“Actually, can you make that a bottle?” Jeff asked the waiter, and I immediately started to cry.

How to explain this? It wasn’t any one thing. I was exhausted, stretched everywhichway, too much stuff to do any of it well and in the middle of everything was my little boy. Didn’t he deserve more? Should I quit my job, mail the housekeys back to the bank, and move to a farm? With like… goats? We could plant a garden, I could finish my novel—I had a novel! Wasn’t I a writer?—and maybe even see my husband occasionally. I’d have a to-do list that read like blue light saber, red light saber, organic apples, instead of curriculum development, book contracts, student work. I’d slow down, engage fully in every moment instead of using the time I was supposed to be living to plan what happened next, but on the other hand—always another hand!—there’s the fact that I love my work. I’m good at it, too. It’s who I am, and it’s important for my son to see that part of me, right?

I went on.

I went on and on.

Jeff listened, waiting for the moment when the words and tears stopped, and when it finally arrived—when my breath came relaxed and quiet instead of gulpy, gaspy sobs—he said, “Are you talking to any, like, mothers?”

I reached for my wine.

“’Cause it seems like lots of mothers go through this. Mine did, I know, and my sister-in-law, too. And maybe if you talked to some you wouldn’t feel so—”

“Batshit crazy?” I said helpfully.

“—overextended,” he finished, leaning back in his chair. “Honestly, I don’t think any of this is a you thing. I think it’s a mom thing.”

*

Over the past four years, I’ve learned that there are many mom things [1]: indescribable love and indescribable fear; lots of laughing; lots of weird bodily fluids and bourbon and crying to our best friends about being overextended; guilt about being overextended; times of utter loneliness; feeling totally connected to any mother in Target with a screaming toddler and if anybody gives that mother a nasty look I will come over and cut you because you know what? If you have a problem with crying children, don’t shop somewhere that sells diapers! It’s common sense, people! Not to mention that no one—no one—wants that toddler to stop screaming more than his/her mother in part because it hurts us to hear our children cry but also because OH MY GOD WHY IS THIS KID STILL CRYING?!; exhaustion; crazy libidos; guilt about working and writing and going out when we should be building super ramps on the carpet 24/7; watching episode after episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer free-streaming on Netflix because killing vampires is sometimes the only thing that can quiet the noise in our heads; lots of noise in our heads; feeling what Stacy refers to as Mother-induced-anxiety; feeling very calm and level-headed in a crisis even if we’re crazy the rest of the time; knowing the U.N. should be made up of mothers ‘cause if we can balance the insanity in our google calendars, why not the f’ing world, and P.S. if I am expected to juggle raising children and educating this country’s children and keeping this country moving with my money and my vote and my hope and faith and perseverance, than you can be damn well sure I have the intelligence to decide what happens to my own body—Dear Washington: LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER!—and I’ve only been a mother for four years! I haven’t even begun to experience the mom things! I’ve just scratched the goddamn surface!

SO.

When I decided to auditon for Listen To Your Mother, a national reading series in honor of motherhood and benefitting moms in need, I had no idea what—of the many mom things I’ve felt/experienced/written about—to audition with.

Through my work with 2^nd Story, I’ve been lucky enough to tell stories around all sorts of themes: heartbreak, politics, faith, sexual identity, dodging bullets, fear, marriage, fantasy, and regret, to name just a few. Usually, I’m commissioned for these shows. I’ll get the theme assignment and then, for a day or two or three, I live with it, reaching down the line of my life to find the moments, experiences, and lessons that fit the idea. I write about it in my journal, talk about it with friends, talk about it with myself when I’m stuck in traffic—

Sidebar: stuck in traffice is an essential part of my writing process. It’s when I think things through and figure out what I want the work to—as they say—say. One time, my son was in the backseat and he said, “Mommy, who are you talking to?” This was it: the moment when I explained to my child that I hear voices, not voices like Sybil Dorsett and all of her alters or The United States of Tara, voices like characters. Like, as perhaps more graspable for a four-year-old, imaginary friends. Many, many imaginary friends. “I’m talking to myself, baby,” I told him, and you know what he did? He leaned forward on his booster seat and said, “You don’t have to talk to yourself, Mommy. You can talk to me!” Imagine a huge tidal wave crashing over Lakeshore Drive and engulfing our car—that’s the pride I felt for this little boy. Pride and gratitude and awe. He is Just. So. Awesome.

