Tag: fiction
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Dog Days: She’s Back!
It’s been a long couple of months for William. Mama’s been stuck in her recliner, knitting, watching Law & Order on repeat. Not much creativity these days. Not that it changes much in his little world. I’m still here, but I think he knows I haven’t been myself. I haven’t been happy. In 2025, I…
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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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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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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
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Spring Roses in Winter
Some stories refuse to stay cut. This one belongs to Maybell, the schoolteacher with the emerald eyes and the long memory. Her story first appeared in an early draft of A Hundred Ways to Say I Love You. Though it slipped from the final pages, it’s still part of Radiant’s heart. AGNES LOVED MAYBELL’S stories. But her…
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To Ezra, from Jojo.
This is the first in a new series called Letters from Radiant—dispatches from the world of my novels, written by the characters who still have something left to say. You can find the full collection here. All photos © Emily Bump Girard, taken in the Shenandoah Valley
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Building Radiant: Three Books, Three Logos, One Small Town
I’ve just finished building something I’m really proud of: individual pages for all three of my Radiant novels. For the past two years, I’ve been writing about Radiant, Virginia—a fictional Appalachian town where recovery is hard-won, violence is never simple, and grace arrives in unexpected forms. What started as one novel has become three (and…
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Stories that Heal
I’ve spent years caring for patients in small-town Virginia, where every cough, fever, and tear has its own story. Sometimes, the stories I remember most aren’t about dramatic diagnoses or heroic saves—they’re about a child with a sore throat and a worried parent by her side. In the exam room, medicine and humanity meet in…