Spring Newsletter: Coming Back Different (& Book Pre-Orders!)
In one of my favorite books from childhood, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, two siblings run away from home and take up residence in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, Claudia and her little brother Jamie encounter a mystery: an exquisite sculpture of an angel, which may or may not have been crafted by Michelangelo.
Eventually the siblings get homesick. They grow tired of sleeping in dusty antique four-posters and taking cold baths by night in the museum fountain. But Claudia is adamant that they can’t return to their former lives just yet. She’ll only go home, she tells Jamie, if she can “come back different.”
In that case, smart-ass Jamie replies, they can take a bus back to the suburbs instead of the train.
“I don’t want to go back differently,” says Claudia the grammar queen, ever exasperated with her little brother. “I want to go back different.”
In the end, the two children solve the mystery of who created the Angel. It is this discovery that allows Claudia to make her peace with returning home. Now she can go back different—invisibly altered, transformed inside into the bearer of a beautiful secret.
Claudia and Jamie were on my mind a lot these past few weeks, as my family wrapped up our six-month sabbatical in Germany. On February 28 we moved out of our Berlin apartment and departed for one last week of travel overseas.
We spent two vibrant days in Istanbul (where we counted 200 cats), then flew to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to visit friends there. Our children now have a great personal detail for future games of “Two Truths and a Lie”: they can say they’ve visited three continents in one day. It was an amazing ending to a full, rich, half-year adventure.
And it stood in sharp contrast with our return to Seattle, where we settled quickly into our old home; the kids transitioned smoothly back to school; my husband resumed the familiar wet trek to his workplace; and now I am once again seated at my desk at our upstairs window, looking out at the blooming star magnolias and dripping evergreen boughs of another Seattle spring.
In a way, it’s like we never left.
Did it change us at all, this experience of a lifetime? I hope so. I want it to stick with us, to mean something lasting.
I find myself almost wishing we felt more friction, coming back. More bumps, more struggle— more evidence that we had come back different. That we no longer quite fit neatly into the spaces we left six months ago.
Back in Seattle, clearing off my desk, I flipped through a chapbook by the deceased poet Matthew Hansen, stepson of the rather better-known poet Richard Hugo. The foreword contained a quote from Hansen’s journal, written just before he returned from a long trip abroad:
For an instant yesterday I wanted to buy something to wear, so there would be something external that would remind me and others that I had traveled far, and changed greatly. But I didn’t, of course; I have too much already and I probably wouldn’t wear it.
Oh, how I sympathized with that desire for an outward sign. But my spouse and I aren’t big shoppers; aside from some Berbere spice and a cheap ukulele (don’t ask), we brought home little from our trip in the way of concrete souvenirs. Instead I find myself taking stock of the intangibles we picked up along the way.
I can carry on a basic conversation in German now, for one thing.
We made and deepened friendships that I hope will last a long time.
Our children gained independence, visiting Berlin bakeries on their own to buy Brötchen on weekend mornings and taking public transit home from school.
We all got to experience a different pace, different routine, different societal systems; we were reminded that there are many ways to live richly and well.
But did we come back different?
I’m not sure, yet. I think, maybe, that we’ll have to actively cultivate the changes that these last six months have seeded in us.
That’s the next adventure.
Book News
Launch Events
My book about Annunciation House, Strangers in the Province of Joy, comes out on May 20 (!). I’ve planned a few related events so far:
El Paso: I’ll have books available at A-House’s annual Voice of the Voiceless dinner on May 23.
Seattle: Book launch event at University Bookstore, Saturday, June 6 at 4pm. I’ll send out more details to locals soon.
Online: stay tuned for details on a virtual event.
Pre-Orders
If you’re interested in purchasing the book, please consider placing a pre-order! It really helps create interest among booksellers and other readers. You can pre-order now at Amazon, Bookshop, or your local bookstore (here’s mine). (Note that Bookshop lists an earlier, incorrect publication date… apparently it takes forever to correct the metadata on these sites?)
Stocking Libraries
Another (free!) way to read is to request the book through your local library. At the end of this letter, I’ve included links to some library systems where I know I have readers. I’d love it if you could take a moment to place a request; library books are gifts that keep on giving.
Recommended Reading
As I publish my own book, which engages extensively with immigrant experiences, I also want to point readers to the many powerful immigration narratives written by immigrants.
Solito, by Javier Zamora, and Dora: A Daughter of Unforgiving Terrain by Dora Rodriguez, are two searing first-person accounts from Salvadorans who crossed into the US through the southwestern desert—Javier when he was just nine years old.
Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends takes readers into the absurdist American court proceedings where unaccompanied immigrant children as young as two years old are expected to answer complex questions that will legally determine their fates. A quick and gripping read.
And if you’re looking for something with more humor but just as much heft, check out Catalina, the debut novel from Karla Cornejo Villavivencio. (Her nonfiction book The Undocumented Americans, a finalist for the National Book Awards, is also a compelling read.)
And If You Want to Read More From Me…
I recently wrote a guest column for an old friend who publishes wise and hilarious reflections on her Substack titled The Mediocre Mother. While you’re there, check out MM’s extensive archives; if you’re a parent, I guarantee you’ll find something that’s so relatable it hurts.
Signing off without further ado,
Mary
Now about those library requests…
Click the links below to request that your local library order Strangers in the Province of Joy: Practicing Radical Hospitality on the US-Mexico Border by Mary Fontana. You may need the ISBN (9781626986558), publisher (Orbis Books) and pub date (5/20/26) as well as your library account info. Thank you!
Seattle Public Library book request
King County Library system
Berkeley Public Library (scroll down to “Suggestions for Our Collection”)
East Baton Rouge Parish Library
Washington, D.C. Public Library
Don’t see your library here? Google its name plus “book suggestion” or “book request” .