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is a writer. For 30+ years, she wrote on staff for Time, freelanced for Condé Nast, and became a ghostwriter. Then she was hit by a truck. After years of relearning to write, her work now appears in Oldster and three times a week at Dispatch from Bewilderness on Substack, where it’s a Bestseller in Literature.

1. What are you reading now?

I don’t read anymore, not the way I used to. My vision’s poor and my memory’s worse. I listen to audiobooks, then lose what I hear as I hear it. I press pause and rewind but still — when the book is over, I may remember how it made me feel, or recall a character, but rarely more than that.

Poetry is the one exception, it’s short enough to somewhat recall individual lines: Mary Oliver, Ted Kooser, Robert Creeley. This extends to my own writing, too. If you read something I wrote, it will be new to you. If I read it, it will be new to me, too. Sometimes it’s fun to be surprised, even delightful. That’s the plus side.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

That’s where reading still lives — back then, when I still could. Charlotte’s Web, Black Beauty, Pippi Longstocking, Island of the Blue Dolphins. I didn’t hide them from my parents; I hid inside them, lived in them, to some extent. I also drew endless families very unlike my own. Those were “stories,” too. I imagined their names and their ages, their smiles, their dinners, their homes.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

Reread is a hard word. Everything becomes a mixtape: a piece of this, a piece of that, a character here, a character there. No way to connect snippets to a particular author or book. Or no way to do so for long. One exception of sorts is The Little Prince, in which a boy falls out of the sky. I fell out of me and my first life — and landed somewhere I’d never seen as someone I’d never been.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

A loose soft sweater that wraps around me. With pockets — I like pockets.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

I try to be guided by this, though I don’t always succeed: “Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?”

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

My dog Wilby, who sustains me. His predecessor Biggy. And his predecessor Zeke. Also my cats, Jesse, Callie and Mr. Cat. I rescued each from a shelter; three were disabled when I found them. Strange to segue to birds, but I must mention them.

For many years, I built homes for birds from salvaged wood. Birds fly from Mexico to Montreal and back and are said to return to the exact same spot each Spring. The homes I built fledged about 1,200 birds each year for 16 years. I watched babies learn to fly.

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

Doctors said I wouldn’t be able to write again. This was accurate in that it did end my income from ghostwriting. The injury ended that. But there was one good result, although I admit this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. If a writer’s job is to make things new, a broken brain can help. There’s “new,” “fresh,” and “surprising” just about everywhere.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

I sing everywhere — when alone — and dance when inspired, also alone. I also make collages, some of which appear on my stack.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

My hopes for myself include my hopes for my daughter — for her to be healthy and happy. I hope, too, for pre-posthumous publication of my one, two or three books. Plus staying well – and writing – for as long as I can.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

Visiting my writer friends, Abigail Thomas and Nancy Aronie.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

Wilby, birds, words, prayer.

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Johanna Franzel is a writer, teacher, biodynamic craniosacral therapist, radio producer, and autoimmune intimate. Her studies include a masters in arts in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a training in documentary writing and radio from the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, and certifications in both neuromuscular therapy and biodynamic craniosacral therapy. Her most rigorous learning comes from over two decades of living with chronic illness, an experience that’s made her a passionate teacher of practices that help others connect to their own complex, bodied aliveness through language. Her upcoming book, Write Yourself Home, is a practical guide to living well in the body you have through embodied writing and gentle movement, and arrives from North Atlantic books on August 4^th, 2026. Find her via her Substack Permission Slips and at johannafranzel.com

1. What are you reading now?

I’m usually reading fiction, quickly, in the foreground, and then have a slower nonfiction work running in the background. I just finished Lauren Groff’s Wilderness and am gobsmacked that this period piece with almost no dialogue and a single, wordless protagonist could turn me inside out and create such gorgeous emotional beats. How’d she do it, Jane, how?? Other books I’ve devoured at high speeds lately: Lily King’s Heart the Lover and NK Jemisin’s The City We Became – so. good. On the nonfiction track I’ve been savoring Samantha Irby’s Quietly Hostile and Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

My mother emigrated to the U.S. from Sweden in the 70s, and so my childhood books were deep cuts of the Swedish canon. Beyond Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi there was Lotta and Ronja and Mardie and Emil, wild stories of feral and fierce children who ran away or accidentally ended up on a sleigh headed out of town or defiantly balanced on the ridge of the barn. Kids who stripped to their skivvies and danced around the spring bonfires. Tove Jansson’s Moomintrolls were prominent too, with their rotund strangeness and characters smelling of thunderclaps. I didn’t hide books from my parents (as a Gen Xer, our parents weren’t keeping a particularly close eye anyway) but I did have secret hopes to move through the world like those kids, free and brave and truthful.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

I don’t tend to reread books, but I do revisit Parker Palmer’s essay All the Way Down nearly every year. The short piece is part of Let Your Life Speak, the Quaker educator’s tiny beautiful book on vocation - but it is this particular essay, about Palmer’s descent into clinical depression and slow return, that’s offered real grace and reorientation. His writing is spare and unflinching, not offering a map so much as sharing the confounding mystery of his condition. The months he couldn’t leave the house, the friend who came over daily to massage his feet, the well-intended but misguided reassurances that did not land. Palmer explores the idea that somewhere in the whole mess some part of him was asking to be known. I’ve lived with Crohn’s disease for twenty plus years, and this was one of the first pieces of writing that reached through the noise to offer a solace I could feel. Treating my disease and its expressions as a friend trying to get my attention felt so much kinder than regarding my body as a failing mess. It was a relief to let go of the punishing and pat idea that things happen for a reason. Terrible shit happens. Full stop. And also living well in the body I have means orienting to a larger and more forgiving field of what’s possible.

(Coda: Every few years I also reread Jo Ann Beard’s essay The Fourth State of Matter so I can be quietly devastated by its exquisite perfection).

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

A tie between: 1) My old steel blue Carhartts: strong denim that’s perfect for gardening, absolutely without pretension, and utterly comfortable. Pants that fulfill my secret boring wish to wear the same easy beautiful thing every day.

2) Hot neon pink and red Air Jordans. A few years ago on a trip to New York I was blindsided (not a thing that happens for me with clothing!) by these bright shoes that have become my go to dance party kicks. I adore them truly and deeply. They infuse every space with insouciant joy and give me extra zip for getting down.

I have to admit that, taken together, the Carhartts and the Jordans do feel like an accurate portrait!

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

“Nature always pulls, never pushes.”

My dear friend Dr. Megan Poe (an artist, psychoanalyst, and galactic poet) shared this bit of ecological/biological wisdom with me, and it’s shifted both how I listen and where I listen from. I’ve done my time pushing for things that I wanted to be true: my body to follow my plans, my loved ones to stay pain free, the world to drop its machinations. But pushing for those things rarely yielded more than a compressed sense of life as immovable.

While I can definitely think of moments that called for pushing (giving birth to my child certainly comes to mind!) listening from the felt sense of pulling shifts something kinetically. What am I co-creating? What am I inviting in? What natural currents might we ride together towards a different way of existing? You might get curious about how this lands in your own field: first imagine that you’re pushing for something you hope to be true. Then pause, drop that posture and try pulling this dream towards you. In my body this feels much less like a desperate trying and more like opening.

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

I grew up with hamsters, a nameless goldfish, and a vicious cat, so I was more animal avoidant than attached.

And then, Charlie.

I was in my late twenties when my partner Jon and I adopted him, a Collie Shepherd mix who had already been given up twice and brought careening, unfettered energy in a 90 pound body. Charlie was a supremely gentle soul. He did not lick or cuddle, but preferred to work the perimeter, making sure his people were safe (swimming with him was a certain kind of hell; he’d scrape your thighs until you returned to shore, so strong were his instincts to shepherd). He romped in gladness at the word “pond” and was an excellent soccer player, though the balls were short-lived.

Over the years we grew into each other, becoming shared imprints of a certain way of being. During weeks I was too sick to move, Charlie sat by the bed, watchful and patient. When our daughter was born, he stayed close, sometimes leaning his big head on her infant body. Charlie died 10 years ago, but the mention of him still dissolves me. He schooled me in a kind of love I hadn’t known until then.

I’ll add that for a long time I was sure I could never love like that again. A year to the day later we adopted the red dog Rosie (rarest breed: the Mississippi porch hound) who howls sweetly at people she loves and trips going up stairs. And somehow, I love her too.

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

In my early twenties, after a rough year in New York City, I applied to a Swedish folk singing school, thinking this might be the antidote to a roach-infested apartment, protracted breakup, and barely scraping by. I’d constructed a whole fantasy of an alternate life in Scandinavia in which I’d return to the motherland and build a beautiful future of socialized medicine and easy harmonies. But I didn’t get in to the school. By way of explanation the director told me she’d dumped all the applications on the floor, closed her eyes and picked randomly. No American meritocracy here, just blind Nordic fairness.

That rejection sent me in a whole different direction, to working three jobs in Berkeley and eventually to Latin America, where I got hired as a teacher in a school in the Cloud Forest, discovering vocation, and as it turned out, lasting love. I wonder sometimes about the other timeline, then shake my head – thankful for this one.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

Emphatic yes. I do both often and enthusiastically.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

To be brave, inclusive, vulnerable, and wide. That whatever I’m writing learning teaching hearing can create a kind of circulation of support and becoming. To not get stuck in a single version of any story, to leave things mysterious, unfinished, still growing. To live from the knowing that my liberation is tied to yours. To show up, to show up fully. To tell the truth. To be rooted in an extravagance: towards this moment, towards the health that’s available even in the midst of deep illness. To be generous, to be misguided. To be earthbound. To sing loud. To dance in my skivvies around the spring fire like those bold Swedish kids from the stories.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

I can say without exaggeration or hyperbole that I’m alive because of kindness. Fueled by it. Frequently saved. A thousand examples come to mind, but here’s one from the tapestry: I’m in a secret rock band with two friends. We never actually perform or record, but gather every few weeks to make music and catch up and often cry and celebrate together. In 2019, when my body fell spectacularly apart and I could not move or sit up, Molly and Colleen came over with instruments and lay with me on the floor. I couldn’t really sing or play or speak but they held something beautiful and true and generous and deeply loving. I went into the hospital not long after, but that moment was a kindness of epic proportions, an unconditional we’re-here-with-you that made everything else endurable.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

Wide range. I equally love moving through the depths of grief and hilarious bawdy laughter, so perhaps we could also call this guiding force it all gets to belong. It’s why I teach embodied writing with the principles of reverence and permission. Reverence asks: Can we regard ourselves and each other with the same utterly accepting, non corrective lens we might offer a newborn? Just: Wow. Look at her and that holy perfection. Look at his immaculate eyelashes. And permission (which we could also call irreverence) knows not to take any of it too seriously, to listen from the inside out to whatever calls. Which might look less like writing and more like eating chocolate in the corner. The idea is to be so wide and inclusive that every part knows: You’re welcome here.

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’s work as a writer, architect, and professor navigates our time of climate collapse and environmental reconciliation. She is a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning, & Preservation. She holds a Fiction MFA from Southern New Hampshire University. She writes the newsletter on Substack, where she serialized her CliFi novel, FLUX. Julie has been published in the magazines Orion, Ecological Home Ideas, and Urbanite; and in literary journals: Assignment; Dark Mountain Journal #6, #8 and #10; Dark Matter #3 and Immanence. Her essay, “Song of the Chesapeake,” is included in the 2025 anthology, Dark Matter: Women Witnessing: Dreams Before Extinction.

1. What are you reading now?

Remembering Earth: A Spiritual Ecology, by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, which comes out from Shambhala Publications on June 23. It’s a beautiful meditation on our relationship with the living world and the transformative power of story. It includes presence practices to try outside, to reconnect and experience wonder.

Nina Schulyer’s marvelous forthcoming novel, Open the Floodgates, which will be released September 15. I love her audacious, imaginative premise, and who better to explore the personhood of a river than Nina?

Just finished Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke. Even though it’s been mega-hyped, I liked it more than I expected. It made me think and I’m a sucker for good metaphors.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

Charlotte’s Web and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret come to mind easily. Yes, they’re cliché, suburban American girlhood books. When I was 10, I secretly read the very racy (!!) Flowers for Algernon. I even remember why I had to hide it.

