The Assay Interview Project: Laura Julier
August 15, 2025

Laura Julier’s lyric memoir, Off Izaak Walton Road: The Grace that Comes through Loss, published by University of New Mexico Press, won the 2023 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. She is former editor of Fourth Genre, the literary journal of nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Under the Gum Tree, Assay, Gulf Stream Magazine, and The MacGuffin. For many years, she was a professor of writing at Michigan State University and directed the professional writing major. She currently works as a hospital chaplain and lives in Iowa City in a house built in 1893, off a dirt alley, where once a barred owl lived in an old swamp maple.
About Off Izaak Walton Road:  Loss and sorrow can overwhelm even the strongest person, forcing them to reckon with their emotions whether they want to or not. In this extraordinary debut, Laura Julier recounts her reckoning, which took place in an old cabin tucked away on a hidden and forgotten gravel road along the Iowa River. In company with silence and snow, with eagles, owls, and a host of other birds, Julier finds solace and begins to emerge from the dark corners of grief. Over time, she comes to understand she cannot bury grief or turn aside from loss but must walk in its presence, awake and humble, until, at last, she finds her own wholeness within it.
For at least the last 20 years, I’ve been an avid reader of the literary journal, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. I love the genre of nonfiction at large, how capacious it is—like a tiny bag of rainbowed fabric that suddenly opens into a parachute. (I assume I’m not the only child on the playground who went wild for the “parachute game.”) In adulthood, nonfiction writing is my parachute game, so I want to talk with writers who shake the parachute in surprising and invigorating ways.

One of those writers is Laura Julier. She was a long-time editor at Fourth Genre and the first to support my work there. I can see how she embodies in her own work the “explorations” (plural!) that this journal celebrates and embodies. Her book-length nonfiction debut, Off Izaak Walton Road, is a parachute that keeps unfolding, line by line, sentence by sentence, section by section, until the reader wonders how so much insight and attention can fill the pages of a single book. (The answer: A lot!)

Laura is a humble, thoughtful essayist working at the intersection of nature writing, spiritual writing, and historical research. She may not have meant to include herself in her book, but it's her keen vision, honed as an editor no doubt, but forged as a human of big mind and soft heart, that makes Off Izaak Walton Road an unforgettable read, not to mention a guide for writing the physical and psychic landscapes in which we live.

​Oh, and the other thing about parachutes—they save lives. I don’t think it’s overstating to say that this book will, too. Likely, it already has. There’s a gentle, pulsing lifeline in Off Izaak Walton Road that models for the reader how to persist in uncertainty, how to endure an enduring grief, and how to tilt toward hope, even when a surer future feels so far away.
Julie Marie Wade: Off Izaak Walton Road is the winner of the 2023 River Teeth Nonfiction Book Award, and as I read your book the first time, I kept thinking how apt the title of the prize truly is. “River teeth,” as you know, refers to trees that have fallen into a river and been sculpted by water over time. Metaphorically, I think of the river’s teeth as the things that catch, that snag, that don’t flow easily through with the current but get caught in memory, in feeling. Your book catches me. It catches my intellect, my heart, my spiritual sensibilities. There’s an intractability to your continual return to the house off Izaak Walton Road in the book’s long arc, and there’s also an intractability to the way this book returns to the reader long after reading or perhaps simply doesn’t leave, can’t dislodge.

I'd like to begin by asking when you knew you were writing a book and how you began to understand the book you were writing was this particular one. Did it begin as notes, journal entries, individual essays that evolved into chapters, research, something else altogether? What is Off Izaak Walton Road’s origin story?

Laura Julier: I love hearing origin stories of all kinds—thank you for this question, Julie! After the first time I lived in this cabin, someone said to me, offhandedly, “You should write a book about a cabin at the end of a dirt road along a river.” Trying to write it amid teaching, advising, administrating became too hard, and it emerged slowly. I wrote mostly when I was able to return to live on the river, during a summer or small chunk of time; it seemed I had to live there in order to write about it.

