Overview

To live while drowning. To endure without expecting rescue. Water is a raw and luminous collection of poetry that wades deep into the currents of trauma, mental illness, and survival. With the wise voice of an old mountain woman-weathered, wise, and unwavering-Grandma Urchin holds the water still long enough for us to peer beneath the surface. From the bleak and unrelenting weight of grief to the flickers of light scraped together in the darkness, her poems uncover profound beauty and goodness in unlikely places: a graveyard, a night snowstorm, the banks of a creek where a beloved horse lost its life, old vinyl records. She speaks from her heart, and from her own personal struggles with autism, schizoaffective disorder of the bipolar flavor, and dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder). From a lifetime of physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional hardship, Grandma Urchin offers not solutions, but solidarity. This book is for the ones awake at 3 a.m. in hospital wards and hollow places, for those navigating diagnosis, their identity, and the aftermath of abuse. Water is a companion, a candle in the fog, a quiet voice saying: You are not alone. There is still something worth finding. Please keep going.

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9781038339607

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Grandma Urchin is both an Appalachian and a Renaissance woman. She is a poet, mother, teacher, scientist, farmer, entrepreneur, artist, and advocate. Her life has been shaped by tragedy, survival, and the quiet strength of defiance. Raised in a fundamentalist cult, with a chronic medical condition since infancy, she writes from a place of deep personal experience-where pain is real, beauty is hard-won, a chance at freedom demands deep struggle, and truth emerges through the prism of water. When not writing, she currently spends her days working with special education students at a local public school. She can also be found practicing her homesteading, tending a small menagerie of animals on her Appalachian farm, and embracing the rhythm of rural life. Grandma Urchin offers her words simply as they are: a steady hand for those navigating darkness, a quiet reminder that freedom and healing are possible.

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