—Anyhow. I’m stuck in traffic, thinking about stories. I’ll think of one or two or five connected to whatever theme I’ve been assigned, and then I’ll grab whichever one is most taking my attention, that big proverbial YOU ARE HERE sign, and on from there. But motherhood? Motherhood shook the living hell out of me, not because I couldn’t come up with anything; rather the opposite. I couldn’t stop. My usual one or two or five ideas was now twenty, twenty-five, forty, all those mom things I’ve written about in some way or another for the past four years suddenly clogging my brain: stories about Caleb’s infancy, turning one, turning two, the many times I’ve questioned myself, the many times I’ve felt literally breathless with joy. Which one to walk into the audition for Listen To Your Mother? What were the producers looking for? How on Earth was I supposed to choose?

In the end, I didn’t. Auditions were held in the back of Uncommon Ground on Clark, and I arrived with six stories in my bag. At the bar, I had a glass of wine and narrowed the six down to four. Then my name was called, and as I walked into the room, I cut it to three, then two as I introduced myself to the two lovely, hard-working, visionary women producing LTYM Chicago (Hi, Melisa! Hi, Tracey!). “What will you be reading for us today?” they asked, and I did that thing where you open your mouth without knowing what you’re going to say, just trusting that it will be the right thing, and what came out—very fast and nervous and slightly wine-induced—was this:

“Actually, I brought two stories. I’m not sure which one you’d rather hear? One of them is about this tumor I had but maybe you’ve already heard like two thousand tumor stories today in which case can I buy you a glass of wine? ‘cause that’s a lot of tumors and I don’t know about you, but I had a lot of wine with my tumor. P.S. I’m fine now! I also brought this other thing about trying to get pregnant, but I wrote it in the present tense so maybe it wouldn’t work ‘cause it’ll sound like I’m trying to get pregnant now which totally isn’t the case, thanks, I already have one kid I can barely keep up with plus our condo is the size of a closet so where would I even put another baby let alone like taking care of it? Hi. I’m Megan.”

These two lovely, hard-working, visionary women? They didn’t even flinch. It was eight p.m., they’d been there all day, had seen Lord knows how many mothers telling Lord knows how many thrilling/beautiful/awful/hopeful/hilarious stories about motherhood. They must have been exhausted. Their ears must’ve been exploding already. And you know what they said? They said, “Let’s grab some more wine and hear them both.”

I am grateful for their kindness. I’m grateful for the trust they’ve placed in me to be a part of this amazing performance, one of many Listen To Your Mother shows happening all around the country in honor of the many diverse yet utterly relatable mom things that we all experience. I’m grateful to stand on stage tonight at Victory Gardens [2] with our lovely, hard-working, visionary cast. Turns out, I didn’t need to worry about choosing a single story that would exemplify the many facets of motherhood.

All of us, together, make that happen.

I’m also grateful to have all these new mothers to talk with. About time I gave Jeff a break.

[1] I use the word mom because that’s what I am, but I think this can also apply to Dads and Grandparents and Foster Parents and any Significant Adult working with great love and commitment to raise healthy, happy, awesome children.

[2] The show tonight is sold out, but all the Listen To Your Mother performances both in Chicago and around the country will be filmed and up on youtube.

I write a little every day, without hope, without despair—Isak Dinesen

What’s scary isn’t the writing, it’s living with the writing. I’m afraid that if I say, Today is day one, Today we are beginning the life of Writing This Book, that I’ll fail before I even get started. I’ve failed before. I have many excuses, so many reasons to put it to the side: my kid, my job, my other job, my other other job, sleep, students, other deadlines, readings, mortgage, so tired, so many things to worry about—but fuck it. It’s time. I’m reading Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel—and P.S. where has this book been my whole life? How have I never read it? It’s the journal he kept while writing East of Eden, one of my very favorite books, my child is named after that book and now, at the age of thirty-six, I’m reading it for the very first time?

Maybe it’s because now is when I need it.

Here’s the gist: he wrote a little bit to his editor, every morning, before he worked on the book; he credits these little letters with allowing him to get into the writing, clearing his head enough so he could focus and find his words. I tried that today and it worked—it worked! It worked! 1000 new wonderful, messy, not-yet-right but still there, existing on the page, moving forward words! I’d like to keep that pace up every day, but it’s not realistic. 500 is realistic. I can make 500 happen. Steinbeck keeps talking about taking it slow. He says, “As I go on, my happiness increases,” and I need to remind myself of this, again and again. My happiness will increase. The part of me that’s felt off, crazy, furious all the goddamn time, is because I haven’t been writing this book. It’s because I’ve been working on every other possible thing, the easy stuff—no, not easy, just… the stuff that has an end in sight, essays, mostly, and short stories, things I can finish in one or two or five sittings. Done and done. But in the back of my mind is this story, this book—and it is big.

