Spring 2022 Black River Chapbook Competition Winner

"There's no such thing as society," Margaret Thatcher famously-and cruelly-proclaimed. "There are individual men and women and there are families." Through three stories in Ten More Things About Us, Nancy Welch illuminates the consequences of this philosophy-writ-policy in the very particular lives of women who labor to care for family as devastating illness frays familial ties and tests social consciousness.

-----

I just finished reading Nancy Welch's brilliant TEN MORE THINGS ABOUT US. I'm writing from a hole in my heart because she's managed, through impeccable handing of detail, to remind me of life as it is, not the lucky life we sometimes live on the border of catastrophe. I love the way the stories overlap, points of view shifting, names and circumstances changing. Yet the stories resist the magnetism of chapters to stand alone, each one nudging us into recognition. Nancy Welch has written a powerful book.

Hilda Raz, author of Letter from a Place I've Never Been: New and Collected Poems

In this astute and moving collection, Nancy Welch shines a light on caregiving as both a personal and cultural act. Welch's portraits of families navigating illness and frailty are intimate, tender, and a pleasure to read, but her skill at gesturing to abiding social questions makes this trio of stories impossible to forget. Fans of Claire Keegan, Edna O'Brien, and Elizabeth Strout, here's another author to cherish.

Maria Hummel, author of Still Lives and Lesson in Red

In Ten More Things About Us, like a highly skilled lapidarist, Nancy Welch guides us through illness and wellness. We meet people, broken and whole, as they navigate the multiple meanings of care, and also un-care. As one mother learns to let go of a home full of history, another demands that her daughter bring her meals. This book, like life, is held together by women's unpaid labor-by teachers and nurses, by family, both kin and made. And because Nancy Welch makes legible such labor with such extraordinary compassion, as a reader, I found myself, like Trudy, "practicing at being in no hurry."

Tithi Bhattacharya, co-author of Feminism for the 99%