As a visual person, I’ve always loved picture books, so it was a treat to revisit my favorites when my son was little. Where the Wild Things Are, Harold and the Purple Crayon, and The Little House are close to my heart. I felt sorry for the innocent little farmhouse being bullied by the aggressively encroaching, dirty, noisy city. Sure, it’s cheap American anti-city propaganda, but I was smitten by that cute, anthropomorphized house.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

The book I’ve re-read the most is Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Partly for entertainment, partly to marvel at how she does it. I always learn something new about her craft, and I’m always in awe of the economy of her storytelling. The latest re-read, I noticed that it can be seen as an early foray into what we now call eco-fiction or climate fiction. The novel is set within a deeply felt, ever-present connection to nature.

I read Brian Doyle’s Mink River during the pandemic. Getting lost in his wit and real-life magical world was a salve to my extreme anxiety.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

Leopard print pajamas, which I’m wearing right now.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

I’m an obsessive collector of aphorisms, so this stumped me. How can I possibly choose? Yesterday, I read this from James Hillman: “We need to recall that we do not just make words up or learn them in school, or ever have them fully under control. Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us.” I love the idea that words choose us, not the other way around.

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

I live on a cove at the head of a creek. Our resident Great Blue Heron is endlessly fascinating. She doesn’t suffer close observation but will tolerate me if I keep a respectful distance. Her patience is a lesson. Her skill. I’ve watched her head dart under and come up with a wriggling fish in her long beak. She tips her head back and extends her elegant snake-neck to swallow the fish whole. Then she sips a dainty bit of water for a chaser. To witness a Great Blue take flight is always a thrill. Whenever the Egret dares to visit from another part of the creek, the Great Blue escorts him out. Bossy and territorial: I like it. I flirted with including her perspective in my short story, “Shapeshifting.”

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

I tried for years to quit my profession. I wasn’t getting enough traction as an eco-architect, whether in practice, consulting, or teaching. Ecological devastation and the climate crisis continued to worsen, despite the many strategies to do better. Eventually, I discovered that architecture is not alone in being infected with our mistaken cultural story of separation from (and domination of) the living world. With that perspective, I recast my relationship with architecture, mostly as an educator. I’ve always been a storyteller, so that’s how I approach it now.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

I’ll sing in the car (alone), and I’ve danced in the kitchen on occasion (with a partner). When I was younger, I thought my body was just there to carry my head and thoughts around. Now I’m delighted for my body and grateful that it allows me to get out there and participate and feel the world.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

I hope to publish my novel and future novels, and maybe other writing. I’m in love with writing, it gives me such pleasure, and I will keep doing it as long as I’m able.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

My son’s birthmother chose us to be his parents. There’s no greater kindness than that sort of trust. He’s 24 now, we’ve all been through a lot together, and he is the most marvelous human being. I’m so proud of him and enjoy his wit and intelligence. He sees the world so differently from me, it’s like his job in life is to keep me humble.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

Hope. I can’t help it, I don’t know why I’m this way, but I am a hopeful person. Hope is different from naïve or blind optimism. Hope is a muscle that needs to be worked. Perhaps paradoxically, it’s an outcome, not a driver. It’s a guiding light for action, not an excuse for apathy. It orients to the future from present reality and past experience. Most of all, hope derives from a healthy dose of wonder and humility in the face of the great mysteries of life.

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is the Amazon best-selling author of The BreakAway Girl: Secrets of a Tantric Yogi and the creator of the Substack publication . A Certified Integrative Coach with more than three decades of experience teaching yoga, meditation, and personal transformation, she helps people uncover hidden patterns, embrace paradox, and navigate life’s beautiful mess with grace, grit, and humor.

Her essays weave together non-dual spirituality, psychology, sensuality, and the raw terrain of everyday life, inviting readers to find meaning in both heartbreak and joy. Her work has appeared in The Rolling Desk, Tales of a Wayward Yogini, In the Limelight, and Without Child.

Paulette lives outside Ashland with her husband and their Wheaton Terrier, Saoirse, and can often be found wandering the Pacific Northwest in an RV, gathering stories along the way.

1. What are you reading now?

I’m usually reading two or more books at a time. In the mornings, before or after my meditation, depending on how I feel, I read the poets.

Recently, I read One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad, which led me to his prescient novel American War. Balancing that out, I’m also reading The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.

To connect with my ancestors, and for inspiration as I work on my next manuscript about generational shifts–what we carry, what we lose, and what we gain–I return again and again to Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino, randomly choosing a story each time. I love how folklore and myth reveal universal truths about the human condition.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

The most impactful book I read as a young girl was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I completely fell in love with the story, with Francie, though our lives were quite different, and with the way words could transport you to another world.

And yes! I definitely hid books from my parents. I was fascinated by In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. After my father read it, I snuck the book into my bedroom and stayed up late into the night reading. One night, my mother came into my room and found me both terrified and thrilled. She gave me an old-fashioned talking-to, but she let me finish the book.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

The Bhagavad Gita has been my companion for decades now. When I first read it as a new yogi, I was deeply drawn to it, even though I didn’t understand the nuances and depth of its teachings. It’s an allegorical text about facing the battlefield within and has carried me through many a dark night of the soul.

And the older I get, the more alive it becomes. Each time I return to a verse or passage, a new light is shed. I own about six or eight translations/interpretations, and each one reveals the text through a slightly different lens, offering something new. I’ve even gone so far as to have the bindings removed on a few copies and replaced with spiral binding for easy access–which probably says something about my nerdiness.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

Oh, that’s a hard one. I think I’ve had different favorites for the different seasons of my life.

Right now, I’m in what my family calls the ‘soft pants’ era. Otherwise known as sweatpants, but they have to be kind of cute as well as comfy. And I often wear a tweed cardigan sweater that I bought with my mother years ago. Whenever I really want to connect and feel her presence, which is a lot right now, with the writing of this new book, I wear it.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

It’s not recent, but it’s to the wisdom of The Bhagavad Gita that I return when I need guidance, when I feel alone or scared. In it, Krishna tells Arjuna that it’s better to live your dharma, your purpose and path, imperfectly than to live another person’s life perfectly. Even though the idea is often repeated, I think it speaks deeply to authenticity: to living as fully yourself as possible, warts and all.

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

I’ve written about this love affair before. When both my mother and father were placed in hospice at the same time, my mother asked my husband to take their fourteen-year-old Chihuahua. We had just lost our own family pet, and she thought it would ease some of his sadness.

But the Chihuahua, as I often referred to him, became my dog. I think, in some way, I was a natural replacement for my mother. When we took him in, he was overweight and needed surgery. So, we did everything necessary to help him heal and grow stronger.

He died in my arms at almost eighteen years old. When that little guy died, the dam finally broke. It was as if the umbilical cord that kept my parents alive inside me was finally severed, and I was forced to fully grieve their loss.

I still miss him; his name was Bandit.

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

About fifteen years ago, the yoga community I had been part of for years imploded. It was not pretty. It was painful, messy, and devastating for everyone involved. At the time, I was heartbroken. But out of that loss came unexpected new directions and possibilities.

I had been mentoring teachers for years, so it seemed natural to deepen that work and become a certified life coach, which I still do today. Around that same time, I became more devoted to writing, which I had done up until then in fits and starts. Eventually, I wrote The BreakAway Girl-Secrets of a Tantric Yogi and later began publishing Because Life is Messy…on Substack.

What once felt like an ending became the doorway into a more authentic and generative chapter of my life.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

Well, for decades, as a yogi, practicing asana has been part of how I inhabit my body and express myself, even though the intensity and level have shifted over the years. But I’m also from the Saturday Night Fever and disco era, so honestly, dancing in the kitchen wins.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

I’m at an age where I think about the end of life and what that journey might look like for me. I know it’s a cliché, but my hope is to stay as healthy as possible for as long as possible and not become a burden on my husband and family.

I hope to stay curious about people and life, to keep growing personally and spiritually, and to remain open to life’s unfolding.

I also hope to keep deepening my craft so I can continue writing in a way that feels true and alive.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

It’s hard to name just one. The kindness that has shaped my life has often felt cumulative–those small, steady gestures of staying with me when it might have been easier to walk away, of truly seeing me, of not turning away when things were uncomfortable or when I wasn’t at my best. There have been so many people over the years who have held out their hand and helped to lift me up when life felt overwhelming.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

The Tantric teachings, along with the myths and the stories woven through them, are a guiding force in my life. They remind me that the saint and sinner live within each of us. That the mess and the magic are interwoven. That laughter and joy coexist alongside sadness and pain.

I honestly don’t know what happens when we die. The teachings don’t speak of a heaven as a distant afterlife so much as a state that can be touched here and now. So, the invitation becomes: live fully, love imperfectly, and don’t squander the gift of your life.

If you enjoyed Paulette’s answers, you might also enjoy this Questionnaire with Don Hamilton (Rudy and Delilah’s wonderful homeopathic vet!):

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is a writer, digital creator, and advocate for authentic self-expression in midlife women. Following her husband’s death from cancer, she began using memoir and social media to explore the complex intersection of grief and desire, cultivating a community of thousands drawn to honest conversations about life after loss. Widow in the City, A Memoir of Heartbreaks and Hookups (published by She Writes Press / distributed by Simon & Schuster) was published in May 2026. Her work also appears in and Narratively on Substack, as well as Medium publications including The Memoirist and Slackjaw. She lives in New York City, where she enjoys photography, travel, and raising her son.

1. What are you reading now?

I’ve mostly been listening to audiobooks and I just finished The Midnight Croissant by my good friend Bonnie Solomon. It’s a wonderful, feel-good cozy fantasy set in modern day Paris, France.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

I loved From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg. It’s about a brother and sister that “run away” to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (where I grew up) and become embroiled in a mystery. I also read a lot of Judy Blume: Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Deenie, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Mom, the Wolfman and Me, and Forever.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

When I was fifteen, my mother and step-father gave me The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. It’s a collection of twenty-six poetic essays offering philosophical wisdom on universal themes like love, marriage, work, freedom, and death. They’ve both passed away, but I still have the copy they gave me with their beautiful inscription.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

I love my rhinestone studded sneakers by Betsey Johnson because I can feel comfortable and a little bit fancy at the same time.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

The only thing we can control in life are our own thoughts, feelings and actions.

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

A few months after my husband died I hired a babysitter to help me with my son who had just turned ten years old. We didn’t have any pets, but Charlotte would sometimes bring her golden retriever when she picked up my son from school. We both loved Milo, who had just turned a year old, and spent the next two summers living with both of them at a house we rented with a pool. I feel nostalgic for that time.

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

I think I might have answered this question differently before my husband died in August 2021. My first thought is that I am NOT happy about that part of my life turning out differently than I expected, but his death changed my whole world – and it’s not all bad. I don’t know if I would have become a writer or published a memoir if he lived, which I am happy about. There’s a duality in grief and I find I’m both happy and sad at the same time.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

One hundred percent dancing in the kitchen!

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

I’ve spent a lot of time alone the last three years, mostly writing in my apartment. I never got back to “normal” after the Covid lockdowns but I would like to find more community in person. Most of my human interaction is over Zoom or another online platform because the city has felt overwhelming to me. I’ve reinvented my life a few times in recent years and find myself once again on the cusp of something new; I just don’t know what it is yet.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

I have a small group of writer friends who encouraged me early on. Their kind words and positive comments kept me going when I felt self-critical or too vulnerable. I wish people understood how much their support means to writers and other artists. They might think it’s just a few words typed into a comment box, but sometimes it feels like a lifeline.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

Humans have created too many structures that divide us, like religion, race, and the gender binary. The DNA of any two people on Earth is approximately ninety-nine point nine percent identical. At our core, we all want to be loved and appreciated for who we are. My guiding force is dismantling hierarchical cultural and economic systems that relegate so many to the margins.

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is the author most recently of the memoir This is the Door. Her other books include the memoirs Flash Count Diary, Easter Everywhere and five novels: Sister Golden Hair, Milk, Jesus Saves, Suicide Blonde, and Up Through the Water. Her books have been translated into ten languages, and many have been New York Times Notables. Her nonfiction has appeared widely and she often writes about art. Her web story “Blindspot” was a part of the 2000 Whitney Biennial. She has been a Henry Hoyns Fellow, a Stegner Fellow, Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi and on the long list of the Independent Book Award and the French Arles Author Prize. She has taught at the Columbia University School of the Arts, New York University, Princeton, and the American University of Paris. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn.

In case you missed my interview with Darcey, check it out here. And Darcey’s brilliant Craft Advice here.

1. What are you reading now?

I just finished Jen Percy’s amazing Girls Play Dead and I am nearly done with the Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth’s amazing If Only. I have an intergenerational book group with my friends, my daughter and her friends and some of my former students and we are about to read Icelandic writer Halldor Laxness’ Under the Glacier.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

I read like crazy as a girl! I loved The Chronicles of Narnia of course and Edward Eager’s Half Magic series. But I would basically read almost anything. I remember reading Psychoanalytic text that my Dad kept in his bathroom. Sometimes I would sneak into my parent’s bedroom and read the books on their nightstand. I remember Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Fear of Flying freaking me out!

