military spouse writer I ever met, and I still think of us as two of the founding members of that small club. So, it means a lot to have Alison review Dots & Dashes; I can’t imagine a more ideal reader for the collection. You can read the whole review here.