My published writing appears most often in books and quarterly journals. This means that there is often a long delay, sometimes years, between the time I finish a piece and when it shows up at a bookstore.
Until I saw the review last night I had no idea which essay had been accepted for the anthology. I had a vague idea of the content but my memory supplied no clues as to the form or title and I never really cared enough to ask.
Publisher’s Weekly informs me that the essay is called The Theory of Maternal Impression.
When I wrote it I had an office in a warehouse on the river in Portland. I was still using the cranky old Linux machine for all of the site work; it didn’t have a good text editor so most of my writing was stored on a laptop at the house.
One day while I was picking up the kids someone shimmied up the back of the house, knocked out the rear dormer window, and very efficiently made off with the piggybanks, cameras, and the laptop. Of course I had no backup of the files – an entire manuscript went missing that day.
The Theory of Maternal Impression was one small piece of that book, but was a rather tangential fragment. Losing the manuscript was a terrible experience but starting over from that point has been instructive, not only in practical terms (I make multiple backups of everything now) but also in understanding the story.