The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Malnourished by Cinthia Ritchie

This selection, chosen by guest curator and Sundress intern Victoria Carrubba, is an excerpt from Malnourished: A Memoir of Sisterhood and Hunger by Cinthia Ritchia, released by Raised Voice Press in 2020.

Excerpt: Prologue

Memory is a funny thing, isn’t it, how it adds and subtracts, takes something as simple as watching a whale swim along the shore and mixes it up in your mind so that your sister is there beside you, even though she’s been dead for years. Still, this is what you remember: the wind and the smell of the marsh, the silver-blue tint of an Alaska twilight spreading the water, and beyond it all, the small and simple feel of your dead sister’s hand slipping inside of yours.

What else can you possibly do? You tighten your grip. You hold on.

Cinthia Ritchie is an ultra-runner who spends a ridiculous amount of time running mountain trails with a dog named Seriously. She’s a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a recipient of Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award, Alaska Arts Council Connie Boochever Fellowship and Hedgebrook and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts residency fellowships. She’s the author of Dolls Behaving Badly (Hachette Book Group) and Malnourished (Raised Voice Press), with work featured in New York Times Magazine, The Water-Stone Review, Evening Street Review, Sport Literate, Best American Sports Writing, Mary, Into the Void, Bosque Literary Journal, The Hunger Journal, Clementine Unbound, Deaf Poets Society, Forgotten Women anthology, Nasty Women anthology, Gyroscope Review, and others. She divides her time between Alaska and Tucson.

Victoria Carrubba is a senior English Publishing Studies student at Hofstra University. She is currently a tutor at her university’s Writing Center and a copyeditor for The Hofstra Chronicle. She has also worked on her university’s literary magazines, Font and Growl, and was previously a fiction editor for Windmill Journal. Outside of work, Victoria can be found reading, dancing, or drinking chai.