They called this project The Wellness Letters.
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And, eventually, they decided to write a book together, a collection of their email and text correspondence about a topic with undeniably broad appeal: how to live in the world and be okay. They sometimes joked about running away together. They took a class in New York City together. The two entered an intense loop of contact. Read: Why making friends in midlife is so hard (Albany! How does one find friends in Albany?) Yet here was Rebecca-the center of a lush social network, a pollinating bee-showing up on campus at Fence’s office every day. She was a new mother, all alone in a new city, Albany, where her husband was a tenured professor. It would be hard to overstate how much that mattered to Elisa. To Elisa, Rebecca was a glamorous and reassuring role model, a woman who through some miracle of alchemy had successfully combined motherhood, marriage, and a creative life. To Rebecca, Elisa was “impossibly vibrant” in a way that only a 30-year-old can be to someone who is 41. The two women became close more than a decade ago, spotting in each other the same traits that dazzled outsiders: talent, charisma, saber-tooth smarts. She’s also the author of a novel and four poetry collections, including Manderley, selected by the National Poetry Series she has a fifth coming out in the fall. She’s the founding editor of the literary magazine Fence, a haven for genre-resistant writing and writers that’s now almost 25 years old. Rebecca is someone I knew only by reputation until recently. The same articulate fury suffused After Birth, her follow-up her next book, Human Blues (her “monster,” as she likes to say), comes out in July. I was instantly struck by how unafraid of darkness and emotional chaos she was. She was such mesmerizing company that I rushed out to buy her debut novel, The Book of Dahlia, which had been published a few months earlier.
I met Elisa one evening in 2008, after an old friend’s book reading. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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