The Wet Collection

by Joni Tevis

Joni Tevis’s concern is with the precise relationship of components in the world: how one element in an environment interacts with others. How does the antique taxidermy in a natural science museum relate to the living birds outside the window? How do the opals found by campers, stored in mineral oil to conserve the water trapped inside, relate to the water table? “My practice is observation. How do relationships illuminate?” Using such models as Joseph Cornell’s box constructions, crazy quilts, and specimen displays, Tevis places fragments in relationship to each other in order to puzzle out lost histories, particularly those of women. Throughout The Wet Collection, the narrator navigates the peril and excitement of an outward journey complicated by an inward longing for home.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Science, Memoir

192 pages, Hardcover

First published June 14, 2007

About the author

Joni Tevis is from Easley, South Carolina, and is currently finishing a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. Tevis has published in Isotope, Dislocate, AGNI online, Texas Review, High Plains Literary Review, Pleiades, Rain Taxi, and the New Review of Literature, among others. The Wet Collection (Milkweed Editions, 2007) is her first book.

Her writing has appeared in Orion, Oxford American, Shenandoah, Conjunctions, AGNI, The Bellingham Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. In 2006, she was awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina, and teaches literature and creative writing at Furman University. She is at work on a new book of nonfiction about ghost towns, tourist traps, and atomic dread.