Every now and then a completely unexpected book grabs (and holds) your attention. Kim Dana Kupperman’s I Just Lately Started Buying Wings is that book. A collection of essays that, together, make up something akin to a memoir, Kupperman hits notes that are almost obligatory in the genre: crazy mother, a difficult childhood, travels far and near, torrid affairs, strange jobs. But in her hands and through her eyes, these oft-told stories become fresh and gripping. We’re thrilled to be able to introduce you to her in the below interview — and thanks, Kim!

WORD: Your book is labeled as an essay collection, but reads not unlike a memoir. Many of the pieces have been previously published. What was the “assembly” process like?

KIM DANA KUPPERMAN: [I'll answer this question with parts of a talk I gave at last year’s AWP conference, from a panel called "The Essayist's Dilemma," which was moderated by Marcia Aldrich, editor of the journal Fourth Genre and included Lucy Ferriss and E. J. Levy.]

The arrangement of my book came about in stages, beginning with that monster called the Creative Thesis, completed after two plus years in a Master of Fine Arts program. After I graduated, I thought that all I’d need to do was write a few more essays to fill out the collection I had so diligently assembled as a thesis. And then a friend read the essay titled “Relief” and said, “This is very interesting, but what happened before the time you wrote about?” That question prompted me to take apart this particular essay and write it into a memoir. Which meant, for practical purposes, removing a piece of writing from an already slim collection. And so I spent almost two years writing a memoir. Though I published chapters from it as discrete essays, it did not sell. After sending it to agents, publishers, and contests and seeing it turned it down, I decided to take a new course of action. I dismantled the memoir, breaking it into discrete autobiographical essays and restoring “Relief,” the essay from which it germinated. I merged these pieces with the essay collection I had already written and to which I had added one or two newer pieces. It occurred to me that if I wanted to publish this book, I’d need to solve the puzzle of how to organize these somewhat-linked-but-mostly-not pieces.

Though a book of discrete essays may be opened and delved into at any given point, most readers, perhaps because we are trained by the beginning-middle-end literary schema, desire an organizing principle, a structure that imposes meaning—even if it is quite nuanced—that relates the parts comprising a whole. Using sections to group the essays would help, I thought. And, the book’s title would derive from one of the essays, and I knew that the title would, eventually, lead me to develop a suitable configuration, but which title to pick, which essay to emphasize? I identified some of the shared preoccupations among the essays—air, wind, flight—as well as some of the overarching themes—departures and disappearances (read “death”), but how to wrap it up in a neat package for the dear readers I imagined on the other side of the page?

When I decided on the title, I Just Lately Started Buying Wings, I realized I’d need a subtitle as the agent of cohesion. I thought of applying a leitmotif of correspondence, using different kinds of letters as subheadings for individual sections.  I noted words and phrases that evoked the epistolary: Letters home. Missives, disp