E.B.'s Notes & News: Augtember 2025! 🚌📚❤️✏️📓📝🎒🍁🐢🍂
Less than two months until GOOD GRIEF is in paperback!!!
Notes & News: August + September 2025
I never sent a newsletter in August! Oh no! Who cares!
Seriously, with everything happening in the world, really, who cares that I missed one month sending out an email that is, frankly, pretty self-indulgent. But, on the other hand, if you go too far with the who cares mindset, it can pretty quickly unravel everything.
I remember one summer in middle school when I suddenly realized that eventually everyone I knew and loved was going to die, and that included me too, and how it was very hard to shake off the idea of why bother doing anything (finishing that craft project, writing a short story, saving up money for some big purchase) if one day we’ll all be dead anyway. In retrospect, this was my first experience with depression, and it was a rough summer.
It’s a fine line to walk between who cares it’s not a big deal that I missed sending out an email, I need to be kind to myself, but also I do really still care because if you don’t care about anything, it’s easy to let the world burn. And right now we need to hang on to the things we care about as much as possible, even if maybe they feel silly or insignificant compared to everything else. We have to keep caring.
So, enjoy reading about some things I care about.
xoxo,
E.B.
Hope Notes & News:
I swear this section of my newsletter isn’t going to turn into a “Mary Cate Notes & News” section BUT you know my friend Mary Cate Zipprich who gave all the great recs in the July Notes & News for organizations to protect immigrants and help families impacted by ICE raids? Well, she is doing more excellent work, this time by raising money for the development of new treatments for Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT), to improve the quality of life for people with CMT, and to find a cure for CMT.
On September 28th, Richie, Luca, and I will be participating in the Walk or Cycle 4 CMT event to raise money for the Charcot-Marie-Tooth Association (CMTA), biking as part of Mary Cate’s team, The 4C Force! Richie plans to bike 20+ miles with Luca in a seat on the back of his bike. I hope to bike at least 5 miles! (Pray for me.) Mary Cate has CMT herself, and she does so much to help other people (as I write this newsletter, she is filming ICE agents in her neighborhood in Somerville) that this feels like a way to give back to Mary Cate and support a cause that is personally very important to her and her family. Thanks for considering a donation of any amount!
You can support Mary Cate’s team and the Bartels-Corrado family's ride here.
Writing Notes & News:
TWO MONTHS! TWO MONTHS until November 11th!!!
Yes, Good Grief will be out in paperback two months from YESTERDAY! I continue to beg you to please preorder a copy at your local independent bookstore, from Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, or even Amazon. Preorder numbers really help authors! Also stay tuned next month for a special preorder campaign!
Some Good Grief love I’ve gotten recently:
Leigh Cypres interviewed me about Good Grief and my childhood dogs, Gus and Gwen, for her Substack Beyond A Cute Dog Painting, and then she painted GORGEOUS PORTRAITS OF BOTH OF THEM. Seriously unreal. I can’t get over it, Leigh. Thank you!
Kinship editor Hilary Weaver included quotes from conversation back in March in another article on the website: “The Real Reason Grieving a Pet Can Feel So Much Harder”
Haley Young wrote about Good Grief and meeting me on her Substack Paws and Reflect.
Good Grief was included in two lists on Times Now, a news site out of India: 10 Books That Felt Like a Lifeline When Everything Fell Apart and 10 Books That Teach You to Let Go Without Falling Apart.
Did I ever share that my elementary school (Lexington Montessori) did an alum spotlight on yours truly last December? Probably not because I still wasn’t sending newsletters then.
Plus, I wrote a feature for the summer issue of Wellesley magazine about Wellesley myths and legends, and editor-in-chief Lisa Scanlon Mogolov told me that when she checked out the magazine’s website analytics she saw that this story is the most-viewed article in a couple years with over 2,200 views! This is definitely thanks to the help of our social media manager Liz Hoveland who has been promoting it heavily on the Wellesley College Instagram account. I’ve learned so many more myths and legends since publishing this story thanks to people’s comments — I’m going to have to write a follow up piece.
Events Notes & News:
I think I finally have enough events planned for this fall to warrant bringing back a separate events section! For the latest info on my upcoming events, you can always check my website’s events page, but here’s what’s happening as of right now:
Tuesday 10/14/25, 6:30pm-8:30pm: I’m so honored that Christina Pascucci-Ciampa, the owner of All That She Wrote Books in Somerville, asked me to be in conversation with fellow local author Elizabeth MeLampy. We will be discussing Elizabeth’s book Forget the Camel: The Madcap World of Animal Festivals and What They Say about Being Human, which I am SO excited about, plus this will be your last chance to snag a hardcover copy of Good Grief courtesy of my very own secret stash.
Saturday 11/8/25, 6:00pm-9:00pm EST: The Head of Circulation and Adult Services at the Holliston Public Library, Taylor Hodge, reached out to me to ask if I’d be part of their second annual Local Author Expo, and you know that there is absolutely nothing I wouldn’t do for a librarian, so obviously I said yes. Then imagine my delight when I saw that my pal Theresa Okokon would also be part of the event! Plus, get this: even though the expo is three days before the official paperback pub date, I got permission from HarperCollins to sell paperbacks of Good Grief at this event — so come to Holliston on November 8th if you want an early paperback!
Saturday 11/15/25, 11:00am-3:00pm EST: This is my official paperback launch party and it’s going to be a turtle-y terrific event featuring Sy Montgomery and her new picture book, The True and Lucky Life of a Turtle. The event will be organized by Newtonville Books and hosted at the West Newton Cinema (if my name ends up on the marquee my high school self will absolutely die from joy) and it will feature a meet-and-greet with the famous Terrence and Twyla, author presentations followed by a Q&A with me and Sy, a silent auction fundraiser for Turtle Survival Alliance, and a screening of a documentary about turtles! More info soon about tickets!
