The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated

Sarah Minor

The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated revisits the true story of the Lykovs, a family of Old Believers who survived in the Siberian Abakhan wilderness alone for 42 years. The book then uses commentary in the form of myth, fairytale, scholarship, and personal narrative to unpack what it means to tell stories about women in the first place. Joseph Harrington writes, “The collision of history and myth creates a liminal space between inside and outside, permitted and forbidden, wildness and tameness, content and form, body-text and margin. A mother who eats her children and a mother who won’t eat so her children can.”

“138. Narrator: Two ideas walk into the woods and are mistaken for witches.

222. Narrator: If a woman makes a dying sound out in the wild. If a woman makes a praying noise.

224: Fairytale: Though she gnaws, she tears—her teeth are iron clad—Baba cannot pass out of the wood. Now that she is old.

And you wonder why she eats them.”

SARAH MINOR is an essayist and designer from Iowa. She curates a series on visual writing at Essay Daily and teaches in Athens, Ohio, where she is a doctoral candidate in Creative Nonfiction. Her work appears, or is forthcoming, in Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, The Normal School, Passages North, and Pank. She was recently awarded first place in Hotel Amerika’s TransGenre Writing Contest.