Tag: Emily Girard
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On the Road . . .
I’m heading out of town for a girls’ weekend, crossing over Afton Mountain from the Shenandoah Valley into the Rockfish Valley. My destination: Smith Mountain Lake. But let’s rewind from the beautiful to the mundane. On my way, I start to think about travel. My trip starts, as all trips in my neck of the…
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How Jojo Found Me
How Jojo Found Me This essay was also published by Human Parts on Medium (November 2025). Read it on Medium here. PICTURE THIS:The year is 2023. I’m working a Saturday shift at an urgent care. It’s flu season, the first bad one after the COVID era. Everyone decided to skip their flu shots, and influenza has…
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What’s Playing?
I listen to music when I write—quiet, steady songs that help me find the emotional center of a scene. These are the tracks I return to again and again while writing the Radiant novels. They’ve shaped the mood of the mountains, the ache of grief, the flicker of hope, and the quiet moments between my…
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Dear Alice
In A Hundred Ways to Say I Love You, love often shows up in small acts: a letter slipped into a suitcase, a line about laundry, a favorite song. When Alice goes away to college, both her parents put their feelings on paper—Don’s meandering and tender, Ruth’s brief but quietly fierce. Two voices, one envelope. These…
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Lessons from a Maple
TWO WEEKS. That’s all it took. The first photo—taken this morning—shows the maple outside my window, bare as bone, every branch sharpened against the sky. The second, snapped barely fourteen days ago, is lit up with a hundred shades of red. It happens every year, but somehow the change still surprises me. One day I’m…
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Dear Jojo
This letter was never sent. Molly wrote it during her first semester of college, several months after Jojo’s death. She keeps it in a box with all the notes Jojo wrote her over the years—correspondence that can never be returned. More Letters from Radiant
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What Happened
In Chapter 29 of A Thousand Ways to Say I’m Sorry, Jojo watches as Matthew and Ezra write this statement together for Andy in preparation for the trial. The actual statement never appears in the novel—until now. This piece exists in the margins because some truths are too raw to tell the first time. Ezra…
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The Lowdown: What it’s Like to Die
This piece came to me on the drive home from my eighth night shift in a row. Sometimes Jojo won’t let me rest until I’ve listened to what he needs to say. The moments Jojo remembers here all appear in A Thousand Ways to Say I’m Sorry—but seen through the eyes of the living. This…
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Morning Seven of Eight
What I leave behind is as beautiful as where I’m headed—one of the quiet gifts of living in a valley. I’m tired after seven nights. Just one to go, and then a week to rest. Still, I’ll miss this morning drive. It’s the time of year when everything is shifting. The last stubborn autumn leaves…
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For Benji:
This letter comes from Matthew, a man recovering from a gunshot wound, written to Benji, the boy who changed both their lives. It belongs to my novel in progress, humming quietly in Radiant. More Letters from Radiant