Wednesday 11/19/25, 7:00pm-8:00pm EST: A literally awesome literary animal conversation with Sangamithra Iyer, author of Governing Bodies: A Memoir, A Confluence, A Watershed, which is coming out on 11/4/25! We’ll be at Porter Square Books: Boston Edition (in the Seaport!) and can’t wait to see you there! The last time Sangu and I were in conversation together was at the Boston Book Festival in 2019 a.k.a. another life.
Saturday 11/22/25, 1:00pm-3:00pm EST: This event will be a doggone delight! I’ll be in conversation with Karen Fine, author of The Other Family Doctor, and Ellen Finnie, author of The Ten Perfections: Spiritual Lessons from a Life with Dogs at Tatnuck Bookseller in Westborough, where we will talk about the great canine loves of our lives.
Plus more things still in the making with the likes of Melanie D.G. Kaplan, Carla Fernandez, and more!
Reading Notes & News:
Guys, I am so behind on things I want and need to read, I don’t even know where to start, so I’m going to just focus on one book for right now: The Ten Perfections: Spiritual Lessons from a Life with Dogs by Ellen Finnie. I am doing an event with Ellen (and Karen Fine!) on November 22nd, and it was my honor to get to read and blurb her book this summer ahead of that event. Here’s what I wrote about the book:
"Anyone who has known and loved a dog will love and appreciate Ellen Finnie's The Ten Perfections. In engrossing and thoughtful prose, Finnie writes about ten dogs from throughout her life and the important spiritual lessons each one has taught her. Finnie honestly shares both the joys and challenges of a life with canines and she does not shy away from the life-changing love and the hard truths of the human-animal bond. The Ten Perfections is a perfect tribute to the many gifts our pets give us––love, compassion, loyalty, empathy––and the monumental ways they shape our lives, even decades after they're gone. Fans of Sy Montgomery's How to Be a Good Creature and Jennifer Finney Boylan's Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs will love Finnie's moving memoir!"
Friend Notes & News:
There is so much bad stuff going on in the world but I am happy to report that my amazing friends and former students are putting so much GOOD STUFF out there that it gives me a lot of hope.
My former GrubStreet student Lance Tukell is the winner of the 2025 Orison Prize in Fiction, and his novel In the Dark All Cats Are Gray will be published by Orison Books.
Julie Parker had a personal essay published in Short Reads! (“If you were hoping to read a piece about both miscarriage and constipation, I'm your gal!”)
Tomm McCarthy had a short story published in Silly Goose Press!
Kea Krause is on fire! She published “The Democracy of Wild Carrot: Lessons on birth control from the ubiquity of plants” in Orion, and wrote about the “Windy Work” of studying weather on Mount Washington for the Sierra Club, plus she writes a moving and gorgeous Substack called Time Pill. Subscribe!
Did you know Georgie Nink writes a fantastic blog called Curious Georgie???
Fairyland, the movie based on Alysia Abbott’s memoir of the same name, is finally going to be in theatres starting October 10th! You can now watch the trailer and check out the People magazine exclusive feature as well. Congrats, Alysia! This has been SUCH a long time in the making! I can’t wait to see it!
Ali Barthwell has a book coming out in July 2026! Reality TV for Snobs: Everything You Need to Know about the Shows You’re Too Intellectual to Watch sounds right up my alley.
Nicole Graev Lipson was interviewed in the Memoir Land newsletter!
I found this essay by Jesse Sposato for The Bump about being “One and Done” extremely validating.
How did I miss that Nina Sharma published a memoir??? Oh I know, because I was four months postpartum when it came out lol. Can’t wait to eventually read The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown.
Lilly Dancyger has a new book coming out! It’s a a novella-length essay about dance and chronic pain called Ballet Will Heal Me, and it will be published by Autofocus Books in 2027!
Milo Todd’s novel The Lilac People was the NYPL Book of the Day on 8/3/25!
Shout out to Melissa Fraterrigo who gave me a very nice shout out in this interview she did for Newcity Lit about her essay collection The Perils of Girlhood, which was published on November 1st by University of Nebraska Press!
And my newest Substack obsession is “Paws and Reflect” by Haley Young, who writes “nuanced thoughts about life with dogs” and who I got to meet in person back at the end of July! (See above photo.)
Menagerie Notes & News:
Part of why I missed sending a newsletter in August was because Richie, Luca, and I were in Yellowstone National Park for ten days! It was a very exciting trip for many reasons: it was Luca’s first plane ride and his first visit to a national park, my niece Agnes joined us for the second half of the trip and it was also her first time in a national park, and we saw SO. MANY. ANIMALS. Talk about a menagerie!!!!
Luca and I visited the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center in West Yellowstone three (!!!) times and saw grizzlies and wolves up close (see above), plus when we were in the park we saw black bears, ravens, bison, elk, pronghorn deer, a whole flock of pelicans, owls, bald eagles, coyotes, badgers, a snowshoe hare, cutthroat trout, herons, ducks, geese, red squirrels, various chipmunks, oh, and WOLVES CHASING BISON IN THE LAMAR VALLEY. And, yes, we ran into our BFF Rick McIntyre again. (Read about our first encounter with Yellowstone wolves and Rick McIntyre on Pangyrus.) Agnes took an amazing video of the wolves hunting. Leave a comment if you want to see it!
I call what you talk about in the intro here the line between “comforting nihilism” and “nihilism nihilism”. 😅 Very much relate.
Also, thank you so much for the kind words, and again for taking the time to hang out with me in person!
And yes we need to see wolf videos!!
As you know, I’m a huge Agnes fan! Your trip sounded like one to remember 💖