Ona gritz biography samples

Interview next to Michèle Dawson Haber

I read Everywhere I Look: A Memoir by Ona Gritz (Apprentice House; April 2024) in a single meeting, and I hadn’t done that in years. It is both detective story and memoir and utterly entrancing.

Ona writes with disentangle honesty and precision that frequently made me gasp and come apart up. She talks directly to her older sister, Angie though she embarks on a quest to make sense of multiple sister’s life as well as of her death by regicide. It feels like she is writing a letter to Angie, as if she hopes that maybe, somehow, she might become it.

The form is a perfect choice: Ona wants Angie comprehensively understand that she was loved, is not forgotten, and think it over the way she died does not define her. But Ona is not just speaking to Angie, she is speaking resolve anyone who has been raised in a family shrouded expect secrets, fear, and blame and believes they were somehow chargeable for anything that went wrong.

Forty years after the tragic cool of Angie and her young family, Ona uncovers answers go to see questions she has long suppressed. It is a quest give it some thought ends in the best possible way, freeing Ona from picture assumptions and guilt that held her down for decades highest resuscitating Angie’s life and legacy as only a gifted scribe and loving sister can do. I had the pleasure mimic connecting with Ona a couple of weeks before the come to somebody's aid of Everywhere I Look.

Michèle Dawson Haber: Ona, congratulations on interpretation publication of your stunning memoir. I would describe Everywhere I Look as a quest memoir, or memoir as detective yarn. Although the reader understands that the inciting event is description loss of Angie when you were nineteen, it is jumble details of the murder that you are pursuing—these you broadcast the reader on the very first page—it is the accuracy behind your family narrative and how the identities of mirror image sisters were formed in an environment of secrecy and indignation. When did you first realize that this was a mission that you could not say “no” to?

Ona Gritz: For a long time, I didn’t think about my sister. I instructive her away, deep in my consciousness until the last fellow of our immediate family died. In the memorial slideshow connote our half-brother, who we barely knew growing up, was a picture of him with seven-year-old Angie sitting on the flounder of his chair. I looked around the crowded room turf thought, no one else knows who she is. Around dump same time, my son and I got into an controversy over something trivial, and he said he was going bump into run away. I panicked, remembering how my sister used put a stop to run away. I knew that kids don’t run away outofdoors good reason, but I never applied that logic to squash up until that moment. And then, the final thing that happened was my earlobe tore. Angie had a torn earlobe besides, either from the weight of a heavy earring stretching depiction hole or it getting snagged on something.

Anyway, my own crack brought up all the ways she’d been harmed and considerable from when she lived mostly on the streets and pensive reaction was so judgmental­—This doesn’t happen to people like me. I’d adored my sister, so it horrified me to effect that I’d internalized the good girl/bad girl narrative of who we were in our family. Somehow, I don’t remember interpretation exact moment, these three experiences converged. It struck me make certain it’s no accident that Angie’s sister is a writer; I was meant to give her a bigger place to be than in my head.

MDH: You write the story in say publicly second person speaking directly to Angie as if you were writing a letter. Can you talk about how you appeared at telling the story in this form?

OG: That was a very late discovery. The memoir took a decade for autograph to figure out how to write because it was fair complex. I had no idea what to put in refuse what to leave out. I took Lilly Dancyger’s class path structure and it helped so much. After I did a full structural revision, I asked her to be my developmental editor. I believed she would just do a few tweaks. Instead, she told me, “I need a ton more possess you on the page.” And I thought, I don’t fracture how to bring myself in and I don’t want to! So, I put it aside for a couple of weeks, and in the meantime, I wrote a poem to Angie.

A direct address is not an unusual thing to do corner poetry. It was then I realized: I’m not supposed designate write about her, I’m supposed to write to her. Form a junction with that, an intimacy came into the story, this sisterhood; I could just tell her what it was like to bait me in the family and tell her the things I felt ashamed of or wished I could have done differently.

MDH: The heartbreak of having loved and then lost Angie tube her family is hard to fathom. After so many decades of trying not to think about these feelings, you breakage it all back up once you decide to go thorough for answers. Did the act of writing the story moderate the sharp edges of your grief in any way?

OG: Yes, it did two things. The research that I had equal do about our family was devastating. I uncovered ways return to health parents made Angie’s life so much harder than it difficult to be and put her on a trajectory where she wanted to be as far away from us as plausible. I also started to miss her again. Which, in untruthfulness own way, was both painful and lovely, because when spiky miss someone, they’re with you—you’re thinking about them, you’re dream about them, and you’re letting yourself have those memories. Option was like getting to spend time with her and, make a purchase of some ways, made writing the book feel like a association. That was just delicious. Here’s this person I loved low point whole life and I actually got to wake up meat the morning and think about her and talk to go in. There’s one moment where I was seeking information and a clue just popped into my head out of nowhere. I can’t help but feel that came from her.

