The recipient of multiple honors for her writing, including a Lambda Literary Award, the Anhinga Prize in Poetry, the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, a “Spoon River” Editor’s Prize, an Oscar Wilde Award, and a special mention for a Pushcart Prize, lesbian poet, essayist, and educator Julie Marie Wade is also one of the most prolific writers you will ever read.
With more than 20 books to her name, Wade provides readers with something for almost everyone. Her newest book, the interconnected autobiographical essays collection, “Other People’s Mothers” (University Press of Florida, 2025), was released in September 2025. Wade, a finalist for a 2025 Lammy Award in Lesbian Memoir/Biography, was gracious enough to make time for an interview before classes started at Florida International University, where she is a Professor of English & Creative Writing.
Julie Marie Wade will be doing a reading at the Miami Book Fair in November 2025.
Julie, were the essays in your new book, “Other People’s Mothers,” written with this book in mind or independently of a book?
They were written with this book in mind. In 2012, as I was finishing my creative nonfiction dissertation at the University of Louisville, I had the idea that I wanted my next project to focus on mothers who were not my own and families to which I did not belong as a lens for better understanding my personal formation story (bildungsroman!) as a child of a particular time and place. I grew up studying the other mothers in my insular, suburban community of West Seattle just as much as I grew up studying my own mother. It was only a matter of shifting my gaze and reframing my coming-of-age experiences in light of what I learned from those other mothers, and by extension, other families, to write my way toward and through this book.
Were they all written at once or over time?
Once I wrote the first stand-alone piece, which I believe was “Mrs. Arlington [Or a Study of Apocalypse as an After-School Special],” the others came quickly thereafter. I was working on another book-length project during the same post-dissertation time period — Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing — so I toggled between that very impressionistic, experimental lyric essay project and this much more linear, narrative project for a couple of years. I believe I wrote most, if not all, of these autobiographical stories (I really do think of them more as stories than essays, even as they are literary nonfiction and not fiction) between 2012 and 2014.
Because there is so much dialogue in the essays, do you rely on memory or journals to reconstruct the conversations?
I was indeed a ferocious journaler throughout my childhood and adolescence, so I think consistent record-keeping of the details of my daily life definitely honed my memory and helped me to think about my life, even at the time, as something I wanted to recount as a story. It was validating as well as heartbreaking when I found, in my adulthood, a journal entry from junior high where I had written about my gut-level feeling that my friend’s father was “creepy,” not someone I should ever be alone with — and some years later, when I was in high school, I learned he had gone to prison for molesting teenage girls. The diary entry doesn’t appear in “Other People’s Mothers,” nor is it referenced there, but I tried to evoke that uneasy feeling, that reticence on my part where my friend’s father was concerned, in “Mrs. Williams [Or a Study of Postmodernism and the Many Ways That Walls Are Broken].” It wasn’t only words people said that made their way into my journals, but how I felt about what was said and what wasn’t — as well as the looks and gestures I observed and my own intuition about what might be going on around me.
The aim for me is not a perfect transcript of conversations from my past, which would be impossible anyway, but a reconstruction on the page of the tenor of those conversations — what was communicated at large and how the various speakers contributed. Who spoke a lot? Who was more reserved or evasive? What kind of idioms did certain people favor in their speech? How did they reveal their values and beliefs through what they were willing or unwilling to say?
How much would you say that being an only child impacted not only your writing, but also the writing of this book?
It’s interesting that you ask this question because I just realized that I never mentioned the name of my dissertation collection. It’s called The Missing Sister & Other Stories: A Bildungsroman. I wrote explicitly about being an only child, a girl who had always wanted a sister and who eventually invented an extensive imaginary family. Writing from an absence led me to think about other perspectives I could write from. What about other families, particularly other mothers? I might not have paid such close attention to those other families at all if mine had been larger — and I’m realizing now that I didn’t know any other only children when I was a child. Not having siblings was another way I had been marked as “different,” or at least felt my difference acutely from my peers. Also, it’s possible that if my own relationship with my mother had been less fraught, I might not have paid such close attention to the other mothers and the way they interacted with their children. I think I was trying to figure out what made a family “work” and how flexible the roles within a family actually were.
You write about the mothers of sons (i.e. Mrs. Mann and Mrs. Newport), as well as mothers of daughters. Do you ever wonder about how different your life would be if you were a son, and a queer son at that?
I haven’t thought much about if I were a son, let alone a gay son, coming of age in my family. I was raised with the knowledge that my mother had cancer when I was born and could only have one child — that she had been advised against even having one. And I knew she wanted a daughter more than anything. In that way, I felt like it was a good thing that I was born a daughter. I wouldn’t say I experienced any gender dysphoria in terms of being a girl or becoming a woman, but I didn’t like the constraints and expectations that were often placed upon me because of my gender. I wanted to be a girl, and later a woman, in the ways that made sense and felt intuitively true to me.
