meredith boe

Paper Nautilus has announced the release of Meredith Boe’s What City, a chapbook of prose and winner of the 2018 Debut Series Chapbook Contest.

These stories and essays received the following praise:

“Moving with deft concision from location to location, this collection of eight pieces of brief prose feels like wandering through a city and stumbling upon treasure: a geocache of place and its associated feeling–not just where things happen, but how and why they matter. The stories leave the reader with a soft illumination, the way ‘lightning bugs emerge from a blanket of black sky.’”

— Kathleen Rooney, author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“In What City Meredith Boe’s prose inhabits neighborhoods of circumstance and memory. These essays delicately navigate love, loss, and moments of being, tracking terrains both intimate and urban. What city? Her city.”

—Barrie Jean Borich, author of Apocalypse, Darling and Body Geographic

Order your copy here or visit Meredith’s Contact page!

Voyage Chicago interviewed Meredith recently as part of their Most Inspiring Stories series.

On the freelance lifestyle:

“Taking such a big risk wasn’t easy. Work sometimes still bleeds into my evenings or weekends. But that usually happens when I spend part of my day doing something fun, like going to the beach, working on a creative project, or volunteering. So, it’s worth it, to me. When I’m doing something I want to be doing for work, it doesn’t usually feel like I’m working ‘after hours.’

That being said, the work is not always sunshine and rainbows. There are days when I don’t feel like working, as with any job; even if you love it. Writing for a living requires a lot of focus and precision, so my editors can tell if I have an off day! It’s hard.”

“Unremembered Skies and Snows” by Meredith Boe

Your hands have always looked too big to hold those meek potatoes. Fingernails peeling and callouses dirt crusted, you hand me a bag of freshly plucked reds and yellows, caked in mud that I’ll wash off later in my Chicago kitchen sink. I still have never seen you happier than when you aren’t driving your truck and can tend to vegetables.

Your hands have been gripped around more Bud Lights than all the plastic six-pack yokes in the ocean, and in cuffs on occasion. They’ve yanked a decaying tooth, no doubt. Long ago carried candles as an altar boy. Shoveled snow gloveless in the dark morning hours, just as the cows begin to stir in the field beyond the barn. Just as distant suns unwillingly fade, yielding to light.

Read the rest in the Chicago Reader here.

Meredith Boe’s short prose collection What City was chosen as a winner of Paper Nautilus’s 2018 Debut Series Chapbook Contest.

Expected release is in early 2019!

https://readpapernautilus.wordpress.com/2018/10/16/announcing-the-2018-debut-series-chapbook-contest-winners/?fbclid=IwAR34MDa6YWWawGKX0AGzpJR9HuqtqZ85CIQ19IvLEQkucb4AoRYubfxAvMg

“The poet is the gatekeeper who determines that all is a blessing, the good and the bad. So I say in unison with my daughter, include it all in the poetry—sorrow, tears, broken hearts, as well as the delicious madeleines and the glass of cold milk. Every morning, we open our eyes. There should be anticipation and gratitude for the gifts that will be delivered that day.” – Richard Jones

Read the full interview, published by the Chicago Review of Books: here: https://chireviewofbooks.com/2018/06/21/stranger-on-earth-richard-jones-interview/

Check out the full interview for the Chicago Review of Books here!