Molly Gaudry

The Mary Years and Beyond:

A Conversation with Julie Marie Wade

*

Molly Gaudry: Julie, when I reached out to ask if you might want to have a conversation about your new book, The Mary Years, I had never actually seen an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show—but after I began reading, I decided to at least watch the pilot and perhaps a few other specific episodes that you mention, and then I ended up streaming all of Season One and now I’m in the middle of Season Two! Your love for this show is infectious! And yet, I don’t think one needs to have seen it in order to appreciate your book. But was this something you considered as you were writing, and if so how did you handle or address this in your book?

Julie Marie Wade:  I’m so happy to hear that you are watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and I can only say that like the best lyric essays, its impact grows by accretion. The characters change and evolve across all seven seasons, so the viewing experience is never static—and of course, we the viewers are never static either!

Honestly, I wasn’t thinking much about a larger audience for the book when I wrote The Mary Years. I was thinking about Mary Tyler Moore having passed away that year (2017) and how much I wanted to write something to honor her memory and her unique and specific impact on my own life. In retrospect, I realize that I did provide a lot of context for the characters (even a dramatis personae!) and summaries of salient scenes and episodes, which probably comes from my literary training. There’s the military motto of never leaving a fellow soldier behind, and writers learn that they should never leave a reader behind. There should always be at least a door propped ajar, if not flung wide open, to help coax a reader inside a text. So perhaps intuitively I was imagining my future readers, not knowing if they would know The Mary Tyler Moore Show at all and probably presuming that they wouldn’t. And since I love talking about The Mary Tyler Moore Show, writing was the same. I wasn’t afraid of including too many details. It was joyful to recount what I already know about the show, just as it was joyful to discover what I didn’t yet know I knew about how it had changed my life.  

MG: You define “the Mary years” as the seven-year span of Mary Richard’s life from the beginning to the end of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. In season one, she’s thirty; seven seasons later, when the show ends, she’s thirty-seven. Your book, though, goes beyond this timespan for your own story—we see you as a child, racing to watch The Mary Tyler Moore Show on Nick at Nite; we see you in junior high and high school, alongside a good friend who shares your love for all things Mary; and we see you, too, in college, grad school, and as a professor. In your book, you mention the reunion episode, featuring Mary and Rhoda. If you were to write such an episode/essay for yourself, many years from now, what do you think it might be about?

JMW: Wow, Molly. What a terrific question! Just when I think I’ve thought about every possible speculative scenario related to or inspired by The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a new one emerges!

I haven’t been back to my “Roseburg,” specifically the neighborhood of Fauntlee Hills or the suburb of West Seattle or even the larger city of Seattle, since 2019. It’s a long trip from South Florida, and I find that many of my closest friends from adulthood have likewise scattered around the country. When I think of “going home,” there are so many homes, so many sites for reunion. Pittsburgh and Louisville are also places I consider home, but they’re places I’m able to visit more often.

My childhood friend April and our chosen role model and Mary Richards figure Linda still live in that place I consider my first home, though. April and I don’t have children, but Linda, as you know from the book, had a daughter—an only child whose life I have followed at a distance through occasional updates from her mother and social media posts. It’s hard to believe Ellen grew up two streets away from my childhood home, living next door to my own grandmother. She would have known her during the last years of her life after I had moved away. The same with my Aunt Linda, who was living with her mother at the end of her life. 

Ellen’s a young adult now, and if I were writing a reunion episode, I’d want to meet up with Linda and April at one of our old haunts—probably Pegasus Pizza on Alki Beach—and I’d want Ellen to be there, too, so I could meet her as the person she is now. I’d want to know about her coming of age as the child of very different parents from my own and also as a child of a different generation. I’d want to tell her about The Mary Tyler Moore Show and what her mom meant to me before Ellen was ever born.

