A little tired from the holiday season? We’ve got the cure here in the Ohio Bunker! The fantastic and lovely Elisabeth Sharp McKetta stopped by to talk about her first novel, She Never Told Me About the Ocean.
She and Brad talked about life in Texas, fairy tales, Harvard and M.I.T., English living, and the intricacies that make a writer a writer. Pour a little holiday cheer and join them for a high-energy hour of fun.
About Elisabeth Sharp McKetta
Elisabeth Sharp McKetta teaches writing for Harvard Extension School and Oxford Department for Continuing Education. In the past decade she has authored ten books of poetry and prose, in addition to delivering the 2019 TEDx talk “Live Like a Poem.”
Elisabeth’s first novel She Never Told Me About the Ocean (Paul Dry Books 2021) was described by Karen Russell as “a tidal and intimate book, brimming over with wonders and terrors and the watery echoes that bind generations of women.” Arthur Golden touted it as a “beautiful, ambitious first novel” and Grace Dane Mazur called it “a superb enchantment showing the richness of ordinary life and the permeability of life’s margins.” Booklist noted that its “imaginative reworking of the mythology of death and the afterlife creates a remarkable mode for examining love and loss.”
Also in 2021, Elisabeth co-edited with her former graduate student an anthology of women’s resilience stories titled What Doesn’t Kill Her, reviewed by retired NASA astronaut Barbara Morgan as “an important and necessary book.” Cherie Blair praised the book, saying that “you cannot fail to be inspired to end the injustices that these stories so eloquently recount.” Gloria Steinem wrote: “When someone is ill, many old cultures say that they have lost their story. I believe that reading the stories in What Doesn’t Kill Her will help each of us to trust and tell our own.”
Elisabeth has a lifestyle book, Edit Your Life, forthcoming from Tarcher Perigee in 2023, and a collection of essays, Awake with Asashoryu, forthcoming from Paul Dry Books in 2022.
Before writing books, Elisabeth worked as a magazine editor, a reader of college admission essays, a study guide writer, a barmaid, a community college professor, and a host of other jobs. In her twenties, she earned a PhD from the University of Texas, where she studied the intersections of fairy tales and autobiography, a concept that still influences her work. Elisabeth’s short work has been published widely, including in The Poetry Review.
Originally from Texas and with lovely stints living in Idaho and New England, Elisabeth now lives with her sea swimmer husband and two young children in Cornwall.
