Congratulations to SR Contributor Kelle Groom on her forthcoming book, How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays.
The book has already earned strong praise from established voices. Read some of the reviews:
“Kelle Groom is a navigator of the soul’s voyage, from mooring to mooring, no matter the tumultuous seas. She is a writer of deepest heart and purest eye, who seizes you and takes you where she wanders. How to Live is one of the most beautiful books I know, a profound reckoning.” — Susanna Sonnenberg, author of Her Last Death and She Matters: A Life in Friendships
“At its simplest, this is the story of a restless search for a place to be– a way to live– after a series of devastating events. But there’s nothing simple about it. Kelle Groom has created a marvel: a haunted, haunting, beautifully sustained dream of a book.” — Joan Wickersham, author of The Suicide Index and The News from Spain
“Is home the place you left, or the place you are now? This is a central question in this fiercely won, wildly original, and ultimately beautiful meditation. Kelle Groom is one of our most gifted writers, and this book is her Odyssey, which means we will end up back where we started, only changed. Along the way we will visit strange lands, we will come face-to-face with our fears, we will find ourselves among kind strangers, and we will understand why we are alive. This is a book which wrestles with our hardest, darkest questions, and comes out on the side of gratitude. ” — Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and This is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire
“It’s really a book where the tissue between life and death feels very thin at times and Kelle Groom negotiates these mortal stations like a wandering medieval saint on residencies and short term teaching jobs who finds consolation, wisdom and suicidal despair in violet rain, flashes of feeling in the grasp of a hand, while the euphoria of love and eloquent scraps of knowledge keenly ornament this trail where being a bare faced reader is precisely enough. Kelle Groom writes with a relentless and avid consciousness and in this story there is a child and I think it her own becoming.” — Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls and Afterglow
Kelle Groom is the author of the award-winning memoir I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl and four poetry collections. Groom’s honors include numerous fellowships and grants, and her works have received Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, Library Journal Best Memoir, Oprah O Magazine selection, and Oxford American Editor’s Pick. Her work has appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among others.
Groom is a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in Prose and Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Nonfiction. She was previously Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Assistant Professor of Humanities at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe and formerly poetry editor of The Florida Review. She is now a nonfiction editor for AGNI Magazine and works as director of communications and foundation relations for Atlantic Center for the Arts.
View four poems by Kelle Groom in issue 5 and “Dear Baby” in issue 13 of Superstition Review.
The book is available for preorder here. The book will be for sale from Tupelo Press starting October 1, 2023.
To learn more about Kelle Groom’s work, visit her website.