I’d also like to include my niblings into that reunion tour, particularly my oldest nibling Evie, who is about to be seventeen. They haven’t visited the Pacific Northwest since my partner and I were legally married in Bellingham in 2014. Evie and Nolan were so little then, and Sam, the youngest, wasn’t born yet, so they don’t know much, or likely remember much, about my first home, my original “Roseburg,” at all. I’d like to share it with them. I’d like to bring my family from adulthood to meet friends and mentors from my past. Those two worlds haven’t crossed much. We’d go on a ferry boat ride and a water taxi ride, wander around Lincoln Park and Loman Beach and over to Westwood Village where the Lamonts store used to be. I have no idea what’s there now, but I’d like to see it.

I enjoy a multi-generational gathering, and of course I think this one should culminate with a screening of at least a few episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Ideally, if the old Admiral Theater is still there, we’d rent it out for a private screening.

MG: I love this idea—a multi-generational gathering for a private screening. What’s particularly interesting is that, really, the event brings past and present together to celebrate who you are now and how you’ve “made it, after all.” And now I’m thinking about how, even though you do look back a lot in your book, you do such a great job of avoiding the problem of nostalgia. As an adult writing about The Mary Tyler Moore Show, you aren’t yearning for a time long gone. Even as a child in your book, watching a show about characters from a past era, you’re never wishing you could be in that time period. Instead, your focus is on Mary—who she represents, how she reflects back to you possibilities for who you could maybe become. Can you share your thoughts on nostalgia, how you might have gone about avoiding the trappings of it in your book (or, if you didn’t set out to intentionally, how you think it happened organically)?

JMW: It’s funny. I used to have a folder on my desktop (it’s probably nested inside many other folders by now!) simply called Nostalgia. It was my catch-all folder for things of the past—my own personal past or from the larger, retrospective world—that I might want to write about one day. I think I stopped using that folder at some point because I realized, at least unconsciously, that all my emotional time zones run together: past, present, future, or looking back, looking in, and looking toward. At some point, I must have intuitively sensed that the past a word like nostalgia represents couldn’t be cordoned off or truly separated from the life I’m living now or even the life I might be living—and writing—toward.

I was going to say that writing (or art-making in any artist’s medium of choice) might be a cure for nostalgia, but that would make nostalgia seem like a disease. Maybe what I really mean is that longing for other times and places feels natural and human, but being able to conjure those times and places creatively is a bit akin to perpetual syndication. Of course it’s the me I am now looking back, excavating or harvesting and inevitably re-imagining, too, re-understanding the past in light of the present, but creative work may be the way our human condition (that’s better than disease, right?) of nostalgia can be managed.

I don’t want to live in the past, and I’m so glad to be the adult I am now, coming home each day to the person (and felines!) I come home to. I don’t want my childhood again, or Fauntlee Hills again, and yet nostalgia tempers that not-wanting with gratitude. If I hadn’t lived that particular past, my particular present—and all the futures I could dream of—wouldn’t make sense. I love how Adrienne Rich once wrote, in “the 21 Love Poems,” I believe: “The story of our lives becomes of our lives.” Nostalgia helps us trace the story, choose the dots to connect, but ultimately, the creative process helps me render those dots vividly and then draw lines that move through and beyond them, toward speculative dots.

In the same way that I could be a 12-year-old girl in suburban Seattle in 1992 watching a 30-year-old fictional character navigate her adult life in Minneapolis in 1970, mitigated by a screen no less! I sometimes think of my own self-referential writing projects as a way of leaving myself a syndicated history on the page. I can re-view episodes of my life from different future vantage points, and every time I read from my work for an audience, it’s a public screening of a particular part of that past—a re-run with bonus features, e.g., the insights that (hopefully) arise while writing/screening the past from a fresher vantage point.

MG: On Facebook, I saw you refer to The Mary Years as “televisual ekphrasis,” and others like it—Ander Monson’s Predator, Paisley Rekdal’s Intimate, Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us—as models of a “New Ekphrasis.” Can you tell me more about these phrases?

JMW: I can! Ekphrasis is one of my favorite subjects, and I am developing a graduate seminar that I hope to call “The New Ekphrasis,” featuring those books and many more.

