It was late in the writing process that I recognized “The Irish Goodbye” as my title. It didn’t guide my composition process. It was retroactively applied in a way that gave a unity. What happened was, I couldn’t think of a good title. I had a title. I didn’t love it. My editor didn’t love it, either, so I went back to the drawing board. I was brainstorming, and at one point it occurred to me that often people title their book after their most significant piece. I’ve seen people do that, and I like when people do that. I looked back at my collection for the most significant piece, and then I saw that short piece, a sentence fragment. I liked how that, in itself, was like an Irish goodbye—something that’s over before you realize it’s over.
Hi Beth Ann,
I loved both of your micro-memoirs! Please thank your daughter, Alzheimer’s runs in my family as well. Your book came at a serendipitous time - I didn’t know you’d be discussing the topic, but I had just found out that a close family member had been diagnosed when I started reading it. Those passages, in particular, really hit me in ways I wouldn’t have anticipated (good ways!).
My question, though, is this. I so admire memoirists who share their lives with such honesty and vulnerability. How has this impacted you once your books are out in the world? Is it therapeutic connecting with readers, or do you ever feel overexposed?
I selfishly hope you write more micro-memoirs! Thanks for your books and for sharing with us! Kathy
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I’m curious about how you constructed the book. Did you start with, say, a bunch of loose-leaf pages or a notebook that you added to over time? Did you have to leave bits out, or come up with just one more memory because you needed a type of story in this one particular spot? I imagine it was challenging figuring out what to include and in what order to include them.
You write about your family and friends in The Irish Goodbye, and I almost feel like each story is a love letter to someone close to you. What kind of reaction have your friends had to what you’ve written about them? How did your kids react?
I found some of the stories in The Irish Goodbye to be laugh-out-loud funny. You capture humor beautifully but what people find humorous can be subjective. Do you find it difficult to be funny in print, or does it come naturally to you?
Oh thank you! I love it when people tell me they laughed when reading my book!
I don’t consciously TRY to be funny or to build humor into my writing; I merely have stopped trying to excise the humor I naturally see in the world! When I was younger, I tried to keep humor out because I thought it would get me dismissed as nonserious. I remember, for example, when I was in grad school, I would see all these people writing poems about Greek myths. So I would think, “Oh, that’s what Big, Serious poetry is. I want to write Big, Serious poetry. I’m going to write my Perseus poem.” Those weren’t good poems I was writing. There was a falseness to the very seed of the endeavor that poisoned the endeavor. As I went on with my writing, naturally I became a bit more confident. And part of that was beginning to listen to my own voice, honoring my own impulses and interests. I basically think that there’s a lot of humor and absurdity in the project of being human. So I no longer exclude these aspects when I represent the world as it appears to me. And I think the presence of humor is not only natural but necessary given that the book has a few dark strands that reoccur–namely my sister’s sudden death and my mother’s greatly protracted one.
Kathleen! Thank you SO much for your kind words! It’s lovely to know my book came along at a good time for you! And thanks for asking about honestly and vulnerability. I think a lot about those topics, too. I think at this stage in my career I’m not interested in holding anything back or protecting myself or being coy. We’re drawn to memoir to experience someone’s essential humanity, without buffers and borders or falsity. If we want falsity, we go to social media. If we want someone to talk about their interior life openly and nakedly, we go to memoir.
When I’m writing, I’m not thinking about what vulnerable material I’m sharing with the reader. I’m not thinking, Oh, what’s this going to sound like to so-and-so? Is this going to be embarrassing? Do I look fat in these pants? When I’m writing, I’m not asking myself those questions, because I’m not even thinking about a reader.
But later, when it comes time to publish, I do have a lot of hesitations and questions. For example, the closing essay in The Irish Goodbye, “Dear Viewer of My Naked Body,” is about posing nude for a well-respected artist: I knew that would be weird for my children, as we live in a conservative town in a conservative state. And there are complications to that kind of revelation, given that I have a public-facing job as a professor. I expect, always, to be judged harshly for my choices. I expect people to be horrified by my vulnerabilities, weaknesses, shame.
But, strangely, often the opposite thing happens. You admit to some dark feeling or shameful action, and other people say, Oh, I also have felt this ugly feeling. I’ve also had these crazy thoughts. You end up feeling that simply by the act of being read, you have a new friend, which is very strange but kind of warm and wonderful. I’m so grateful for every reader who has reached out–that typ of thing is so bolstering. SO thank you!
Oh yes, it IS challenging to take the various pieces, in various lengths, and in various tones, and about different periods in my life, and make them into a harmonious whole.
Of course, the “narrator” of every piece doesn’t change–little ole me. But when the memories or material comes, they arrive with a kind of feel. Some want to be dreamy, more poetic, have elongated syntax, or be rich with metaphor. Some want to move very fast and need a short sentences or a flat tone. Some need white space to moderate and provide a moment of reflection that allows a difficult trope to touch down. Each piece seems to have its own requirements and I just try to use my ear to figure it out.
With organizing, it was important to me that the book have a lot of stylistic variation and look different on the page—I wanted to keep the reading experience lively.
But I still had to cut a ton. An early draft of the book had 100 pieces. My editor suggested I cut it down, not because any of the micro-memoirs were huge pieces of garbage so much as that the book felt a little overwhelming. So I cut down pieces that seemed outliers thematically. I kept ones that focused on my central roles—wife, mother, writer, woman—and hoped the cuts allowed a kind of coalescing among these central roles. The book is in some ways about the choices we make in an effort to be happy.
