In August of 2001, New York City writer Maggie Dubris was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Three weeks later, on September 11th, she responded as a 911 paramedic to the World Trade Center attack. In The Dust Zone began as her story of being thrown across the great divide, into a world where the landscape, both inner and outer, is destroyed in an instant...

In The Dust Zone is an illustrated book that weaves the strands of this experience into visions of a now vanished Afghanistan, an eye-witness account of Pliny’s death in the eruption of Vesuvius, the journal of a young man who would become the writer’s great-grandfather, caught in the throes of the ague fever. The drawings layered into the text are threads in a tapestry of dislocation, faces and sights drawn from an “enemy land” whose people spent have years wandering in the Dust Zone. As the book progresses, moving through this world where no one can ever see clearly no matter how many times they rinse out their eyes, drawings and text become entangled, time jumbles together, language begins to fray and Pashto words creep in. The reader travels across this canyon as the authors did, to finally emerge, somehow still walking, and connected to a larger human experience by their time spent in this strange and terrible place.