Lucy Ferriss - Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill

With Rilla Askew and Mary Kay Zuravleff at the Authors Guild Gala

Read Past Newsletters

"Ferriss strikes the perfect balance between the global and the personal." -- Ivy Pochoda, author of These Women

Selected Works

Christina Stead's "The Man Who Loved Children"

"Lucy Ferriss brings her signature honesty, clarity, and grace to bear on Christina Stead's famously challenging and rewarding novel about the frightening misuses of paternal power. I happily followed her into such literary byways as what to do with "impossible" characters (in books and in life), the virtues and pitfalls of excess in fiction, and how writing can sometimes save our souls. Through it all, Ferriss reckons with her own late father and his influence on her emerging artist's vision. This is a beautiful blend of memoir and deep reading."—Pamela Erens

Essays

Meditations for a New Century

"Lucy Ferriss's modern-day meditations are harrowing, whimsical, elegant, and probing. These beautifully composed pieces are small miracles of the essayist's art, and few writers at work today are as deft as Ferriss at finding wonder and meaning in the ordinary, the overlooked, the unusual, and the familiar." --Sudip Bose, American Scholar

Fiction

The Misconceiver

The Misconceiver is a startling novel in ways that highlight how unsurprising most pro-choice novels are. Ferriss isn't interested in merely confirming our liberal ideals; she makes us work for them. . . . The novel offers a challenging exploration of one woman's struggle to work through the profound moral dilemmas of her life. -- Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Foreign Climes

"The geographic breadth of Foreign Climes is only the beginning of its power. What makes the collection stunning is Ferriss's ability to go deep inside her characters, to the hidden places where we are foreign to those closest to us and even to ourselves, inviting profound reckoning." -- Dawn Raffel, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Couney

A Sister to Honor

"As ineluctable as a Greek tragedy." -- Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs

The Lost Daughter

"From its harrowing prologue to its final sentences, I was emotionally engaged with this fine novel. Ferriss is a masterful storyteller." —Wally Lamb, author of I Know This Much Is True

Memoir

Unveiling the Prophet

"Ferriss’s exploration of St. Louis’s Veiled Prophet Ball is a must read. . . . This is one of the best books of the year."

-- Riverfront Times

Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill

March 21, 2023

. . . and the writer home from the readings.

Friends,

I hope you are enjoying the start of spring. The Misconceiver and I finished winter with a fortnight of travel. We stopped in St. Louis, MO; Columbia, MO; Iowa City, IA; Chicago, IL; and Detroit, MI, giving readings in each city to benefit local groups supporting, protecting, and fighting for reproductive rights. The encounters were deeply personal and heartwarming. Audiences all wanted to know how on earth, in 1997, I had been so prescient about the 2020s. I wasn't, I had to tell them. Other people were. I just read what they were writing, and created the world they dreaded would evolve from our liberal sleep. I also realized, as I talked to all the intense, interested readers and activists in the audiences, that the point of my novel was not the ability to have an abortion. It was the ability to have choice. Overused as that word has been, we tend to forget that the ability to make moral choices, to consider and then to live with their consequences, is both the burden and the privilege of being an adult human being. Take away moral choice, and you render a person neither adult nor fully human.

I'm happy to report that we raised a fair amount of money for the Midwest Access Coalition, The Reclaim Project, and the Emma Goldman Clinic. And the work continues. If anyone on my mailing list knows of reproductive rights groups in your area who could use a fundraiser, I hope you'll put them in touch with me.

And next up . . . Meditations for a New Century! This little book launched at the Associated Writing Programs Conference in Seattle, followed by an event on Orcas Island with Jill Johnson, poet extraordinaire and also the publisher at Wandering Aengus Press, which awarded me their nonfiction prize in 2021. The cover represents the blending of two meditative images. The first is Georgia O'Keeffe's "The Lawrence Tree," in the permanent collection of my local art museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum, which has the artist looking up at the twilit sky through the branches of a ponderosa pine on D.H. Lawrence ranch in Taos. The second is the notion of a stone dropped into a pond, rippling out in all directions while also plunging into the depths. I love the cover and hope readers will as well.

My February reading with Ethan Rutherford, canceled by late winter snow, has been rescheduled for May 24. If you're in Connecticut, come by the West Hartford Library to talk about fiction, essays, and the creative life we're all trying to find within the chaos.

May the breezes be soft and warm for you,

Lucy