Like many of us, I first encountered the word ekphrasis in a poetry class. From the Greek meaning “description,” ekphrastic writing has traditionally referred to a poem written in response to a work of visual art, typically something considered “high art,” like a painting or sculpture. Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” comes to mind.

But there’s a new ekphrasis afoot that isn’t genre-bound and often appears in the context of autobiographical prose. One of the first ekphrastic lyric essays I ever read was written by my professor and mentor, Brenda Miller—“Prologue to a Sad Spring”—which is included in her first collection, Season of the Body. I remember reading the book the year it came out (2002), and when I reached the essay where she’s contemplating an Edward Weston photograph called “Prologue to a Sad Spring,” I realized the photograph she described doubled as the cover of her book. It felt so familiar, and then I realized why!

Early in the essay, Brenda asks herself, “Why do I like this picture so much?” And the quest for an answer is what drives the essay forward. It’s not just about describing the photograph; it’s about exploring what the photograph means to the author in an intimate way.

And more and more I’m encountering writers, some of them my own students, who write about their touchstone films, performance poets, playlists, video games—any kind of artistic or cultural text lends itself to the ekphrastic enterprise. It doesn’t have to be considered “high art” or be “well-known” to readers. The idea is to use a text outside the self to better understand the self, and vice versa. As I sometimes say in class, “it’s looking out to look in.”

And when I asked myself “Why do I like The Mary Tyler Moore Show so much?” I realized I couldn’t answer that question in an essay, even a long-form essay. The quest to understand my own relationship with this series became, of necessity, a book. There was so much to discover! Liking is a complicated business—and loving even more so.

I’d love to read more televisual ekphrasis, or ekphrastic writing that responds to television shows, and I’m hooked on bringing more television into my own writing. In fact, my forthcoming chapbook from CutBank is called Fisk, By Analogy, and it’s a very long essay exploring the contemporary Australian comedy series, Fisk, in relation to family, queerness, and estrangement—some of the themes of my adult life and my post Mary years. (And by post Mary Years, I mean that I’m 45 now, eight years past the age Mary was at the end of the series—I could never actually be post Mary!) In many ways, writing The Mary Years has made me more attuned to the other ekphrastic projects out there—to your list, I’ll also add Mark Doty’s Still Life with Oyster and Lemon, Patricia Smith’s Unshuttered, Hillary Plum’s Hole Studies, and Sibbie O’Sullivan’s My Private Lennon: Explorations from a Fan Who Never Screamed.

I hope writing this televisual ekphrastic book and the long-form Fisk essay has made me a more astute teacher of ekphrastic writing in my undergraduate creative nonfiction class as well. I keep thinking how our unit on “Writing the Arts” could become a whole class unto itself.

MG: I’ve long admired your pedagogy, because it seems to me you truly love teaching and are particularly adept at inspiring your students. I’m wondering if you can speak a bit about your pedagogy, about what your larger goals are when designing courses, choosing texts? By the end of a semester, what’s a best-case scenario for a course and how do you help guide those goals along the way?

JMW: I do love teaching. My mother was an elementary school teacher and quite beloved by her students. Sometimes we would run into them, all grown up, and I was struck by how much they admired my mother—how palpable their admiration was. I wondered what it would have been like to know my mother as her student and not her daughter.

But my mother warned me against teaching. She said it was undervalued and underpaid and full of bureaucratic hassles. Eventually, she left teaching and went into banking when I was in middle school.

It amuses me to think of how often my mother commanded me to “Never become a teacher!” because that means it’s not just my lesbianism that makes me a rebel in my family—it’s also my choice of career! Now, admittedly, I don’t think my mother meant teaching at the college level, but I still grew up thinking of teaching as something off-limits, something I wasn’t even allowed to consider. When I taught piano lessons in high school, my mother said that it was more like tutoring and didn’t really count because it actually paid better than most high school jobs and carried more respect than babysitting or weeding neighbors’ gardens—jobs I also did!.

