Hi Everyone,
I’m happy to share the first podcast episode for the fall! On this episode, Jessica Treadway joins me to discuss a story from her 2026 short story collection, I Felt My Life with Both My Hands (Cornerstone Press). The story first appeared in Five Points and was later chosen as one of the 2025 Best American Short Stories. You can listen to Cynthia Nixon read the story here on Symphony Space.
“The women who narrate the remarkable stories in Jessica Treadway’s I Felt My Life with Both My Hands find the same kinds of hopes and sorrows filling and emptying their hearts—overtaking or abandoning them with power so startling but so intimately familiar that we recognize on every page our own sense of how often we are strangers most of all to ourselves.”
—Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize award for Tinkers
Here’s a PDF thanks to Cornerstone Press:
Jessica Treadway: An Early Departure
In addition, I highly recommend another Treadway story we touched on during the podcast:
You can purchase her book, I Felt My Life with Both My Hands (Cornerstone Press), via Bookshop and Amazon.
One final note:
I hope some listeners will consider becoming paid subscribers this year. I would love to record more podcasts, but the cost is prohibitive. Two yearly subscriptions cover the cost of producing one podcast.
If a paid subscription isn’t an option, please like the podcast on Apple, Spotify, and Substack.
I am so grateful for your support!
Kelly
Flannery O’Connor Award-winning author Jessica Treadway’s eighth book and fourth story collection, I Felt My Life With Both My Hands (Cornerstone Press, April 14, 2026), contains stories narrated by ordinary fictional women who become extraordinary by virtue of allowing us into their minds and hearts. From different ages, sexualities, family/social backgrounds, and life experiences, the speakers explore subjects including motherhood and childlessness; partner relationships; careers and job loss; the quest for spirituality; guilt and sacrifice; illness and grief.
In “An Early Departure,” selected for The Best American Short Stories 2025 edited by Celeste Ng, an aunt must choose between granting her niece’s request for help or risk losing a relationship she has always cherished in the absence of having children of her own. In “Cliché,” a wife recovers from vertigo and the discovery of her husband’s infidelity, only to find them linked in a way she would never have guessed. And in “The Daughter’s Story,” Treadway offers a companion tale to the late Andre Dubus’s classic “A Father’s Story,” in which a father sacrifices his spiritual integrity and a lifelong friendship to save his daughter from facing the consequences after she commits a fatal crime.
The New York Times Book Review called Jessica Treadway “a writer with an unsparing bent for the truth.” Her collection Please Come Back to Me received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her novel How Will I Know You? (Grand Central, 2016) was a People Magazine Book of the Week, and her novel Lacy Eye (Grand Central, 2015) was a Target Book Club selection.
A little bit about your host:
Kelly Fordon has published two award-winning short story collections, I Have the Answer (2020) and Garden for the Blind (2015), and two poetry collections, What Trammels the Heart (SFA Press, 2025) and Goodbye Toothless House (Kattywompus Press, 2019). Her poetry chapbook, The Witness (Kattywompus Press, 2016), won the Eric Hoffer Award for the Chapbook and was a Finalist for the Grand Prize. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review Online, The Boston Review, The Florida Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Rattle, and The Saturday Evening Post, among others. She was the spring 2026 Resident Fellow at VCCA’s Moulin à Nef campus in France. You can find her website at kellyfordon.com.
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