Thank You for Staying with Me: Essays

Urgent, meditative, and searching, Thank You for Staying with Me is a collection of essays that navigates the complexities of home, the vulnerability of being a woman, mother-daughter relationships, and young motherhood in the conservative and religious landscape of the Ozarks. Using cosmology as a foil to discuss human issues, Bailey Gaylin Moore describes praying to the sky during moments of despondency, observing a solar eclipse while reflecting on what it means to be in the penumbra of society, and using galaxy identification to understand herself. During a collision of women’s rights, gun policy, and racial tension, Thank You for Staying with Me is a frank and intimate rumination on how national policy and social attitudes affect both the individual and the public sphere, especially in such a conservative part of the United States.

Bailey Gaylin Moore is an Ozarks-based writer who lives with her husband and son in the heart of Missouri, where she is amassing a plant collection for her cat to shamelessly destroy. She serves as the editor in chief for the online nonfiction series Past Ten, which asks contributors to consider where and who they were ten years ago. Her work has appeared in AGNI Magazine, Pleiades, Wigleaf, Willow Springs, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and other journals. Thank You for Staying with Me is her debut essay collection.