From Publishers Weekly, 1/5/17:

 

I went to New York City in late October, and one of the things I did was have lunch with my agent. She’d submitted my proposal for this anthology in August (maybe September?) and we’d had a really positive phone call with my editors at Algonquin about it. An hour after lunch, I had my phone in my hand and was walking, taking photos. I got an email notification and it was my agent — the anthology had officially sold and we had our terms and agreements met.

That was before the election.

When the election results rolled in, I’d been packing to go to New York City again, this time for Book Riot Live. The event was cathartic, even with the unbelievable questions of “what’s going to happen?” and “how?” lingering in the air. It was hard to focus, and I don’t think I mentioned to anyone that I’d sold another book.

(In a side anecdote, I’d had lunch with one of my editors on that trip and an hour later, when I was in The Strand, I got a call from her, wherein I got the new of my first starred trade review from Kirkus. New York City has been growing on me.)

Over the last couple of months since selling this anthology, I’ve been putting it together bit by bit. I’ve sketched out who I’d like to take part. I’ve researched and reached out to people I knew, as well as people I’d never met or talked to before, to start a conversation. It wasn’t easy. I wasn’t feeling particularly good about the process.

It wasn’t the people. It wasn’t the topics.

It was feeling the overwhelming weight of the question “what does this matter?”

I turned my computer mostly off for the last weeks of 2016. I read. I wrote. I took photos. I disconnected from being “on” in order to focus on turning inward. And somewhere in there, I realized that this anthology was exactly what I needed to be working on because it’s exactly the conversation that needs to be happening now, maybe more than ever.

And when the new year rolled around, my agent decided that yes, we needed to share this good news. I finished up my contributors list days before the announcement came out.

I’m honored and thrilled to be working with Algonquin Young Readers again, with two editors and a whole team who are unbelievably enthusiastic about this work. I’m also honored to share a complete contributor list for this collection as it stands now. There will be more pieces, reprints and perhaps another original or two, from celebrities and other “big names.” I’ve gotten permissions to two very exciting ones, and I am working hard to make more connections happen.

This process, with the knowledge I gained through building Feminism, felt like it wasn’t quite coming together because I wasn’t necessarily believing how well it was coming together.

But now? Now I cannot contain my excitement. This is going to be an incredible collection with brilliant insight into the landscape of mental health. The topics I’ve seen already are topics I can’t wait to read more about.

(Don’t) Call Me Crazy is, we think, a tentative Fall 2018 title. You can add it to your Goodreads shelf here.