Made Holy: Essays

 Made Holy: Essays, is now available from UGAPress, IndieBound, Barnes&Noble, or Amazon!

So many of these essays began here at this blog, rising out of the moment I occupied, the feelings that flooded me, that brooded and swirled through the landscape of memory. We become ourselves through stories and it takes years to shape them, years of becoming. So much gratitude to all who travel this road with me. Hope you enjoy the book!

"Made Holy satisfies a reader’s longing, quenches a thirst for beauty won from suffering, or peace from travail. Here is Emily Arnason Casey’s life, or parts of it, but more, here is her art made of words that refer to and call back and make sense of her life, which is a life, like all lives, rife with struggle and disappointment and lasting memories of pain, all of which she explores with a gentle nostalgia and unrestrained love. The essays here ultimately bring light and goodness, hope and joy, all synonyms for the holiness we all seek."  ---Patrick Maden, author of Sublime Physick & Quotidiana

Lyrically driven, vivid, fragmented prose form the pulse of this moving debut collection on the American family. Entwined by the narratives of generations, Made Holy tells the story of love, loss, and addiction. Emily Arnason Casey employs the lyric imagination to probe memory and the ever-shifting lens of time as she seeks to make sense of the disease that haunts her maternal family tree and the alchemy of loss and longing.

The lakes of her childhood in Minnesota form the interior landscape of this book, a kind of watery nostalgia for something just beyond her reach:“I know this feeling,” she writes. “We travel along the surface of time, and then suddenly the layers give way, and we are in another year, another body, another place.”

Casey’s willingness to honestly examine the past and present with contemplative lyricism offers fresh perspective and new understanding. In electric moments that are utterly relatable, she weaves a tale of love and commitment to the truth of her experience despite the incredible desire to keep alive a legacy of secrets. Like the mullein plant she invokes in the final essay, these essays form a kind of “guardian to the lost.”