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

I am not a big re-reader. But I have returned to Wuthering Heights more than once. That book is like a forever channel, it’s so alive. When I have problems, I always find books that might help me. I remember when my mother died. I read A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir about her own mother’s death. And during a bad break up I read Lydia Davis’ book The End of the Story, that helped me. I also read a lot of theology from all religions.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

My Flatbush sweatshirt. I write in jeans and a sweatshirt. One of the nice things about getting older is that I don’t stress as much about clothes. Sometimes when I go out at night, I don’t even change. This would have been unthinkable in my younger days.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you encountered recently?

From my therapist: “Now that your parents are both dead try to stop seeking their approval.” Game Changer!

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

My cat Junebug! He is actually sleeping as of this moment on the bed beside me. Thirteen years ago we heard a cat crying in our yard just before Hurricane Sandy and when my husband when out, Junebug, then a tiny kitten, crawled up his pants leg. He is very bonded to us. After I feed him in the morning he comes up to my office, I pet him while I drink my coffee and then he comes and sleeps on the bed beside me while I write. At night he comes into the bedroom and curls up on the pillow beside mine. He has very large soulful eyes. When he dies, I will be devastated.

7. What one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

I think when I was a younger writer I thought I would teach at a university in a small college town. But, while I went out to teach sometimes, it never really stuck. I was always happy to get back to Brooklyn. I love Brooklyn. I do open water swimming at Brighton Beach and I love all the bookstores and literary life. I live near Prospect Park and I walk there almost every day.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

I like to walk. I have always loved just to roam in the city. Sometimes, rather than take the subway, I will walk for an hour or more across Brooklyn, from one hood to another. The street life in the city is very nourishing to me. The little interactions you have with people, dogs, children.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

I hope to be, as I say in my new book, worthy of my suffering. I hope to continue to transform my life into stories that people will want to read. A lot of people my age are thinking of retiring and traveling, and while I love to take trips, the most important thing for me still is to be at my desk most days, to see what I am thinking by working out ideas in language.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

So many! My early writing teachers were great. Some of them were very hard on me, but that helped me see what’s at stake, and how I would have to work tirelessly. But just strangers too. I remember when I was in my twenties and had just come to NYC, I was crying on the subway and an old women came over and sat beside me and said: “I have felt just how you are feeling now.” That stays with me.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

My daughter, Abbie, is amazing. She is hard working and creative and kind, a film producer and through her I get to experience so much. I see the younger generation, their art and music and I understand the world is going to be ok. She is also very centered and wise.

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spent more than three decades working in and around the capital markets, including over a decade on Wall Street where he organized and managed several securities trading businesses. His career in finance gave him a front-row seat to the inner workings of markets, institutions, and power.

After leaving the industry, Weems turned to writing, producing essays, white papers, and research reports on financial markets, economic systems, and American culture. His work has been quoted in major financial publications and cited in academic research. In 2022, he authored a report on blockchain use cases in healthcare for STAT, the digital health publication of Boston Globe Media.

In 2020, he founded , a newsletter exploring the intersection of economics, politics, culture, and race in American life. The publication has since grown into a multi-platform project that includes livestream programming and collaborative journalism. Weems is also the founder of The Journeyman Media Network, a creator-owned collective of independent writers and journalists.

He is currently completing a memoir about his thirty-year career in finance. An essay from the manuscript, “How Starting an Investment Firm Almost Landed Me in Federal Prison,” received wide attention when it was published in 2023.

Always interested in new forms of storytelling, Weems made his theatrical debut in 2023 in the role of Uncle Ben in a local production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

1. What are you reading now?

I tend to read several things at once. It’s usually a combination of economics, history, and journalism. Lately I’ve been revisiting books about financial history and global economic systems because they provide useful context for the strange period we’re living through now. The older I get, the more I find that history is a reliable guide to what markets—and people—are likely to do next.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

As a kid I used to sneak comic books into the house—mostly Spider-Man and Batman. I also read a lot of mythology and was really fascinated with the stories of the Norse gods. You know, Odin, Thor, Loki. Looking back, those myths led directly to my comic book habit. Superheroes are just modern mythology. That’s why M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakableis one of my favorite films.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

I’ve reread Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, half a dozen times. It’s gripping storytelling, but it’s also about power, corruption, and justice. Those themes never really go out of style. I listen to a lot of audiobooks, and Simon Vance is one of the best readers in the game.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

It used to be my French-cuffed shirts. When I worked in Manhattan, there was a tailor several of us used. He’d come to the city and set up in a Midtown hotel like a pop-up clothing store. We’d drop in, get measured, and place our orders.

I still have about a dozen of those shirts, but these days it’s very different. I collect T-shirts with logos from movies or television shows, and I wear hoodies a lot. But my favorite piece of clothing is my Converse sneakers. They’re the Jack Purcell edition, which is difficult to find. Folks mistake them for Chuck Taylors, but Purcell was a Canadian badminton champion. I’d never heard of him, but when I saw the shoe, I had to have a pair.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

The older I get, the more I’ve come to believe that life is less about certainty and more about judgment. You rarely have perfect information. What matters is how thoughtfully you make decisions with the information you have.

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild.

We’re cat people, and we’ve had several—always rescues. All of them were special, but there was one named Kibbles who was particularly memorable.

Kibbles had heterochromia, a genetic condition that causes deafness in cats. Cats with it are snow-white and have different colored eyes. He made the move with us to North Carolina and was part of the family for many years. When he passed away a few years ago, it genuinely felt like losing a family member.

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

Leaving Wall Street. At the time it felt like the end of something I had spent years building, but in retrospect it opened the door to writing, storytelling, and a completely different way of thinking about the world.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

Neither—but does chair dancing count?

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

To keep learning, keep writing, and build something that outlasts me. Right now, that means continuing to grow The Journeyman and the community around it. I’m also working on building the Journeyman Media Network, a collaboration of independent writers who believe audiences increasingly trust people more than institutions.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

Throughout my career there have been people who took chances on me—mentors, colleagues, editors, and readers. Those moments matter more than people realize. Sometimes a single act of belief can change the trajectory of someone’s life.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

I’m not always successful, but I try to do the right thing. Most of us already know the difference between right and wrong. The real challenge is having the courage to act on that knowledge when it matters.

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is the author of the novels Fellowship Point and Think of England, and two collections of short stories, In the Gloaming and Naked to the Waist. She is a professor in the English department and the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Rutgers-Newark. A standalone edition of her short story, “In the Gloaming,” with a new afterword will be published in the Scribner Shorts series in September ’26 and a new novel, Wherever You Are, is forthcoming from Scribner in April ‘27. She writes the newsletter .

1. What are you reading now?

During the semester I am occupied with the writing of my MFA students, and also with reading books for blurbs. However I read a book of my own choice in the tub at night and often drop it into the drink. Right now I am rereading Elizabeth Strout novels. I have waterlogged copies many times over the years and have had to buy new ones. If Liz is seen driving a Bentley, I think we can blame me.

Before this I read Art Work by Sally Mann. She is in her seventies and looking back on decades of her photography practice and habits of mind. It’s a wonderful depiction how much work it takes to realize your vision, and much work exists around the work in terms of organization, contacts, and so on. She details her hundreds or thousands of failed pictures, rejections, disappointments…it’s so important for aspiring artists to know how much of this will inevitably come along.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

I never had to hide books; the adults in my world didn’t monitor my reading. My grandparents had a bookshelf at the shore filled with Reader’s Digests and paperbacks by Ian Fleming and James Michener. I was obsessed with the Michener novels and embarrassed by and curious about James Bond. That was when I was nine or ten. A bit earlier I loved A Child’s Garden of Verses and memorized many of the poems. In Sunday school I memorized many psalms and loved them too. I imagined a fate that might have me captive or a prisoner when it would come in handy to have many writings memorized.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

I went through a long period when I reread Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh every year. I loved the sentences so much, their rhythm and evocation of young love, glamour, and the beauty of the English countryside. I have reread Howard’s End by E.M Forster often in recent years, for pleasure and for teaching. The Nature of Personal Reality by Jane Roberts is another I reread every couple of years. I am taking notes on a future novel and am writing about an experience such as Jane had with the entity, Seth, channeling knowledge through her. I reread Alice McDermott to remind myself of where the bar has been set, and every Christmas I reread A Christmas Carol to prepare for another go round of trying to be good. Each summer I read The Catherine Wheel by Jean Stafford and laugh my head off.

The book I give most is Upstream by Mary Oliver. It sits on a shelf I have of personal writing by women, all short, brilliant books. I dip into these out often, read a few pages, and feel glad to be alive. I am in two reading groups, one fiction and one non. In the fiction group we read a lot of Forster during the pandemic but not Where Angels Fear to Tread, which we are reading now, and I am laughing! The last time I read it was before I read The Ambassadors by Henry James; this time within a few pages I recognized Angels as Ambassadors’ fan fiction. Fun stuff!

In the non-fiction group we most recently read The Price of Democracy by Vanessa S. Willliamson about the history of taxation in this country starting with the Boston Tea Party—who knew the patriots were protesting for taxes? It’s a really great book arguing that democracy cannot exist without a healthy and fair tax system.

I don’t think anything has helped me through a hard time but time passing.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

I have a ratty old ripped up cotton nightgown that is so soft I can’t part with it. Whatever is continuous about myself becomes cherished when I put it on and get in bed, under either heavy covers or in the summer, under only a sheet. I have bought new pajamas and nightgowns but they end up in giveaway boxes while my transitional object nightgown is washed and worn again.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

In the documentary “Meet Me Under The Good Light,” Andrea Gibson, wise beautiful person, says to call “everything that you are feeling love” when you are in a painful situation. This hit me so hard; I have taken on the practice, and every time a guilt or regret pops up to chastise me for how I fell short of my expectations as a caregiver, I now call it love. I wouldn’t feel regret and guilt without the love being there in the first place, and this practice makes that the important focus.

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

So many. Animals are central to my life and why I am a vegan. Right now I have two cats, one called Mama Newark who is an indoor feral—she has lived with us for nine years and I have never touched her, we communicate through long blinks—and the other is Holly who I adopted from a local shelter to be a friend for both me and Mama after we lost three animal housemates during COVID. Holly is a dogcat who can sense me coming home from work when I am a couple of miles away and goes to the door to greet me. She is a content, happy creature who doesn’t want much affection, but every so often she plops on my computer seeking a long session of compliments and stroking.

I live on a very busy street but have a yard full of animals; deer, possum, racoons, squirrels, birds, chipmunks, cats, bats, and more. I love them all, especially the squirrels. They invent ingenious games, getting the crows involved when they come through.

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

I went for a long time when I was young thinking marriage wasn’t for me. Turns out that learning one person over decades is humbling, compelling, and a great grace. Turns out, marriage teaches you who you are.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

I don’t let myself do the things my body loves very often. I know, I know. It’s a work in progress. I love to swim and have always thought of myself as a sea creature rather than a land animal.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

Retire at 75 in 2028, live by the sea, more cats and dogs, write a few more books, help a few people, read and reread, resist, see the whole California coast, fingers crossed for a grandchild, a painless death. And—I want to put on the red dress, fly over the pond, and go to Folkstone for the Wuthering Heights reenactment.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

I saw a therapist for 15 years who was only and consistently kind. That’s all she did; she kindly validated my feelings. I would get frustrated with her method and want something rigorous and challenging, but her way helped me. She wore me down! I started being kinder to myself.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

My grandfather had a code that covered just about all areas of life. I carry those sayings in my head. Example: Never lend money, instead give it freely and never think of it again. This applies to so much.

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is the author of the novels Edinburgh and the national bestseller The Queen of the Night. His essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel was named a best book of the year in 2018 by New York Magazine, the Washington Post, Publisher’s Weekly, NPR, and Time. In 2025, Kirkus Reviews named it one of the hundred best books of nonfiction of the 21st century. Chee is a recipient of the NEA Fellowship in Fiction, The Whiting Award, The Guggenheim and The USA Artists’ Fellowship. He teaches creative writing at Dartmouth College and lives in Vermont. He writes the Substack newsletter .

1. What are you reading now?

A Long Game by Elizabeth McCracken, her long awaited book on fiction writing, a perfect companion to the work of finishing my new novel draft. And by long-awaited I mean I have wanted it ever since she suggested it could exist. I just finished This Is Where The Serpent Lives, by Daniyal Mueeneddin, a novel about social class in contemporary Pakistan that I will be absorbing for a long time, I think.

