As a child, I narrated stories in my head before I knew how to write. My mother, a high school English teacher, would describe the plots of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights to my sisters and me while she graded papers. My father, an extroverted bookstore manager with a laugh that carries into the next room, would regale us with stories of his own childhood. Both of my sisters could draw, but I lacked any ability in visual art, so I gravitated toward writing dark poetry and science fiction. In high school, I found The Best American Short Stories at the library and decided with the seriousness only a teenage poet possesses that this was the fiction I wanted to write, stories that dug deep into the ordinary to uncover extraordinary insights and prompted me to consider lives and perspectives much different than my own.
In college at Loyola University of Maryland, I met working writers for the first time, attended readings, and started imagining life as a writer. My twenties seemed to take me in reverse. I left a practical, federal job at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC to earn an MFA in Creative Writing at The Ohio State University. One night after too much wine, my friends invited me to move with them to New York City. That fall after graduation, with no job, little money, and no idea what my next step in life would be, I took the train to New York and spent my first month sleeping on the kitchen floor of a sublet. I worked in the rare book room at Strand Bookstore and fell in love with the gorgeous city that whirled around me. Before long, I’d also fallen in love with my husband, a musician and fellow writer.
While I found writing fulfilling, I knew it would never feed me or pay my rent. My husband’s friend connected me with a grassroots labor advocacy organization and launched my career in the non-profit world. Eventually, we made our way back to Columbus so my husband could earn his MFA and I found work with Mental Health America of Ohio. I started out answering the phone and listened as people shared their stories of living with mental illness or struggling to find help for family members. I led the agency’s first peer training program, helping people with lived experience become certified to support others in recovery. Becoming a mother and working full time meant I had to change my writing habits, but it also challenged me with bigger love and more complicated fears than I’d ever known, emotion that seeped out into my writing. After eight years in Ohio, we relocated to Watertown, Massachusetts, and maybe now I’ve finally settled down.
My short fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly, CutBank, and The Masters Review. I’m thrilled that my novel, This Is What Always Happens, has found a home with Regal House Publishing. The manuscript was on the shortlist for the 2022 Southeast Missouri State University Press Nilsen Prize, the first chapter was short-listed in the 2019 Craft First Chapters Contest, and the year before, I was awarded a Vermont Studio Center fellowship based on an excerpt.
Writing fiction and working in social services have marked me in similar ways—building empathy and challenging me to explore perspectives that are stigmatized. Mental illness confounds our desire for meaning, closure, and moral certainty. In fiction, I have circled these ideas again and again—to what extent is a person responsible for symptomatic behavior? Who bears the blame when that behavior causes suffering? What in our lives can we control and what lies beyond our control? Where is the line between identity and illness? How do we create justice when we are so flawed? Through my work, I hope to broaden conversations about the human condition and give voice to experiences that are often overlooked.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Maureen Traverse’s This is What Always Happens in 2027.
