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“Writing personal essays is a way of finding out what I really believe about my life and relationships and of coming to terms with that discovery,” shares Hudson Valley-based author Roselee Blooston of her upcoming book, Including the Periphery. 

Roselee has a storied history as a professional actress and playwright. She holds an MFA in drama from Trinity University at the Dallas Theater Center in San Antonio, TX, and a BA in drama from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. Throughout her career, she has taught acting, voice and speech, and dramatic writing on faculties of many prestigious colleges and universities across the country. 

While writing was always a part of her life, she only began writing in earnest whilst working as an aspiring actress. Her creativity led her to write and perform four original one-person plays in New York City, across the country, and overseas. Much later, after she left the theater behind, Roselee wrote for magazines and even started a non-profit organization for writers called Tunnel Vision Writers’ Project, which operated from 1998 to 2005 and specialized in original interdisciplinary collaborations with composers, visual artists, and dancers.

While running multi-genre support groups for that organization, Roselee began dabbling in fiction. When the first short stories she wrote got published, her commitment to a life of writing began in earnest. Since then, she has written a novel, Trial by Family; two memoirs, Dying in Dubai and Almost: My Life in the Theater; and a story collection, The Chocolate Jar and Other Stories. 

Including the Periphery, a collection of personal essays, is Roselee’s fifth book. “Writing is my way of being in the world, and will continue to shape and reflect my life,” she shares. 

The vulnerability of sharing your life’s story

Including the Periphery is a collection of essays that spans Roselee’s life from her adolescence to later adulthood. While some of the essays were written a while ago, many of them were written more recently. 

“My perspective on the incident cited in ‘Puberty,’ the first essay in the collection, has changed over the years, but I wasn’t ready to write about it until recently,” she shares. “Clarity can be elusive and coming of age looks much different decades later. I’m glad that I waited, because now I see that facing that early setback gave me a lifelong habit of resilience. The arc, if you will, of the collection traces a dialogue between past and present with many such insights.” 

Including the Periphery is not Roselee’s first time writing about her life; her first memoir, Dying in Dubai(2016), tells of her marriage and the first year following her husband’s sudden death, while her second memoir, Almost: My Life in Theater (2019), covers her ambition to be an actress, her failures, and the drive to create that continues to present day. 

Although writing her memoirs was an incredibly vulnerable process, Roselee was gratified to find that many of her readers identified with the challenges that she faced personally and professionally. “I’m in my seventies and felt that now was the time to address the aftermath of those books, especially Dying in Dubai,” she explains. “I consider Including the Periphery an informal companion piece to that memoir. ‘Hudson Valley Happiness’ is the final essay; its title gives you a sense of how far I’ve come.” 

A handful of the fourteen essays in Including the Periphery were written years ago, and some had even been previously published. When Roselee decided to put together a collection, she wanted the pieces to stand alone, but also be compatible as a whole if read in order. Given the collection’s overarching themes of change, renewal, and perspective, there were essays that did not find their way into the collection because they didn’t fit the bill. 

“I write about my life only when I really need to do so – when something won’t leave me alone, either a subject that’s been bothering me or that I want to celebrate,” she says. “Memoirs are long form works. Personal essays are not. That was the biggest change. I focused each stand-alone essay around a theme or subject, rather than pushing one story from beginning to end.” 

More than anything, Roselee hopes that readers of every generation will reflect on the ways that time, evolving priorities, and self-awareness have impacted their own lives. “I hope they will include the periphery of their personal histories, allowing the past to inform the present without overwhelming it, as I have attempted to do in these pages.” •

For more information about Roselee Blooston, her work, and her upcoming events, visit her website roseleeblooston.com. Her books are available wherever books are sold.