At one point, I went off to the Goodwill and bought a three-ring binder, because I knew that would help to give physical form to a big project early in the process, so I could see what I was working towards. I printed out a title page, drafted an acknowledgments page, and printed the pages I’d written thus far. I didn’t pay much attention to shape or focus for a while. I had written short pieces about different aspects of the place—what does the cabin look like inside? Outside? What about the road? Across the river? On the river?—and transcribed journal entries from different seasons.

In this way, I accumulated pages, though I didn’t know what those short bits would become. One day, I came across a photograph of a three-dimensional art piece, a structure with dozens of small, handmade papers shaped like coins, each hanging by a string from a horizontal grid. The artist’s statement read, “I make small elements, which I join together to form a larger one. Small pieces of paper become a bigger structure.” Immediately, I knew that was how I conceived of this book: small pieces that accumulate, eventually achieving a mass, becoming something else.

I kept accumulating pieces, some very short. Some were lists—objects on the fireplace mantle, broken kitchen items carefully placed in the garden, each type of bird I spotted on morning walks. Some were stand-alone narratives. Eventually I had enough pages—enough pieces—that I knew I needed to figure out a sequence, especially because by that point, I’d lived in the cabin five or six different times. And over time, each time, something had changed.

I began sketching out structures, at first by grouping pieces chronologically into sections and trying to see the heart of that section, both narratively and emotionally.

By this point, I was working on the manuscript in a different way, trying to find where it was headed and what it was about. For a long time, I thought this was a cultural, geological, and natural history of this particular place, and despite feedback from different friends and readers, I didn’t want any focus on myself. I resisted that for a long time. But once I understood that I was very much a part of this story, it still took a long time to figure out what the point was. Finally, a very smart writer—my spouse, before they were my spouse—said to me, “You think this is a book about nature, but it’s really a book about how nature healed you. It’s about how you can research and analyze yourself endlessly, but in the end, you need time to metabolize loss and make sense of its boundaries.” I remember standing dead still in shock when I heard that: I both didn’t want to hear it, and at the same time, realized it was true in a way I did not (yet) know how to make happen.

I took another year to sculpt and shape and revise and edit the entire manuscript to find its ending and make sure it focused in a way that made sense. Its meaning emerged as I worked over and over with the threads that I’d laid down early on as well as the threads that I’d cut short over the years of writing and revising, and which I was finally able to pick up again and follow.

I know your spouse, in person as well as on the page, and in fact it makes good sense to me that Kate Carroll de Gutes encouraged you to acknowledge yourself more fully in the project, your own authentic presence and investment in writing toward healing. I’m a fan of Kate’s work in The Authenticity Experiment and Objects in Mirror are Closer than They Appear, both notable essay collections that reckon deeply with self in relation to the larger world.

In your project, there is no lack of authenticity—far from it—but there is far less explicit self-disclosure than in many works of creative nonfiction I have read. As a reader of Off Izaak Walton Road, I gain small glimpses of your personal history, but not in the way I might expect to meet a memoirist on the page. Your premise is not autographical storytelling, summoning the past and recreating it on the page. Rather, this book strikes me as deeply rooted in the essay tradition, specifically essaying as a verb. I meet you on the page through your mind at work, your descriptions and observations, your approach to researching the history of that place in Iowa, the man who gave the road its name, and your reflections on suffering, on healing, on what it means to be human and the quest to live a more intentional life. As I read, I felt I was looking through your eyes at an unfamiliar place rather than through your life at the events that brought you there.

Who are your literary touchstones as an essayist? Perhaps there are memoirists, too, and poets, whose work has informed your approach to crafting such clear, incisive prose, even as your content is far less “confessional” than the work of many memoirists and poets? These might include writers whose work you have cherished long before you realized you were writing your own book of creative nonfiction as well as writers whose work extended invitations and permissions to you as you were writing as well as sculpting, shaping, and revising Off Izaak Walton Road?

This is such a great question, and my brain is ping-ponging all over the place picking up on different aspects of it. I know that from the first time I read the essays of Joan Didion I felt her voice coming from inside my own head, and that started, as you suggest, long before I even knew what literary nonfiction was or anything about the long history of the essay. In her nonfiction, she is relentless in questioning or examining, in a kind of interiority that is carefully crafted on the page. I’ve lived with her voice and the shape of her essaying for decades, through reading for the pure joy of it, analyzing and writing about those essays, and in teaching them. So, I know they are woven into my practice and my aesthetic in ways I’m probably not even conscious of at some level.
 
