![]() Since the recession hit two years earlier, he’d been making money fixing up old homes in the area, doing everything from painting to drywall to roof repair. That’s what we did over the summer, my father and me. Up close, though, one could see the chips in the paint, the cracks in the plaster, the repairs that were so desperately needed. Far away, the church looked magical, rising from the pages of a fairytale. When I returned home, the steeple was a comforting sight. Maybe that’s what was missing my first year away at college, all the way across the country in California. From my childhood apartment to the living room of the duplex where I received my first kiss from the landlord’s son to the small split-level my parents were able to buy when I was in high school, there was always a church steeple in the distance. I’ve always lived within view of a church steeple. ![]() Upon revisiting an old playground outside the Elk Lodge where the Sasquatch Society has gathered, the narrator asks herself, “How could you have believed?” This story, along with so many others in Girl Country, answers that question by surfacing these near-constant threats and the countless ways they can dampen one’s capacity to trust, showing how, even still, there is magic waiting out there somewhere, just ready for the narrator-and for the reader-to find it. The narrator’s growing interest in the Sasquatch Society and whether Bigfoot actually exists reflects the search for meaning in the wake of horror and whether there even are spaces of wonder and faith, let alone safety, for women in this world. And the woods themselves are named after the legend of a dead woman. ![]() Boys gaze with predation across bonfires in the woods. In the aftermath of the narrator’s experience, menace lingers on every page, built by Vogtman’s expert description. Early in the story, she imparts, “Something happened that I wanted to forget, something that damaged the part of me that believed, like a scratch in a record so I could no longer hear God’s voice.” Vogtman weaves together the idea of belief as lapsed religious faith-the narrator was raised in a Catholic family and still seeks its comfort even as her spiritual practice has waned-with belief as recovery and also belief in the voices of those impacted by sexual violence. “How could someone have so much faith in Bigfoot,” she ruminates, “when God and even people were so hard to believe in?” This early interiority sets the tone for the story’s virtuosic meditation on the multiple meanings of faith, from religious belief to magical thinking to trust in other human beings in the aftermath of trauma.Īs the story unfolds, the first-person narrator slowly unveils that she won’t be returning to college due to her family’s financial circumstances and that in the recent past lies the memory of sexual assault, an attack she is still concealing from her parents. ![]() In “BI6FOOT,” a young woman returns from college for the summer and joins her father in fixing up her hometown’s main church, a project that draws her into contact with the town’s Sasquatch Society as they hunt for Bigfoot. From gender-based violence to economic constraints to looming environmental collapse, each story revels in the possibility of magic and how belief in the fantastic can coexist with near-constant menace. Girl Country is a blade-sharp book of eleven stories that don’t shy away from the ever-present threats that women face in this world. Finding Bigfoot Is Easier Than Finding MyselfĪs a longtime fan of Jacqueline Vogtman’s work, I screamed at my desk when I saw the announcement that she won the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize.
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