Last year, when I tried to sit down and make it happen, tried to get myself on a schedule, I kept banging my head against this idea that it had to be about one thing, like with an essay, or the pieces I write for 2nd Story. Then, I was reading Shirer’s bio of the Tolstoys and found this:

Anna Karennina remains one of the great works of the imagination, a moving tale of two very opposite love affairs… But it is much more than that. It is at the same time an ode to life, to human courage and endurance, a pleas for understanding and a tolerance of those who fail and fall, a devastating critique of a cruel and corrupt society, and a deep inquiry into the questions that troubled the author all his life: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? What is the meaning, if any, of life—and death? (Love and Hatred, pg. 79).

It hit me, a brick to the forehead, and God, what a simple, obvious thing: A novel doesn’t have to be about one thing. It can be about twenty, forty, a hundred. I don’t have to chose. At least not before I even get started, and when I say started, I don’t mean out of the clear blue sky, facing down a blank page. I’ve been working on this thing for a while now, chunks and instances and journal entires, like puzzle pieces. I saw a video recently of Anne Rice talking to a group of high school students, and she said each of her novels took years of thinking, of journaling, and then when she finally sat down to write it would come quickly, easily, because she already saw so much of it in her head. And I’m like—okay. That. That’s how this is going to work, right? Those 1000 words I just wrote?—cake. And why wouldn’t they be? I’ve been kicking around this story for years. I can taste it almost, some two hundred some pages of What the Fuck already written.

Now it’s about putting it together, finding what I want to give to an audience, what I want to—as they say—say.

It’s about committing to the life of Writing This Book.

*

Here’s the thing: you set aside time to write and then when you get to that time, you’re exhausted. I swear, I had time today, but I spent yesterday doing an eight hour long workshop on professional documentation, working with thirty faculty members on cv’s, teaching philosophies, portfolios and cover letters, and then my brain felt heavy, like I was carrying concrete up there instead of light, airy tissue, and then—then—I got home and my little boy runs to hug me, Look at this spaceship I built, Mommy, and I have to chose.

Either way I go, there is guilt. There is always, always, always guilt.

This is where the Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel does me a diservice: he had money coming in already from scripts and other projects, so he could wake up in the morning and write, and then hang with his family and rest. I don’t have that luxury. I don’t need his journal. I need Toni Morrison, who’d work all day and then come home at the end to take care of her family and then have to summon the energy to write at night. How did she find that energy? I bow before that woman, for a thousand of reasons, not the least of which is she was a single mom, so not only was she doing it, she was doing it on her own. I am not on my own, I am lucky in a thousand ways: supportive partner; healthy, awesome kid; a job that I love, that I’m good at; and I’ll have the time tomorrow for this novel, right?

Right?

Here’s an Ignite talk I gave at ORD Camp about loving both print and digital publication.

On May 6th, I’ll be telling a story at Victory Gardens as part of Listen to Your Mother, a national event raising money and awareness for motherhood and moms in need. I’m super-excited and grateful to be a part of this – thanks for having me, Tracey and Melisa! Here’s a quick cast interview I did about motherhood, Chicago, and telling stories.

“The recent work of writer Megan Stielstra is an emblematic example of the hybridity that characterizes new short work infused with online elements. Although Stielstra is based in the U.S. her debut book, Everyone Remain Calm, was published by an alliance between two Canadian entities, Joyland and ECW Books. The book is only available electronically, which lends visibility and a means of distribution that flout international borders. In the collection’s captivating short story ‘I Am the Keymaster,’ Stielstra’s protagonist uses a distinctly digital mechanism—Craigslist—to approach a thoroughly corporeal problem—a need to secure affordable birth-control pills.”

Thank you to Shawn Syms!

The Right Kind of Water

The first hour is great. I’m in the bathtub, submerged to my neck. The water is warm and lovely, I’m more relaxed than I’ve been in months, and the best part?—what I’m doing here is work. It’s rewriting. It’s research.

While finishing up final edits on my story collection, Everyone Remain Calm, I couldn’t shake this nagging feeling that one of the stories, “One One Thousand, Two One Thousand, Three,” wasn’t right. It was missing something. I read it over a thousand times and couldn’t pinpoint what bothered me, which is the fucking worst. If I can name the problem, I can fix it. I can go to my bookshelf, pull down the Marquez, the Tolstoy, the Hubert Selby or James Baldwin or Dorothy Allison and figure out the literary gymnastics necessary to make the damn thing work.

