reprinted with permission from workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

If You Say So is a set of true stories about loss and reinvention, longing, loneliness, friendship, community, and family. It’s also about grief, and the way it lives in the body—and joy, and the way it lives in the body too.

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And, which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

“Enjoy” is such a funny word when it comes to writing! (Or is that just me?) I mean, if I’m not writing (something, anything), I feel pretty miserable, so just working on a new essay or story or novel is enjoyable by comparison (my paternal grandma used to say, if I complained about being bored and unhappy, “Go bang your head against the wall”—presumably to make me better appreciate the feeling of not banging my head against the wall—but I digress). Still, I guess I could say that the two essays I most “enjoyed” writing were the one called “Old House” (both because it required me to do research on the turn-of-the-twentieth-century house I’ve lived in for going on four decades—and research with a personal angle is one of my favorite things—and because I wrote it in the months directly following my retirement from full-time university professing, thus wrote pretty joyously all the livelong day) and the one called “On Balance,” because I wrote it very fast and with great certainty, clarity, and ease, which doesn’t happen all that often (and which, come to think of it, is a pretty meta thing to say about this essay).

The one that gave me the most trouble was the book’s final and title essay, “If You Say So.” I started writing it in the immediate wake of a close friend’s death, while still in the thick of dealing with it (not just my grief, but all of her belongings and everything else that a death leaves behind), which in itself made it hard to get my arms around (but I felt I had no choice—I had to write it, then and there; I feared that if I didn’t, my heart and brain would explode), but I also had to figure out what it was “really” about, which took a while and a bunch of drafts.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

I could tell a long version, full of heartbreak, but as I went on at such length in my answer to the last question, I’ll just say this, about the lows: My former literary agent read it and said, “Nope, can’t send out a miscellaneous essay collection! Nobody’s publishing them.” My current literary agent declined to read it at all (“What’s the point?”). And so I sent it out myself, carefully–agonzingly. The “high” in this road is having landed at Galileo Press, where working with my editor, Barrett Warner, has been a dream.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

If you’re stuck, it’s most likely not a writing problem—it’s a thinking problem.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I wrote each of these essays separately over a period of about five years. When I put them together—and especially when I read the final one in the context of the others—I was stunned to see the threads that ran through all of them and bound them tightly together. So, not a “miscellaneous collection” at all! When I revised them as a whole, now thinking of them as a whole, I kept that surprise in mind . . . and let myself be surprised along the way, all over again.

What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?

This book is a love letter: to my friend Judith—who used to say, “If you say so,” sweetly and utterly insincerely, whenever I said something she didn’t agree with or just didn’t want to hear (which was often)—and to the tight community of serious amateur dancers we were, and I still am, a part of; to my father, who looms as large in my life a decade after his death as he did for the six decades before it; to all the rest of my human family, as well as all the animals (the dog who was supposed to be mine, but who was singularly devoted to my father; the dog who was supposed to be my daughter’s, but was singularly devoted to me, and was my closest companion and only consolation after my father’s death; and all the others—including, most painfully, the pandemic-adopted puppy whose life story is at the heart of the essay “Animal Behavior”) I have considered family; the Victorian-era house that has come to feel like part of me; and, well, to be completely honest, just about all the other things and people that constitute the story of my life. (Except for a few things/people that it’s the opposite of a love letter to, like my high school boyfriend, or a love/hate letter to, like the cigarettes I smoked for fifteen years.)