Taking a leap with Anna Rollins

After decades of hoarding vulnerable stories, this writer now has a book deal

This is the fourth installment of Not Til Now, a series that features never-before-told stories or first-time feats from artists, innovators, or anyone taking creative risks.

---

Do you ever have those moments where you want to throw your phone into a lake, hop into a time machine, and go back to 1998? I sure do. Sometimes, I wonder if social media is ruining our lives.

Other times, I’m grateful for it. When I use it with intention, vulnerability, and courage, oh, I am here for it.

Without Facebook and Instagram…

• I wouldn’t have made many of the dear friends I have today.

• Some of my biggest life experiences — living in Germany for two years, navigating international adoption, leading various entrepreneurial endeavors — would’ve looked completely different.

• ALL of my smallest life experiences wouldn’t be chronicled on the internet. (Lookin’ at you, 2,000 Insta-Stories of caterpillars, flowers, and JeeWoo’s one-liners!)

In short, these platforms have connected me to some of the most insightful, resourceful, and inspiring humans around the world.

One of those people is

Anna Rollins

.

This sweet mama lives in West Virginia with her husband and three children.

When she’s not wearing her Director hat at the Writing Center at Marshall University, she’s changing diapers, taking daily walks, Marco Polo-ing with me, waiting for developmental edits on her forthcoming (and first!) memoir, or pitching her next story. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Shondaland, NBCNews, HuffPost, Newsweek and more.

If I were to map out the full timeline of how she and I shook digital hands, it would be like that time I watched a worm wiggle its whole body back into the soil:

I’d be wide-eyed with wonder.
You’d be in a deep slumber.
We’d be here forever.

But let me put it this way:

Had I not set out to write a book,
And read a heart-wrenching article that I quoted in my book,
And followed the author of said article on Instagram,
I wouldn’t have caught another piece in which she quoted Anna in.
I wouldn’t have discovered Anna’s work.

And had I not read Anna’s piece on playing piano badly,
And felt like I was reading my own story,
I wouldn’t have reached out to her.
I wouldn’t have made such a wonderful friend.

To some, this chronological list of events is simply a stack of coincidences.
To me, it proves that everything is connected. Everything.

It also shows what happens when one decides to try…to share…to ask…to LEAP.

And as you’ll see in the following Q&A, that’s exactly what Anna has been doing in oh, so many ways. So, are you ready to be inspired? Are you ready to be moved?

3…
2…
1…

JUMP!

Via vvvian.blogspot.com

Brit: Your first book will be coming out next year. (Congrats!) Are there things about your writing journey that no one knows about yet? 

Anna: The subject matter — disordered eating — is something I wrote about privately for, easily, several decades, and I never had the guts to share my writing. In fact, I wrote an entire draft of my book without ever having published an essay on the topic.

Once I started querying, I had agents and consultants tell me — you really need to publish some standalone essays on this. But I was terrified. I had so much to say, but I was scared of making myself publicly vulnerable. 

I eventually decided that what I had to write about was too important to keep to myself — so I began pitching essays on the topic in 2022. I have since published nearly 50 standalone essays, many of which talk about diet culture or body image.

Making myself vulnerable in this way was a huge leap.

And if I hadn’t had the guts to put myself out there, I feel confident I would have never gotten a book deal. 

OK. Wait a minute. FIFTY ESSAYS?!?! Where did you find the time to write on top of teaching, momming, and all the things?

You know, I have no clue. When I read that, I also think it sounds extreme. But I found myself writing in small cracks of time. I would sometimes dictate paragraphs to my Notes app while driving or walking the dogs. I came up with headlines in the shower. When students didn’t show up for office hours, that gave me time to revise. 

I also unapologetically hire help, which is something that is absolutely rooted in privilege but also something I appreciate when others acknowledge. It wasn’t like I wrote and then did all the things.

I wrote, and I paid for childcare. I wrote, and I ordered my groceries a ton. I wrote, and now I have someone who comes to clean my house twice a month. That sort of thing. I justified it because many of these essay outlets paid me, so the math worked out.

And I would often find myself thinking: do I want to spend the next two hours at Kroger shopping for food, or do I want to write an essay for Slate? And I chose the essay. 

What ultimately moved you to start sharing your story?

I realized that if I never wrote about this topic, I would never write about anything at all. For years, when I would sit down to write about anything — God, parenting, nature, marriage, you name it — my narrative almost always came back to the feelings I had about food and the body. I couldn’t move past it. And for a number of years — maybe 5 years after I received my creative writing degree — I just thought, okay, well, this just means you can’t write about anything at all then. 

But at the beginning of the pandemic, everything about the world felt so uncertain, and I personally felt so isolated. I wanted to write. And one day, in the kitchen, I just gave myself permission.