Here’s the gist: a 13-year-old girl, Eliza, is skinny-dipping in a quarry in Southeast Michigan. She thinks she’s alone, but turns out there’s a group of high school guys nearby getting drunk in the woods. They discover her. Threaten her. Trap her in that quarry like a cage and demand she get up so they can look at her. Like a lot of  fiction—mine, at least,—this is based on some assemblance of a true experience, and what interested me the most as I wrote it was the tension. Would she stand or wouldn’t she? How would they react when she did or didn’t? How would she react to their reaction?—and on and on.

I teach creative writing classes, and what finally cracked the issue was a discussion my students and I had around a scene from Don DeGrazia’s American Skin. Alex, the main character, boards the el, all hell breaks loose, and then he gets off. “How much times passes between the on and off?” asked one of my students. “Like five minutes? How does the reader see those minutes passing?” and all of a sudden—I knew. In “One One Thousand,” the story starts when Eliza gets in the water, and ends when she gets out. But how much time passes between the two? I didn’t know. Later, rereading the story, I saw certain clues I’d placed unconsciously: at the beginning, the sun is high, warming the water, and by the end, it’s freezing and the stars are out. So that’s—what? 3pm to 8pm? Five hours? That’s a lot of time for somebody to be naked in the water. What happens to a body when it’s submerged for that long?

This is the point where, historically, I hit the library. I’m the stay up all night/drink too much coffee kinda girl, finding esoteric details in random books. Even now, with the internet, I still stalk libraries, milking electronic reserves for all their worth.

But.

I’d recently published a story set in a greenhouse. I wrote that greenhouse from memory—blah blah plants and trees,—adding in fancy-sounding names pulled from the 25^th Anniversary Edition of The Book of Plants. And then, not long after, I stopped by the Gethsemane Garden Center and realized my description had been totally, completely, utterly wrong. I’d forgotten the tropical temperature. The hoses full of pinpricks, spraying everything with a fine, hot mist. The ceiling of green, like a jungle, and I knew then that I needed to up my research game. If I could go there, I’d go. If I could do it, I’d do. If I could live it, I’d live.

So.

With no quarries in the immediate vicinity of Chicago and the late-fall chill already here, I decided on the bathtub. I would sit in the bathtub. For five hours. iPhone alarm set to count down the minutes, journal on the nearby toilet to take notes about my skin, my fingertips and toes, my teeth (chattering?). I had very vague, very naïve, very uninformed ideas of what would happen, and a silly sense of pride in what I was doing.

Research!

I was so totally a writer!

*

In the second hour, my hands and feet are, predictably, wrinkled. The water is cold and draining slowly, down from neck-level to just below my breasts. More than anything, though, I’m bored. Usually, when I take baths to relax, I either read or prop my laptop precariosuly on the toilet to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer free-streaming on Netflix. But this?—here, in the bathtub?—this is not relaxation. This is research! Serious research! I’m experiencing what Eliza experienced, feeling what she felt, living what she lived! That’s what I tell myself, at least. The reality is that I’m safe at home in my bathtub and can get out any time I want. In order to really experience what Eliza experienced, I’d have to enter a situation in which I also feel trapped.

I’m fascinated by writers who engage experientially in research. I admire their commitment and worry for their safety. I think they’re profoundly courageous and batshit crazy. Whenever I bring this up, someone asks if I’m talking about Hunter S. Thompson—the drugs. The Hell’s Angels,—but my personal case-in-point is far less well known. In fact, I have no idea if he ever published anything.

Again, the gist: I was at a techno club—black lights, strobe lights, relentless beat—and some guy asked if he could buy me a drink. I was a first-year Philosophy major (don’t ask) with a newly purchased fake ID. It was my first time in a real, grown-up bar. I ordered an Amaretto Stone Sour and as I took the first sip, he asked if he could be my slave for a week.

I asked him to please repeat the question.

“Can I be your slave?” he said, and, in response to the look on my face: “I’m a writer. I’m writing a collection of essays. In each one I’m someone’s slave for a week and I write about what they make me do.”

“What do they make you do?” I asked—and yes, I know, I was gullible as all hell and probably he was lying through his teeth, but who cared. It was the best, craziest, most awful story my eighteen-year-old self had ever heard. One woman prostituted him to her gay friends and kept the money. Another made him clean her house wearing only a saddle. A suburban couple filmed him setting fire to himself—“They made me pour lighter fluid in my hair,” he said, “like it was shampoo or something.”

