Alterations

"In the city where I was born there is a collective of women taking apart donated wedding dresses. Seam ripping and taking off lace, uprooting stitches and unstringing beads—one by one by hand in their spare time." A collective of women gathers to painstakingly turn wedding dresses into burial garments for infants. “Like many collectives whose existence and skills might seem unfathomable, most of us won’t know about them until there is a need to know,” writes Winrock. It is when confronted with the loss of her own unborn twin child that Winrock learns of their transformative work and begins to create a garment herself—made of language. Threading together stories of textiles and texts, from the first space suits and the seamstresses who made them, to Emily Dickinson’s famous white dress, to the Steinian rhythms of Goodnight Moon, Winrock constructs and reconstructs an essay that might begin to accommodate devastating loss. A work of process and possibility, Alterations enacts the hidden labors of mourning.