Betwixt-and-Between

Essays on writing, moving among digression, reflection, imagination, and experience as a lover might, bringing art into the world.

Boully’s essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections between the digression, reflection, imagination, and experience that characterize falling in love as well as the art of arranging words on a page. Literary theory, philosophy, and linguistics rub up against memory, dreamscapes, and fancy, making the practice of writing a metaphor for the illusory nature of experience.

Publication date: April 3, 2018

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5 x 7.75

Page count: 152 pages

ISBN: 9781566895101

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Jenny Boully is the author of The Body, The Book of Beginnings and Endings, not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, and other books. Born in Thailand, she grew up in Texas and holds a PhD in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She teaches creative writing and literature at Columbia College Chicago.

Shortlisted for the 2018 Chicago Review of Books CHIRBY Award for Nonfiction

“Boully’s thought process, as seen on the page, is a pure pleasure to behold—she’s full of delight and her words offer sensations beyond what mere words usually do.”

—Nylon

“Formally inventive and frequently gripping.”

—Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“A book for fans of the lyric essay and for those who want to think about writing and the creative life.”

—BookRiot

“A slim book that captures an author’s practice and the relationships she draws between writing and falling in love, dreaming and memory.”

—Poets & Writers

“The magic of [Betwixt-and-Between] is not prescriptive, but subjective; Boully splays open her own torso and readers divine what they need to from the spill of her organs.”

—The Rumpus

“Boully’s collection reminds us that there is a story not just on the pages we produce, but for every phase of our writing life, and for every genre, voice and style we pursue.”

—Electric Literature

“Boully has given us a collection of essays that also functions as a craft book in motion—not a set of directives but evidence of a writing life lived. It is everything we could want, but not as we expect.”

—Brevity

“[Betwixt-and-Between is] not only a powerful demonstration of writing as life, but of the ways that lived experiences can illuminate and transform writing.”

—The Star Tribune

“Jenny Boully’s newest collection brings together her essays on the writing life, including her coming-of-age as a poet, the magic of writing craft, and the relationship between writing and the nature of being.”

—The Margins

“In this new collection, Jenny Boully evokes knowledge’s ephemeral core, how it looks in the air or as a meadow, her brilliance inflected with lyric witchery.”

—Carmen Giménez Smith

“[A] wonder of a book.”

—Charles D’Ambrosio

“One gets the sense that [Boully] has straddled the space between waking and dreaming, not writing and writing, her whole life, and has something real to tell you about the time she’s spent in the in-between. You should follow her as far as you can go.”

—Ander Monson