Just One Thing with Amy Bailey

We can’t get enough of Amy Bailey’s featured memoir from our October issue. “Trailer Park Triptych” is incredible, and if you haven’t read it yet, you should get to it soon—especially because we have a new issue heading your way on Friday! Here, Amy shares just one thing about how this memoir came to be:

“These pieces are some of my first attempts at writing flash. I was inspired to try shorter, sharper stories by Beth Ann Fenelly’s ‘Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs.’ I felt freed from conventional essays by her work. Each of her micro-memoirs, some only a sentence or two long, had such energy coupled with a conciseness of language and meaning. They were connected in ways that you could best absorb by reading them all. Her work is a guide to me for all those possible memoir moments that need less rather than more.”