A few years ago, when I was developing a graduate course on flash writing, I knew that I wanted to include Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (2017) because it showed how brevity helps language to draw images and moments precisely while allowing characters to reveal themselves plainly. I have since taught the book to students who find themselves, not surprisingly, leaning into every word. In class we talk about how the stories (and sometimes the characters, quite literally) bare themselves in ways that allow for both vulnerability and humor. 

This fall I plan to try out her newly published work of micro-memoirs, The Irish Goodbye, for the same class because Fennelly has a poet’s ear and a storyteller’s wit, providing a little something for all of us. In this book, she continues that work of baring, including when she decided to pose in the nude for an artist and when she revealed to her readers the cause of her sister’s death at the request of her editor. Fennelly’s directness in these moments about her choices and her thinking along the way are disarming and welcome to the reader in unexpected ways.

Until last year I only knew the Fennelly who appears on the page, but during the last NonfictioNOW conference at the University of Notre Dame, I finally had the opportunity to meet Beth Ann in person and to learn how the skill and fun that she puts on the page also reflects the person she is. I’m glad to share our recent email conversation about The Irish Goodbye, about what she has learned from the genres she blends, and about why she’s not afraid to get personal in her writing.

—Abby Manzella

 

Abby Manzella: Beth Ann, I have long admired your writing and your ability to say so much, so succinctly, but with such style. Therefore, I was hoping you might talk a bit about genre and form. I know that you have a poetry background. How does poetry influence your prose? 

Beth Ann Fennelly: Poetry taught me like the weight of the world teaches coal—poetry taught me extreme compression can result in diamonds. Poetry taught me to pay attention to every word, every syllable. Poetry taught me that there are no such things as synonyms—if a word sounds different, it has a different feel and therefore isn’t interchangeable. Poetry trained my ear, and even though I’ve jettisoned the line break and am crushing on the sentence and its narrative possibilities, I still read everything aloud and weigh it on my poet’s tongue.  

 

AM: You are an incredibly witty writer. I can never get over the image in Heating & Cooling of your writer husband wanting to push one of your old boyfriends who was an architect out of a “story” because he couldn’t push him from an upper story of a building. In this collection, your husband names “oven mitts” as an “O” answer for a commonly folded item in a game you’re both playing, resulting in his ongoing need to prove this by keeping your own oven mitts folded. These small moments highlight the connection between the two of you that often involves a comic playfulness. Are there particular ways you think about building humor into your writing? 

BAF: I don’t try to build humor into my writing; I merely have stopped trying to excise the humor I naturally see in the world! When I was younger, I tried to keep humor out because I thought it would get me dismissed as nonserious. I remember, for example, when I was in grad school, I would see all these people writing poems about Greek myths. So I would think, “Oh, that’s what Big, Serious poetry is. I want to write Big, Serious poetry. I’m going to write my Perseus poem.” Those weren’t good poems I was writing. There was a falseness to the very seed of the endeavor that poisoned the endeavor. As I went on with my writing, naturally I became a bit more confident. And part of that was beginning to listen to my own voice, honoring my own impulses and interests. I basically think that there’s a lot of humor and absurdity in the project of being human. So I no longer exclude these aspects when I represent the world as it appears to me.

 

AM: How did writing this book compare to writing Heating & Cooling? I see some connections through the return to “Married Love” sequences, but do you see it as a sequel, especially as it returns to key figures in your life such as your husband and your sister?

BAF: I don’t see the book as a sequel exactly but the two books are in deep conversation with each other. As you note, in Heating & Cooling there is the sequence called “Married Love” that I return to in The Irish Goodbye. I don’t think anyone needs to have read the earlier book to understand the newer one—my goal is for each piece to be able to stand alone. I’m not interested in creating fragments, pieces that rely on others to make sense. I want each to be its own thing—a very small thing, yes, but not an incomplete thing. But I do hope that someone who has read both collections and sees some of the same themes and characters reoccur will have a bit of that novelistic pleasure of a narrative unfolding over time. Like a painting by Chuck Close, each micro-memoir offers brightly colored swatches of moments that, as the book progresses, combine to present a portrait, in this case, the portrait of a woman as a writer, as a wife, as a mother, and as a participant in the delicious and bizarre human endeavor called life on Earth.   