Thanks for your reply! I completely agree on social media vs. memoir. I read a variety of genres but it’s the memoirs that often stick with me long after reading, and I think it’s for that very reason - the honesty. It’s also memoirs that have helped me through the most difficult periods in my own life. There’s something about knowing other people survive and even thrive after incredible hardships that shores me up. As a reader, you hope memoirists don’t feel alone on their end after sharing so much. I think there’s such beautiful strength in vulnerability! 
YES to all of that. I feel moved to share with you one of my favorite quotes that speaks to what you wrote: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
―James Baldwin,Giovanni’s Room
I love that! It’s so easy to get caught in the trap of thinking we are all alone in our pain. Baldwin was a wise soul!
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This is your second published set of “micro-memoirs” (a term you coined), with your first, Heating and Cooling, coming out in 2017. Why did you decide to revisit the format? What made now the right time? In what ways is the person who wrote Heating and Cooling different from the one who wrote The Irish Goodbye?
What was the journey like to get your first poetry collection, Open House, published in 2001? I see its original publisher went out of business, but then the book got picked up by W.W. Norton in 2009. How did that come about?
Your poetry has won lots of awards - you were, after all, named the Poet Laureate of Mississippi, for heaven’s sake - that’s HUGE! But once you became so well known as a poet, was it challenging to get your works that were written in other genres published?
I’ve read that you enjoy attending poetry readings, and that you love reading your work to others. What’s it like traveling the world to attend these gatherings? Do you have a favorite venue? Are there any stories from the road you care to share?
I revisited the format because I’m still learning from it–the form is still surprising me, entertaining me, and challenging me! I don’t see the new book as a sequel exactly but the two books are in deep conversation with each other. For example, in *Heating & Cooling *there is the sequence called “Married Love” that I return to in The Irish Goodbye. I began this sequence because I wanted to look at the everyday kind of love between people who hang out day after day in a long relationship. That’s what my husband and I have after 28 years–the kind of love we have has of course changed from that first-bloom erotic intensity to something more mellowed and complex and richer and funnier. I wanted to look at that, because our society tends to only portray early love, or unrequited love. Middle-age love hasn’t captured our imaginations, so it was fun to investigate. And in the new book that thread weaves through again. I don’t think anyone needs to have read the earlier book to understand this thread in the newer one—my goal is for each piece to be able to stand alone. I’m not interested in creating fragments, pieces that rely on others to make sense. I want each to be its own thing—a very small thing, yes, but not an incomplete thing. But I do hope that someone who has read both collections and sees some of the same themes and characters reoccur will have a bit of that novelistic pleasure of a narrative unfolding over time. Ideally–like a painting by Chuck Close maybe–each micro-memoir offers brightly colored swatches of moments that, as the book progresses, combine to present a portrait, in this case, the portrait of a woman as a writer, as a wife, as a mother, and as a participant in the delicious and bizarre human endeavor called life on Earth.
But one difference is the person who wrote the new book is perhaps a bit more reflective, perhaps due to aging–and you’ll see there are several longer pieces in this book that make room for more reflection.
I do love to give readings! I’m a failed high school actress and really enjoy the oral/aural component of literature and performance, actually.
It’s strange because in order to write a book you have to be very good at being alone. But then your job description flips once the book comes out. Now your job is promoting it, which is a kind of relentlessly social, very outward-facing expenditure of energy. I’m an ambivert, so I like both phases—but, after a few months of promotion, I’m ready to crawl back in my hole.
My favorite venue will always been my AMAZING hometown bookstore, Square Books! But I have plenty of other favorite places. This time I was able to visit a brand-new bookstore–I was one of their first events! Ladybird Books in Charleston. I adored the owner and events manager and the store’s vibe. And this Nov. I get to return to The Sanibel Island Writing Conference, another favorite spot–it’s the first re-boot of that conference on the island since Hurricane Ian.
Yes, when I first started writing micro-memoirs, I had a hard time getting them accepted. If I sent a magazine submission of 4 poems and 2 micro-memoirs, they’d take the poems only. Eventually I wasn’t writing poems so all my submissions would be ONLY micro-memoirs. And then an interesting thing happened. I’d send 6 micro-memoirs, and the magazine would take all 6. My hypothesis is that, because I was writing in a new form, the editors weren’t quite sure at first what they were looking at, and I had to show them enough that they could figure out my project before they wanted to publish any of it.
Your “Married Love” segments were my favorites. I never really thought about it, but you’re right, there aren’t that many books out there that feature mature love.
I think the “micro-memoir” idea is genius, but I’m not surprised publishers didn’t quite know what to do with it. I think the beauty of The Irish Goodbye is that there’s enough material there, and the chapters are just connected enough for readers to start to “see” you. Kind of like an incomplete mosaic - one is starting to get an idea of the overall shape, if not a complete picture.
It sounds like you have enough material for a third book. Do you think you’ll publish another set of micro-memoirs in the future?
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It sounds like most of your works were initially published in anthologies or in magazines, is that correct? If so, at what point did you decide to collate a set of them into a volume? Did you self-publish? If not, did you approach a publisher or agent, or did someone approach you?