Manuscripts under submission

“Wormery: Essays”

“Oh hold onto your anger and use it as compost for your garden”

Thích Nhất Hạnh, speaking with bell hooks

The spring after I turned 26, my estranged dad, Stanley, essentially dead to me for the past five years or so, sprang back to life in the most uncanny way—he killed himself. I was living in Vermont at the time, he in Florida. I didn’t like Florida, saw that overgrown bog as a stand-in for Dad’s depression, soaked with toothy gators. The early grief so overwhelmed me that I chose not to read Dad’s suicide note or learn how he killed himself until 13 years later. That spring, I finally opened the box Mom, my sister, and I call The Suicide Box: the collected materials of Dad’s life and death, including his note, death certificate, and personal photographs. As I flipped through the old photos, and read Dad’s final words, I felt my trauma begin to break down, the way a wormery transforms food scraps and other waste into material that can feed a garden. I decided The Suicide Box was a wormery. I liked the idea that, through time, grief could become useful worm shit, a catalyst for a new, lush life. My manuscript consists of nineteen linked essays that, read together, form a memoir about grief and renewal after Dad’s suicide. “Wormery” includes both lyric and narrative essays, all of which include personal memoir while also turning outward toward animals and ecological art. Photographs paired with each essay help uncover the body of the larger animal, which in my case is family. The essays often have a dark humor as the book writes toward the light.