I Just Lately Started Buying Wings Missives from the Other Side of Silence

A finely crafted debut, winner of the 2009 Bakeless Nonfiction Prize Kim Dana Kupperman's essays plumb the emotional and spiritual depths of a transitory life. Her episodic "missives" cover territory from the chaos of a frenetic childhood to love affairs, failed and otherwise, to the Chernobyl nuclear accident, to an ocean-crossing search for her Eastern European roots. In confident, lyrical prose, Kupperman leads the reader through a winding gallerya collection of still lifes and portraits, landscapes of loneliness and love.

Kim Dana Kupperman's work has appeared in Best American Essays and many literary journals. She is the founder of Welcome Table Press and works as a managing editor of The Gettysburg Review.

I’m preoccupied with how the practice of secret-keeping begins, with putting my finger on the origin of behavior as easily as I might touch a map to locate a town or a river. Perhaps pinpointing these intersections—of time and geography, the movement of ordinary lives along those continuums—will help reshape a memory fractured by omissions. —from “Teeth in the Wind”