As I grew up, I knew my mother was disappointed in me for many reasons — for not being more traditionally feminine in my appearance or wanting to wear make-up, and most of all, for not pursuing the heterosexual life she would have chosen for me, with a husband and children, a house and garden, a life that revolved around the same social circles and clubs she belonged to. Would any of those disappointments have been eased if I were a son? Probably not. A gay son? I don’t think so. Both of my parents have strong, religious objections to queerness in general and deep investments in Christian ideals of family.
But maybe there would have been less false hope at the beginning of our relationship if I were a son. It touched me, albeit poignantly, when I was in high school, that for a period of years, my mother had a friendship with a man she worked with who happened to be gay. They seemed to have a good rapport with each other, to genuinely enjoy each other’s company, and she even got him a housewarming gift when he and his husband bought their first home. I’ll always remember that — a little glimpse of something I didn’t expect from my mother, a kind of openness and generosity toward someone different from herself. But when I asked how she could have a friendship with a gay man but not “approve” of his “lifestyle,” she said that she didn’t have to worry about it because she wasn’t his mother.
How do you think these mothers would feel about the ways in which they are portrayed?
I think everyone who writes creative nonfiction hopes that the people depicted in their work will feel that they were presented honestly and fairly. I always hope that the people who appear in my work will understand that I’m writing from a place of curiosity, and yes, sometimes bafflement, too, but always wanting to make sense of the past as best I can. My work is exploratory. There isn’t any malice or vengeance guiding the work — more, a desire to peer inside our shared histories and see what can be learned. I think these mothers would recognize that the writing is observational rather than judgmental. They might also realize, if they hadn’t before, how closely children are watching the adults in their lives and what a powerful impression those adults can make, even when they aren’t explicitly trying to “teach a lesson.”
I found the Mrs. Arlington essay especially disturbing. It reminded me of the way that Christian extremists accuse LGBTQ people of grooming when, in fact, they are the ultimate groomers. As someone who was in the process of being groomed, please comment.
I’m glad you asked this question, Gregg, because conservative Christianity was the guiding worldview of my childhood, and I found it terribly repressive and harmful. Most of the conflicts in my early life, particularly those with my own parents, stemmed from religious imperatives that didn’t seem fair or kind. I attended Christian school and Christian church and Christian social groups like Pioneer Girls my entire youth. Graduate school was the first time that I was enrolled in a public institution, and I didn’t arrive at graduate school until I was almost 22. The biggest irony for me was that I was always told that Christianity was about loving our neighbors, and yet in practice, what I saw around me didn’t feel like love. As you say, the experience was one of grooming, social control. And the mandates I experienced about gender expression and sexual orientation and what a good life was or could be all seemed to stem from the belief that religion, as interpreted by the adults in my life, was a prescription, not a set of ideas that could be discussed, challenged, or reimagined.
There is a recurring theme of young Julie being told not to put words in other people’s mouths. Would it be fair to say that one of the pleasures of being a writer is that you can actually put words in other people’s mouths?
I love this interpretation, Gregg! I try to make sure the words I put in their mouths match the way they spoke, the beliefs they held and extorted, but I get to put the words on the page, and that’s powerful. Maybe it’s an act of reclaiming some of the power that wasn’t available to me when I was small — power I didn’t have because I was a child, because I was a girl, because I was someone who wavered in her faith, and later, because I was someone who realized she was gay. Now I get to tell the truth as best I can, and I get to do that as an out gay woman, a secular humanist, and a memoirist.
Regarding the Mrs. Williams essay, did you ever get to see Annie Hall?
I did! And I loved it! Well, I loved her and went out and bought a necktie immediately after viewing!
As an educator, what are you most looking forward to during the 2025 fall semester?
Being a creative writing professor means I have front row seats to so many previews of the literary future, and let me say, that future is looking bright! This semester, I’m teaching my undergraduate lyric essay class, which is a favorite of mine because the undergraduate students at FIU wanted an analog class to the Graduate Lyric Essay seminar for many years, and I was finally able to add it to the official course catalog for the first time in 2020. This is now the fourth iteration of Special Topics: The Lyric Essay, and the enthusiasm my students and I feel is palpable every time.
Have you started thinking about or working on your next book project?
Yes! I’m always working on several projects at once, so I can toggle between them freely. But right now, the project that is demanding my fullest attention is a poetry collection tentatively titled The Language Tangoes. One of my all-time favorite books of poetry is Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, and I don’t think I’ve ever written the homage to Mullen that I would like. I hope The Language Tangoes becomes that book. It contains an abecedarian series in 26 prose poems, each “tangoing” with a single word from the English language and in between are lineated poems that “tango” with zeitgeist markers and idioms, among them a long poem “Content Warning” and a love poem called “No Picnic.”
