VESUPIA · AN IMPRINT BY ANNA ALLARD-VEILLON
Where story meets strategy.
The imprint of Anna Allard-Veillon — author, former legal executive, paralegal, poet, and designer. The catalog moves from practical legal form books to literary work about survival, family, silence, and power.
Echoes of Shadows
In 1974 a nineteen-year-old from Seattle hitchhiked to Nova Scotia because it was as far from home as he could get without leaving the continent. He came home to a pregnancy and a wedding.
He kept travelling after that. Just never with his wife. Never with his kids.
Fifty years later his daughter drove that first road herself — in December, alone, with his ashes in the car.
Johanna is deaf. She married young, raised her children, homeschooled them, worked as a paralegal in her husband's firm, and spent twenty-six years being told by him what had happened between them and how she had felt about it.
He wrote it down. Hundreds of pages: letters, emails, private journals she was never meant to read, and homework from a court-ordered domestic violence program. She kept every page.
Echoes of Shadows is built from that archive. His words appear exactly as he wrote them.
Between late January and the end of February 2008 — on bail, in a court-ordered class, with a plea deal pending — he wrote her fourteen letters in thirty-seven days.
Fifty years, two road trips, one archive. A book about who gets to say what happened.
Tues 22 Aug 95
To my future husband ~
You know, I often think about you. Especially when life no longer seems worth living. I try to remember that I have a future … and you’re part of it.
I wonder how I’ll meet you. Or when we’ll know that we’re meant for eachother. It could be immediately or far into our friendship. Or both.
I wonder if you’re someone who I’ve known for a while already, like someone from King’s, or if I’ll meet you at college, or elsewhere.
I wish you were in my life right now. How I long for your love and affection. I long for your embrace, your lips on mine, your words in my ear.
I want to go to coffeeshops with you right now. I want to walk along the beach with you. I want to be with you.
Right now, all my friends are drunken pot-smokers looking for a good lay. I know you won’t be like that. I need friends who don’t do those things.
I don’t know if I’ll give this compilation of letters to you on our wedding day or on a different day. I wish I could give them to you now, but I know it’s not God’s timing.
I love you. Remember that. You are a VERY special person.
🤍 me
Jan 11, 2008
Johanna,
I'm sorry I hurt your feelings. I'm dying inside. Please help me. Please?
One reason I know I'd fall apart if you left is how lonely I get waiting for you to wake up. I want to talk to you so badly, I can't even think. You just don't understand how weak a person I am. I need you so much.
I know you can't tolerate caretaking and don't feel like you can nurture anyone right now, even yourself. I know you believe I can't tolerate you.
But I wish, like I've never wished for anything before, that you could nurture me right now. I'd promise to nurture you back. I just can't do this alone. Please? I need someone I trust to hold me while I cry. I need someone to reassure me that I'm not a monster.
I was very angry yesterday. You haven't fucked me over for 8 years. Really stupid thing to say and I'm sorry.
Frank