Julie Marie Wade

Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing

Poetry. LGBT Studies. "Julie Marie Wade's lush post-confessional poems are unabashed in their desire, tentative then bold in their knowledge. They're sparkly talismans to transform and transport us, delicacies with creamy insides to fill us up. WHEN I WAS STRAIGHT is a profound 'before and after' examination of the self, complete with cultural and family commentary—delightful, heartbreaking, magic and real stories with a multitude of prepositions to guide us: a gifted young poet's coming to, coming out, coming jubilantly back into self."—Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton

When I Was Straight

"For a long time, everything only happened to other people," Julie Wade writes. Or so she thought. She records her falls. The "stunned body, the purloined speech" she experiences after crashing to the ground from a swing. The sensation of slipping from the platform saddle atop a circus elephant, sliding "flat as a penny against his wrinkled skin, rattling the bones of my ribs." The shame and uncertainty of being spilled from the security of parental love. And, finally, triumphantly, the felix culpa, the fortunate fall, of love. Juxtaposed against the fragmentary structure of the memoir, this fall comprises both the energy source, the burning center of the book, and its thematic vantage point. Falling in love is an explosion in Julie's mind as well as her body, an epiphany that remakes the map of her world, slicing the knot of her parents' shame, unmasking the visceral truths of her body. In love she is in motion, reimagining the past, striking out on road trips. Suddenly, she is living, grabbing, tasting, writing, her mouth full of "honey and moonlight," her mind afire. And we are reminded yes, this is what love does, this is how it saves us. Julie Wade has received the Oscar Wilde Poetry Prize (2005), the Literal Latte Nonfiction Award (2006), the AWP Intro Journals Award for Nonfiction (2009), the American Literary Review Nonfiction Prize (2010), the Arts & Letters Nonfiction Prize (2010), the Thomas J. Hruska Nonfiction Prize (2011), the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir (2011), and seven Pushcart Prize nominations.

A Memoir in Fractures

Wishbone

Brenda Miller

Literary Nonfiction. "TELEPHONE is, for me, a stellar example of what can be achieved in collaborative work where two voices figure out how to link connective threads that bring out the best in each of their words, images, and narrative flourishes. This is a real gift of a book, one I hope to keep learning from."--Hanif Abdurraqib "Miller and Wade's TELEPHONE is a polyphonic emergency. These divinely nostalgic and politely oracular essays,--are they essays? watch them essai,--pursue the maximum boundaries of genre, and there, in the peripheries, together, we reach into our pockets to read their decoded message: I love."--Lily Hoang "Wade and Miller's collaborative essay collection, TELEPHONE, stretches the possibilities of the form, creating a kind of thought puzzle that you're happy to never truly solve. Their voices bounce and blend, weave and bob, in a way that seems almost impossible and magical. TELEPHONE is a testament to the power of voice and the beauty of collaborative art."--Steven Church "TELEPHONE is unusual, thoughtful and compelling. The two voices together are clever, passionate, entertaining and intriguing. TELEPHONE pushes the boundaries and demonstrates the power and potential of the creative nonfiction genre."--Lee Gutkind "Miller and Wade's marvelous TELEPHONE takes the ordinary--cars, exercise, toys, sex--and elevates it to the extraordinary. Each subject is subjected to lyrical rendering and astonishing interpretation. TELEPHONE stuns us with its burnished music, its use of form, and its brilliant musings on seemingly quotidian subjects. In these twin-voiced essays is a celebration of narrative's thrall, but also a liberation blueprint that frees us from the tyranny of a single self, a single story."--James Allen Hall

Telephone: Essays in Two Voices

A collection of essays from the author of Same-Sexy Marriage. “A painfully honest but beautiful journey . . . Heartfelt and hopeful” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). This is a daughter’s story. In Small Fires, Julie Marie Wade recreates the landscape of her childhood with a lacemaker’s care, then turns that precise attention on herself. There are floating tea lights in the bath, coddled blossoms in the garden, and a mother straddling her teenage daughter’s back, astringent in hand, to better scrub her not-quite-presentable pores. And throughout, Wade traces this lost world with the same devotion as her mother among her award-winning roses. Small Fires is essay as elegy, but it is also essay as parsing, reconciliation, and celebration, all in the attempt to answer the question—what have you given up in order to become who you are? “Reckoning with imperfect parents—what they owe us and what we owe them—is one of the chief tasks of these essays, which form a kind of pointillistic autobiography. Another is the construction of memories, even imagined, in which understanding and forgiveness trump judgment and hate . . . Throughout, the writing is sharp, surprising, and precise.” —The Boston Globe “In Small Fires, Julie Marie Wade . . . considers family and memory with a poetic eye and unabashed tongue . . . [It] is Julie Marie Wade’s story, but the collection opens onto something universal—how we individuate from our family, how we become ourselves, what we carry forward from our pasts and make our own.” —Lambda Literary “A book of essays that left me transfixed and transformed through brilliant prose and ideas. It’s like finding a time capsule of nostalgic treasures.” —Brevity

Julie Marie Wade

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