Rancher

Limited Edition Hardcover

To heal is to be changed, to be, potentially, revolutionized by the fracture whose initial presence signals as a wound. For all of its pain, the fracture sends out new lay lines – new paths of inquiry that necessitate new modes of knowing and being-with. Rancher follows such paths into the uncanny territories of life after rape: What happens when a lie becomes the truth? What happens when the ghost haunting your house turns out to be you? Saterstrom considers these questions with the oracular input of saints behaving subversively, black widow spiders, and a host of ghosts and friends alike.

Praise

“Selah Saterstrom writes books that are alive, books that breathe and shape-shift and do whatever the hell they need to do. Sometimes it feels impossible to be alive, which means Selah writes impossible shit. She does it by being gracious enough to allow contradictions to share the same space, and allowing things to be what they are until they reveal themselves as something else, and allowing disparate similarities to collide when least expected. All of this is in the service of listening, loving, and some real-ass caring.” —Steven Dunn

“Maybe talking ‘around’ rape is the most interesting way to talk ‘about’ rape because in talking ‘around’ rape we enter rape’s surrounds. There a girl eats day-old Bear Claws from the Piggly Wiggly while her rapist sleeps soundly in his rancher with in-ground swimming pool. Or we learn that there, in rape’s surrounds, once, a long time ago, a girl was made into a saint for being raped, but then they canonized her rapist, too. There, or here, though, we also find schoolyard girls, lots of them, who, when asked, How do you solve a problem like…? know the answer is to chase the rapist down and kick his teeth in. In other words, in talking around rape, Saterstrom tells us all about it.” —Magdalena Zurawski

Interview

“Selah Saterstrom’s Rancher (Burrow Press, 2021) is a book-length essay which takes the form of a resurrection. Offering no diversions in the rigorous investigation of how to rest with the violence Saterstrom endured when she was young, the form of the resurrection gives way to an unseen community of women, girls, people who are not just survivors, but who are resistors. Rancher balances an inviting level of candidness with a formal syntactical style to examine why some sentences are believed and some people are not believable.Resurrection is what happens to anything interred, no matter how deep, no matter where. The shifts of the vessel containing what has been buried will bring it back eventually, though not always in the shape or living the life as we have previously known it. It’s less like a blessing or a punishment, and more like a guarantee. The loop of resurrection is also the shape of this essay. Can an essay be a resurrection, a burial, a space for action or reinvention, a site that diminishes the grip of resurrection? What place does resurrection have in your writing practice – particularly in essay writing?” —Julia Cohen and Abby Hagler for Tarpaulin Magazine, read the full conversation here

excerpt

“How do you solve a problem like Maria? is also a repeated pun in the religious blogosphere concerning a different Maria, Maria Teresa Goretti, who was eleven-years-old at the time of her death in 1902. Half a century later, Maria was the youngest person ever to be canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church. Another first: present at her beatification, both the saint’s mother and her murderer. Maria Goretti is the patron saint of sexual assault and rape victims. You might say that she is the patron saint of the #MeToo movement.” —”How do you solve a problem like Maria?” Full Stop