Fiction ’96 alumna Joan Frank‘s new essay collection Because You Have To: A Writing Life will be released September 15, 2012, from the University of Notre Dame Press.

My interest . . . is in the emotional and physical and dream-life of writing (and reading) as an inescapable calling, and in ways of inhabiting that life . . . topics that have often struck me as screened off from the general dialogue, treated as unsavory—like that hidden little back room where the car salesman ducks away, to discuss your proposed purchase price with his “boss.”