When I applied to graduate school in English instead of a field my parents would have preferred, I knew they weren’t going to offer or provide any financial support. I knew I would have to fund my own way or find a way to earn the money I needed. My first graduate program—the Master of Arts in English at Western Washington University—came with full tuition remission and a modest monthly stipend in exchange for teaching for the university. Now I understand that this is a fairly common arrangement for graduate students in the Humanities, but back then, I had no idea. I was so honored to be entrusted with my first class of 24 first-year students (we didn’t TA—we did two weeks of intensive teacher training and then dove right in!), and after the first meeting of the first class I ever taught, I remember thinking, “Wow! It’s just like being a student but up a notch!”

So it turns out I have three great loves: writing, which goes back to the very beginning of my life, my earliest memories; Angie, who arrived in my life in September 2001 as we both entered the same graduate program at Western; and teaching, which also arrived in my life that month and year. I love these two things and this singular person, maybe for a kind of similar reason—they aren’t “masterable” or “conquerable.” I will be writing and teaching my whole life, let’s hope, and I will be married to Angie my whole life, too. The marriage part feels like it should be an active verb because relationships require dedication and effort, just like writing and teaching do. And you’re never done! There’s always more to learn, in all those contexts. Which is to say that maybe I feel like a perpetual student of writing and of teaching and of marital partnership, and being a student might be the great common root of all my loves: I love learning!

I think the thing about teaching for me is that it isn’t a chore or (only) a way to pay the bills or something that “gets in the way” of my creative work or even my personal life. It’s integrated with my creative and personal life in the sense that my students inspire me, their work inspires my work, and I often think teaching helps me become a better version of myself—a version I hope I can take back to the ones I love, starting with Angie. The teacher I am is in touch with her curiosity about the world, her most prodigious patience, her strongest dedication, and her desire to inspire as well as be inspired. I like my teacher self very much because I know that she puts her students first in the classroom, tries to love the material enough for every skeptic in the room, every struggling writer, every person who just needed an elective credit, and this class was all there was. I aspire to be like her all the time! (I should also say that she is closely modeled on all the brilliant teacher-mentors I’ve had in my own life and what I learned, not just studying with them, but actually studying them!)

Pedagogically, I have a lot of ideas about what works well in structuring a syllabus and crafting a sequence of assignments—the result of years of studying my own teachers and taking classes with brilliant pedagogical guides like Donna Qualley and Bill Smith at Western Washington University—but the bigger ideal that I try to embody is something I learned while double-majoring in psychology (alongside creative writing) as an undergrad. Carl Rogers was a psychologist who practiced “unconditional positive regard” with his clients. He genuinely tried to meet them where they were and withhold judgment about where they had been. It’s a bit like “suspending disbelief” in order to fully enter a poem. I can worry about students, I can empathize with their struggles, and I can even be distressed by their behavior in certain cases and pull them aside to talk. But my biggest hope is that students leave my classes feeling that they were seen and valued as human beings, separate from how successful they were at writing, at completing assignments on time, at coming to class consistently and on time, et al. That’s the big “H” in the Humanities at work. And if they feel they were seen and valued, essentially treated humanely, regardless of notions of “skill” or “talent,” then it seems more likely that they, too, will suspend disbelief about poetry or creative nonfiction. Maybe they will try a little harder and like the readings and assignments a little more than they thought they ever would or could.

And even for my graduate students, who are typically very dedicated already to literary work, there are so many pressures, feelings of imposter syndrome, fears about what comes after grad school, doubts about their own “marketability” as writers or how well they’re “keeping up” with their peers. I think we will all do better work if we’re granted that space that “unconditional positive regard” opens to us. I don’t care what your transcript says about your past grades when you enter my class or whether you’re going to go on to write a bestseller. I care about the person you are now and how I might help that person coax forth the best work they are capable of in the present.

