Just One Thing with Casey Mulligan Walsh

Casey Mulligan Walsh’s June issue memoir “Still” consists of one long, heartbreaking sentence and a single, perfect coda. Here she shares just one thing about the piece:

“‘Still’ is my first compressed flash nonfiction piece. Following along where my mind took me, mining the associations, evoked a certain alchemy, like a study in the way the brain works. With conventions suspended—much like they were in living this scene, with no road map for deep grief—words poured out. A single paragraph, breathless, with few sentence breaks, was the perfect vehicle for digging into a moment as intense as this one. It brought things out in my writing I would not have otherwise put down on the page in just that way. Though revisiting this wrenching experience was not easy, the writing felt a little like magic.”