Features

INTERVIEW: Jacque Gorelick, Author of Map of a Heart: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Finding the Way Home — HIPPOCAMPUS MAGAZINE

I didn’t expect Map of a Heart: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Finding the Way Home (Vine Leaves Press; February 2026) to be a page turner, like a mystery, but it is.

In the book, Jacque Gorelick and her young husband, Ed, go for a hike with their two-month old newborn son. Ed takes off for a run, leaving Jacque and the baby. When he returns, he looks at Jacque and says, “I don’t feel well,” and then collapses on the ground.

INTERVIEW: Cindy Eastman, Editor of Grief Like Yours: A Story Collection of Life After Loss — hippocampus magazine

Grief is universal, yet so individual. Grief can make you feel very alone, so when you find a community, like the one that editor and writer Cindy Eastman created in the anthology Grief Like Yours: A Story Collection of Life After Loss (Carpe Vitam Press; June 2025) you feel seen, recognized, validated, and less alone. Not only have I lost humans I love, I’ve also lost dogs and places. And, I know only too well what anticipatory grief is like, so talking to Eastman was like talking to a good friend about the losses we all experience.

What OB-GYNs Want You To Know About Having Sex After Menopause — WOMEN’S HEALTH MAGAZINE

In 2019, Joanne LaMarca Mathisen, co-executive producer and co-producer of the PBS documentary The M Factor: Shredding the Silence on Menopause, started experiencing “very painful sex.”

Later, at lunch with friends, she asked if anyone else was dealing with the same issue. The answers were sobering. Between pain and lack of desire, many women had stopped having sex, and most were okay with that.

“I didn’t know it was menopause,” Mathisen says. But talking to other women was illuminating and, eventually, this conversation led to her working on the documentary.

INTERVIEW: Jennifer Crystal, Author of One Tick Stopped the Clock — HIPPOCAMPUS MAGAZINE

In 2013, my department chair at Emerson College asked if I would be interested in working with a grad student on her memoir. I said yes, immediately. That student was Jennifer Crystal, author of One Tick Stopped the Clock.

Many years later, I sat in the audience at Porter Square Books Boston to listen to her read from the book at her launch. Jennifer’s book is about her struggle with Lyme and other tick-borne diseases: how it was missed in 1997 when she was a counselor at a camp in Maine.

INTERVIEW: Joanne De Simone, Author of Fall and Recovery: Raising Children with Disabilities through Lessons Learned in Dance — HIPPOCAMPUS MAGAZINE

I was so moved when I read Joanne De Simone’s memoir, Fall and Recovery: Raising Children with Disabilities through Lessons Learned in Dance. Not only was the writing and story gripping, the structure was so engaging.

De Simone was a gymnast most of her young life and became a dancer at 19. But between the death of her mentor and being shut out of a dance troupe, she had to pivot. She went back to school and got a special education degree. Then she had her own sons, one who was diagnosed with a life-limiting brain malformation, and several years later, her second son was diagnosed with Autism.

INTERVIEW: Jessica Fein, Author of Breath Taking: A Memoir of Family, Dreams & Broken Genes — hippocampus magazine

Within the first pages of Jessica Fein’s memoir, Breath Taking: A Memoir of Family, Dreams, and Broken Genes, (Behrman House, May 2024) the reader learns that Fein’s daughter, Dalia, has died.

Breath Taking is Fein’s story of creating a family, taking care of her daughter, and creating joy for Dalia from the time of her diagnosis at 5 to her death at 17. There is a lot of loss in this book, but you’ll be surprised by how much love, joy, hope, and even humor is also there. Breath Taking celebrates life.

Interview with Casey Mulligan Walsh, author of The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared — women writers women books

If you read “The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared,” and you should, it may seem like the memoir is about Casey Mulligan Walsh’s son Eric’s untimely death in a single-person car accident when he was 20 and Casey’s grief. While that is most definitely part of it, you’ll see the memoir is really about Casey’s search for belonging, for home, which is very relatable.

INTERVIEW: Jillian Halket, Author of Blade in the Shadow — HIPPOCAMPUS MAGAZINE

In Blade in The Shadow, Jillian Halket dives deep into her relationship with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, her sexual abuse, alcoholism, and how so much of her life—her relationships with friends and family—was directly affected by OCD. For most of her life—she is 28—she didn’t know why she had devastating thoughts.

And Justice for All 

When Assistant Professor Mike Brown had Elspeth (Ellie) Cypher in class in the late ’70s, he didn’t know that the comments he wrote at the bottom of her papers—“go to law school”—would result in Cypher becoming a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Judge, appointed by Governor Charlie Baker in 2017. 

INTERVIEW: Suzanne Roberts, Author of Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties — HIPPOCAMPUS MAGAZINE

Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties, by Suzanne Roberts and published by The University of Nebraska, is a collection of essays that on the surface sound as though they could be depressing and sad. The theme carried throughout the book is about loss, loneliness, and grief. I found it validating, informative, fun in some places and completely relevant to my life even though I haven’t been to some of the places Roberts writes about. I also found it full of love.

Close Up: Juan Pablo Espinosa — Expression Magazine 

Growing up in Bogotá, Colombia, Juan Pablo Espinosa ’03 had never heard of Emerson College. But today, the alum, who recently finished filming a new Netflix series, a survival show called Breathe, in Vancouver, says, “I can definitely say that Emerson was my life-changing moment as an actor.

INTERVIEW: Allison K Williams, Author of Seven Drafts: How to Self-Edit like a Pro from Blank Page to Book

Allison K Williams is a force in the literary world. In addition to celebrating the release of Seven Drafts: How to Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book, she is the social media editor of (and frequent contributor to) Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog.

Memoir and Indescribable Magic: An Interview with Alden Jones — Brevity

In The Wanting Was a Wilderness (Fiction Advocate, 2020), Alden Jones blends literary analysis, craft essay, and memoir to create a thoughtful, distinctive examination of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.