Brenda Miller with Harrison Candelaria Fletcher — Love You, Bye
Seven-time Pushcart Prize winner Brenda Miller and NEA Fellow Harrison Candelaria Fletcher discuss Miller's new essay collection tracing a daughter's grief and the forms memory takes.
Why we picked this
Miller has won more Pushcart Prizes than almost anyone writing essays today, and this new collection — a daughter's grief rendered in fragments and poems — is the kind of personal work that accumulates before it arrives.
Brenda Miller is one of the best essayists working in America right now. Seven Pushcart Prizes, a Washington State Book Award, and a body of work that treats the essay as a form of inquiry rather than a vehicle for opinions — her collections consistently find the formal shape that matches what the subject demands. Love You, Bye: A Daughter’s Journey in Essays and Poems is her new book, and from early reports it channels grief into something more formally adventurous than the standard memoir: a sequence of essays and poems that circles loss rather than narrating it.
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, a Colorado-based essayist and NEA Fellow, is a practiced conversation partner for this kind of work. His own writing operates in similar territory — the lyric essay, the personal meditation that refuses easy resolution — and the two writers have been in dialogue about the craft for years.
Tattered Cover’s Colfax location hosts this on a Saturday evening. Tickets include a signed copy of the book or a gift card.