IN THE DUST ZONE :: www.dustzone.com
written by Maggie Dubris
drawings by Scott Gillis

READ 1st CHAPTER CLICK HERE
READ 2nd CHAPTER CLICK HERE
READ 3rd CHAPTER CLICK HERE
READ 4th CHAPTER CLICK HERE
READ 4th CHAPTER CLICK HERE

IN THE DUST ZONE :: www.dustzone.com
written by Maggie Dubris
drawings by Scott Gillis

READ 1st CHAPTER CLICK HERE
READ 2nd CHAPTER CLICK HERE
READ 3rd CHAPTER CLICK HERE
READ 4th CHAPTER CLICK HERE

IN THE DUST ZONE :: www.dustzone.com
written by Maggie Dubris
drawings by Scott Gillis

READ 1st CHAPTER CLICK HERE
READ 2nd CHAPTER CLICK HERE
READ 3rd CHAPTER CLICK HERE

IN THE DUST ZONE :: www.dustzone.com
written by Maggie Dubris
drawings by Scott Gillis

READ 1st CHAPTER CLICK HERE
READ 2nd CHAPTER CLICK HERE

Chemical Synthetic Biology

Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the Promethean protagonist that Mary Shelley created out of words in the early 1800s, has been back in the news lately.   But this time only letters were used - As, Cs, Gs and Ts, the nitrogenous bases that are in our DNA--and the creature is not a giant but a microbe.

IN THE DUST ZONE :: www.dustzone.com
written by Maggie Dubris
drawings by Scott Gillis

IN THE DUST ZONE
written by Maggie Dubris
drawings by Scott Gillis

Introduction

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 together strands of this experience with 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, people emerge, one by one, somehow still walking, and connected to a larger human experience by their time spent in this strange and terrible place.

HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN TAPAS BAR

Actually, I just made that up. Still though, at
some point that either did or will happen!

Sweet sixteen and I hadn’t even had my first multiple orgasm, yet I found myself a nationally-acclaimed “sexpert”, with my opinions on teenage sexual habits and needs for sex education and contraception being sought out by Dr. Mary Steichen Calderone and John D. Rockefeller III.

I didn’t even know who Edward Steichen was, or that Dr. Mary was his daughter, yet I guest-lectured with her at a SIECUS (Sex Information and Education Council U.S.) convention.  It was held in the summer, and we took our meals together.  Sitting outside at a picnic table, we learned that the entrée was fish.

“I never eat seafood in the summer!” the elegant, patrician, silver-haired world-renowned doctor/former acclaimed stage actress/National Women’s Hall of Fame member exclaimed gaily.  “It is simply swarming with staphylococcus!”

I love that phrase--it should become part of the lexicon. Unlike my ex-husband, Robert, perpetually on the look-out for the meaning of life, I never experience existential dilemmas.  The way I see it, things are either simply swarming with staphylococcus, or they’re not.