2, What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

God, I loved so many. I’m pretty sure I wrote my second novel, The Queen of the Night, because I read The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. LeGuin and it lay in my imagination like a stowaway. I loved the Susan Cooper Dark Is Rising novels also. And the poetry of T. S. Eliot and e. e. cummings, whose poems I used to memorize for dramatic interpretation on my high school debate team.

I didn’t start really hiding books until they were gay books, and also stolen—I often shoplifted to avoid paying for a book I wasn’t “supposed” to be reading and so I avoided being denied or exposed at the register. So, The Persian Boy, by Mary Renault is one of those. Also Perfect Freedom, by Gordon Merrick.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

I do reread in dark times. But as I’m a teacher of writing, it’s a bit of a professional thing. I have taken to listening to favorite novels on audiobook also for consolation. I recently listened to The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst and was spellbound by it. The actor reading it was also able to do all of the different British accents, it occurred to me, and so it was a treat and also a bit of a salve on how much I miss London after my four months there in 2023.

I remember during the first year of the COVID pandemic it was very hard for me to read anything or to write. But what brought me out of it was listening to an audiobook of Maurice by E. M. Forster, which then got me to reread it next, and the spell seemed to break. It was terrible to feel shut out of the only solace I’d ever really known besides wandering the woods or swimming. I’ve reread it three times now in the last six years along with A Room With A View, Howard’s End and Where Angels Fear To Tread. Also Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin, a good novel to also read aloud from.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

There’s a navy canvas Carhartt zip front hooded jacket I’ve had since… I don’t even know how long actually. It’s one of my oldest jackets. The sleeves are fraying near the cuff, and it’s still warm. I just replaced it with a new one made of denim.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

That the answer to political paralysis and despair is to do more, not less, in the service of your beliefs. This was in a recent Tessie McMillan Cottom talk she put up on her Instagram, but I think it was for PBS Newshour.

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

We took care of a friend’s dog a few years ago now, a sweet French bulldog rescue named Freya with a beautiful brindle coat. She had just been rescued when our friend needed surgery on her leg and so we offered to take care of her, a difficult gesture because she barely knew our friend and now we were taking her off to Vermont from Brooklyn. Our friend’s recovery and rehab was long, and we cared for her for about two months. I remember she used to sleep with us sometimes, and when she did she insisted on having her head up near our heads, between us. But if she succeeded, then she snored quite loudly. It wouldn’t wake my husband up for some reason but it woke me. I’d have to leave the room and sleep in our guest room. So we arranged to sleep in a position that didn’t allow her to pull even, but she would try, a kind of inexorable push to the top of the bed. It was so funny, really. She was never frustrated, just so determined.

It was nice for a while to be a professor with a dog and to take her to the office, where she was very popular. She’s back with her owner and has a girlfriend bulldog whose tongue sticks out in a very funny way. They’re really very cute together. But in a way she taught us we didn’t want a dog. Not for now at least. I never want to say never because that’s the next thing that happens. But we love her.

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

I have lived a life I never imagined possible and that no one ever told me I could hope for. So really, all of it. I was told I would never have a lasting relationship, much less a husband. That I couldn’t get published if I wrote about queer lives. That I couldn’t be a teacher if I did that. A lot of my life has been listening to people telling me what I can’t do while I go off and do it.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

I have returned to low impact aerobics, which I used to teach in college. I do the warmups as the coffee brews. It cheers me up. It’s like dancing in the kitchen, I guess. But my favorite way my body expresses itself is of course sex.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

I have a sabbatical that begins in June, a year’s sabbatical. I’m dreaming big. I want to go to Seoul, and to take my husband, to tour Korea partly for research and partly for fun–he’s never been. I want us to to Big Sur, a dream we keep putting off as we’re terrible about taking trips just for us. I want to go back to London, back to Barcelona, back to Mexico City.

And I want us all to live in a free country, freer than any we’ve ever known. There’s a lot of writing in here too but I’ll keep that to myself for now.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

There’s so many, I barely know where to begin. But I can think of one: Elizabeth McCracken writing a note to me after I was rejected for the Provinceton Work Center back in the 1990s. She said some nice things about my sample, and she really didn’t have to. It helped me through a difficult time of uncertainty over my writing career, mostly due to my self-doubts but partly due to very real homophobia and racism. Many years later we are friends.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

My love for my husband, and his for me. Last year I went back to the place where I was living when I met him and was doing some research. I remembered enjoying my life there but what I understood as I sorted through those memories was how I was lonely then in a way I never recognized before I met him.

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is the Publisher of Empress Editions, an award-winning independent press distributed by Hachette Book Group and dedicated to amplifying the voices, stories, and cultural authority of midlife women. A writer, editor, and media entrepreneur, she is the author of Gotham Girl, Interrupted and the forthcoming novel Ellery Goes Dark.

In addition to her books, Alisa writes Newsletter and the comedic Substack , where she explores culture, creativity, ambition, and midlife reinvention with humor and candor. Through Empress Editions, she is building a bold, multimodal publishing ecosystem spanning books, audio, AI-driven reader experiences, and film- and television-ready IP. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, writes in pajamas whenever possible, and believes—fiercely—that stories can still change lives.

1. What are you reading now?

Mostly submissions—which is its own genre, honestly. One in particular has that quiet, uncanny Emily St. John Mandel energy that makes you sit up straighter and whisper, please let us get to do this one. The truth is… I could find a way to edit, fix, and sell almost—just out of love for an author’s voice. It’s the voice we invest in for a lifetime—over any type of media.

I just finished The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett. Her entire backlist is a delight, but this book is pure chef’s-kiss dopamine. There’s a cat named Pancakes who is—spoiler alert—an agent of death. I loved it. Everyone gets to mess up repeatedly and with real abandon, and yet there is so much forgiveness. It’s almost holy. I half expected Josh O’Connor to wander in from Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man (required holiday viewing in our house) and absolve everyone on the spot. I missed these characters immediately. I wanted to keep hanging out with the lovely randos of Pondville, Massachusetts forever.

And because I believe in balance, I’m also listening to North Woods by Daniel Mason, which I somehow missed when it first came out. It’s hypnotic—like wandering through a forest where time folds in on itself and you’re very happy to be lost.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

A Wrinkle in Time was everything to me—Madeleine L’Engle was my spiritual north star. Add The Chronicles of Narnia, The Secret Garden, Mary Poppins, Little Women, and every single Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden mystery ever written.

I definitely snuck Judy Blume’s Wifey and Forever past my parents, along with a highly adult biography of Edie Sedgwick, the title of which I’m completely blanking on—but it was not age-appropriate. I think I snuck it out past the librarian under my plaid skirt.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

I Capture the Castle. Cassandra’s voice—hopeful, sharp, and hilarious in the face of utter ruin—never fails to steady me. The bohemian stepmother is one of literature’s great unsung comic achievements. That book reminds me that despair and humor can coexist beautifully, often in the same paragraph. And I love their solution to writer’s block. Truly inspired nonsense.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

Pajamas. Specifically white cotton, old-school Diane Keaton pajamas à la Something’s Gotta Give. I own multiple pairs. I live in them. If I could make them formalwear, I would.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

Even when everything feels like it’s going completely kaflooey, I’ve now lived long enough—and seen enough—to trust that I have the discernment and resources to handle whatever comes next. This is deeply comforting and also mildly annoying, because it means I can no longer pretend I don’t know better.

6. Tell me about a special relationship you’ve had with an animal.

We once had a chicken at my father’s ranch who survived a brutal bear attack that wiped out her entire flock and almost ate my brother. (Which was a shame) The bear was named Gwyneth Paltrow—I don’t know why—but she was very bossy about territory and had consciously uncoupled with two cubs she was quite fond of.

The chicken survived but was never the same. She followed people around like a dog, stationed herself at windows, sang back if you sang to her, and developed an intense love of sourdough. We called her Needy, because she had what can only be described as an attachment disorder. One Thanksgiving, I made pumpkin pies and realized—mid-bake—that the eggs I’d used were Needy’s eggs. Tiny, anxious eggs from a deeply traumatized bird. I panicked. Could I serve trauma pies? Was this a karmic violation? The internet weighed in. Poems were written. Art was made. Needy achieved cult status. We even recorded Have Yourself a Needy Little Christmas together in the garden. Watching strangers bond with a scrawny, anxious chicken who refused to be invisible was unexpectedly—and genuinely—moving.

7. What’s one thing you’re happy worked out differently than you expected?

Empress Editions. The women who’ve come together because of it—their brilliance, generosity, and shared sense of building something that actually matters—none of that could have been planned. It’s been the great surprise of my professional life. I’d love to name them all right here, but I’d mess it up.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen?

Both. Loudly. With a heavy rotation of musicals. I am a complete ham and have made peace with it (even if the neighbors have not). I usually perform the whole of Once Upon a Mattress in the shower from beginning to end, all the parts—even the cheesy Minstrel, which makes for insane hot water bills. I’m sure the co-op board is going to set the dogs on me at the next meeting, but I love Carol B. and I’m no quitter.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

That my kids finally forgive me for maybe 85% of my f*ckups? And see that (much like in The Correspondent) “I was just a girl.”

That Empress Editions thrives and outlasts me. And that I finish my next novel—ideally tomorrow—without inventing new and creative ways to procrastinate.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

Someone once looked at a lost, ragamuffin child and thought, Oh—this little girl belongs with us. That simple act of recognition changed everything.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

Stories. A story can save you. I’ve seen it happen.

If you enjoyed Alisa’s answers, you might also enjoy this one with Mesa Fama:

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Welcome to another edition of The Body, Brain, & Books. If you enjoy reading these quick, insightful interviews brimming with wisdom and hope, please become a subscriber!

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is a novelist, poet, forest therapy guide, life coach, and single mom of three. She lives in the rolling hills of Central Kentucky, where her best days are the ones she spends in the woods. Her debut novel, “All Is Well,” was published in 2025, and her not-yet-published poetry collection was a finalist for the James Baker Hall Book Award. Lisa writes Wild Ground, where she shares poems, writing prompts, and essays inspired by her moments of deepest aliveness. She came to Substack for a place to share her writing, but she stays for the magic of community.

1. What are you reading now?

I tend to read several books at once. I’m slowly savoring Margaret Renkl’s “The Comfort of Crows,” Joanne Dobson’s “The Nurse Who Came from Away,” and Pema Chödrön’s “When Things Fall Apart,” and I’m rapidly devouring Andre Dubus III’s “House of Sand and Fog.”

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

I read and reread “The Little House on the Prairie” series and the “Anne of Green Gables” series again and again. The only book I remember reading on the sly, though, and it was juicy, was my older sister’s diary. If you can get your hands on a copy, I highly recommend it!

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

I don’t reread books all that often, but Pema Chödrön’s “When Things Falls Apart” was a good friend to me when I first got sick with long Covid in the spring of 2020. I’m reading it again now and appreciating how the author’s wisdom—and the wisdom of my past, in-the-thick-of-breaking self—are both speaking to me through the pages.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

I have a pair of coral and purple and black fingerless gloves that I wear in the colder half of the year. They’re thick enough to feel cozy, but they still let me touch the smoothness of a rock or the roughness of bark. I like to pluck a sprig of Eastern red cedar on my way into the woods each morning and roll it between my finger and thumb, just for the delight of smelling it. The gloves smell like forest—and like my dog Jeff, who is with me on every walk.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

I recently encountered this line from Rumi, which I’d never heard before: “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” Being a writer (or a parent or a human) demands openness—to the blank page, to the words that come, to the words that don’t come, to revision. Sharing my writing here on Substack sometimes makes the creative process feel pressurized, though. I start to worry about how I appear—to the detriment of how I show up. I want to show up with my bewilderment intact—always. With my sense of wonder, which if I’m honest and present, will always wildly outstrip my cleverness.

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

It’s hard to choose just one—and I don’t want to hurt my dog Jeff’s feelings by telling you about a different animal, but since he can’t read and also has a really forgiving disposition, I’ll chance it. Early this summer, I went for a hike in a nearby nature preserve. It was a weekday, so there was no one else around, and I sat on a limestone cliff overlooking the Kentucky River for rather a long while, when all of a sudden, there was singing. A summer tanager was perched just feet away from me in the low limb of a very tenacious tree. After a while, I got the hang of his song and began singing it back to him. I would sing, then he would sing, over and over again. We must have spent around a half hour together, much of it in this strange duet. Eventually, another hiker arrived on scene and the tanager flew off. I know this little sliver of time may not seem like it adds up to a “special relationship,” but for me, the feeling of the experience was that we are all always in relationship. It’s not relationship that’s rare of special. It’s the noticing.

