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ABOUT THE BOOK
“Writers only know how to begin,” Laura Childs Gill declares in one of her many attempts to trace the origin of the desires that upended her comfortable life. Did it begin when she asked B. to get a beer? Or was the impulse inherited along her paternal side, a lineage of writers who'd also fallen in love outside of marriage — who’d also always been leaving?
In What a House Can Hold, Gill’s meditative essays take form around her inability to neatly narrativize her domestic and creative crises. Visiting the houses of Dickinson, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, driving through the Florida Keys with her father, the Mojave Desert with her mother, and the American South alone, Gill searches for answers to her questions about how one leaves, and builds, a home. At once about the loss of a previous self and the acceptance of a new one, What a House Can Hold contends with, and exemplifies, what happens when the structures designed to contain us—marriages, homes, habits, self-mythologies—no longer can.
PRAISE FOR WHAT A HOUSE CAN HOLD
“Laura Childs Gill writes with such a command of her narrative weave, that we are hooked by the story itself—the quest for a home place and the fearless exploration of loves lost and found—and at the same time amazed by the artistic joinery we see happening at every turn. To her title What a House Can Hold—my response is ‘much more than I would have thought.’”
—Sven Birkerts, author of The Miro Worm and the Mysteries of Writing
“What a House Can Hold is not so much a book as a door opening upon a quickening, vivid heart. It is tender, complex and erudite; a feast of symbols and a dispatch on the nexus of love and writing. I did not want it to end.”
—Sue Rainsford, author of Follow Me to Ground
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura Childs Gill is an author and teacher living in Miami, Florida. Her essays have been published in AGNI, The Los Angeles Review, West Branch, Washington Square Review, and Electric Literature, amongst others.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: October 20, 2026
Print Length: 160 pages
Dimensions: 5.5×8.5”
ISBN: 978-1-957392-51-6
ABOUT THE BOOK
“Writers only know how to begin,” Laura Childs Gill declares in one of her many attempts to trace the origin of the desires that upended her comfortable life. Did it begin when she asked B. to get a beer? Or was the impulse inherited along her paternal side, a lineage of writers who'd also fallen in love outside of marriage — who’d also always been leaving?
In What a House Can Hold, Gill’s meditative essays take form around her inability to neatly narrativize her domestic and creative crises. Visiting the houses of Dickinson, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, driving through the Florida Keys with her father, the Mojave Desert with her mother, and the American South alone, Gill searches for answers to her questions about how one leaves, and builds, a home. At once about the loss of a previous self and the acceptance of a new one, What a House Can Hold contends with, and exemplifies, what happens when the structures designed to contain us—marriages, homes, habits, self-mythologies—no longer can.
PRAISE FOR WHAT A HOUSE CAN HOLD
“Laura Childs Gill writes with such a command of her narrative weave, that we are hooked by the story itself—the quest for a home place and the fearless exploration of loves lost and found—and at the same time amazed by the artistic joinery we see happening at every turn. To her title What a House Can Hold—my response is ‘much more than I would have thought.’”
—Sven Birkerts, author of The Miro Worm and the Mysteries of Writing
“What a House Can Hold is not so much a book as a door opening upon a quickening, vivid heart. It is tender, complex and erudite; a feast of symbols and a dispatch on the nexus of love and writing. I did not want it to end.”
—Sue Rainsford, author of Follow Me to Ground
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura Childs Gill is an author and teacher living in Miami, Florida. Her essays have been published in AGNI, The Los Angeles Review, West Branch, Washington Square Review, and Electric Literature, amongst others.
BOOK INFO
Pub Date: October 20, 2026
Print Length: 160 pages
Dimensions: 5.5×8.5”
ISBN: 978-1-957392-51-6