I think I honestly believed the world would never go back to normal, and I thought I may never see other people again. So I told myself, you’re going to write this story. You’re going to write it as intensely as you want. And then it’s going to be out of you so you can write something else. 

And that’s exactly what I did. 

How did you land your first essay? 

I’d published a few essays in small literary journals, and I had experience publishing academic work related to writing center studies — but it took me almost a year to figure out how to break into the popular market.

There were so many moving parts — editors’ names and hidden email addresses and what did they want and how in the world do I write a pitch? So, I had to really study all that stuff. I joined a few private writing groups on Facebook where women would share intel about their publishing experiences, and I just studied those groups.

I studied where the responsive editors were, what they liked, how long the essays were that they published, etc. And then, finally, I pitched a timely New Year’s essay about my resolution to exercise less to Emily McCombs at HuffPost. And she said yes several days later. I was beside myself. 

Has anyone reached out to you to thank you, confess something, or basically share something that made opening up SO worth it?

I’d say that almost every time I publish a vulnerable piece, people respond (privately) with vulnerability. I’m not writing about anything unique to me. In fact, I think that’s what gives me the courage to write about this subject matter: it’s something most people don’t feel like they can talk about, but it’s something that also affects most (all?) people. 

Tell us more about how the book deal came about. How did you decide who to pitch to? Who ultimately gave the green light? 

I queried for almost two years (nearly 100 agents), and eventually, right around the time I was thinking about trying for another baby, I thought, maybe this just isn’t meant to be. Maybe I just need to move on. And that exact day (don’t you hate stories like this?), I got a DM from my now-agent.

She and I had connected during an interview I’d conducted for my book, and she’d started following my work. She basically requested my book proposal, and I signed with her shortly after that.

I’m really abbreviating this story, but you can read more about it on my Substack. We went on submission that summer, and the book sold about two months later. 

Here's how I connected with my agent

You’ve had a lot of “firsts” lately. Any other not-til-now moments you’d like to share?

Well, I’m expecting my “first” daughter any day now.

I’ve spent my entire pregnancy working on this book about diet culture, purity culture, and the way we surveil women’s bodies. Sometimes it makes me want to cry thinking about it — how what I’m working on so hard is, in many ways, in hopes of changing the world for her.

I’ve thought a lot about the environment I want to raise her in. I have two sons, and I am already very mindful of the way I speak about food and bodies, but I certainly worry less about how they are being affected by, say, the conversations that are happening at church or school.

I won’t feel that way about her, though. And so I’m grappling with a lot of those questions at the moment. Of course, before we get there, I just need to get us through labor and delivery. So, that’s top of mind.

UPDATE! Eight days after typing that, Anna gave birth to her beautiful baby girl on Groundhog Day. She and her family have been doing so well.

Is there more writing you haven’t shared? If yes, why?

Yes. Absolutely. I have another big story that I think could one day be a book — but that story intersects with another person’s story who I love deeply. It’s not just my story to tell, even though I’ve felt some compulsion to tell it.

I’ve spoken to coaches about this, and at this point, if I were to tell this narrative, I think I’d need to co-write it with this other person. Or perhaps fictionalize portions of it (I don’t know how to write fiction, though! Believe me, I’ve tried). Or somehow distance myself from the narrative. 

I spend a lot of time thinking about boundaries in writing: how much vulnerability is good writing and how much we need to protect certain parts of ourselves.

Famished, my memoir coming out next year, is a vulnerable book. It’s my story. But it’s also a story I feel I have some distance and perspective on, and it’s one I feel strong enough to tell. This one isn’t yet.

---

Aaaaaahhhh! Do you have goosebumps? Did you love this interview as much as I did?

Wherever you are in your journey through life, I hope this gave you just the perspective you needed on when to move, when to wait, and WHY we need each other’s stories.

I hope it showed you the power of patience, vulnerability, and full-circle magic.

Most of all, I hope it gave you courage to put a little bit more of YOU out there.

Throw those seeds into the wind, baby! You never know who you’ll impact, meet, or become great pals with.

To keep up with Anna:

• Check out her website.

• Follow her on Instagram.

• Subscribe to her Substack.

---

Before you go, I have one more Not Til Now-ish thing for you. I was recently a guest on the Soulful IVF podcast with Lisa White.

Not only was I the first person to tell an adoption story on her podcast, but this was the first time I told a lot of my story in the “open.”

As I was listening back to it, I was lying on the floor — oscillating between the fetal position and burying my face in the carpet — and wondering if I’d shared too much. It took a lot to talk about what I did. But I’m glad I did.

So, here’s me throwing another seed into that ever-mysterious yet always-purposeful wind:

Listen on Spotify | Listen on iTunes | Watch on YouTube

Until next time,