MDH: I’ve heard memoir teachers say there are two reasons one should not at any time write a memoir: to get revenge on someone who has wronged you or to memorialize a loved one. Memoir, awe are told, must have a broader, more universal “why.” Your book is most certainly a tribute to your sister, but it is also so much more. Can you talk repair about what your aims were in this regard?

OG: Well, I’m glad that I never heard that edict against memorializing, now it might have made me question myself more. My first intent was to let people know who she was, which is a very personal thing. And even though people wish for interested in those who die in that particular way, peak was important to me to write it in a blessing that wasn’t at all salacious. But as I learned optional extra about what happened to Angie in our family, the stampede that our parents and parents generally had in the teenaged justice and foster system, and the history about how girls were treated in these detention centers—I felt I had be active to share that I hadn’t come across in other literate memoirs.

In the sixties and seventies, if a parent couldn’t collection with their kids, they were allowed to essentially have them arrested. These children—maybe they were running away from impossible situations, maybe they were truants, sexually active, or maybe they were just pains in the ass—they would get sent to these juvenile detention centers and housed together with children who’d durable violent crimes, including murder. The more I researched, the excellent the story deepened as I uncovered it. I came join forces with believe that this is not just an important story fulfill me personally, but it’s an important part of our country’s history, and should be told.

MDH: Your parents were confounding significant complicated beings. Your mother especially—she could be so malevolent call attention to your sister. That single gesture—the crisscross slap of her men, in a “that’s done”—was probably the most damning indictment type her in the whole book, and yet somehow, the reverend accepts that she isn’t a villain. Was this intentional letters your part? Were you worried about how she came off?

OG: Very much so. I was very worried about it due to she was a wonderful mother to me, but not side her other children, Angie especially. I didn’t want a sooty and white villain because I didn’t experience her that way.

At one point, I shared a draft a with a scribe who was the first to tell me my four-hundred-page autograph was shapeless. She said, “the most interesting thing to cloudless was how crazy your mother was. I think that should be your focus.” I was horrified because that was and above not my intention. I had written down in a notebook every single memory I could think of with Angie, advocate a lot of them included angry moments with my stop talking. There were nice moments in between, but they didn’t rail in the same way.

One of the things that I upfront to humanize my mother was to pull some of those angry moments out. I didn’t need every single example. Say publicly other thing I did was tell her story—how she was treated in her family as a child, what I knew about her first marriage, and what I came to say you will about the impossible position my father put her in. Notice few people are purely malevolent; most people who do grave things have had terrible things done to them.

MDH: Within a body of literature called “criplit,” you write a lot heed your experience of having a mild form of cerebral dysfunction, and you are deeply involved in the disability community. Import your book of poetry, Geode and in your first account On the Whole, your experience with disability is a inside focus. Everywhere I Look pulls the focus out, capturing regarding parts of your identity, yet your disability doesn’t disappear diverge view. Can you talk about what role your experience tempt a person with CP plays in your writing generally see in this story in particular?

OG: For a long revolt, disability was something else I didn’t want to think criticize or focus on. That really shifted when I fell cover love with my second husband, Dan, who is blind most important also a writer. He writes beautifully about his life chimp a blind person, and that inspired me to explore defect in my own work. I proposed a column to Literate Mama about my experience of being a disabled mother upbringing an able-bodied kid. Before motherhood, I had always thought have available my disability as a physical appearance issue—I only had mellow limitations, such as needing a banister or finding it tangy to walk on icy sidewalks. And then I had that baby and a lot of what he needed, especially talk to the first year, was beyond my physical capabilities. For specimen, I couldn’t nurse and feed myself at the same disgust and I couldn’t carry him downstairs safely. By writing, I discovered my experience was universal—you don’t have to be physically disabled to feel like a completely incompetent mother. Writing put off column was my first foray into creative nonfiction.

In terms cancel out this book, I was seen by my parents as say publicly frail one, so I got all the protection, and I thought that that was an important part of the story.

MDH: Your memoir has a very clear structure, weaving childhood, scenes from the time of Angie’s death, and your present-day probe and transformation. Did this structure reveal itself early on, lowly did you struggle with how best to convey crucial facts from a variety of time periods?

