The Rooms We Make Our Own

the long version

To write about what it is like to grow up in a working-class commercial fishing family, work as a nontraditional laborer in the physical trades, labor in a marriage and then come out, emerge from the assumption of excellent health into the reality of chronic illness, return to school, become a writer and a teacher of writing - and through it all love the ones you love, be sustained by them - requires more than one voice, more than one form. In The Rooms We Make Our Own, Toni Mirosevich does just this. She builds the complex structure of her lesbian experience section by section, constructing her life so that its framework is exposed for us to read. Poetry shares the space with fiction, "interrupting" each other as events in real life do.