Drifting Toward Wonder: The Millions Interviews Lia Purpura

“Childhood’s a long training in never minding all you’re losing, everything that’s falling, crashing, being taken”—Lia Purpura’s essays unfold in rich, detail-driven vignettes, but every so often she stops me with a sentence of pure wisdom. I’ve got to take a second before moving on. All the Fierce Tethers, her new book of essays, is full of these moments. Yet when I read that line about childhood, I not only thought yes, she’s right, but also appreciated her essayistic skill in opening that place for imperfect conjecture. Her essays help readers drift toward wonder.  

In the collection’s title essay, she says that when she watches people, “it’s exactly the boundedness of their lives, the precise sizing down that moves me. How absorbed and unprotected they are.” In a twist that might best be described as a bit of literary magic, Purpura’s essays make me appreciate the contours of everyday life more: our “small moments, fixed in their own tondos of light.”

Purpura is the author of nine collections, and . She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop’s MFA program. We spoke about presence, absence, irony, and how writing can come from a “desire for repair.”