Featured Author Interview

Tell us about the significance of the title of your new hybrid memoir, This Season, The Next.

The title was a lucky accident of sorts. I was submitting the manuscript to a publisher and didn’t even have a working title, so I did a quick scan of each page to see if something struck me. When I came upon that line, “this season, the next,” which was in response to a discussion I’d had with my father regarding mortality, I knew it was the perfect fit. It really encapsulates the threads throughout the book, as it relates to the seasonality of not just nature and life but also relationships.

We really enjoyed the hybrid nature of your memoir, which consists of short prose pieces and poems.  Can you tell us a bit about the choice you made to use a hybrid form? Were you inspired by any other hybrid books?

Heretofore, I’d mostly written poetry. For me poetry is how I process the world and I am always looking for ways to showcase how meaningful that genre is. Certainly fewer people read poetry than they do fiction and nonfiction so I saw a real opportunity to make poetry more accessible and maybe appreciated by including poems that were clearly inspired by the prose therein. To me it seemed the poems helped organize and sustain the book.

In your memoir, you describe extensive renovations you did to make the house you live in now a home. Do you see any parallels between home improvement projects and revision?

Absolutely! Especially in the sense that nothing ever feels done, but it means something to try. I think most writers agree that there’s always tweaking to be had with words. And with a home, there’s always going to be work needing completed.

At one point in the memoir, you ask your children to weigh in on their favorite memories from living in your current home. This struck us as really significant as memoir writers sometimes struggle with representing the real people they care about in their writing. What are your thoughts about fair representation of others, and/or how did you go about trying to portray other people fairly?

It helped that I truly love the people I portrayed! I definitely shared passages with them to make sure they approved. I mean my kids hardly let me post photos of them unless they give the okay! I would never betray their comfort and I don’t think it’d be fair to assume their thoughts, which is why I straight up asked them.

There are many threads that weave throughout This Season, The Next, including doing home improvement projects, connecting with nature, keeping animals, blending a family, and looking for signs from the universe that you are on the right track. Can you discuss how you wove one or more of  these threads through the memoir in an early draft or during the revision process?

For me, this was the most joyous part of writing. I started writing the book after we had a pack of coyotes kill a large portion of our chicken flock. What was just going to be a short nonfiction piece about our loss, became much more once I started reminiscing on previous chicken mishaps and then how we got here—meeting the love of my life, blending a family, finding and remodeling our own bliss that we turned into an urban farm. It didn’t take me long to see how connected these pieces were because it takes refining, renewal, and patience to weather all of it. I didn’t set out to write with a certain theme in mind; it just came through organically. Once I saw that connection I wanted to keep writing to tease it out and that was the best part—the magic of seeing how these seemingly distinct things could relate on a universal level. It really became a love letter to that transformative time of my life.

Casey Knott is the author of the hybrid memoir This Season, The Next (Cornerstone Press, 2024) and the poetry collection Ground Work (2018). Her work has appeared most recently in Prism Review, Empty House Press, Gulf Stream, Storm Cellar, december, Contemporary Verse 2, The New Territory, The Westchester Review, Cimarron Review, Salamander, Sugar House Review, and Thin Air Magazine. She lives on an urban farm in Des Moines with her husband and kids and runs Bluestem Coffee Roasting Co.