RAZOR WIRE WILDERNESS
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“Maximum Compound time doesn’t flow; it pools around you, goes stagnant. Each day is similar from the view of a locked world, a day hard and long to get through, and the years flying away.” Violence, victimhood and redemption converge in stunningly personal new true crime memoirNEW YORK – Perpetrator. Bystander. Victim. Longtime author Stephanie Dickinson straddles the lines of true crime and memoir in Razor Wire Wilderness as she examines the lives of those affected by violence in this immaculately assembled account that takes readers directly inside incarceration and face to face with inmates. Krystal Riordan watched as her boyfriend beat a drunk teenager to death in a vermin infested New Jersey hotel room. Could she have stopped it? Could she be his next victim? Now, Krystal is serving a maximum 30-year sentence, while the man who beat the teenage woman to death is about to be released. And it’s no anomaly, with studies showing more than 80 percent of women who fail to stop their partner from committing a violent crime serve more prison time than the perpetrator. What does it take to survive in a maximum security lockdown for 30 years? Is it possible to thrive? The answers only lead to more questions in Dickinson’s raw and emotional look into the criminal justice system and how it’s failed not just one but countless victims of violence. And what unfolds is a beautiful depiction of moral ambiguity, loss and redemption within the confines of the prison walls and beyond. Praise for Stephanie DickinsonRead Andrew Kaufman's review of Razor Wire Wilderness
“‘That was before…’ Before things go badly for Krystal Riordan, an inmate at a Correctional Facility in N.J., and for Lucy, her prison friend, and for Stephanie, the author herself. Before and after are different in this powerful, riveting, wise, detailed, and heartbreaking book. The past is never distant and affects every decision in this compassionate, well-paced book where the three women’s lives, as well as the juxtaposition of several others, are intertwined. Dickinson’s writing is lyrical and emotionally charged. Who is the victim and who is the perpetrator? Is there a wrong time and place? Or are events the cumulation of history or fate? This is a visceral book of wounds and choices. As the author says, ‘We cannot fully abandon our former selves, but we can go beyond them.’” “Part memoir, part true crime, and part meditation on the resilience of the human spirit, Razor Wire Wilderness is penned with precision and grace. Due to Stephanie Dickinson's unique ability to identify and magnify the personal details that are often unknowingly or willingly overlooked, this book transforms the way we see not only the complexities of a tragic crime but also the way violence becomes embedded in our lives and collective social systems. At its core, this is a story about friendship, but it is also about survival, what happens to us, and what we get to decide during our brief existence. It is about the way we live when we are caged, be that literally or figuratively, and the beckoning light of genuine human connection.” “Stephanie Dickinson writes with the beauty of a wounded angel. The protagonists in these eleven stories are achingly real, so natural that they craft their own lives. Most, but not all, are women; most, but not all, are young. Each has met humanity’s dark underbelly—through war, predation, neglect, the crueler vagaries of family—and felt the jagged elbows of alienation. And yet, like the ‘Flashlight Girls Run’ of the title, they power on with a particular awkward grace that makes these stories hard to put down, and impossible to forget. Gorgeous, heartbreaking, empowering stuff!” “Despite the haunting beauty of Dickinson’s language, naked is possibly the best way to describe her prose. Naked emotion. Naked observation. The warts and the pimples of living presented with the same intensity and honesty as the finely curved hips and thick auburn hair that give life its pleasure. No one writes like Stephanie Dickinson, except maybe God.”
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“In the ‘Razor Wire Wilderness’ of Stephanie Dickinson’s exquisitely lyrical portrayal of female incarceration — intimately researched by becoming pen pals with many inmates over many years — she reveals her own dark attraction and identification with Krystal Riordan... It is not, ‘There but for the grace of God go I,’ but because of Dickinson’s grace and amazing god-given talent that she is able to take us into the heart, mind, memory and imagination of Krystal, passive accomplice to a nightmarish crime. In prison where there is no weather, Dickinson manages to encompass the great Outside; her rendering of Maximum Compound is the opposite of a claustrophobic read. Like Hamlet, bound in a nutshell, Dickinson is king of infinite space, Infinite empathy, and the Infinite beauty of bad dreams.” 