I studied nonfiction with Carl Klaus, a rigorous, fierce, intense mentor, whose commitment to the essay was unparalleled. From him, I absorbed the compulsion to go over and over and over words and phrases, seeking preciseness. From him and his several memoirs, I also came to value and understand the way many essayists convey in essaying the habits of a mind at work. Virginia Woolf’s “A Street Haunting” is just one perfect example.
 
There’s so much I learned from studying poetics, meter, and poetic form years ago. I really like the word “touchstones,” because I think of that literally: the writers whose work I pick up and have to flip through and reread. I’m thinking of Mary Oliver’s poems and the lyric essays of Annie Dillard, including Holy the Firm. Also, Terry Tempest Williams’ Leap and Refuge and Abigail Thomas’s Safekeeping. I know that reading these collections years before I started crafting my book gave me a sense of what I wanted in a reading experience. They sit together on one of my bookshelves conversing with one another—and your recent collection Otherwise has joined them there. These works are deeply personal, not confessional, concerned most with finding a shape for experience in words.
 
I should add that it was seeing that photograph of the art piece I mentioned above that anchored my sense of how this book would be shaped—and I did have in my mind that word “sculpted” that you chose. That piece, an example of many individual objects collected into one larger object, is an aesthetic I’ve written about and been fascinated by for many years. Like the AIDS quilt, the Vietnam wall, the Clothesline Project, individual pieces stand both alone and together. That was how I envisioned the book: a collection of very short pieces, side by side, placed somewhat associatively, layering into meaning.
 
This is such a beautiful and apt description of how your book accretes for me as a reader. (I hope you love the word “accretion,” and I have a hunch you do!) There is something about Off Izaak Walton Road that accretes gradually, associatively, immersively, so by the end, I’m breathless without having been running the whole way. The reading experience is more like a thoughtful meander where you don’t realize at first that the elevation is increasing. Then, you arrive at a summit, which is the book’s final volta. And of course, this metaphor feels all the more appropriate because of the many walks you take throughout this book, ruminating while moving slowly and deliberately.
 
I always ask my students to choose a heart passage from every text we read together. The “heart passage” is my idiosyncratic term for that which encapsulates the essence of the larger project. If they could only choose one poem or chapter or short piece from a collection to stand in for the whole, which poem or chapter or short piece would they choose? The trick is that I turn this question back to them at their own thesis defenses, requesting them to select a heart passage from their own book and parse it for us. How have you done in this small, specific piece what you are aiming to do in the collection at large?
 
So, I would like to ask you to select and reproduce a heart passage here to share with the readers of our conversation. How does your heart passage reflect your ideals for the larger collection or perhaps even your discovery of what you were writing toward all along?
 
It doesn’t surprise me in the least that you’d use a term like “heart passage,” Julie, and challenge writers to identify this in their own work! Your own work is nothing if not circling always towards an open heart.
 
As I was working with my manuscript seeking a shape for it, I found the short pieces wanted to fall into sections, and I realized the boundaries of those sections weren’t clear to me yet. I had to find a way to clarify them for myself. At first, I kept trying to track chronology, but I knew that “what happened” was not the primary organizing structure for me. The chronology had to make sense, of course—I couldn’t lose readers, leave them wondering where I was in time, and what happened before or after what. But more important was the emotional, psychic, and spiritual shape of the story, and so I was thinking more in terms of musical movements.
 
I tried to identify the “notes and textures” and the key piece of each section. So, for example, in Part I, I knew I needed to give the backstory and set the stage for the first time I lived in this cabin. But I also knew this section wasn’t going to explain anything. It’s heavily lyrical, evocative, weighted with unrelieved sadness and unspecified loss. The notes and textures are winter, chant, solitude, the river. And the key piece—the heart of it—is “Loss.”
 
Somehow, I came up with the idea of using three words to name the primary emotional or spiritual note, to mark the orchestration that I was aiming for in each section. The first part became Snow Fire Silence, the second Wind Wood Memory, and so on.
 
