A reading and conversation with Brenda Miller. Hosted by Rick Chess.

A luminous collection of essays and poems about family, faith, and the art of saying goodbye from award-winning essayist, poet, and teacher Brenda Miller.

In Love You, Bye, Brenda Miller maps the territory of caregiving, loss, and unexpected grace. The title—drawn from the simple phrase she and her mother said to each other for years—captures the bittersweet essence of a book that finds profound meaning in the ordinary expressions of love.

At the center of this collection lies the story of Miller's journey as the "wayward daughter" who becomes the devoted caregiver to her aging parents, chronicling her father's gradual decline and her mother's final months with remarkable vulnerability. From the rituals of Passover to the silence of hospice rooms, from the mysterious appearances of tree frogs to the sacred work of singing at deathbeds, Miller weaves together the ordinary and the transcendent, often finding that the sacred is embedded in the mundane.

Miller's voice moves seamlessly between prose and poetry, between humor and heartbreak, between the personal and the universal. She transforms the simple act of saying goodbye into an art form and the everyday language of love into something approaching prayer. 

Love You, Bye is essential reading for anyone navigating the complexities of aging

parents, the mysteries of faith, or the simple courage required to keep loving in a world that can break our hearts.

Robin Hemley, author of How to Change History: A Salvage Project, says about Love You, Bye, “Approach this book not as your typical collection of essays and poems, but as a jar of bright beads, cohesively combined yet individually shimmering as they catch the tender reflected light of their subjects: Miller’s aging parents foremost, as well as Miller’s own many stored selves from childhood to early old age. Long admired as an essayist of stunning invention and sensitivity, Miller had me nearly in tears from the outset and wouldn’t let me catch my shaky breath until the very last.” 

Love You, Bye is just out from Skinner House Books (April 2026). Brenda Miller is the author of six additional essay collections, including A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form, and An Earlier Life, winner of the Washington State Book Award for Memoir. Her work has received seven Pushcart Prizes. She co-authored, with Holly J. Hughes, The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, and, with Suzanne Paola, Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, now in its third edition. She coined the term “Hermit Crab Essay.” Her website is www.brendamillerwriter.com.

Brenda Miller is the author of six essay collections, including A Braided Heart: Essays on

Writing and Form, Listening Against the Stone, and An Earlier Life, which received the

Washington State Book Award for Memoir. Her work has received seven Pushcart Prizes. She co-authored, with Suzanne Paola, the textbook Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction and co-wrote, with Holly J. Hughes, The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. She is Professor Emerita of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.

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