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

I’m almost scared to say this, like it might be some kind of jinx and propel me back into more disabling illness, but here goes . . . In the fall of 2019, I worked up the courage to leave a very unhealthy marriage. I was full of excitement and plans for my next steps, but in March 2020, I got Covid and did not recover. My whole life flipped upside down and inside out. My existence felt whittled down to the essentials—which means I gained a tremendous amount of clarity about what matters to me and what does not.

This clarity feels like a superpower. I’d been a chronic people pleaser my whole life, but suddenly I became allergic to that pattern. It would be disingenuous to say that I’ve fully recovered from my people pleasing impulses, but I’ve grown by leaps and bounds—or rather, by carefully paced walks and sips of nettle tea. This growth and clarity and the connection and redirection they’ve brought about feel worth all of that unexpected suffering. Of course, that’s easier to say right now than at other times because as far as my health goes, I’m doing startlingly well at the moment. (I still can’t say that without knocking on wood.)

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

I dance in my kitchen if no one’s around, but I sing . . . everywhere. My parents had to enact a no-singing-at-the-dinner-table rule thanks to me. One of the great and unexpected surprises of parenthood is that my children (10, 14, and 17) have not yet told me to shut up.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

I could make a long wish list of the external things my mind likes to grab for, but my deepest, clearest hopes are about my inner life, not my outer one. I’ve had so many experiences of intense, seemingly nonsensical joy in the middle of difficult and definitely-not-wished-for circumstances that when I’m fully honest with myself, I have to admit that I don’t know what the hell is going on here. How could I know, really know, what to hope for on the surface of my life? Here’s what I hope for on the inside, though . . . the courage to be deeply rooted and the courage to be swayed, to drop all my leaves and start over again. For the wisdom to know when it’s autumn and when it’s spring and feel the beauty in both. For the softness to welcome the wind when it comes, to let it scour me of everything that isn’t love. For the presence of mind to remember that everything can be that wind.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

When I got sick, my older sister started calling me every single morning. There are 2,316 miles between our front doors, and in that first year of illness and pandemic lockdown, it felt like the whole world was thousands of miles away. But every day, for a little stretch of time, distance collapsed, and my sister—my soul sister, best friend, writer of juicy diaries—was right there next to me. I grew and learned so much during that first year of illness, but I don’t think I could have done it without that backdrop of love and support. As my health has improved and our lives have picked up speed again, we’ve dropped the frequency of our calls to every third day, but they are still the same alchemical cocktail of laughter and lifeline.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

I was walking through the woods a couple years ago, anxiously fretting over whether I’d ever be well enough for a “normal” job when these words rang inside me like someone else had spoken them: “Your job is to love the world.”

I’m not all that good at my job. I’m an entry-level assistant, bringing coffee and possibly spilling it. But love for this world—the one inside me and the one around me—is the work I try to show up to every day.

If you enjoyed Lisa’s answers, you might also enjoy this one with :

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Dr. Tamara MC is a memoirist, poet, and cultural critic whose work appears in The New York Times, Newsweek, SLATE,Salon, HuffPost, and 90+ publications. She is the 2025 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of the Year. She has two forthcoming books: Poetry for English Language Learning (University of New Mexico Press, 2026) and Oldest Tucson(Reedy Press, 2026). She holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics and attended Columbia University’s MFA program in both poetry and creative nonfiction. A U.S. Department of State Fellow and Arizona Commission on the Arts grantee, she has attended residencies including Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Ragdale, and received a fellowship from the Highlights Foundation. She founded Muslim Jewish Love nonprofit and serves on the steering committee of the National Coalition to End Child Marriage, contributing to legislation ending child marriage in 16 states and counting.

1. What are you reading now?

Publishers Weekly, Poets & Writers, everyone’s Substack—how wildly consuming keeping up has become—social media posts, submission guidelines, my own manuscripts in revision, friends’ manuscripts. And essays—always essays—in lit mags like The Rumpus, Electric Literature, The Sun, HuffPost Personal. Personal essay reading is my absolute favorite. I love slipping into someone else’s body, feeling what it might be like to live a life not my own.

As far as books, the last one I devoured was Elizabeth Gilbert’s All the Way to the River. I couldn’t wait for it to come out—finished it in a night or two. I used to read Liz for joy and story, like Eat, Pray, Love. This time, I read her for craft and curiousity. How did she pivot from Eat, Pray, Love to All the Way to the River? How does a writer make that leap? But life lifes. Our stories change as we change, so how could two of our memoirs ever be the same?

Perhaps more revealing is what I’m watching. That’s where my joy lives. At the end of the night, when my eyes are tired and my wrists ache from carpal tunnel, I need my brain to rest. So I turn to reality TV—TLC shows especially. 90 Day Fiancé, Sister Wives, Seeking Sister Wife, Three Wives, One Husband—anything featuring polygamy. I grew up in a polygamist community, so I watch with fascination and in horror. What are these women thinking? That it’s God’s plan when really it’s men getting to have multiple partners while women can’t?

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

Dr. Seuss was my first love. The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish—I read them until the pages softened. The rhymes, the rhythm, the way language could dance and surprise. These books taught me writing could be joyful, playful, rebellious.

But my absolute favorite was Encyclopedia Britannica. I’d sit for hours in my yellow bedroom, reading entries from A to Z, mesmerized by how much knowledge existed in the world. It never occurred to me that humans wrote encyclopedias. I thought God sat down and wrote them. That’s what writers appeared to be to me as a child—gods. Dr. Seuss was God.

Full circle: I’m now an encyclopedia writer myself. I was recently featured in the Encyclopedia of Gender and Politics through Sage Publications, writing entries on such topics as child marriage, polygamy, trad wives, temporary Islamic marriage, and domestic servitude.

The Diary of Anne Frank has always been among my favorites. My grandmother, Bubbe, was a Lithuanian Holocaust survivor, so I felt deeply connected to Anne’s story. I’m also a lover of diaries—a diarist myself and a scholar of diary and journal studies for my PhD. I love examining women’s diaries: what is said, not said, and hidden between the lines.

And Judy Blume. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was a secret between us. Just Judy and me. She taught me about bodies, periods, all the things I couldn’t discuss with anyone else.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

I don’t generally reread books or rewatch shows. I’m a novelty seeker—my ADHD brain craves constant newness.

But reference books are different. I return repeatedly to Story by Robert McKee. It’s incredibly dense, the bible for craft. I can read it multiple times and still not fully grasp it.

Picture books are different too—they’re meant to be reread, reconsidered, felt again and again. I’ve begun writing children’s picture books, and I constantly study them for craft: how to compress emotional universes into 32 pages, how to trust rhythm and repetition. I love Love You Forever. I can’t wait to have grandchildren so I can read my favorites to them.

I remember reading Dani Shapiro during a difficult time—moving through her books from first to last. This is something I love: reading an author’s complete body of work in order, from their earliest book to their most recent. One of my true joys.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

Skorts, leggings, cotton t-shirts. I live in Arizona and I’m sensitive to fabrics, so I live in these basics. Natural fibers, super soft cotton. I always have something pink on somewhere, without any planning.

But what really makes me feel like me? My earrings. I collect them—huge and bright. I just bought a pair of pink alligator earrings in Louisiana. Ridiculous and perfect.

And always flip-flops. When I lived in the Republic of Georgia during the dead of winter, I wore flip-flops. In New York City in January, flip-flops. Always.

My signature: MAC Candy Yum Yum lipstick. I have a collection of fuchsia lipsticks and could have long conversations about each brand.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

I’m watching All’s Fair, Ryan Murphy’s new legal drama on Hulu with Kim Kardashian as a divorce lawyer. She runs an all-female divorce firm with Naomi Watts, Niecy Nash-Betts, Sarah Paulson, and Glenn Close. Judith Light’s character says, “You know what a woman’s best friend is? Not diamonds. Her lawyers.”

I don’t even like diamonds or divorce attorneys (especially divorce attorneys!), but I thought it was clever. I’d rewrite it as: “You know what a woman’s best friend is? Not diamonds. Her dogs.” Duh!

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

I love all of my dogs: Li’l Guy, my Yorkie-Wawa and Latka, my Chihuahua, who hated men who wore boots; Blazer, my Boston Terrier, who I’m both grandma and mom to; and my grandpup, Willow, an Aussie.

Desert animals are my constant companions. Spiny-tailed lizards sunbathe on my patio and dart across the asphalt during my daily bike rides, alongside roadrunners. Beep. Beep. I observe ants building their intricate cities and welcome ladybugs that land on my arms during the summer. I carefully scoop bees from the pool and delight in watching them dry their wings and fly away.

Then there are the prairie dogs. They pop up from their burrows and stand on their hind legs, watching and chirping warnings to each other. Their little towns spread across the desert floor.

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

I’m not sure I’m happy about this, but I’m learning to sit with it: the quiet. The aloneness of aging.

I grew up with a large community on my dad’s side—full of people, noise, constant presence. Then I spent a lifetime building relationships through educational programs, marriage, my kids’ friends. I thought my life would always overflow with people, with noise. I thought I’d have many more children. I always wanted six. I thought I’d be married to my forever person.

But now, at 53, I find myself mostly alone in my home. The quiet is often surprising. My adult sons are in their late 20s, living their own lives. The house I thought would overflow with children and chaos, and a partner, now holds just me, my collections, and my walls.

Maybe that’s what I’m working out differently than expected—learning that without more children and people, I have time to write and leave my legacy. I have time to tell the stories I’ve been waiting a lifetime to tell.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

Dancing in the kitchen to 80s music—Madonna, Prince, Cyndi Lauper, Michael Jackson. I blast “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and dance like everybody’s watching because in the community where I grew up with my dad, we weren’t allowed to dance. Movement was controlled. Music was restricted.

Pickleball too—my pink ASICS shoes, pink balls, pink everything. I play when I can.

And cycling. I ride daily. My body moving through the Arizona desert, feeling the heat, the wind, the freedom. On a bike, I control where I go, how fast, how far. I still feel like a child when I ride.

Swimming too—pools, oceans, lakes. Water heals everything, but then again, I’m a Cancer, a water sign. When I float, I remember I’m made of stardust and saltwater. I’m obsessed with stars and space. And could forever discuss: When we’re up in space, are we still human?

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

The Nobel Peace Prize. As someone both Jewish and Muslim, bringing peace to the Middle East has been my dream since childhood. I want the Pulitzer too—for memoir. And I’ve always wanted to be President of the United States, so maybe at 70?

My other hope: wake up every morning at 4 AM (like I do naturally, always), make my Nespresso, write until I can’t write anymore, take my bike ride, eat well, love on my animals—the ones I can touch and the ones I love from afar—breathe in my desert air, watch my boys grow into the beautiful men they already are, and see my mother age with her health intact.

Oh, and I want to be Dr. Seuss. A picture book author writing and speaking to kids about choice and questioning—each of us with freedom to make our own decisions.

And becoming a glamma!!!

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

With animals and the desert, I can be myself. They can be themselves. We can respect each other—either closely or from a distance. My dogs—Li’l Guy, Latka, Blazer, and Willow.

The Arizona desert itself has been the kindest presence in my life. The saguaros standing sentinel. The mountains. The monsoon rains that smell like creosote and promise.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

Curiosity. Questioning. Asking why. Always asking why.

Questioning is central to everything I do. There are no right answers. We all have our own answers. It’s in the questioning, not the answers. That’s how we learn about human nature, the natural world, the universe, animals, ourselves.

If you enjoyed Tamara’s answers, you might also enjoy this one with

⭐️⭐️Beyond is a reader-supported publication that pays contributors. Thank you to everyone who’s joined this beautiful, growing community devoted to bringing as much light as possible into this world of ours. If you would like to support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Beyond cannot exist without you! ⭐️⭐️

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As always, thank you for reading! Your comments keep me going. I read each and every one.

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Summer is a writer, artivist, and Spanish teacher living in Lingít Aaní (Juneau, Alaska). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Slate, Electric Literature, and The Sun, among others. She is the winner of the 2020 Alaska Statewide Poetry Contest and several Alaska-based writing awards.

Summer writes The Feral Stack, a Substack bestseller newsletter that blends humor with unflinching honesty, examining how patriarchy, capitalism, ableism, and other cultural systems constrain us—and what it means to “go feral” by rejecting the programming that no longer serves us.

1. What are you reading now?

In my living room: My friend Bailey Williams’ memoir Hollow: A Memoir of My Body in the Marines

In my ears: On All Fours by Miranda July, per a friend’s recommendation for perimenopausal coming of rage

In my bedroom: There, There by Tommy Orange

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

1. The House of the Spirits - Finally, a story that featured spirits the way I experienced them growing up in Alaska. This book inspired me to move to Latin America and marry a Venezuelan whose parents were brujos (practitioners of witchcraft/magic). Isabel Allende wrote it while living in Venezuela—which is basically like Alaska but hot—and thick with supernatural encounters.

2. A Wrinkle in Time - My first introduction to quantum entanglement at age eight. Also, scientists just discovered that time is not linear but folds in on itself. Clearly, L’Engle was ahead of her time, pun intended.

3. Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret (my version of porn, sorry)

4. Anything by Tom Robbins, the patron saint of weirdos

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

I’ve reread Where the Wild Things Are 1,426,792 times—mostly to remind myself that wild things eventually go to bed (they do, RIGHT?). Every time it heals the part of my soul that’s turned curmudgeon from raising my own wild and feral things.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

Can I pick jewelry? My friend Lily Hope, a Chilkat and Ravenstail weaver, made me some earrings. Every time I wear them, I feel connected to this land and its history, and grateful to my friend for letting me carry a piece of it.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

“A dragon is still. Hence, it is able to constantly transform itself” – Heshang Gong 河上公 , Lao-tzu-chu

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

The coyotes. When I lived in the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras, I was nicknamed Coyote because I was too curious for my own good, asking too many questions, ears always pricked.

Fast forward twenty years later, I’m in the Yukon with family camping, and I accidentally took too many asthma meds. My heart is racing, I think I’m going to have a heart attack, it’s 3 in the morning, who knows where the hospital is.

So I get up and walk around the campground. Everyone is dead asleep except for these barking coyotes. They are going OFF. I walk towards the woods, it’s so deep and thick and dark. The yelping coyotes are going crazy. I want so badly to walk in the woods and go commune with them, but I’m crazy, not stupid—still gotta raise these kids. So instead, I stand back and listen. Then, suddenly, Aoooooooooo!!!!!! The sound of a lone wolf.

The sun came up an hour later, and I couldn’t sleep the rest of the day because I was so high, spiritually speaking. Twenty years after Honduras, I finally met my pack.

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

One time, I was waiting for the school bus alone in the dark during mid-winter. I was six years old. Suddenly, a full-grown bull moose came charging straight at me. I’d never seen a moose before—they don’t live in Juneau. Must’ve swam over from an island. I remembered my Girl Scouts training: if a bear charges you, pretend you’re a tree. If it knocks you over, pretend you’re a rock. So I became very still, closed my eyes, stopped breathing, and became a tree. The moose ran right by. I’m very glad that worked out that way.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

Dancing in the kitchen, 100%. Preferably to Bad Bunny or Digital Underground. I also dance with a kick line of witches, the Off the Hook Honeys. We aspire to professionalism, but it’s all frivolity.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

I hope I publish my memoir before I’m dead.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

My mom. She was kind of everyone’s mom in high school. It’s like her full-time job to spread fairy dust and flower seeds everywhere, tell you what you’re good at, insist you wear more lipstick, and feed you extra sauce and butter. Now I’d add my sister, who inherited that superpower—except without the lipstick. Gen-X don’t do lipstick.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

The wilderness. Nature is truth. Going for a walk in the woods is the best therapy. (Don’t tell my therapist I said that.) It’s why I moved back to Alaska, the Tongass Rainforest, a.k.a. “lungs of North America.” Biggest deciduous rainforest in the world, right out my doorstep. It helps me be still so that I can get to the transformation part.

If you enjoyed Summer’s answers, you might also enjoy this one with Julie Barton:

⭐️⭐️Beyond is a reader-supported publication that pays contributors. Thank you to everyone who’s joined this beautiful, growing community devoted to bringing as much light as possible into this world of ours. If you would like to support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Beyond cannot exist without you! ⭐️⭐️

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As always, thank you for reading! Your comments keep me going. I read each and every one.

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Annie Weatherwax spent her early career sculpting superheroes and cartoon characters. Included in her portfolio are characters from Nickelodeon, DC Comics, and Pixar. Her debut novel, All We Had, was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award and is now a major motion picture from Tribeca films.

She has written on the link between language and art including for The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and in a monthly series for Ploughshares. In 2017, she received the Hamilton Life Achievement Award for individuals with dyslexia. She was recently the inaugural fellow at New Yorker Cartoonist James Stevenson’s Lost and Found Lab.

Her most recent endeavor is “Monster in a Dress,” an animated short story that won the 2025 Massachusetts Cultural Council Award for Media Arts. She is currently finishing a book called “Erstwhile, CT,” a series of literary cartoons featuring oddballs and relationships fashioned after some of the people she grew up with.

1. What are you reading now?

Right now, I’m reading everything I can about the history of the blues. The book that has currently captivated me is The Devil’s Music: A History of the Blues by Giles Oakley. Until recently, I was only vaguely familiar with this history. Music has always been a big part of my life, but honestly, all I knew about it was what I liked. Lately, I’ve been on a journey to understand more about it—how it’s composed and arranged, and how the elements are woven together. I’m finding it to be such an exciting endeavor, and not surprisingly, it’s helping my process both as a writer and as a visual storyteller. The elements of great music—pacing, rhythm, a hook, structure, emotional integrity—are also essential for great storytelling.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

There is one book above all others that I loved as a kid: Go, Dog. Go!written and illustrated by P.D. Eastman. No matter how many times I read that book, it was always wildly engaging—and even though I knew the ending, it somehow always came as a wonderful surprise. I still have the same copy I had as a child. The binding is coming apart and many of the pages are loose, but I treasure this book for how it consistently sparked my imagination.

I never hid a book from my parents, but I used to hide Go, Dog. Go! from my siblings.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

Aside from “Go Dog Go” there are very few books that I’ve reread. To be honest, there are not that many books that I’ve read at all because I have always had difficulty reading. I was never sure why until at age 35 I got myself tested and discovered that I’m dyslexic. For me to fully enjoy a book it’s got to grab me and engage me visually. Here’s the very short list of books I have reread: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou and Pilgram at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. In these books, the written word comes to life as a magical visual experience. Oliver Sacks once said, “We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.”

Engaging the mind’s eye is an achievment in writing that I adore and it has endlessly inspired me in my own work.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

I have more than one of the exact same oversized long-sleeve t-shirt. I do a lot of physical, messy work—sculpting, gardening, building frames for my artwork, painting, and drawing—so comfortable clothes are essential. These t-shirts are perfect: when I roll the sleeves up, they stay up; they’re roomy enough not to restrict my movements, but fitted enough not to catch on anything. They are breathable all cotton and most of them are splattered with paint.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

“The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is today.”

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

I found my first dog at an animal shelter when I was in my early thirties. She was emaciated and full of fleas, but when I looked into her eyes, I felt a profound connection with her. I took her home, bathed and fed her. At first I had to feed her by hand. She slowly gained weight and grew to trust me. In the almost fourteen years that I had with her, she taught me everything I needed to know about love.

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

My entire career as a writer has been unexpected. As a visual artist with dyslexia, I was long convinced I could never be a writer. I thought the only way to learn to write stories was by reading them—and I’ve struggled with the pesky written word all my life.

Then I discovered Flannery O’Connor, who said: “Many disciplines could help your writing, but especially drawing. Anything that helps you see. Anything that makes you look.” Soon after, I read this quote from Joseph Conrad: “My task, which I am trying to achieve, is by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.” I began to think I was uniquely qualified to write.

Looking back, I realize it was an experience I had in grammar school that set me on this path. Our assignment was to write a paragraph describing a place we loved. In my mind, to describe something, you use pictures. So that’s what I did. I pictured the creek in my backwoods, concentrating until every rock and root along the bank came into focus. There was something about my ability to visualize that eased my way with words.

When I turned in my paragraph, the teacher kept me after class and asked what book I had copied it from. She didn’t think I was smart enough to write the way I did. Kids with good reading skills were considered the smart ones—and I wasn’t one of them.

A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words—and that has always been my experience. One picture at a time, writing for me has always been a way of translating images into words. This is how I would eventually write a whole novel.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

I love to dance and I do so almost every night. I don’t know any actual dance moves or steps, but that doesn’t matter. I have, on occasion thought about taking dance lessons, but honesly, I think that might ruin the crazy-freeform-pure joy experiece of it for me.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

When I was young and someone asked me, “what’s new?” if nothing was new, I felt like a loser. Now that I’m older, if nothing is new, I feel lucky. At this point in my life, I have everything I need. A loving relationship and time and space to work in. Of course, everything changes, but right now, in this moment, for as long as possible, I hope things stay the same.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

I had a fifth grade teacher who saved my life. I was a girl who didn’t feel like or act like one. I could outrun and outjump every boy in my school. I was better at being a boy than most boys were, and my father “disapproved” of this. Suffice it to say, “disapproved” is putting it mildly.

My teacher, Mr. Schoen, celebrated these qualities in me. He told me constantly that I was amazing. He elvated my sense of self and counteracted much of what was happening for me at home. Years later, I am still in touch with him and I thanked him in the acknowledgements in my book.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

The first thing that comes to mind is “busy hands are happy hands” It’s something my mother always used to say and for me she was exactly right. Build something, make something, create something. This is my pathway to happiness.

If you enjoyed Annie’s answers, you might also enjoy this one with Lauren Aliza Green:

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, a dreamer at heart from way back, has no intention at 70 of voluntarily relinquishing her can-do attitude as she moves through her senior years. She draws on her eclectic past as a former court reporter, peer counselor and landscaper in her writing. Her first book, Lessons of a Wayward Yogini, was published in 2021 and can be found on Amazon. After practicing yoga off and on for over 30 years, she began teaching at the age of 67, and recently added Reiki to her offerings. Sue lives in the foothills of California with her husband, Rick, and their two kitties, Bean and Sis, and four months ago became a first-time grandmother to Lucia Julianne. You can find her weekly blog on Substack where she offers gentle, provocative essays guiding us back into our shared humanity.

1. What are you reading now?

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer which coincidentally, or likely not at all a coincidence, touches on everything that is current in my life, a new grandchild, the importance of one’s legacy, the injustices perpetrated by mankind on his fellow man, and the reality that nature holds all of our answers.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

My parents were what I would describe as responsible alcoholics, hard-working during the day and intoxicated by evening, so I don’t have memories of bedtime stories as a child. The closest I have is a sweet photo of my father and me as a baby on a Sunday morning when my parents would linger in bed with pastries and coffee, tucked under my father’s arm as he read the Sunday morning paper.

The first book I do remember that truly inspired me in school was Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell, a story of survival, self-reliance, courage, and the delicate balance between humans and nature.

Although I hid a great many things from my parents, for instance, cigarette butts in small Dixie cups filled with water hidden in my closet, ugh, I don’t remember hiding books. My clothing must have smelled AWFUL.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

Richard Bach’s Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah is a book I have reread numerous times. There is incredible wisdom in each and every page, and I enjoy reminding myself of Richard’s simple lessons every few years.

One of the most impactful quotes for me is, “Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours.”

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

Without a doubt, blue jeans. As I age, it’s become increasingly challenging to find jeans that fit well and are comfortable. A few years back, I stumbled upon a style I adored at The Gap— I bought six pairs on the spot and have been wearing them ever since. They are a faded denim, baggy with a draw string and a short ankle length.

Recently I unearthed a few old photos of me at the age of 3 or 4, one attending an Easter egg hunt. Amidst all the other girls in their fancy dresses, I sit comfortably clad in my pedal pushers. The other photo on our driveway I could recreate easily 65 years older in my current jeans and t-shirts. Crazy.

It was undoubtedly my mother who is responsible for my love of jeans.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

The best advice I’ve encountered recently is to hold on to your passion for what you do and continue to do what you love. Passion is what keeps our life work authentic, joyful, and deeply fulfilling, and moves us through the ongoing crises of life.

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

I have a special relationship with my two cats. When my children were growing up we had two Abyssinians. The first cat lived for 16 years, the other for 18 dying during Covid. At the end of 2020, we rescued two sibling kitties.

I know this may sound a bit woo woo, but according to AI, various spiritual beliefs, particularly within Hinduism and Buddhism, hold that animals can reincarnate, with the soul taking on different forms after death according to its karma and spiritual journey. Many pet owners also report believing their own pets have reincarnated, sometimes recognizing them in new animals. I’m one of those people. There are so many similarities in their personalities and the connection between the three of us that it’s a bit uncanny. I love them so.

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

Happy would not be the word I would use, but I’m grateful that my first marriage did not end as I would have expected. I’ve grown and evolved in many unexpected ways since my divorce that I’m quite certain I would not have had I remained in the marriage— not a slight on my ex-husband, but a truth about me.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

Dancing, for sure. Additional favorites, swimming. I adore the feel of moving through water. And practicing Reiki, sharing energy with others is quite magical.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

Large amounts of time pursuing my passions— gardening, sewing, writing, cooking, being with loved ones, and especially my new grandchild! I’d love to continue teaching yoga and practicing Reiki. I once read an inspiring article about a yoga instructor in her 90’s. My mother lived to be 99, so who knows? I’m in for the aspiration (the noun, not the medicine.) I’d also like to write and publish a few more books that I have either begun to write or have in mind. And one day in the future, I’d like to volunteer with Hospice.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

In my mid twenties shortly after moving into a new house, our neighbor, Julie, whom we’d not yet met, took pity on my husband and I who had worked all day in the front yard cutting down a tree. She said to her husband, “Chuck, invite those kids over for dinner, they’ve been working hard all day.”

We arrived at their dinner table, tired and hungry, and spent the evening getting to know them, as well as enjoying her infamous fried chicken.

Julie’s kind nature of looking out for others led to her becoming my dear friend and mentor, changing my life in more positive ways than I will ever be able to count, the first of which was teaching me how to make that delicious fried chicken.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

Still speaking of Julie, she believed that bestowing goodness for the sake of goodness, not for the accolades or the thanks, brings about an inner strength. She had a plaque on her wall which read, “do something kind for another without telling anyone about it.”

It’s a principle I strive to practice. If I’m honest, I often fall short. It’s not as easy as it may seem. But when I am successful, the good deed becomes a private energy that is unique and spiritual in nature.

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is an author, essayist, and the voice behind the now-defunct award-winning single motherhood blog, Single Mama NYC. You can find her essays in TueNight, Romper, Raising Mothers, and Loud Coffee Press among other literary publications, and you can find her book, Grief Thoughts: Brief Anecdotes On Profound Loss, at most major booksellers. Issa lives in New York City with her son, Theodore, and their dog, Jake. As a practicing Buddhist for over 20 years she brings a wealth of wisdom and lovingkindness to the lives of others, but as a native New Yorker her prolific use of profanity will never end. You can find her sporadically posted thoughts on Substack under Issa M. Mas, and you can connect with her on Bluesky and Threads at @IssaMas, on Facebook at https://m.facebook.com/issamaswriter, or on Instagram at @GriefThoughtsBook.

1. What are you reading now?

The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

As a very young Gen X kid I loved all of the Judy Blume books, but I read Stephen King’s Christine at 11 years old and I was a huge Stephen King and Dean Koontz fan from that point onward. I never had to hide what I was reading.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

I have, and I’m now realizing how odd this may be, never reread a book. Ever. Even ones I adore. It’s as if, once I’m done with them, I want them to live inside of me exactly as I first experienced them. Maybe on some level I feel as if, to reread them, would be to break the initial spell it had over me. As for books that helped through a dark time, Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now is at the top of that list.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

Jeans. A good pair of jeans makes me feel at home in my ever-changing body. I have 4 different sizes of jeans in my closet to accommodate whichever Issa shows up to the closet that day.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

That romantic adult relationships are really a relationship between two people’s inner children and the wounds they bring with them into adulthood. Heal your childhood traumas and you heal both yourself and your relationships.

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild.

I’m convinced that my dog, Jake, is a reincarnated human and that we were in each other’s lives in previous incarnations. For some that will sound insane, but for anyone who has loved an animal with their entire soul and felt that love poured back into them by that animal, they likely know exactly what I mean.

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

When I called off my wedding at 2 months pregnant, I was terrified and ashamed of being a single mom. 18 years later it remains as one of the best decisions I ever made. Every day as a single parent was hard in some way, but every year that has gone by was deeply magical. My son has saved me more times than I can count, and I am eternally grateful for how things actually worked out for us.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

Both! I love to sing and dance, so when I’m cooking I’m usually doing it to music and dancing along (I’m an Afrobeats dance CHAMPION in the confines of my kitchen!), and when I’m in the shower I have music playing that I sing along to, which is usually Jazz music where I can pretend I’m Ella or Sarah, or 80s pop music where I can pretend I’m Whitney or the lead singer from A-ha.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

To be in a place where the lion’s share of my healing journey is behind me.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

When my dad died, my best friend would come over and do my dishes, among other seemingly “small” things for and with me. They may have seemed like small things to others, but having someone by your side who showed up for you when you couldn’t show up for yourself is often what saves you in life.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

My dad. He’s been gone ten years but everything he taught me guides me to this day. He was a complicated man, who made his share of mistakes, but his level of integrity was unparalleled and the standard by which I measure the integrity of the people I allow in my life.

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R.L. Maizes is the author of the forthcoming novel A Complete Fiction, out November 4 (preorders help writers tremendously!). Maizes’s debut novel, Other People’s Pets, won the 2021 Colorado Book Award in Fiction and was a Library Journal Best Debut of Summer/Fall 2020. She is also the author of the short story collection We Love Anderson Cooper. Her stories have aired on National Public Radio and can be found in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and in The Best Small Fictions 2020. Maizes’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, O Magazine, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and have aired on NPR. She is a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow and the recipient of a Fellowship Grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture for 2024-2025 for her novel-in-progress. Maizes lives in Niwot, Colorado.

1. What are you reading now?

I’m reading the short story collection Autocorrect by Etgar Keret. I like almost everything he’s written. The work is funny and you can tell he sees the world at a slant and that’s great for any writer. I also just finished the novel Family Family by Laurie Frankel who creates the most wonderful quirky characters. She always has a take on social issues that I don’t see elsewhere.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

I loved The Pippi Longstocking books by Astrid Lindgren. I admired how independent Pippi was. She threw her own parties, lived with a horse and a monkey, and had a chest full of gold. I thought that would be a great way to grow up. I appreciated her as an iconoclast before I knew the word. When I was a little older there was a sexy book that I hid from my parents. I wish I could remember the title. I grew up as an Orthodox Jew and that book was where I got my first sexual information. A bunch of us passed it around, the dog ears pointing us right where we needed to go.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

I don’t reread many novels. For me, some of the pleasure in reading is the surprise. It’s not the only pleasure. I savor the language, too, a verb an author engineered that fits a sentence perfectly or a unique description. But when I re-read fiction there’s less surprise.

A lot of books have helped me through hard times. I had just started Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart when my mother died suddenly. That book saved me. There’s a lot of wisdom in it even for someone like me who isn’t Buddhist, maybe especially for someone like me. When I suffered a career setback Rachel Naomi Remen’s Kitchen Table Wisdom helped me through a period of terrible unhappiness by teaching me that if you believe your purpose on Earth is to love well, setbacks are helpful because the unhappiness you feel can allow you to understand other people’s pain. That idea turned it around for me. I’ve lent, gifted, and recommended those books to many people.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

I have a flannel shirt that I wear as a layer in CO in the winter. I snagged it on something and it tore, one of those hard-to-fix tears that contains both an x and a y axis. I tried to sew it and that made it worse. But it’s been softened by a thousand washings and is a little loose and fits perfectly over the thermal shirts I wear from October to May. I’ve tried to find a replacement without success. It’s the perfect shirt to wear while writing or knitting or watching my husband make dinner.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

I was complaining about some aspect of publishing recently and a friend shared something her father always says: “There’s a reason ‘work’ is a four-letter word.” It’s a great reminder about expectations. If we expect things to be easy or without challenges, we add disappointment to the obstacles we’re already bound to encounter. My father has passed, and I appreciated her sharing her father, at least in so far as that piece of wisdom.

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

I had a pair of mutts, Tilly and Chance, who occupied my evening hours after I got divorced from my first husband. I was sometimes lonely then, but much less so than I would have been without them. Chance could be aggressive toward other dogs, but he made me feel safe as a woman living without another human. I almost wrote “as a woman living alone,” but that’s the point, I wasn’t living alone. I lost my cat Arie to cancer a few months ago. She was only eleven. I thought I would have her forever. She used to lay on my chest in the evening and remind me to breathe.

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

I was sure my new novel, A Complete Fiction, which looks at cancel culture and social media addiction would sell quickly because it was timely and funny. Instead, my agent shopped it for a year and a half and two dozen editors rejected it. Every one of those rejections stung. But then I took another look at the manuscript and had an idea. It was a risky idea—the best kind—and one that would either vastly improve the book or cause publishers to shake their heads. I spent six months rewriting the novel and then it sold in two weeks. I’m so happy it didn’t sell earlier and that the new version of the book is the one that will be out in the world.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

Hiking in a pine forest. The mountains are my happy place.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

I’m sixty-two. I hope I’ll be able to continue doing the things I love—writing, hiking, knitting, and caring for the people close to me—for many years.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

A poet I met at a writing conference once posted a beautiful garment she’d knit on social media and I mused that I’d like to learn how to knit. It was one of those things you say that at best you half-mean. The next thing I knew, that lovely poet had sent me a giant cardboard box filled with expensive knitting supplies: alpaca and sheep’s wool, wood and metal needles of different lengths and thicknesses, and a note full of advice. I was overwhelmed with gratitude but also with fear at the thought of learning something that from a distance seemed terribly difficult. Feeling more than a little guilty, I shoved the box to the top of a closet and forgot about it. Years later, I went through another crisis as a writer. A different crisis than the one I mentioned above, although in writing this it does seem that I’m too-often experiencing professional crises. I wasn’t sure how to move forward. Around the same time, a few people gave me handmade gifts: a glazed ceramic mug, a copper and bead necklace, a watercolor. Handcrafted presents are such unique expressions of care. Receiving them made me wish I could make something, too. I found the box my friend had sent, googled “knitting tutorial,” and up popped about ten thousand results. I cued up two different ones. As we get older, we risk becoming less flexible and thinking we can’t learn new things. Teaching myself to knit gave me a shot of confidence. To my surprise, while learning I found myself having the kind of fun that bubbles out of your chest. The experience helped me realize that I’d made writing into a chore and that the solution to my career crisis was to lighten up. I owe that insight and my new hobby to the kindness of my friend.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

Awe is a guiding force in my life. I moved from Queens, NY, to Boulder, CO, thirty years ago to live next to the Rocky Mountains and be reminded every day that life is bigger than the routine challenges that sometimes consume us. To watch a buck graze on a plum tree and foxes taunt my dogs. To walk along a trail and see hummingbirds feed on pine sap and say the thanksgiving prayers I was taught as a child.

If you enjoyed R.L.’s questionnaire, you may also enjoy this one with Sophia Efthimiatou:

⭐️⭐️Beyond is a reader-supported publication that pays contributors. Thank you to everyone who’s joined this beautiful, growing community devoted to bringing as much light as possible into this world of ours. If you would like to support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Beyond cannot exist without you! ⭐️⭐️

As always, thank you for reading! Your comments keep me going. I read each and every one.

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lives with her husband and four sons in rural New York. She is a former environmental journalist and Domestic Violence prosecutor (Brooklyn). Her writing has been featured in the Huffington Post, Elle and InStyle Magazine. She writes literary fiction and is at work on her debut novel. She also writes the newsletter

1. What are you reading now?

I read spiritual stuff in the morning and fiction at night.

I’m nearing the end of Eric Butterworth’s Discover the Power Within You: A Guide to the Unexplored Depths Within—which is more theological than self-help-y. Oprah recommends it often, and I can see how it sparked her life-force. Butterworth’s thesis is that we each have infinite, divine potential, which was Jesus’ message before it got twisted by folks in power. “God is in you as the ocean is in the wave” is a line I love. Plus, reflecting on our shared, limitless divinity really sets me up to manage missing homework, dog barf, spilled milk, etc.

I’m also nearly through Florence Knapp’s The Names, a novel about a family in three different iterations, depending on what a mother names her son. The story’s filled with love, awkwardness, pain, and absorbing details of daily life. The plot is complex, but the through-line is so clear, I’m pulled along without a hitch. Knapp is teaching me a lot as a writer.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

My parents were quite bohemian—my father, Pappy, found God on mushrooms and he had a habit of saying: “there’s no federal law says you have to!” about stuff like finishing homework or dinner. (I had to go to law school to get things straight.) My mother was a theater actress when I was young, and she loves edgy intellectuals. This is a long way of saying: no restrictions.

We didn’t have a T.V. until 9/11 when I was a senior in high school, so we read a lot. Pappy turned me onto all the good stuff: Breakfast of Champions (“To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is a picture of an asshole” was the first time I gasped while reading.) Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl was my father’s all-time favorite. Mom gave me West with the Night by Beryl Markham, a horse trainer and bush pilot in 1920s Kenya. I read that book until the bindings cracked.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

I revisit Man’s Search for Meaning every few years. I love Frankl’s message that our dignity is ours to define. It connects me with Pappy, who died in 2014.

I’m also glad I get to read children’s books every night at bedtime. William Steig is our family favorite and I especially love Wizzil: the story of a witch who turns herself into a gardening glove and falls in love with the man she intended to torment by giving him rashes. Every Steig tale comes with a message of love, but they’re all delivered with so much weirdness and wit you don’t see the transcendence coming.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

I turned forty last September and I hoped my husband would do something special, so I bought myself a white dress as a goading mechanism. “I got myself a dress, Christopher, just in case!” I found it about a week before my birthday—the skirt practically curtseyed at me on the mannequin. I thought: “That dress is me.” I don’t usually feel drawn to clothes and when I do buy something nice, I tend to hoard it, waiting for some ‘special’ occasion that never comes.

The night before my birthday was the Harvest Moon and two close friends came over and took me out to look at the sky. I thought, “Oh screw it, I’ll put on the dress.” We carried candles and set all sorts of intentions for the decade ahead, and it felt like a wedding, except I was marrying myself. Four nights later, Christopher and I went to our friends’ birthday party. I wore the dress in the continued spirit of why not. Turns out, the party was a surprise… for me. I cried and tried to hide behind a bush. I felt so blown open and happy. I keep wearing the dress whenever I can.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you've encountered recently?

“Life is like licking honey from a thorn.”

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

When I was six, Pappy drove by a barn across town, came home and asked, “How’d you like to be a cowboy?” Bonnie’s was a wholesome, backyard operation: nothing fancy. The fences were just electric wires and a goat wandered around with the mutts. Nobody worked there except Bonnie and a bunch of local kids, so we did everything ourselves: hay hauling, grooming, breaking ice off the troughs.

Growing up, the feelings were sometimes complicated in our house—my mom moved from theater into T.V., but my parents didn’t want to raise us in L.A, so she traveled solo for weeks at a time. Pappy had trouble managing his diabetes, and my sister and I took his despair personally because that’s what kids do.

With the horses, though, we were grounded and free. In the summers, we’d ride through the woods and gallop along the edges of the cornfields. I pretended I was Indiana Jones and had no idea how much maternal wisdom I was collecting. The horses taught me how to listen and speak without words and how to be firm but also gentle. Anybody who loves an animal knows that while you think you’re caring for them, they’re caring for you. When our four kids are big and gone, I’ll find another backyard barn and spend my days sniffing the salt-smelling ridge of some horse’s nostril.

7. What's one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

Every day I wake up in awe of the beauty of my life even though it’s not the version of ‘making it’ I imagined. I thought I was going to be an itinerant archeologist, a famous actress, or a suited-exec, driven around in a black car. Sometimes my ego erupts a little and I wonder “is this it?” But I gravitate towards calm, sensuous tasks like sweeping leaves off our brick porch, walking in the woods and cooking. I love reading and writing books. I have a lot of ambition for my work, but no matter where my writing ends up, I’ll want to spend my days exactly the way I do now.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

Moaning on the floor, circling my legs in the air with tennis balls under my butt. Anytime I do unchoreographed, spontaneous stretching I feel like all my vessels have opened and every kind of energy’s pumping through me at double-speed: the blood, the oxygen, the feelings & ideas. I get all lit up.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

I want to see the best in everyone and hold that vision for them even when they fall short.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

College was awful. I was pathologically hungry and always trying to hide it. Being gaunt made me exotic in a praying-mantis kind of way, and I got a lot of weird, scary attention. I felt extremely fragile, which I covered with coolness and bluster.

I would, occasionally, allow myself to dance in the apartment I shared with two friends. One of my roommates—Kelly, who was younger and so looked up to me—once met my eyes as I flung my bones around and said: “Belle, I love it when you’re goofy.” She saw the tender self I was hiding, and she called it out in the most loving, generous way. Her eyes sparkled like she knew who I used to be—silly, open, undefended. It took me ten years to recover that version of myself, but I reached for Kelly’s comment, always. She’s holding me up in the party picture.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

My father used to say that Jesus could be anywhere or anyone. I pictured a man in robes popping out from the bathroom stall at school. But now I realize Pappy was telling me that the deepest dignity and divinity are in everyone, all the time: we’re all as holy as the holiest folks who ever lived. And I agree. I really love people. I try to keep the armor off so I can feel it.

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John Allen Taylor lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He is the author of To Let the Sun, finalist for the Miller Williams Prize at the University of Arkansas Press, selected by Patricia Smith. His work has appeared in Booth, The Common, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He directs the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program and coordinates the Writing Center at University of Michigan-Dearborn.

1. What are you reading now?

I’m writing this as my wife and I wait for our first child to be born, and the stack of books on my nightstand betrays the anxiety, excitement, and anticipation: guides on being a good non-birthing partner; guides on breastfeeding; guides on baby sleep; notebooks of birth plans, hospital resources, and list after list of to-dos. I am nothing if not a serial hobbyist, and this feels like preparation and research for the most significant hobby to date. While I am memorizing pie-in-the-sky sleep schedules and supposed monthly milestones, I am also adding to a little pile of poetry and nonfiction I am eager to return to during these coming months of parenthood. They’re books I’ve always thought of as, a little reductively and with admiration, dad books. Li-Young Lee’s Rose. Oliver de la Paz’s Names Above Houses. Krys Malcolm Belc’s The Natural Mother of the Child. Galway Kinnel’s The Book of Nightmares. Craig Morgan Teicher’s The Trembling Answers.

The last three lines from Lee’s “The Gift” have come back to me over the past 40 weeks: “I did what a child does / when he’s given something to keep. / I kissed my father.”

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

The earliest book I remember loving, and perhaps one of the first I tried to read myself, was the children’s book Blueberries for Salby Robert McCloskey. My mother read this to me more times than either of us could count. I always saw myself in Sal, a child who goes out with her mother to hunt for blueberries in the hills of Maine. Pronouns were clearly lost on me as a child because I was astonished to realize, as I shelved the book in our new nursery this summer, that Sal was a little girl. My mother and I seemed so obviously mirrored in the book; my kid-brain glossed over anything that didn’t fit our perfect replication in the story.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

James Wright’s The Branch Will Not Break is the first book of poetry that took the top of my head off, as Dickinson says. I have returned to this book so many times I have to be careful the pages don’t fall away from the spine. The magic in these poems is no less than the first time I read them. From “Beginning,” “I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe / Or move. / I listen. / The wheat leans back toward its own darkness, / And I lean toward mine.”

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

My grandmother gave me a pair of elbow-length, thorn-proof, deerskin rose pruning gloves the spring after I successfully propagated my first Old Garden Rose from her collection. It’s called “Souvenir de la Malmaison” and was released in France in 1843. My cutting is now doing quite well in 2025 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and I feel like a real gardening superhero whenever I have my rose gloves pulled all the way up to my elbows.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you've encountered recently?

On gardening, Ruth Stout once said, “I never do anything I don't want to do, so I don't do it.”

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

Certainly, this would be my cat Sabriel, named after a beloved character from a fantasy series by Garth Nix. She has been my companion and friend for thirteen years. We found one another on the side of the road in Spokane, Washington. We moved to Los Angeles and then to Boston. We met Marie, who became my wife, and Birdie, who became Sabriel’s sister, and then we moved to Ypsilanti, Michigan. She is, as Franz Wright said of his cat, my “…little // milk fang, whiskered / night / friend.”

7. What's one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

When Patricia Smith selected my book for the Miller Williams Poetry series, it was the third year I had sent my manuscript to the same press. It was also the year my manuscript found the right first-round reader and made its way to the series editor.

I feel relieved, and happy, that my book has come out during a period of my life when I am feeling most at ease and even a little distant from the text. The poems were often painful to write and painful to revisit. I am sure if the book had come out when I first hoped it would, I would have been much less prepared to weather the shock of it coming into the world.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

Here, again, I return to the garden. One of the reasons winters in Michigan can feel so oppressive is because I can’t go outside to pull weeds. Somehow, my least favorite part of gardening has become the surest way to reconnect with my body, slow my mind, and leave (for a time) the feelings of productive versus avoidant work. There are always weeds, thank God, to pull in the garden.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

I hope I am patient. I hope I become more patient and keep the patience I’ve earned.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

My first time attending AWP conference (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) was in 2013. I traveled to Boston from Spokane, WA with my poetry professor Thom Caraway to represent Rock & Sling, a literary magazine housed at Whitworth University. I trailed after him through the bookfair and did my best to draw no attention. We stopped to talk to Kevin Goodan, a poet I loved and love and whose book we had just read in class (Winter Tenor). Thom introduced me as his colleague. He said, “This is John Taylor, my colleague from Whitworth.” I was an undergraduate student in a corduroy blazer two sizes too big that I imagined was suitable for a writing conference. My hands were sweaty.

I think of this moment a lot in my work as a teacher and an administrator who works with undergrads and high schoolers. Thom’s pedagogy, or perhaps his common sense, was pretty simple and quite rare: student writers are writers. I see this as a kindness, but I know Thom would see this as a necessity as a writer and teacher. And, in my work with students, I do, too.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

I want to be of use. Marge Piercy, in her poem “To be of use,” says: “The work of the world is common as mud. / Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. / But the thing worth doing well done / has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. / Greek amphoras for wine or oil, / Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums / but you know they were made to be used. / The pitcher cries for water to carry /and a person for work that is real.”

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As always, thank you for reading! Your comments keep me going. I read each and every one.

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Karen Palmer’s memoir She's Under Here grew out of her award-winning essay The Reader Is the Protagonist, first published in Virginia Quarterly Review and selected by Leslie Jamison for inclusion in Best American Essays 2017. She is the author of the novels All Saints and Border Dogs and has received a Pushcart Prize and grants from the NEA and the Colorado Council on the Arts. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Kenyon Review, Arts & Letters, and Kalliope, among others; a short story, Birds of Paradise, won the 2022 Emily Clark Balch Prize for Fiction. She teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, CO, and lives with her husband in California.

1. What are you reading now?

I’m reading Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s novel The Sisters. In recent years I’ve been drawn to shorter books, but this one, about the three Mikkola sisters, who are half Swedish and half Tunisian, is 638 pages. It’s constructed in seven parts, each covering an ever-tightening time span, and is witty and inventive and completely absorbing.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

I had an uncle who worked at RCA records and one Christmas he sent me boxed-set LPs of The Wizard of Oz, and Alice in Wonderland. Included were copies of the books, with the original illustrations. I read them over and over and over. As for hiding books, my parents used to keep their racier novels in the third layer of a specific bookcase. I knew just where to find them, and would read them at night under the covers.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

There are a handful of books I reread religiously: Larry Brown’s novel Joe, Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, Lucia Berlin’s stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women. For pure humanity in dark times, you can’t beat Edward P. Jones’s The Known World.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

All my adult life I’ve worn plain white T-shirts with everything. They’re soft and comfy and, if the weather is deadly hot, you can walk in the sun without feeling attacked.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you've encountered recently?

My cousin lost her house in the Eaton Fire, and when I asked how she and her husband were managing, she said, “We’re learning what we can live without.”

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

When I was a child, our family cat was the love of my life. I would pick bouquets of flowers for her and feed her treats. She even had a theme song, which I belted out unselfconsciously. Alas, she preferred my mother. I didn’t mind that as much as I might have. It taught me that loving is its own reward.

7. What's one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

My memoir, She’s Under Here, will be out in September. It took years to write and more years to sell. I was often unhappy, but in the end this was for the best, because all that time meant that I wrote the book I really wanted to. Algonquin is a dream press, and Kathy Pories is such a thoughtful, sensitive editor that the whole process has felt exactly right.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

Oh, dancing in the kitchen, definitely.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

What I look for in other people above all is kindness; it’s also what I hope to put into the world.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

Speaking of which … When we ran from my dangerous ex, my new husband loved me into a new life. He loved and protected my daughters. This has meant everything to me. It’s been thirty-six years now, and I am grateful every day that we found each other.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

We have two family mottos: “Everything is relative” and “Down in flames.” Perspective and abandon—that’s the good stuff. We have three grandsons and I have to say that they don’t get it, but someday they will.

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Thank you for being here, dear Beyonders! Your comments keep me going. I read each and every one.

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