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Lilly Dancyger is the editor of Burn It Down, a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women’s anger from Seal Press, and the author of Negative Space, a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the 2019 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards. She is the founder and host of Memoir Monday, a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series co-curated by Narratively, The Rumpus, Guernica, Granta, Literary Hub, and Catapult, featuring the best memoir writers of today. Her writing has been published by Longreads, The Washington Post, Glamour, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She lives in New York City, and she spends way too much time on Twitter (where you can find her at @lillydancyger).

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When I finished Julian K. Jarboe’s debut short story collection Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel, I was struck by how well they captured a world that was ours, but not quite ours. All the fears, anxieties, and terrors were painfully real, but transposed onto a universe that was both familiar and not. Immersed in Jarboe’s stories, I had that sense of being in a dream––one where you know you’re in your childhood home but it doesn’t look like the house you grew up in. I both recognized and didn’t recognize the places in Jarboe’s stories: a gentrified neighborhood now under water thanks to climate change felt a lot like Boston’s Seaport district, a version of the early 2000s where kids can time-travel back to try to rescue parents from the Twin Towers on 9/11, an America where the job market has become so dire that people are emigrating to the moon to find work, a rural home surrounded by fairies who steal human babies and replace them with changelings while parents wonder if maybe not vaccinating their babies would stop the fairies.

By the time Jarboe and I spoke on the phone a couple weeks after I’d finished reading, though, I was having trouble recognizing the world I lived in. Handshakes, hugs, and kisses were things of the past; people were bumping elbows instead, then keeping six feet apart, then avoiding each other all together. I was communicating with friends who lived down the street through Google Hangouts. I couldn’t see my parents and grandparents even though they only live a couple towns over. Doorknobs, light switches, phones, keys, elevator buttons, credit cards, and mail had become dangerous. Everyone was wearing gloves and masks. Stores were depleted of the most basic goods. Many of us were now working from home, exclusively communicating through screens; the most vulnerable and poor still had no choice but to continue going to work. It was a place I at once recognized but also didn’t; I felt as if I had been transported directly into one of Jarboe’s stories.

It seems appropriate that Jarboe’s publication date for Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel was March 5, in the middle of this pandemic. This collection of stories is more than a clever take on the world we live in, reimagining our everyday problems with fairies and monsters, science fiction and myth. We spoke recently about how the places where we grow up influences our work, how to make sense of the world we live in now, and how to imagine a new and better kind of universe.

To keep reading the interview, head over to The Rumpus.

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Cameron Dezen Hammon’s writing has appeared in Ecotone, The Rumpus, The Literary Review, The Houston Chronicle, and elsewhere. Her essay “Infirmary Music” was named a notable in The Best American Essays 2017, and she is a contributor to The Kiss: Intimacies from Writers (W.W. Norton), My Caesarean: Twenty Mothers on the Experience of Birth by C-Section and After (The Experiment) and Common Prayer: Reflections on Episcopal Worship (Wipf & Stock). She is host of The Ish podcast, and her debut book This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession will be published by Lookout Books on October 22, 2019. 

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Grace Talusan is author of the memoir The Body Papers, winner of the 2017 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing for Nonfiction. She was born in the Philippines and came to the United States with her parents at age two. She has published essays, long form journalism, fiction, and book reviews in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Boston Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Rumpus, and many others. She has degrees in English from Tufts University and the University of California, Irvine. Her writing has been supported by the Fulbright, Hedgebrook, Ragdale, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and others. She teaches writing at Tufts University and GrubStreet, and in fall 2019, will be the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University.

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Maya Rao is a journalist and the author of Great American Outpost: Dreamers, Mavericks, and the Making of an Oil Frontier (PublicAffairs, April 2018). In addition, she is a staff writer at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Rao’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, Awl, Philadelphia Inquirer, Houston Chronicle, and Longreads, among others. You can follow her on Twitter at @Mrao_Strib.

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Tyrese Coleman is a writer, wife, mother, and lawyer. She is the author of How to Sit: A Memoir in Stories and Essays, published by Mason Jar Press in fall 2018. Coleman is the reviews editor for SmokeLong Quarterly, an online journal of flash fiction, and an instructor at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. Her work has appeared in Literary Hub, Washingtonian Magazine, The Rumpus, Upstreet Literary Magazine, Buzzfeed, Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She received her masters in writing from Johns Hopkins University and a B.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Maryland in College Park. A member of the Maryland State Bar, she received her J.D. from the University of Baltimore. Coleman lives in the Washington D.C. metro area, but grew up in Ashland, Virginia and is a country girl at heart.

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Meghan Flaherty is the author of Tango Lessons, a personal history of Argentine tango, that was published in June 2018 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Flaherty received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in literary nonfiction. Her essays and translations have appeared in Psychology Today and The Iowa Review, and online at Catapult, The New York Times, The Rumpus, Asymptote, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband, baby, and rescue mastiff in northern California, and enjoys purchasing vegetables in Romance languages around the world. 

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Mandy Len Catron is the author of How To Fall In Love With Anyone: A Memoir in Essays. Originally from Appalachian Virginia, Catron now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Glamour, The Rumpus, and The Walrus, as well as literary journals and anthologies. Her essay for the New York Times Modern Love series (“To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This”) was one of the most popular articles published by the New York Times in 2015. Catron writes about love and love stories at The Love Story Project, and she teaches English and creative writing at the University of British Columbia. You can follow Catron on Twitter (@LenMandy), and on Instagram (@LenMandy) to see her drawings and photos of her dog, Roscoe.

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Samantha Irby is the writer behind the blog bitches gotta eat and the author of Meaty: Essays (Curbside Splendor Publishing, 2013), New Year, Same Trash: Resolutions I Absolutely Did Not Keep (Vintage, 2017), and We Are Never Meeting In Real Life: Essays (Vintage, 2017). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Rumpus, and Jezebel, among others. You can follow Irby on Twitter at @wordscience.

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I woke up at 3 a.m. to pee the other night. This was not unusual. I like to drink tea before bed, and I usually wake up at least once in the night to relieve myself. What was unusual was that before falling asleep, I read a story by Daisy Johnson. I dreamt of deep pools thick with eels, of lips dripping with human blood, of an albatross standing on the kitchen table. This time, when I got up to use the bathroom, I was not fully awake, so heavy pressed the dreams. My shadow seemed to move on its own; the walls of my apartment appeared to be breathing. And when I heard a rustling on the other side of the bedroom door, never did it occur to me that it was just my boyfriend, puttering around the apartment after a late bartending shift. I stared at the door certain that a pack of violent foxes was clawing at the other side. I gasped and screamed and, finally, woke myself from the dreams.

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