My friends wrote books!

An outdoor adventure memoir, an elegy in essays, and 2 books of poetry

Everyone hates self-promotion, but you know what’s fun? Friends-promotion! Here are 4 books you need to know about, and not just because they were written by my friends.

Tap Dancing on Everest, Mimi Zieman

You guys, I am SO PROUD of this book.

Okay, no, it isn’t mine, exactly. But I did read it when it was a just a wee little Word doc! And over the last few years, I’ve been able to watch it become a real, grown-up book.

Just look at her! She’s beautiful!

Mimi and I were in an online writer’s group that formed in 2020, and then we met in person at a writer’s conference, and now we are friends IRL. Which is cool for me, because not very many of my friends have hiked Mount Everest (!!). Mimi also happens to be a doctor and a dancer and a mother, and she’s just generally amazing. I love her and I love this book. You can buy her memoir, about her adventure on Mount Everest when she was just a twenty-something medical student, here (that’s her on the cover!).

Here I am at her book launch in Atlanta a few weeks ago, which was inside an REI and had a hiking photo booth (hence my hat).

The Wet Wound, Maddie Norris

I met Maddie when she taught for Writeshare, the writer’s network I founded. She’s an excellent teacher and writer, so I knew her book was going to be good.

But wow, it is GOOOOD. The sentences are so precisely formed, so tight with imagery and emotion, every page is like a poem. It’s a book about grief—an “elegy in essays” for her father—and not at all a “light read.” But that is the book’s premise: that sitting with grief and sadness is a crucial part of life, that when we avoid grief, we also avoid healing. Here’s an excerpt to give you a sense of the book’s central metaphor:

Dry dressing wounds in thin gauze used to be a wound-healing norm, but in truth, a wound should be kept wet for healing. To re-form the skin that’s been scuffed off, cells migrate up within the wound, slinking from hair follicle and swear gland ducts, while other cells migrate over from the skin at the wouldn’t edges, a lakeshore expanding.

This was discovered in 1962, when a silver scalpel flicked twelve wounds onto the backs of young pigs. These wounds were two and half centimeters wide and one hundredth to three hundredths of a centimeter deep, which meant they were classified as superficial, not deep enough to warrant concern. Still, I wonder if these animals felt the pain of their cuts, if years later, these pigs might remember what it felt like to be sliced open.

Thin polythene film covered half the wounds; the others were left alone. The six uncovered wounds dried and formed scabs, natural bandages to hide the depth of the lesion, a protection and impediment. As new skin cells migrated up and in, some crusted into scabs and hardened into ugly hurt, delaying true healing. The wet wounds, though, the ones tended to and cared for, the ones kept open and fresh, bloody and alive, healed twice as fast.

Here’s Maddie answering questions for Writeshare students.

My Husband Is Learning to Draw

AND

Everyone I’ve Danced with Is Dead, Mamie Morgan

Sometimes your lifelong dream of becoming a published author is realized, and your book is published. Sometimes your lifelong dream is realized TWICE, when you have two poetry books published by different presses AT THE SAME TIME. Queen Mamie!

I invited Mamie, like Maddie (above), to come speak to our Writeshare group, which is comprised of adults working mostly on book-length manuscripts. After the event, one of the student-novelists came up to me. “I almost didn’t come. I didn’t think poetry had anything to do with me,” she said. “But Mamie’s poetry is different somehow.”

It is, different somehow. Mamie’s poetry isn’t the impenetrable stuff you read in high school. It’s relatable and transcendent at the same time. It’s fun to read but also might make the top of your head come off. If you want a taste of it, read this. Whew—talk about poetry that “has something to do with you.”

You can buy Mamie’s first book here and her second book here.

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In other bookish news, I had lunch with Mary Beth Keane, author of Ask Again, Yes (one of my very favorite novels of the last 10 years). I haven’t read her latest, The Half Moon, but I’ll report back when I have. (Has anyone out there already read it?) She writes the most complicated, fascinating characters.

Mary Beth Keane

Okay, go buy some books! Go!