Small Fires
Essays
This is a daughter's story. In "Small Fires," Julie Marie Wade recreates the landscape of her childhood with a lacemaker's care, then turns that precise attention on herself. There are floating tea lights in the bath, coddled blossoms in the garden, and a mother straddling her teenage daughter's back, astringent in hand, to better scrub her not-quite-presentable pores. And throughout, Wade traces this lost world with the same devotion as her mother among her award-winning roses. "Small Fires" is essay as elegy, but it is also essay as parsing, reconciliation, and celebration, all in the attempt to answer the question--what have you given up in order to become who you are?
Julie Marie Wade is the author of Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010) and the poetry collections Without (Finishing Line Press, 2010) and Postage Due (White Pine Press, 2013). She has received the Chicago Literary Award in Poetry (2004), the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize (2004), the Arts & Letters Nonfiction Prize (2010), and an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council (2010). Wade has a Master of Arts in English at Western Washington University and a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh and lives with her partner Angie and their two cats in the Bluegrass State, where she is a doctoral student and graduate teaching fellow in the Humanities department at the University of Louisville.