“Why do you do all this stuff?” I asked, aghast. “Why not just imagine it?”

“You mean like fiction?” he said, like it was a bad word. “People don’t want fiction. They want the truth—the blood and guts and piss and shit.”

I didn’t have the wherewithall then to tell him how, for me, fiction is truth. I hadn’t yet lived enough, read enough, or dealt with enough writers in bars to be able to explain how a story—when it’s done right—can help you find yourself in others, share realities that can’t possibly be real, show a person or people or world that you never before imagined. Blood and guts and piss and shit?—sure, but joy and courage and hope and understanding, too.

The kicker is the when it’s done right.

Which is why I was sitting in the fucking bathtub.

 *

In the third hour, the water has drained below my hips, my knuckles and the soles of my feet are cracked like spiderwebbed glass. My dad is a fisherman in Alaska now and I think of the dead fish he pulls from the water, bloated and eerie blue. I think of all he taught me about appropriate wilderness behavior back when I was growing up in Michigan, camping and hunter safety and taking the canoe over waterfalls on the Shiawasee River. If he saw me now, sitting in this icy water for no discernable reason, he’d think I’d lost it entirely.

“It’s for a story,” I’d tell him.

He’d try hard to be sensitive. He’s a big reader, although one time he got pissed at Tom Wolfe for making a character go quail hunting with buckshot. “Does it have to be five hours?” he’d ask, rational and reasonable. “Can it maybe happen quicker?”

Could it? I thought of when the Eliza story actually happened to me, some two decades ago around my sixteenth birthday. The day was so beautiful, the water warm, I floated on my back, listening to my own breath underwater, in and out, in and out,—and then suddenly they were there, first just one and then he called for the rest, six, maybe? seven? all standing at the edge of jagged rock, looking down at me trapped in a fishbowl below them. Instincively, I locked myself into a ball and moved towards shallow water, low enough so I could stand by still high enough to shield how naked I was. God, the shame! When you’re sixteen! I’ve had so many relationships with my body—it’s been a source of power, hatred, pride, life—but that day in the quarry is the first time I felt shame.

How much time passed that day? Truly, I don’t remember. It could have been five minutes. It could have been five hours.

“Stand up,” they yelled. “We just want to see!”

“Stand up. We’re not gonna do anything to you!”

“Fucking stand up! Are you fucking deaf?—stand up!”

—but I didn’t. I was frozen. I was terrified. I was ashamed. It was so much bigger than five minutes.

But five hours?

After five hours, I’d surely remember the water growing cold. My feet, split and cracked. My skin blue like fish. Wouldn’t I remember?

*

In the fourth hour, I panic. The tub is nearly drained and my face is puffy, my hands swollen, my body heavy like a wet blanket. I’m remembering bits and pieces of biology lectures, articles from Scientific American, things dad said on the boat, out on the ocean where being smart might mean your life. What had he said about hypothermia? Didn’t I read something about Trench Foot? Muscle Atrophy—what was that?  And didn’t David Blaine do this and his skin like peeled off?

This is stupid, I decide. Even for me, and I’ve done some stupid shit. I did acid one time at the opera. And now I’m counting down the minutes, shivering in an empty bathtub? A bathtub! It’s not even the right kind of water! Eliza’s quarry is full of organisms! Minerals! The setting sun changes the water temperature! She is thirteen-years-old, I am thirty-five, and sixteen, too; all of us were in that quarry, the story changes with every telling, and—like Tim O’Brien being unable to remember the smell of the mud in Vietnam—I can’t for the life of me remember what happened to my skin that day in the quarry.

*

By the fifth hour, I’ve given up. I’m on the couch, wrapped in a blanket. My body is too heavy; my head too light. I feel better after the first hot water and bourbon. Better after the second. And the third.

After a while, I get my laptop and google BEING UNDERWATER FOR LONG PERIODS OF TIME. Then I start my research.

