In Case You're Curious
Author's Bio
Paulette Perhach’s writing has been published in the New York Times, Vox, Elle, The Washington Post, Slate, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Marie Claire, Yoga Journal, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Hobart, and Vice. She’s the author of two million-reader viral essays.
Her book, Welcome to the Writer's Life, was published in 2018 by Sasquatch Books, part of the Penguin Random House publishing family, and was selected as one of Poets & Writers' Best Books for Writers.
She blogs about a writer’s craft, business, personal finance, and joy at welcometothewriterslife.com and leads meditation and writing sessions through A Very Important Meeting.
She serves writers as a coach, helping them figure out how to make a life and career out of being a writer while making the money work (as she figures it all out herself.) She's also a speaker on the topics of creativity, writing, and business.
Hugo House, a nationally recognized writing center in Seattle, awarded her the Made at Hugo House fellowship in 2013. In 2016, she was nominated for the BlogHer Voices of the Year award for her essay, “A Story of a Fuck Off Fund,” which is anthologized in The Future is Feminist from Chronicle Books, along with work by Roxane Gay, Mindy Kaling, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Caitlin Moran, and Audre Lorde.
In 2021, she was selected as a Jack Straw Fellow. In 2022 she celebrated a nomination from Barrelhouse for Best of the Net. Her work has been included in round-ups from Memoir Monday, the Aspen Institute, Fortune’s Broadsheet, and Girlboss.
She shared the honor of a 2021 Washington State Book Award for the anthology Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of Covid-19 as a contributor.
After a decade in Seattle, she moved across the street from her best friend back in Florida.
Failures, Humiliations, and Rejections
Paulette Perhach’s writing has been rejected from some of the nation’s finest publications. The Sun, Camera Obscura, Mason's Road, Brevity, Pank, Monkey Bicycle, The Monarch Review, Post Road, Bitch, ZYZZYVA, Ploughshares, Witness, A Public Space, The Cincinnati Review, The Rumpus, Phoebe, The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, Boston Review, Baltimore Review, Kyoto Journal, Puerto del Sol, Third Coast, and Lenny are just a few of the places where you may have noticed her work was not there. Of her writing, Tin House says, “Unfortunately, we must pass at this time.”
Her rigorous study at the University of Florida (Princeton’s Review’s #1 Party School in the nation, 2008), included courses on Drug and Alcohol Abuse (real class), Geology (commonly called "Rocks for Jocks"), and Racquetball (twice).
She did not receive her MFA from Iowa, Columbia, or from Syracuse, even though George Saunders teaches there, and he's so nice, and two, (two!), of her friends have gotten into his five-student cohorts. She is totally ok about it though.
She was not the winner of the ASME internship in New York. She was not selected for the Editorial Assistant job at Coastal Living. She did not get the internship at This American Life, although she later paid to meet Ira Glass, like a creep.
She’s proud to say she has only dropped a laptop in a bathtub once.
She has overstepped her welcome while chatting with Roxane Gay, knocked over a tea tray during a talk by Nancy Pearl, and told George Saunders she loved him while passing him in a plane.
She thought the Pulitzer Prize was the Pullit Surprise until she was like 17. At age 28, she attended an 8-month writing residency in her mom’s downstairs bedroom.
She is from Florida.
Friends such as photographer Daron Dean have described her pieces thusly: “It got long, but then it ended.”
Dream Obit
Paulette Perhach, age 100, died as she lived — attempting to open a ketchup packet with her teeth while going 85 mph on I-95.
Known as the Beyoncé of the Writing World, Perhach was the author of at least two New York Times-bestselling novels, which it would be so cool if Tin House had published. She also wrote three books on writing — covering the life, the business, and the spiritual path of writers.
Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Granta, and all the other cool places, and the Best American Writing About Feelings. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for outstanding achievement in the listicle.
Perhach co-founded Art Church, a weekly spiritual gathering for artists. She hosted an annual writer’s retreat that moved locations each year, bringing writers to Brazil, Patagonia, Banff, and Colombia.
The pieces of her body will be battered and deep-fried and fed to sea creatures off the coast of Florida.
She is survived by her many nieces and nephews of siblings and friends, as well as her best friend Ira Glass.