Once I Was Cool contrasts past aspirations with the mess and magic of the present.
She teaches creative nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a mentor editor with the OpEd Project supporting women\'s voices in public discourse..
A longtime company member with 2nd Story, she has told stories for National Public Radio, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Goodman Theatre, and with The Paper Machete live news magazine at the Green Mill.
Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2013 , the New York Times , The Believer , Poets & Writers , Longreads , Tin House , and elsewhere.
About author(s): MEGAN Stielstra is the author of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, winner of the 2017 Book of the Year Award from the Chicago Review of Books , as well as Everyone Remain Calm and Once I Was Cool (both reissued by Northwestern University Press). "But it was the first time since my son was born that I didn\'t feel alone." Combining footnotes, electric sentences, and uproariously funny anecdotes (have you ever run into an ex while rolling on ecstasy?), Stielstra shows us that maturity is demanding, but its rewards are a gift. "I shouldn\'t have listened," she writes.
She remembers learning how to shoot a gun, a cancer scare, and--in a piece that was anthologized in The Best American Essays 2013 --the time she eavesdropped on another new mother using her son\'s baby monitor.
With conversational flourishes and on-the-mark descriptions, Stielstra\'s Essays evoke the richness of her everyday life and the memories that are never far away.
And it isn\'t what she expected, either.
It\'s just the home her young, cool self imagined.
As an adult, she lives in a turreted condo across the street, with her husband, a child, and an onerous mortgage.
In her younger days, essayist Megan Stielstra saw Jane\'s Addiction at the Aragon Ballroom and fantasized about living on the same block, right in the thick of music and revelry.
Once I Was Cool contrasts past aspirations with the mess and magic of the present