I’ve been following Fresh Signals for a few years now, ever since I met Claire (love you, Claire!) through her series Funny Ha-Ha (love you, Funny Ha-Ha!) and she introduced me to this crazy filmmaker Steve (her husband, incidentally) and when I went home and told Christopher (my husband, incidentally), he was all, Yeah, Steve Delahoyde from Coudal. I love that site at which point Coudal became one of my main go-to’s for – how should I phrase this? – really good shit. The kind of shit that makes you want to rush out and make something, do something, like paint a barn or stage a play or steal a van and fill it with dancers and choreograph a dance inside a van ’cause for years you’ve been thinking about it, for years you’ve been all, Dammit, someday I’m to choreograph a dance set in a van, and also I’m going to have a theatre in warehouse and a circus on the second floor and on the roof there’ll be a garden where I’ll grow my own corn in order to survive when the zombies come but of course you haven’t done it yet, ’cause it’s risky, it’s scary, it might fail, plus who has the time? You have a job and a family and, like, commitments! So the dance in the van remains a dream you dream during some soul-crunching meeting, a file filed under Someday.

Coudal is the place that says Someday is right now.

Last July, I went to Creative Mornings to hear Jim Coudal give a talk called What Are You Afraid Of? It made me want to kick down the walls and quit my job and save the world, but instead I went home and had a little meeting with myself about my time: how was I using it, and what was I using it for?

He said: “When somebody says, ‘Oh I have this really great idea for a croched beer cosy and I’m going to start it in six months’—the problem is the six months. What that means is, ‘I’m afraid.’”

He said: “The problem with doing a project that’s important to you in your spare time is that there isn’t any.”

He said: “What are you afraid of?”

I’d been hearing about Creative Mornings for while. For the Chicago kick-off, last July with Coudal, online RSVPs filled within two minutes, and Christopher was lucky enough to snag a couple. It’s a simple, lovely idea: creative people meet over coffee and hear someone awesome talk for twenty minutes about whatever they’re most interested in. Everyone in the audience fills out these icebreaker name-tag things, answering a question about the topic of the talk that can then serve as a jumping-off point for conversation with all these coffee-drinking strangers.

I loved it, of course. A big part of our mission at 2nd Story is finding connections between people through shared stories, and to spend a morning meeting new people via what they were afraid of was pretty goddamn profound. It also challenged me to really consider what I was afraid of. I’ve been working on this novel for a while now – what do I need to do in order to finish? What kind of time commitment do I need to make? What exactly is getting in the way?

All this is a work in progress, of course (i.e. I still watch too much Buffy the Vampire Slayer free-streaming on Netflix, damn you free-streaming on Netflix, I love you free-streaming on Netflix) but in the meantime, I’ve been a regular lurker at Coudal’s site, searching for inspiration, like this recent video they made for their new line of red Field Notes, which made me cry and then order like five hundred red Field Notes. Anyhow, I’m super excited to be contributing to Fresh Signals, and hope that my little additions can give folks the same kind of food for thought and inspiration and brain-explosions that I get everyday. Thanks for having me, Steve!.

I am in love with Samantha Irby. I wrote her a fan letter one time but I was too shy to send it. Sometimes, though, I hate her pretty, shiny guts ’cause she writes this stuff at her blog Bitches Gotta Eat that makes me pee. Like, in my pants. I’m saying that aloud on the internet. She makes me pee in my pants and then I spend the whole day with wet pants, cursing Samantha Irby and her hilarity and profundity and spot-on truth, seriously, this girl is so honest that the rest of us should immediately attend therapy and work out the things we’re not admitting, an unexamined life is not worth living, right? Right? Anyhow, I got to meet her last month at The Paper Machete and I was all, Samantha, I love you, and she was all, Talk louder, I can’t hear you over this bourbon I’m drinking, and I was like, Sometimes you make me pee, and she said, There are diapers for that, and I was like I am going to JCPenny to buy one of those heart necklaces that crack in half and you give half to your best friend and I’m going to give half to you, and she said, Or we could just make out? and I said, OMG yes.

It was awesome.

And then, then, then she wrote to tell me that my book gave her a boner, which is totally the best review I’ve ever got in my whole life except for the time I asked my friend Amanda from 2nd Story to blurb my book and she wrote, MEGAN STIELSTRA POOPS GLITTER.

That was really nice, too.

“Those who know of Chicago author Megan Stielstra are probably more aware of her 2nd Story readings: amazing theatrical readings that are usually held at Webster’s Wine bar. Check them out. Megan’s performances are intense, composed of a powerful cadence of speech and strong storytelling you won’t find anywhere else. Somehow she has bottled the presence of her performances and sprinkled a little bit on each story contained within Everyone Remain Calm. Each story has a presence that is similar to the intense Megan Stielstra sitting a few feet away from you on a stage telling you a really good story. So check it out.”

Everyone Remain Calm was listed in The Chicago Tribune’s Favorites of 2011! ”Stories to help you sort fantasy from reality.”