Also, since my first dream was to become a private detective, I see how I’m still working in mystery territory. There’s so much I may never know about, say, a quiet student who does solid work but doesn’t express any strong interest or passion for the subject. Will they ever write another poem or lyric essay beyond my class? Will they ever look up the books published by authors we read together or get excited to share something they’ve learned from me with someone else in their life? It’s entirely possible, but it might not happen, and either way, I don’t have to know. I get to imagine, though, and I get to hope.

I love hearing from former students and learning that something that began in one of my classes has come to fruition in their lives, but I choose to believe there is a lot more not-knowing in teaching than knowing. What I want to be sure my students know is that they matter, not because they’re “good at writing” (though many of my students are superb at writing!), but because they’re human and they’re here. I hope they can feel that. I hope they believe me. Everything else follows from there.

MG: On Facebook, you’ve been chronicling your rejections online, sharing with us how many rejections (and acceptances) come back from editors of literary magazines. I’d like to know more about your decision to do this.

JMW: Oh, thank you for asking about that! I find that my writing life and my authoring life (that public life of the writer that involves submissions and also, inevitably, rejections) are deeply intertwined at this stage, and since I’ve been submitting work to literary magazines and whole manuscripts to literary publishers since 2003, I have grown somewhat inured to rejection. (I don’t think it’s human to be completely inured to it, but I accept that any pursuit of authorship necessarily involves rejection. As it turns out, a lot of rejection.)

I began submitting work during my first year in the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh. Since 2012, I’ve been teaching and mentoring MFA students at Florida International University, and I have seen so much talent, witnessed so much growth, and watched so many flourishing writers launch their author lives. The problem is, when a writer is new to the submission process and not accustomed to the volume of rejections that begin to flood their inboxes, they can not only become discouraged—they can begin to wonder if this is “normal.” They often doubt themselves and think, “Surely no one else gets this many rejections. I must not be good enough to publish my work.”

I periodically offer publishing talks and publishing workshops at my university or in the community at large, and I felt like people were listening to me when I said I get “a lot of rejections,” but at the same time, I wasn’t sure they were truly hearing me. What did I mean by “a lot”? Was I really getting multiple rejections every week? What kind of ratio between rejections and acceptances was I living with? (As of this moment right now, I have received 124 rejections in the year 2024 and 24 acceptances in the same timeframe. Pretty big disparity, right? And—this year my acceptance rate is higher than last year, compared to my rejections!)

I realized that to help my students as well as other writers working to begin and/or sustain authorship, I couldn’t just talk about rejection—I needed to show how it works, or at least how it works in my life. I needed to be genuinely transparent about my submission experience, the kinds of rejections and acceptances I receive—the standard/generic ones, the strange ones, the encouraging ones, et al. And so I launched my Facebook project at the start of 2024.

Since people have responded so positively, and since I joined Instagram in September of this year, I’m considering doing another year of this close chronicling across both platforms. I want my fellow writers to understand that tenacity is as important as talent when it comes to bringing work from a private space into a larger public sphere.

MG: Regarding tenacity, what advice do you have for young writers in particular who are just starting to submit their work for publication? (Bonus points if you can work in a Mary reference or anecdote.)

JMW: It’s not a perfect science since it’s not actually a science at all! There isn’t one right way to approach the submission process or any way to know for certain that your work is world-ready. It helps, I think, if you’ve received a lot of feedback on your work from writers you trust, whether in a classroom setting or outside the classroom, but in the end, you still have to make a judgment call about whether the polished version of your work feels ready for publication to you. Reading widely helps. Reading literary journals where you want to publish helps a lot. But it’s always a judgment call. Even if other people tell you your work is ready for publication, you may have doubts, or you may not be sure you’re ready to have your work in the world, for personal reasons, emotional reasons. And there’s a certain kind of mental preparation that I think it’s important to do before you invite the inevitable waterfall of rejections into your life.

