Scars. This item is unavailable.Scars

Nadia Bruce-Rawlings has written a collection of stories with a dark humor and candor that only someone with a survivor’s gratitude can. She takes us on a journey that cracks open family secrets, illustrating the evolution of dysfunction from its very core. She reminds us, as children we do not get to choose our surroundings, while relying on our parents for protection, love, and nurturing, preparing us for our own adult journey into the world, and that more times than not, this isn’t the case. Because parents get abused and scarred, by their parents who got abused and scarred, by their parents, and so on. And with each generation the trauma grows, becoming a collection and a reflection of an ongoing tradition of generational abuse. This book is written based on Nadia’s experiences on the front lines of her own personal battles with child abuse, domestic violence, molestation, addiction, crime, cutting, incarceration, and recovery. After hitting a bottom so hard with only two options left, life or death. Nadia drives home the sad and brutal truth that not everyone gets that choice. Many do not live to tell. This book is written for them, an epitaph. This book is also a love letter and a promise that there is hope for a better life, written for the ones that are still out there, still fighting their way in, and not out, who have lost their way, and still collecting scars.

Nadia uses grains of her often, gritty life to infuse her stories with cathartic realism. Her stories “Fire” and “Scars” have both been finalists in Glimmer Train’s writing contests and are included here in SCARS, her first anthology from Punk Hostage Press. Nadia Bruce-Rawlings grew up travelling the world and living in various countries before settling in Los Angeles. In LA she briefly worked at a vitamin factory and then began a long career in independent film distribution. A single mom for 11 years, she and her new husband have settled into the Nashville area, where she writes by the lake when she can escape their five kids and two dogs.