 

AM: This portraiture work, then, importantly includes not only humorous moments but also difficult topics such as the illness and loss of loved ones. You powerfully show how such key losses, like that of your sister, never leave you. This is also related to a common issue that memoirists must consider, which is the sharing of the private in the public space. How do you decide what to share about your personal life? What to keep for yourself?

BAF: I think at this stage in my career I’m not interested in holding anything back or protecting myself or being coy. We’re drawn to memoir to experience someone’s essential humanity, without buffers and borders or falsity. If we want falsity, we go to social media. If we want someone to talk about their interior life openly and nakedly, we go to memoir. 

When I’m writing, I’m not thinking about what vulnerable material I’m sharing with the reader. I’m not thinking, Oh, what’s this going to sound like to so-and-so? Is this going to be embarrassing? Do I look fat in these pants? When I’m writing, I’m not asking myself those questions, because I’m not even thinking about a reader. 

But later, when it comes time to publish, I do have a lot of hesitations and questions. For example, the closing essay in The Irish Goodbye, “Dear Viewer of My Naked Body,” is about posing nude for a well-respected artist: I knew that would be weird for my children, as we live in a conservative town in a conservative state. And there are complications to that kind of revelation, given that I have a public-facing job as a professor. I expect, always, to be judged harshly for my choices. I expect people to be horrified by my vulnerabilities, weaknesses, shame.

But, strangely, often the opposite thing happens. You admit to some dark feeling or shameful action, and other people say, Oh, I also have felt this ugly feeling. I’ve also had these crazy thoughts. You end up feeling that simply by the act of being read, you have a new friend, which is very strange but kind of warm and wonderful.

 

AM: I saw on social media you ran into a title issue with The Irish Goodbye, namely that another author had also just released a book with the same title, but it seems that the two of you grabbed the publicity possibilities by coming together? What a great idea and way to turn a problem into a pleasure! How did all of that occur? 

BAF: Yes, ugh. You have heard of my howling, hair-rending distress at discovering the recent publication of another book with my book’s title! And not a little book, either—a big novel, in fact Amazon’s number one holiday best seller, a national bestseller and a pick for The Today Show’s #ReadwithJenna Book Club, by Heather Aimee O’Neill. Because of the nature of the algorithm, her novel The Irish Goodbye comes up first in any search engine when someone seeks my book. I wrote about this very bad luck in my free Substack, The Bethannigan, under the cheeky title, “Some B*tch Stole My Title” (my subheading was: “though accidentally and she’s probably perfectly lovely.”).

So imagine my shock upon receiving an email the next day with the subject heading: “I’m the b*tch.” 

She is actually lovely—and as I’d guessed, she’d come up with her title independently of my own. There was nothing to do—my book was already in production—except laugh about it (one of those you might as well laugh so you don’t cry scenarios). But ultimately all we can do as writers is write the best book we can. We can’t control timing or the universe. And on the bright side, I have a new writer friend—my Irish twin. She even came to a reading I did in New York City. And at the reading, she had a lot of fans because plenty of my friends and family accidentally ordered her book—the algorithm is a powerful weapon.

 

AM: Do you enjoy going on book tour? Any lessons you’ve learned this time?

BAF: I do, actually. It’s strange because in order to write a book you have to be very good at being alone. But then your job description flips once the book comes out. Now your job is promoting it, which is a kind of relentlessly social, very outward-facing expenditure of energy. I’m an ambivert, so I like both phases—but after a few months of promotion, I’m ready to crawl back in my hole. 

 

AM: Any recent reads to recommend, especially any micro-work or prose poetry?

BAF: I love Richard Siken’s book of prose poems that came out last year, I Do Know Some Things. And I’ve just started Edward Hirsch’s My Childhood in Pieces.

 

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ABBY MANZELLA is the author of Migrating Fictions: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in U.S. Internal Displacements (Ohio State University Press), which won the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Award, and Ripples into the Wild, her short story collection forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. A 2025 Pushcart Prize winner, her work has been published by places such as The Threepenny Review, Literary Hub, The Massachusetts Review, and Pleiades. She is Assistant Professor of English and creative writing at Truman State University. Find her on Instagram @abby.manzella.

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BETH ANN FENNELLY, a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, was the poet laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021 and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi. She’s won grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Fennelly has published three books of poetry and four of prose. Her newest, The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs, was just released by W. W. Norton. She lives with her husband, Tom Franklin, and their three children in Oxford, Mississippi. Find her on Instagram @bethannfennelly.