All of which is to say it’s really challenging to pick just one heart piece, because each of the six parts has one. But I think (at least at this point of living with the book) I will choose this passage near the end because stylistically, it carries echoes from some of the earliest pieces I wrote that served as touchstones or listening posts as I worked. Also, because it is a huge turning point in understanding the experience of this story—in the narrator or persona or whatever way you want to refer to the “I” of the book—as I repeatedly look back as I am working with the material, trying to manage its shape and its grounding.

I thought that all the time living on the river off Izaak Walton Road had given me something I deeply needed—that being there would erase the sadness for so long lodged at my core. While I was there walking the road, I had had time and space to breathe deeply and expansively. River and road, fire and silence, snow and marsh had allowed me to unclench, unfold, and open my heart. To feel whatever sorrow and grief I’d carried, as deeply and fully as I could. Not to hide or protect myself from it.
            The sob I choked down facing the eagle, the soaring intake of breath and joy I felt whenever I’d see them aloft, the notes I kept feeling in my chest hovering, moving over the river. I was able to feel things I had not felt before, not in my breathing or my skin or my heart. Things I had not known were there, tamped down, unfelt, unrecognized.
            But what I now saw, as I found these places so dramatically erased, was an understanding even more startling than finding the buildings muscling themselves into what I held sacred.
            From the first moment I saw it, driving around the curve on that late September day, thinking I had finally found somewhere to spend my sabbatical, I had mapped my psychic, emotional, spiritual landscape onto this place. And the way I had attached my sorrow to the cabin and river and land off Izaak Walton Road—the way I carried the sorrow like precious and fragile baggage, guarded and hidden but weighing heavily on my heart—turned the place itself into a source of sorrow. A tangible substitute and a ready conduit for all the losses and wounds I had not been prepared to face and feel on my own.
            One more injury, one more loss.
            In circling back over and over, returning to touch the place in any way I could, trying to claim and own it, I kept taking a perverse kind of comfort in holding on to the pain, poking the bruises, picking at the scabs of that old wounded self, over and over, trying to feel again the hurt.
            Solace from injury, and one more injury in itself: it was both things at once.
            In circling back again and again, I finally understood that I needed to return to the lessons of paying attention: it was walking the road day after day, the sensory attention of sight and sound, the face-to-face encounters that taught me to know the birds. Silence and presence had also taught me to know my heart. Had taught me to understand that I could not erase the sorrow, could no longer bury the grief, but having come to know it, could walk forward in its presence.
This is an exceptional heart passage, one I might have chosen myself, though we share the experience of feeling that this book has many hearts—it’s a literary octopus! And, of course, I love thinking about literary composition as musical composition by analogy, “notes and textures” as guideposts rather than strict chronologies or a linear “plot.” The recursiveness of the literal return to the cabin off Izaak Walton Road also lends itself to the recursiveness of the meditative and evolving self—plunging into that place again, deepening attention, noticing anew.
 
To stay with the musical analogy, I see so clearly how loss serves as the leitmotif of this collection. There is palpable grief in this book for the house you lost—the beloved home you cherished so acutely that I felt I knew that house and had lived in it myself—and in its absence, the appearance of the cabin off Izaak Walton Road. It isn’t a “replacement,” by any means, but I read it as a gift made richer because of the earlier loss.
 
For my last question, I’d like to turn to loss or even absence as literary vehicles in addition to a human experience. The melody of this book, for me, is your relationship with places, and the flora and fauna you encounter in the natural world, and your cat, of course. (Some of my heart passages involve your cat and her instinct to hunt, to bring death into your life when you are seeking the opposite.) Instead of a “tell-all,” Off Izaak Walton Road is a “show-deep,” with other losses, not always explicitly shared, haunting the margins of every page.
 
I’m wondering what you left out of this book—both intentional omissions from the start and those experiences and reflections that didn’t make it into the final version. When my students are working on their thesis collections, I remind them that not everything they think they might include in a book will ultimately appear in it. But I also suggest—and have known to be true in my own writing life—that a “shadow thesis” often emerges as they write deeper into their own thesis project. What is absent from the thesis (or lost in revision) might be abundantly present in the shadow thesis. What doesn’t match the scope or the tone of the current book might become the wellspring for the next project.
 