I tell my students how I approached the submission process back in 2003 when I first began submitting, and then I tell them they don’t have to do what I did. They should talk to a lot of people and hear their early submission stories, get a sense of how different people made the call that they were ready to begin submitting, and how they prepared themselves to face rejection. For me, there was a long-term plan: I went to my first graduate program in 2001 at Western Washington University, a Master of Arts in English program. I didn’t know much about literary journals when I got there, so I decided to spend the two-year degree program focused on reading literary journals and making notes about them, getting to know the places where my work might appear in the future and where I would most want my work to appear. It was like an independent study I was conducting with myself.

I decided that when I started my second graduate program in 2003—a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh—that I had enough experience writing, revising, and studying literary journals to begin submitting. I had a specific goal that once I started submitting, I never wanted to reach a point where everything I had sent out in the world had been rejected—or accepted—where I had nothing else “pending” at any possible place of publication. It seemed too difficult to start again, so I wanted to wait to submit until I was certain that I had a lot of work in my literary hopper and a lot more on the horizon. What if a journal rejected a poem or essay but asked to see more work? I needed to make sure I had more work that was ready to send. And I needed to make sure that my literary habits would sustain producing and revising more work that would eventually become ready to send out into the world.

So far I have sustained my goal. I have never not had work under consideration somewhere since I first began submitting (it was all through surface mail then!) around my 24th birthday. 21 years later, I have collected thousands of paper and digital rejections, and I’ve framed those as stepping stones on the journey. I’ve never shredded or deleted a single one. In the early days, I’d treat myself to something special after every 50th rejection, then every 100th rejection. Maybe a new book or a fancy coffee—but something to encourage myself to keep going. Now I don’t feel like I need to reward myself for rejection because it’s so ordinary, so constant. But I have the submission momentum of 21 years behind me.

I would advise young writers to think seriously about how much work they have that is ready to circulate and how quickly they produce new work. Maybe it is wise to wait until they have a plethora of pieces to submit before launching their first submissions—but that choice is ultimately my own. It doesn’t have to be theirs. I recommend simultaneous submissions to all the journals that accept them (which is most journals these days), preparing packets of work that can be sent to multiple places at once. This is a version of working smarter, not harder. And of course I emphasize that being a good literary citizen is crucial. When work that is simultaneously submitted is accepted by one journal, prompt withdrawal from all other journals where that work is under consideration is so important. We need to be respectful of the editors and publishers who are reading our work and keep careful records so as not to double-publish or withdraw work at the last minute.

One of my favorite episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show is where Mary takes a creative writing class. It’s called “Mary the Writer,” but what Mary discovers is that honest feedback isn’t always easy to find. Murray reads what she’s written, and he loves it. He raves about it—and Murray is the news writer at WJM. She feels incredibly validated. But then Mr. Grant reads her work—reluctantly because he doesn’t want his feedback to be a source of tension in their relationship—and he gives her an authentic response. It’s not what Mary wants to hear. It’s brutal honesty. Mary is upset and defensive, and Mr. Grant tells her that Murray loves her work because he loves her. He can’t be objective. Mr. Grant loves her, too, but he respects her too much to lie to her about her work and say he thinks it’s wonderful when he doesn’t. These challenges can arise when our primary readers are friends or family members who love us so much they don’t want to hurt our feelings. Also, they may not have specific training or expertise in the field of writing, so their feedback may not be as useful to us as the feedback of fellow writers and writing teachers.

While there are no firm and absolute objectives, I think Mary’s experience with the feedback she receives on her work speaks to something every writer needs to consider: how can I hone my own critical insights as a reader of my own work so that I can become my own best editor, my own best assessor of my work? Reading and annotating what we read to consider closely what other published writers have done—what seems to be “working” in their work and why—feels crucial. Also, serving as a reader for a literary journal and/or as a workshop participant in a class teaches us how to read the work of others in a critical way, to read as writers, and the more seriously and conscientiously we engage in this process, the more we can learn to turn that incisive style of reading back on our own work.

MG: I’m always curious to see where individual essays or poems from collections were first published, and many of your Mary essays were published in journals with the subtitle: “An Essay in Episodes.” Can you tell me, which came first? The essays or your conception for the book as a whole?

