Fifteen years ago, I hit save on the inaugural post of “The Goddess of Gumbo,” a blog I created as the dark winds of the Great Recession began to blow from Wall Street to the narrow lanes of the Southern college town I then called home.

It was a bleak period professionally and I felt much to blame for that. I had quit a good-paying job to finish and defend a dissertation in American literature. I was following a dream, if you will, but—in a critical mistake—missed my “drop-dead complete” deadline, at a cost of six consequential months.

Because instead of entering the winter 2008 sweepstakes for academic jobs in my field, I found myself polishing personal statements for the fall… which meant that if you went looking for me on the day Lehman Bros. fell—Sept. 15, 2008—you’d’ve seen me perched on my favorite barstool watching the bottom fall out of my world as stocks plunged, rose, and plunged again. Within days, every academic job on the MLA list would disappear, one by one, as the extent of the global economic damage became clear…

The winter of 2009 was bleak indeed. I had been trained up by my elite education and my parents’ aspirations to play a certain part: city girl with a nondescript accent and an elite education dressed for success and doing “important work.” But here I was jobless, saddled with a mortgage, without immediate prospects absent a move I could not at that moment afford, unclear whether there was enough money for cat food much less my next meal.

As one does in such times, I retreated to my roots: roots that felt more country girl in cowboy boots with a “red clay halo for my head” than not. And so I began to root in the soil—coincidentally falling in love with a man of the soil—and to write about it.

The adventures of the Goddess of Gumbo came to an apparent end in 2014, when my mother’s death and a new job dragged me all unwilling back to the land of of cotton. My dreams, in other words, met harsh and unforgiving reality, and I fell silent.

But then I finished and published the book that had been my lifelong obsession–and it turns out that there’s much more to say and a whole new stage of life from which to say it.

And so we begin anew…