Wound Care

Product Description

An honest and vulnerable and urgent mosaic of narrative that accumulates meaning and definition with every page. The style is fresh and riveting, with a stark boldness and perceptive self-exposure.

Fred Leebron, Program Director, Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Queens University Charlotte. Author, Out West,Six Figures, and In the Middle of All This; co-editor of Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology; and co-author of Creating Fiction: A Writer’s Companion

An instant classic! Wound Care is gorgeous and heartfelt writings about the pain, and beauty of marriage, the devastation of divorce, loss of children, the blessings of four-footed friends, the foolhardiness of trying to rectify the familial past, and the unexpected tangles of the aging body. Furman weaves these threads through the book as a single connected strand, the interconnectedness that makes a life. I know of no other book so carefully crafted the one can sense the wholeness of the author’s life through the telling of its bits and pieces, its wounds and stitches.

Laurel Richardson, PhD, Author, Why I Love Ernest, Seven Minutes from Home and Love Twin. Distinguished Emeritus Professor, The Ohio State University, and one of the founders of autoethnographic narrative

How do you make sense of your life when the witnesses to it have gone? In this collection of flash (mostly) essays, Rich Furman fearlessly relates the spiraling journey through his wife’s chronic illness, the dissolution of their marriage, the distancing of his stepdaughters, and the love that sustains him. Wound Care thoughtfully demonstrates how relationships give our lives meaning—despite the wounds they can inflict—and how words have the power to bring healing both to writer and reader

Paula Carter, Author, No Relation

Rich Furman, through lyrical prose and detailed musings, offers a little-heard—but critically important—perspective in Wound Care: that of a man going through a divorce. The short essays are immensely readable and trace the journey of difficult midlife years. But Furman balances the pain with tenderness and lightness. The title addresses both physical wounds we experience, as well as emotional ones. Is one any harder to overcome than the other? Furman’s meditations ponder that important question and give readers knowledgeable insights into the human condition.

Rachael Hanel, PhD, Author, Not The Camila We Knew and We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger’s Daughter. Associate Professor, Minnesota State University Mankato

Rich lifts gestures and objects, and holds them up, with graceful power, and finds anger and despair at least as often as he finds grace. But he also finds words, and puts them in just the right place, that might help us make it through our own hard times.

Nicole Walker, Author, Processed Meat: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster, The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet and Sustainability: A Love Story and A Survival Guide for Life in the Ruins. Nonfiction Editor, Diagram and Professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona