The days are growing shorter, the trees on the land across the way will soon shed the last of their leaves, and I have been reading the poems of W.S. Merwin and the fiction of Lauren Groff, and teaching myself how to write essays again.
Over the years I worked on Ancestor Trouble, All Hallows’ Eve and Samhain became important to me. As a kid, I wasn’t allowed to celebrate Halloween, on the theory that it was demonic, so developing a tenderness and receptivity to what this time of year probably meant to my ancestors centuries ago took a long time. I’m filled with particular . . .
What a wonderful weekend surprise to wake up to an Open Book feature from Louisa Ermelino in Publishers Weekly, with cameos and insight from my amazing agent, Julie Barer, and my brilliant editor, Andrea Walker. “A marvel: absorbing, addictive, informative,” Ermelino says of the book. I am barely resisting the impulse to put a full line of exclamation points after . . .
I’m delighted and honored to share early praise for Ancestor Trouble from Garrard Conley and Alexis Coe, two more amazing writers who took time from their own important work to read my book and say nice things.
I always believed that as an intuitive writer I couldn’t stick to an outline, but I was wrong. The loose structure I came up with when I started writing Ancestor Trouble was my guiding light. If you’re curious, I write a little bit about my book’s structure and table of contents in my latest newsletter. I’d also like to thank Honorée . . .