Justin Armstrong's WYOMINGS
WINNER OF THE LIT PUB'S 3RD ANNUAL PROSE CONTEST
A story of time-travel and undying love, Wyomings is a fiction that emerges from the author’s real-life fieldwork as a practicing anthropologist, from a life spent studying ghost towns, remote islands, haunted highways. In the tradition of Sebald, Borges, and Calvino, the author carves a carefully fractured and reassembled memory-scape about how, after a violent rupture in time, people’s ghosts arrived to erase them.
Wyomings is the rough assemblage and translation of the diaries and field notes of a narrator imprisoned in the refuge of bent loops of time, chasing a vanished love through an endless series of Befores, through a multiplicity of lives as time unravels and decays. The few who remembered what it was like in the last days were left with only fragments of fragments of memories, obscured and scratched. The last remnant of the Old Era, Wyomings is the story of dozens of tiny particles, solar systems of abandoned time, epistles to lives-once-lived and sunburned fables.
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PRAISE
“This is what happens when you live inside a dream not knowing if you're the dreamer or the dreamed. When you don't know if you're trying to escape or go home. When you don't know if you're human or something adjacent, if you are chasing or being chased, if your memories are disappearing or being taken. This is what happens when you lose the lover you've loved through a million lifetimes. This is what happens when you try to find her. In these lushly landscaped dreams, Justin Armstrong ushers us through a story of grieving across time and space, across countless iterations of Wyomings. These pages plot an impossible escape from inevitable history. They chronicle foiled attempts to reconcile love and loss, and through meticulous imagery, they express the precise and painful ways we experience love.” —LENA BERTONE, author of Behind This Mirror
“A dreamy love poem spanning thousands of miles with enough darkness to keep it grounded and heartbreaking.” —SHANE JONES, author of Light Boxes
“There is this thing called ficto-criticism and then there is Justin Armstrong‘s ghostworld of the High Plains where Wyoming slides next to Freud’s Vienna or Kathleen Stewart‘s places on the side of the road as a new capital of dreams, ethnographic hauntings and recast memories.” —ALLEN SHELTON, author of Dreamworlds of Alabama
"Mapping a hallucinatory journey across time, space, memory, and emotion, Justin Armstrong creates a slipstream-dream—a jigsaw puzzle of imagination and ingenuity." —N. J. CAMPBELL, author of Found Audio
"Gosh, this book is beautiful and deadly. It's a mystery like Twin Peaks is a mystery—less about solution and more about what will always remain unknowable, the strange and uncanny in the worlds we know and those we only guess at." —AMBER SPARKS, author of The Unfinished World and Other Stories
"This story is wind, and bone, and a beautiful feral haunting across a shifting geography, creating memory inside of a rendering of time, and love, and loss. This text continues to tell stories long after the last word on the page—a blood sacrifice made in a river constantly trying to find its way home. Dissolution and building of worlds, lives folded against each other, builds a language that will stay forever with the reader. Wyomings is a song, and the process of listening to this text is a letting go as well as a letting in, the story tugs always, toward a beginning and a reconciliation." —JORDAN OKAMURA, author of Gaijin
"There are books that are about another time, another place, or there are books from another time, another place. And then there is this book, Justin Armstrong's lyrical longitudinal study, Wyomings, that choreographs and chronographs a gross of unsquared dances, surveying, section after section of griddled prose, precincts and burroughs and townships and jurisdictions and counties and states of beforing and being and becoming and anding. Read the tender telegraphy of each piece, the quantum mechanics of spectural light. The ethereal prose can be read as elongated titles affixed to a wall of pain sample chips, scaled to define the 200 shades of white that is the space in the space below the cloud of text — gloss, eggshell, flat, flat, flat of flat." —MICHAEL MARTONE, author of Michael Martone and Winesburg, Indiana