So, this final question is actually multiple questions: what wasn’t depicted/explored in Off Izaak Walton Road that you would like to explore (or are already exploring!) in a future creative nonfiction project. Are there aspects of your own lived experience that you don’t intend to write about, and are there aspects that are calling to you now that we can anticipate in a future project? In other words, if Off Izaak Walton Road is the thesis, tell us about your ideal and/or actual shadow thesis to come?
 
One of the things I have discovered since coming back to live in Iowa City full time is the number of people living in town who have stories about that area off Izaak Walton Road. It’s as if the existence of the book out in the world has surfaced stories I would not have otherwise heard. I wonder how many of them I’d have learned about earlier if I had spent more time talking to people. But at the time I was writing, I was very solitary and inward-focused, very protective of the place and the silence. So, I imagine this collection of stories as both a shadow—unrealized, unwritten, unknown until now—and a chorus of voices that is kind of accumulating around me now, a collection that I might make something of. But had I pursued those stories at the time, I think it would have yielded a very different book. So, there’s that.

The other answer to your question is what you alluded to earlier: I didn’t want to write about—and made a consistent, insistent, unwavering decision that I would not write about—the wounds and trauma to which I refer early in the book. To write those experiences would be to tell what happened, and one of the traps of talking about trauma, for me, is the instinct to preface any telling with comparison: it wasn’t as bad for me as for others, or my trauma wasn’t as bad as “real” trauma. I lived in that particular form of denial for years, and I know (from the work I’ve done around it) that I’m not the only one who has experienced that kind of minimizing. I didn’t want to write the story of what happened; I was writing the story of what those experiences left me with, the residue I lived with and ignored and couldn’t find language for.

Decades ago, I had this notion of writing about the ways in which certain nonfiction writers seemed to be trying to talk about the ineffable, the unnameable, one might say the holy or an experience of the holy—experiences outside of language. Alice Walker in both her nonfiction and fiction, Terry Tempest Williams in her mind-blowing project Leap, Gretel Ehrlich writing about landscape and light, and of course Annie Dillard in several of her essays as well as Holy the Firm. I have always found that challenge compelling. And I think one of the reasons for that is what I came to understand in writing this book: as I put it in the short piece that stands now as the Preface but which was one of the earliest pieces I wrote, it’s the psychic landscape, the emotional ecology lingering for me from those experiences rather than the experiences or details themselves that was so devastating and which I was finally ready to confront.

So to come back to your question, the shadow book hovers behind everything I wrote, but it is not a story I’m the least bit interested in writing. It’s not nearly as compelling as the one that’s now in my hands.

Although I have let go of the subject and focus of this book, as I have done readings around the country and engaged with questions readers have, I realize that it has changed the way I approach new work. For instance, the project I’m working on now is also a subject that I’ve carried for years. Its focus is a historical figure and incident, and how the story has been variously shaped over years, showing up not only in literature but also in popular and commercial culture. The story is embedded in a specific area of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and as I’ve returned to working on it, I realize that I’m thinking of the place very differently now—because of the habit of relentless attention I developed in writing about that piece of land off Izaak Walton Road. It might not be evident to anyone else in the end, but I think you’re right—it can’t help but be a shadow flickering over whatever else I write.
 
Thank you, Laura, for your time and thoughtful responses to these questions.
Julie Marie Wade’s most recent collections include The Mary Years (Texas Review Press, 2024), selected by Michael Martone for the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, Quick Change Artist: Poems (Anhinga Press, 2025), selected by Octavio Quintanilla for the 2023 Anhinga Prize in Poetry, Fisk, By Analogy (CutBank Prose Chapbook Series, 2025), and The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020 (Harbor Editions, 2025), co-authored with Denise Duhamel. A finalist for the National Poetry Series and a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and makes her home in Hollywood with Angie Griffin and their two cats. Her memoir, Other People’s Mothers, will be published in September 2025 by University Press of Florida.

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