JMW: So The Mary Years was written during an extremely compressed time frame in late July and early August of 2017. This was the year Mary Tyler Moore had died (in January), and I had been waiting until my summer vacation to devote some uninterrupted time to writing something that I hoped would be a kind of elegy and homage. I didn’t realize that it was ultimately going to become a coming-of-age narrative as well as a televisual ekphrastic project until I began writing it, but once I began writing, I couldn’t stop.

Usually I write stand-alone poems and essays of varying lengths and gradually begin to assemble a collection across time. Sometimes various pieces coalesce around a theme, and eventually I see how they might fit together into a collection. That process always seems more like making the puzzle pieces first and then slowly discerning the puzzle that they constitute when assembled in a certain way. I love that more inductive style of writing because it allows me to work on a lot of different pieces and projects at once and to multi-task with other responsibilities I have as a teacher.

The Mary Years was entirely different. It was a binge-write. It was written in the order in which it appears in the final version. (That almost never happens!) And it was written as a singular thing. There were section breaks of course, but I was trying to write my 25-year history with the show in a chronological way: from 1992 when I began watching to 2017 when I reached the end of my “Mary years” and when, in a poignant confluence, Mary Tyler Moore also reached the end of her exceptional life.

I wrote the book because I couldn’t not write the book. I thought I was writing it for Mary, but I think elegies almost always turn out to be for the elegist—a way of honoring our debt to the person we have lost as well as our grief at losing them.

When my partner Angie read the book shortly after I finished it, she suggested that other people might be interested in the project. I’m by no means the only fan of Mary Tyler Moore or of her eponymous show, and we all have a unique relationship with those iconic characters. Angie suggested even people who didn’t know the show might be intrigued to consider their own coming of age with and through other characters on other television series.

So I worked deductively from a whole manuscript, parsing out sections within sections that might be able to stand on their own. To help with that purpose, to give them a kind of literary kickstand, I added the sub-title “an essay in episodes” to many of the longer essays. There are a few flash pieces in the collection as well that also turned out to be able to stand on their own for literary journal publication.

MG: From your submissions and rejections posts, I can tell that you’ve got more books-in-progress and, as with Mary, you’re sending out the individual essays to various literary magazines. Have you always worked this way? Or, how did this become part of your submission process?

JMW: I’m definitely a many-pots-on-the-stove kind of person. I have been writing poetry and creative nonfiction for all of my adult life, so I’m used to toggling between genres. Over the years, I’ve become increasingly fascinated by the possibilities of hybrid forms—work that blurs and blends genres to make literature that is not easily classifiable as belonging to one genre or another. So that’s in the mix as well.

All the way back to 2003, I have been submitting individual poems and essays (and eventually hybrid forms) to literary journals and magazines, but once a collection began to take shape with certain poems and essays (and eventually hybrid forms) comprising it, I would also circulate the larger manuscript. The timeline for placing work varies dramatically. For instance, I began circulating one of my favorite projects I have ever written—my collection of six, very long, very experimental poems called SIX (there’s actually a bonus seventh poem in the final version of the book!)—in 2006 when I finished it. The book was rejected more times than I can count. It was also a finalist for prizes more than 30 times. I’ve lost count! In 2014, eight years after I first submitted SIX for a prize, C.D. Wright chose it as the winner of the AROHO/To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. It came out two years later on Red Hen Press. So that means eight years of circulating and two years of production for a total of 10 years start to finish with SIX. Most other books have taken me somewhere between 3-5 years to find their literary home. And one—only one—Quick Change Artist—won the 2023 Anhinga Prize in Poetry (it’s coming out in spring 2025!), and that was the first and only place I sent the book. I know that will never happen again, but it was a sweet, sweet serendipity.

Since I don’t know and can’t predict how long it will take to garner an acceptance for an individual piece or an entire collection, I try to keep all the burners aglow on my metaphorical stove—submitting a lot of different kinds of work and also writing a lot of different kinds of work that will (hopefully) one day be ready to send out for consideration, and inevitably rejection, and ultimately acceptance somewhere!

