Vintage DB 96: Quintan Ana Wikswo’s “Oh Appomattax, This Antidote is Our Undoing,” DB 12

This week’s vintage pick is a great example of how different art forms can compliment and enhance each other, creating fuller, richer stories, such as Quintan Ana Wikswo’s “Oh Appomattax, This Antidote is Our Undoing.” While this piece did appear in the Short Short Fiction section of DB 12, Summer 2010, it is much deeper than just a short story. By telling it alongside her photographs taken at the site of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia and nearby at the midwives’ burial section of the Lynchburg Old City Cemetery, Wikswo not only weaves a new tale, but keeps alive the stories of thousands of dead who never had the voices to tell them.

“Claudine arrived in pale lavender. Maw admired Claudine’s red hair, the Irish in her still new and glistening, not tarnished to the ashen pewter sadness of most of Lynchburg’s white people. Claudine had no tarnish yet. She was young and new. Maw knew the penny had fallen into the muck, but she could retrieve it yet, and burnish it to orange on her hem.”

Quintan Ana Wikswo has long been active in the collusion and collision of art and social justice. Her conceptually-based interdisciplinary projects integrate her fiction, poetry, memoir, and essay with her original photographs, performance, and video. Her more than 35 projects are published, performed, and exhibited internationally. Her several books include the acclaimed collection of photographs and stories The Hope Of Floating Has Carried Us This Far (Coffee House Press); other work appears in magazines such as Tin House, Guernica, Conjunctions, the Kenyon Review, and Gulf Coast, and as well as in anthologies, artist books, and exhibition catalogues. She holds multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and others, and multiple residencies at Yaddo, including the Pollock-Krasner Residency. She is a member of PEN USA and serves as guest artist, visiting lecturer, and strategic advisor at multiple arts institutions, including the Millay Colony, NYU, and many others. She lives in rural Northern New Mexico, and when necessary in New York City, where she can regularly be found performing. For Wikswo’s full bio and other pieces from her vast collection of work, visit quintanwikswo.com

Click here to enjoy “Oh Appomattax, This Antidote is Our Undoing”