In the Dust Zone

In August 2001, New York City writer Maggie Dubris was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. On September 11th, she responded as a 911 paramedic to the World Trade Center attack. This book began as her story of being thrown across the great divide, into a world where the landscape, both inner and outer, is destroyed in an instant. This illustrated book weaves her experiences into visions of a now vanished Afghanistan, an eye-witness account of Pliny's death in the eruption of Vesuvius, the journal of the writer's great-grandfather, caught in the throes of ague fever. Drawings layered into the text are threads in a tapestry of dislocation, drawn from an "enemy land" whose people spent years wandering in the Dust Zone. The book moves through a world where no one can ever see clearly no matter how many times they rinse out their eyes. Drawings and text become entangled, time jumbles together, language begins to fray and Pashto words creep in.