Carlin Steere

In April, during a graduate nonfiction class at the University of South Florida, you instructed your students to bring a copy of their final essays to class. Towards the end of the session, after we read the drafts of our essays excruciatingly slowly to each other in pairs, you instructed us to slice and dice our work — to cross out words, phrases, and even paragraphs that didn’t move our pieces forward. I bring this up to say that it is clear Women in Tampa Talking About Alligators has been painstakingly edited. It is concise. Its words and the arrangement of them matter. You practice what you preach, which is beyond admirable.

For a short period of time in my teenage years, my mind blocked out memories made within a nine-to-12-month period. I was unable to recall a hospitalization, a car crash, or what author John Green calls “the night feeling” in his collection The Anthropocene Reviewed — an overwhelming sense of dread that flooded my mind and body until I awoke the next morning.

It is complicated in the way that life is; law, morality, and the truths we decide for ourselves and others seldom agree with one another. Thank you for this.

This memoir is as much about you dealing with a late-term medical abortion as it is about navigating the grief, loss, and processing of your family members.

Throughout Bloodstream, you explore grief and nostalgia for humans (those unborn and those present) and pet dogs alike. You write want. Want to have a few more moments with those passing. Want to have experienced motherhood. Want to make it through these wantings unscathed.

By sharing your understanding of how your mother became the rough-around-the-edges woman you saw during your childhood and young adulthood, you still offer her a space in the narrative. You leave room for speculation.

Interview with Karen Kao’s husband, Frans Verhagen​ CS: Do you have a story that comes to mind when thinking about what the writing process meant...

CS: Is there a memory that sticks out for you from your experience with Karen Kao in a workshop? If so, would you mind...

I want to grow kinder, more considerate as I age, and I would like to be seen as a valuable part of my community, even when I am no longer of service to the workforce. I would hope that as I change, grow, and progress, the duty of care I uphold in my relationships with other people will not only allow the security of a cushion to fall back on, but also a more supportive community at large.

I want to be a woman who is much more than she seems. If my body were to contort and transform the way Sam’s does throughout the novel, I would like that fish — because, let’s face it, I’d be a slimy water-dwelling creature with the absurd number of hours I spend searching for the nearest body of water to swim in — to grow sharp anglerfish teeth to feed and protect itself.