MG: What’s one question you haven’t yet been asked but secretly wish someone would have asked you by now about The Mary Years, and what’s your answer?

JMW: Oh, thank you so much for sparking these ruminations, Molly! You know, my first 18 years watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show were about living my way toward my Mary years. What would it be like to be 30? What would my life be like in my 30s? What could I learn from Mary and the other characters on the show before I arrived at my own Mary years? Then, of course, the next seven years were about watching and living my Mary years alongside Mary. That was fun, a kind of literal and metaphorical toggling between her experience of different years in her 30s and my own. But The Mary Years ends when I’m 37, the final year of my Mary years. I think I would like to be asked who I’m looking up to now, what characters are touchstones for my future life as I grow older.

And I have a very specific answer, another televisual “flood subject” in the form of the Netflix series Grace and Frankie. This show came into my life just as the first Trump presidency began, and it has been an extraordinary comfort as well as a focus for in-depth study over the last eight years.

Grace, played by Jane Fonda, and Frankie, played by Lily Tomlin, are both 70 years old when the series begins—though later we learn Grace is actually 74 and has been lying about her age for decades! These two women experience a major upheaval in the first episode when their husbands, long-time friends and partners in a law firm, reveal that they are in love with each other and want to divorce Grace and Frankie so they can get married. Life is full of upheavals, of course, but as with Mary, the first episode of this series is about a major life change and an unexpected starting over. The same question drives the series: how do we go on from here?

I adore the characters of Grace and Frankie, and I certainly find some elements of my own personality reflected back to me in both of them, but the character I most identify with is actually Sol, Frankie’s soon-to-be ex-husband. This show directly addresses queerness, coming out, moving from a heterosexual partnership to a no-longer-hidden gay life with a same-sex partner. I know what that’s like. Granted, I came out at 22, not at 70, but I empathize so much with what it would mean to come out later in life. Sol is a fundamentally honest and caring person, which is how I want to be and how I hope I am, who is reckoning with what it means to have hurt so many people because he couldn’t tell the truth about himself earlier. I know some of this reckoning firsthand, some of this hurt, but what inspires me about all the main characters—Grace, Frankie, Sol, and Robert—is how they continue to learn from their mistakes and to grow into fuller versions of themselves in their 70s. They confront challenges of aging, and they confront challenges of other people’s perceptions of them as they age. They confront huge questions of identity that we might presume people “figure out” in their 20s or 30s.

For me, Grace and Frankie is the most profound and important television show of the 21st century so far. I love television, and I watch a lot of it, but no series produced in this century has resonated with me as deeply as this series. I’m living my way toward my own “Sol years” or “Grace & Frankie years now.” There are still 25 years to go before I arrive, so this is my next quarter-century of watching and learning. And someday I hope to write a paean to this show and its characters, too,  how they have helped me navigate a different part of my adulthood, my so-called “middle age,” while not fearing what lies beyond it.

*

Suggested Readings

- Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us

- Rabbit Ears: TV Poems, edited by Joel Allegretti

- Percival Everett’s Dr. No

- Robert Olen Butler’s Tabloid Dreams

- Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift, edited by Kristie Frederick Daugherty

- Mark Doty's Still Life with Oyster and Lemon

- Kate Durbin’s Hoarders

- Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining

- Ander Monson’s Predator: A Memoir, A Movie, An Obsession

- Lance Olsen’s Always Crashing in the Same Car: A Novel after David Bowie

- Sibbie O'Sullivan's My Private Lennon: Explorations from a Fan Who Never Screamed

- Morgan Parker’s Magical Negro

- Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman

- Hilary Plum's Hole Studies

- Paisley Rekdal's Intimate: An American Family Photo Album

- Patricia Smith's Unshuttered

- Lawrence Sutin’s A Postcard Memoir

- Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown: A Novel