Emily Brisse

Right now, my two children are entertaining themselves in the playroom. I've spent the past twenty minutes lying in bed, listening to them in the midst of the relationship they share outside of me or my husband. Someday I will write about this, about the way it makes me feel suspended between lake and sky on a perfectly calm day. But that is not the point of this post. I came here to craft a bit of a writing update: In the spring, I had a string of print publications, including essays in Grub Street, Lumina, Saw Palm, and December Magazine (I was a finalist in a contest for this one), plus a short story in New South . None of these are available online, unfortunately, but they were fun to receive, hold in my hands, and share with the people I can hold hands with. In the summer, I published an essay detailing my first experience with trapeze, called "Hup," in Tahoma Literary Review . You can hear me read it here (all my years of reading aloud to students hel

(Below, an oldie but a goodie, published first by Literary Mama in 2015. ) You were never much of a hunter. Pheasants, yes. Squirrels and chipmunks, I suppose, when you were younger. But you never came home from a weekend away with a buck in the bed of your truck, because you never had much interest in deer season and you owned a sedan. I imagine some people from other places can hardly conceive of a Midwestern man without a shotgun over his mantle, a closet full of blaze-orange jackets, a copy of  Field and Stream  next to the john. And yet when I think of you, I do see an outdoorsman. I see you paying attention to landscapes, to the shapes of clouds. I see you teaching me to love the world. The lessons looked like this: leaf piles in autumn, the way you would dive into them wildly. And this: two ends of a strong rope -- one tied to the front of my winter sled and the other around your waist -- with which you’d tug me behind you as you cross-country skied. And this: you, wal

One year ago I learned the great state of Minnesota was trusting me with an Artist Initiative Grant in support of my writing. This vote of confidence from strangers gave me a specific kind of momentum, and in these past twelve months I’ve published essays in great places (' This Is My Oldest Story " in Creative Nonfiction's True Story #15 ; " To Be Held " in Sweet ; " Look At It Like This " in Up North Lit ; & " Clean Lines " in Ninth Letter ), was a finalist in a nonfiction contest ( Curt Johnson Prose Award ), received two nominations each for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize (thanks, Sweet, UPL , and Creative Nonfiction !), taught an adult writing class through Minnetonka Community Ed (which I'll be offering again through the Plymouth Library system in late winter), and folks, I’ve gone and written a manuscript. I’ve barely touched its pages since school began in August, but something shifted over this last month, and the

I'm happy to share that my essay "This Is My Oldest Story" has been published by  Creative Nonfiction's True Story . The title doesn't say it all, but it says a lot. With these words, I finally found a way to write about something I've been trying to process since I was eight: the abduction and decades-long disappearance of Jacob Wetterling , a neighbor boy from my hometown. Even though--as I discuss in the essay--I still have reservations regarding writing about Jacob publicly, I had another conversation with another stranger just yesterday that echoed much of what I explore in this piece: how for Minnesotans, there was "a time before Jacob Wetterling's kidnapping and a time after it," how the entire region was affected by this boy's loss. Sitting with these memories now still reduces me to fear and anger and heart ache. Which is why I wrote about them. Which is why I think we all do better when we leave the solitary shadows. By tellin

Aside from Thanksgiving, which I love, November can be a gray month in Minnesota. But this year, it brought me some bright news: I was awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant in support of my in-progress essay collection . It's a big honor and a big responsibility, and to say I feel overwhelmed by the expectations I have set for myself is an understatement. But there is no time like now. Perhaps this--in addition to the new baby and preschooler and fixer-upper house and demanding job--explains why I have been so absent from this space? Fingers crossed that absence here means presence in some bound hard-cover pages one fine day.

Popping in quickly here to point to you a story of mine that was recently published by Santa Fe Literary Review . It's called "Confluence," and it's a bit of a sad one. But sometimes life is like that. Here's a snippet: "It was astonishing to her that the water just kept coming, that it passed by her for one instant and then was on to someplace else. She assumed the creek led into the Sauk, the river that ran through Albrun—the town five miles west of them—but then where did it go? What happened next? All this water mixing, these long trails that moved across counties and states and into oceans without anyone accounting for their individual particles—it scared her that there was no way of linking even one molecule to the snow on a hillside in a small country yard." I wrote this one years ago now, so I'm grateful SFLR gave it a home. Thanks for reading, all!