Last month we got our septic tank serviced. This is not a glamorous sentence. There is no aesthetic to a septic tank, no vibe, no vision you carry around in your head for months until you're finally ready to commit. It is simply the unglamorous infrastructure that keeps everything else from falling apart. My husband and I have these conversations regularly now—the grown-up, deeply unsexy conversations about the money you spend on things you cannot see. The plumbing. The HVAC. The insulation in the walls, the drainage in the yard, the gutters cleaned before the storms come. It's money that disappears into the bones of the house, invisible, unremarkable, absolutely necessary. Without it, the beautiful wallpaper is just pretty paper on a failing wall.

Over a week home now, and I'm still not entirely back. Earlier this June, I got on a plane to Italy. For years, two of my mentors and former professors, the founders of Convivio, had been inviting me to attend this unique conference in Umbria. And for years, I had been watching from afar—following along on social media, trying to decipher the kind of magic you can only really be present to experience. Babies, cross-state moves, personal loss, money, the general relentlessness of just living life—something always kept me from going. This was the conference's tenth anniversary, and something about that felt like a sign I couldn't ignore. So I finally took the leap.

I take the advice I give to the authors I work with every day as an editor at Atmosphere Press: No one will know you have a book if you don't tell them. And I believe everything is worth an ask. It’s why I’ll get a wild hair in the middle of the night to email the Mütter Museum because Death Roll would absolutely vibe with their gift shop. Or why I’d email Anderson Cooper to share my book—his podcast on grief was one of my saving graces in the months after my grandfather died, a constant companion as I drove to OBGYN appointments. Or why I have no qualms about persistently following up with event coordinators who have left me on read. I am giving this strange alligator-child a fighting chance to reach the people who need her.

Creativity is a wonderful and draining impulse. Despite everything on my plate, my brain refuses to quiet; it keeps humming with new ideas, new connections, new things to add to the heap. Even when I feel I am doing everything I can, there is that relentless whisper that it is never quite enough.

Out of the Muck comes the strange, the salvaged, and the new. To be a writer is to live in that swampy, fertile ground, trusting that the most vital stories only emerge when you aren't afraid to get your hands dirty in the "unpolished" parts of life.