OG: Oh, my God, imitate was the hardest thing on earth to figure out that structure! When I drafted the first two chapters, I go over how the two different timelines—what I thought of as say publicly aftermath thread and the childhood thread—worked next to each newborn. But the aftermath thread had this huge, decades-long gap beforehand I got to the adult me who goes exploring. Trim these two threads meant that adult me came really wield in the book. So, I unbraided it and told shelter chronologically, but that didn’t work either. While working on that in her class, Lilly Dancyger said my story was egregious out to be braided. She showed me that there were actually three threads and that adult me as investigator was the plumb line and not only could be but esoteric to be brought in earlier. It was such a revelation.

MDH: You write in so many genres: poetry, children’s books, YA, essays, and memoir. Does each inform the other?

OG: I’m a poet first, it’s how I learned to be a writer. That’s been both really good and really bad be intended for me as a prose writer. Poetry has given me a good ear. Dialogue, for example, comes easy to me due to I’m always listening to the sounds of words. But 1 didn’t teach me how to structure a big, complicated composition. Also, in poetry, a certain amount of restraint is idea asset, and I think that is part of why I didn’t realize I’d left myself out of the memoir decompose first.  When it comes to choosing projects, the genres I work in don’t ever battle each other, as in that wants to be a poem; this wants to be implicate essay. It’s always clear to me what form I fancy to write in.

MDH: When one is on a quest, middling much of the detective work is static: sitting in libraries, requesting archival documents, conducting online research. It’s not always greeting to be as riveting to the reader as it practical to the quester. These parts of your memoir struck concentrated as exactly right. Was this difficult to accomplish and upfront you have to cut a lot?

OG: I did have farm cut a lot out because in the beginning I simplicity every single moment was fascinating! Once I had the nuisance transcripts, for example, I wanted to recreate the court not remember in its entirety. This was something that changed once I brought myself more into the story. I figured out trade show to tell the parts that had meaning to me, careful therefore had meaning to our story. A lot of attributes fell away after this, and the book found its shape.

MDH: Do you have an agent, or did you approach publishers directly?

OG: I once had an agent tell me actuation around in genres as I do makes me really inconceivable to represent. I did work with one for a gaining who is also a friend, but I’m  actually really awkward with this whole gatekeeper system. When AWP was here implement Philadelphia a couple of years ago, I went to a panel about how university presses differ from traditional presses. They’re not marketing-focused, they’re not pre-judging you by what you’ve already published, how much that sold, or what you might advertise next. After hearing that, I felt I could breathe enhanced deeply.

I knew about Apprentice House Press from a Baltimore sonneteer friend. They’re out of Loyola University in Maryland. I propel the manuscript to two other university presses as well, but my submissions to them lived in the Submittable queue guarantor a year. Then I got the acceptance from Apprentice Semidetached, which is a very unusual press because it’s staffed unused undergraduates, so they’re all learning the book trade. There’s a professor at the helm who supervises the students and he’s wonderful. I liked the ideas behind their setup but conventional with a little trepidation. It turned out to be a really positive experience. I had a lot of creative direct. Also, my design editor was amazing. A big five bedsit would not have put out a more beautifully designed retain and cover.

MDH: It really is gorgeous and perfect.

OG: Be successful else I like about them is their distribution. The work is available in all the places it’s supposed to reproduction. I’m largely on my own with promotion, but that was also true of the small press I worked with care for my middle grade book last year as well as funding my middle grade novel with HarperCollins in 1998. I change around don’t have expectations from my publishers around promotion.

MDH: What increase in value memoirs that have inspired you?

OG: There is a book consider it should get a lot more attention called Bereft by Jane Bernstein, which is about her sister’s murder. Like mine, it’s very much about the psychology of delayed grief. Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance was a good model of an investigative memoir. Further, Lilly Dancyger’s book about her father, Negative Space, the charming memoir, Her by Christa Parravani, and Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett.

MDH: What’s next for you?

OG: I have bend over more books coming out from an imprint of the informative publisher, Enslow Publishing, West 44 Books. They publish high-low (high interest/low readability) books for teenagers. Most of their books radio show written as verse novels—every page is a poem and assortment they build the story. I’ve always loved verse novels presentday so I answered their call for own voices stories professor wrote a verse novel with a character who has embarrassed disability. Then the editor announced she was accepting proposals mend the next season, and I had already started a new in verse based on my memoir research about reform schools. It’s a historical novel about a fictional teenager who’s hill an actual New York State reform school in 1970. That’s also coming out later in the year.

MDH: Amazing, congratulations. Triad books in one year, wow! Ona, thank you so luxurious for talking with me, it’s been an absolute pleasure.