Fissured Tongue Series

White-Winged Dove's Song
by Wendy BooydeGraaff
and Susan Wider 
​Fissured Tongue Series Vol VI  |  May 2025​

"Wait" by Ann Wong WanYee. Oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm, 2023

White-Winged Dove's Song

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About the Authors 
Susan Wider’s nonfiction has been included in Orion, Wild Hope, and Bird Watcher's Digest, and her middle-grade biography It's My Whole Life: Charlotte Salomon, An Artist in Hiding During World War II (Norton Young Readers) won the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for Young Adult Literature. Her next book is forthcoming with Scholastic Focus in 2026. http://www.susanwider.com   

Wendy BooydeGraaff’s poems have been included in Cutleaf, Barzakh, About Place Journal, Dunes Review, and anthologized in Under Her Eye (Blackspot Books), Midwest Futures: Poems & Micro-Stories from Tomorrow's Heartland (forthcoming from Middle West Press, March 2025), and Not Very Quiet (Recent Works Press). https://www.wendybooydegraaff.com

Susan and Wendy’s collaborations have appeared in Cheat River Review (now Hellbender Magazine) and The Gravity of the Thing.

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About the Work
​Wendy and Susan have a regular habit of phone calls to discuss writing. Susan is often watching her outdoor bird feeders during these calls and cannot resist commenting on the bird visitors. One day she tried to describe a white-winged dove. Wendy mentioned later that she couldn't stop thinking about the bird. Her thoughts became poetry and Susan replied with nonfiction snippets about the doves.

“White-Winged Dove’s Song” became their first collaborative piece, with others published in The Gravity of the Thing, Cheat River Review (now Hellbender Magazine), and a book-length work-in-progress.

About the Artist
​​Ann Wong WanYee obtained a BA in Visual Arts from Hong Kong Baptist University in 2020, and I currently live and work in Hong Kong and Sweden.
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​"I use different media to record and reflect on trifles in life. In my works, I explore the possibilities among media by duplicating, extracting, covering or simplifying individual elements and then combining them in a specific way." https://wanyeeann.com/ 

Wong's art piece, "The Thorns of Anxiety," is this volume's featured cover art. ​

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