Heating and Cooling

I hoped I would like Beth Ann Fennelly because I so loved her new book, Heating and Cooling; when she showed up for our recent breakfast interview wearing a necklace made out of a bullet casing and a doll's arm, I knew I loved her. The Poet Laureate of Mississippi, among other triumphs, Fennelly has also gained recognition for essays and fiction. With Heating and Cooling, she explores a new, possibly just-invented genre: the micro-memoir.

The fifty-two pieces in Heating and Cooling vary from a few lines to a few pages: my favorite is one long sentence with a sassy title. Fennelly said they've been well received when people have understood them: "I never had one accepted by itself. If I sent in a handful, people got the idea, and they'd accept them." After working on a novel with her novelist husband for four years (Fennelly is nothing if not brave), she turned to shorter work. "I didn't initially feel like this was 'writing,' but I realized when I was writing these short things in my notebook, I felt the same energy."

I Come From a Long Line of Modest Achievers:

I'm fond of recalling how my grandmother is fond of recalling how my great-grandfather was the very first person to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on the second day.

These little pieces are short, sharp, and illuminating, more revealing of character than story. We don't know the arc of Fennelly's mother's life, but we know that she scorns pink M&Ms as "unnatural," a far more revealing detail than a mere birthplace. She shows us how hard it is to remember anger at someone you loved who has died; how nonsensical sexual harassment can be; how fleetingly someone may lust after a repairman. Fennelly said that fairness had been important to her, and that she had shown the work to every "character" who appears in it. All approved, if sometimes with reservations, except for one man who said that he thought the characterization was fair but unflattering. Fennelly didn't consider it one of the stronger pieces, so she left it out. In writing about her late father and sister, she applied similar filters, "though of course it's easier, since they won't read it."

Fennelly will appear at the Louisiana Book Festival and to give a workshop, Make Me a Hummingbird of Words: Salvos into the World of Micro-Memoirs