Ann Alejandro knew her own mind. She knew what mattered to her, and she lived her too-short life cultivating a deep connection to those things. In the gorgeous posthumous collection of her work, I Know About a Thousand Things, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye and Marion Winik, Alejandro’s dynamic voice is clear. She offers advice: “It is very important to skip school / to go to the river,” and astute self-analysis: “I must not atrophy, must always strive, must test myself, must never become soft . . .” She observes the world around her with clarity and reverence: “A hill never reinvents itself. The rocks just fall and the floods just come and the sun just bears down hard.” Alejandro wrote voluminously, but due to chronic illness, much of her work was in the form of letters, and she didn’t publish much in her lifetime. Nye and Winik promised her that they would work to change that – and indeed they have. (Winik wrote about this three-way friendship here.) The book’s reception has been enthusiastic. On their Texas tour, the book sold out at nearly every event. The outpouring of love and admiration for Alejandro was evident in the crowds who came to hear her work, some of them personally connected to her. Her high school history teacher read from a paper that young Alejandro had written; she had kept it all these years and driven over 350 miles from Dallas to Uvalde all by herself. But Texans aren’t the only ones who will appreciate Alejandro’s words. About two-thirds into the book when she declares, “I am in love with a thousand things,” readers will already sense this. Most will be starting to feel the same way, to feel a sense of love and abundance and awe. Through her writing, Alejandro models a way of being in the world that acknowledges and accepts the existence of loss and pain but chooses to seek out what is breathtaking and magical. Baltimore Fishbowl spoke to Nye and Winik about this project in advance of Nye’s visit to Baltimore for events in the area.Naomi Shihab Nye and Marion Winik, friends of the late Ann Alejandro, have edited a new collection of Alejandro’s writings, titled “I Know About A Thousand Things.”Baltimore Fishbowl: In the introduction, you describe Ann as “the best Texas writer almost no one has heard of.” What makes her so good?Naomi Shihab Nye: I’ve been reading Ann’s work for so long, and I’ve realized that her writing always startled my brain into some new moment of thinking or connection, some new way of saying, some new focus on a detail. She woke me up, you know? She had a voice that always woke me up, and I think people may be responding to that. She wasn’t trying to follow anyone else’s style. She was just her own style, entirely.The other night a man came up to me at this theater event, and he had picked up the book and started reading it. He didn’t know Ann, didn’t know me, didn’t know Marion, but he said he was overcome with a sense of presence and precious attention in all the things that that Ann wrote about. Marion Winik: I think it makes a difference that most of the stuff in the book was not written for publication. Just about everything in here, except for a few things that are identified otherwise, is pulled out of a letter that she wrote, so the writing has the vibrancy of interpersonal communication and shows Ann’s big personality. She was somewhat curmudgeonly in her humor, forthright in her letters in a way she might not have been in essays or stories or poems.BFB:  You selected the work from a vast collection of letters and emails – literally thousands of pages. How did you decide what to include and how to organize it? MW: Two years ago, Naomi and I were in Pittsburgh together teaching. By this time, we had started to go through the letters and pull excerpts. I had a strong idea that we would sort it out into topic areas and try to use short sections, and that day we sat in the hotel lobby and came up with the sections. That day we wrote all the little introductions to the chapters where we make comments on her relationship to the different topics. The process was very organic. Naomi was so good at having the patience to plow through the full text, while I was the one who would take whatever she had pulled out and then sharpen it and sort it into a category. NSN: I was the harvester, and you were the cutter. I brought you huge baskets into the fields of these pages, and you came along with your machete and said, “No, just this line.”BFB: What were some of the criteria you used in your culling?MW: We tried to be respectful in putting together this posthumous portrait of Ann. We navigated around the more difficult parts of her personality. For one thing, she really did suffer with this horrible chronic illness and pain for 25 years, and there was way more about that than anyone would have wanted to read; we had to do just enough to get an idea of what she went through without making her seem like a victim. Also, in these letters she had things to say about her relatives and other people that we had to be careful about including. NSN: We were careful editors with all that, because we cared about the relationships in her life. And we didn’t want to hurt people’s feelings. That wasn’t the point of the book.BFB: How did you find a publisher? Did you already have one lined up when you began the project? NSN: I had a relationship with Steve Davis, who has just retired as the literary curator at the Wittliff Center, which is a great archive of papers at Texas State University where I’m on faculty. He had also published some of his own books through Texas A&M, so I made a lunch date with Marion and Steve and me. He loved this manuscript, and he communicated personally on its behalf with the publisher, whom I didn’t know personally, and he gave money to the project from the Wittliff series; they have an initiative where they help publish books they believe in. This was very special because the book ended up being sponsored and supported by two Texas state universities, which would have made Ann very happy.MW: This was an amazing connection because it could be hard to explain why we should read the letters of this Texas writer nobody ever heard of. But Steve really got it and really trusted Naomi. He basically wrote this letter explaining the project and sent it to Tom Lemons at Texas A&M, and Tom really got it, too.BFB: Why would someone in Baltimore want to read this book?MW: For one thing, most people have only heard of Uvalde as a Columbine-type place, but we’re giving people some other thoughts about Uvalde. I hope that it broadens people’s thinking about places where tragic things happen.NSN: Yes! Uvalde is somewhere art is made! I always feel so sad for the individuals who have suffered through a darkening of the reputation of their place, whether a whole community or specific school. This book is a service to that effort, too—to remember. Don’t stereotype. It feels like a little jewel to me when people talk about the book, and they come back to us with comments. Even Ann’s husband has said it’s given her back to him.MW: I also think that people feel personally inspired by the idea of writing letters and observing your own life with the kind of intensity that Ann observed hers. People feel such a beating human heart in the book. It’s a real connection to another person, and everybody who reads it starts to feel like Ann was their best friend.NSN: Yes! They start weeping and getting emotional. I had been invited to do a podcast by a guy who lives in College Station where this book was published. He wanted me to talk about my own work, and I said I thought it would be more interesting to talk about this book, but he wasn’t interested at all. When we did our zoom, though, he had picked up Ann’s book after all and read it within 24 hours, and he wrote me this email where he was just going crazy about it, like, “This is the best thing I’ve ever read.” He said, “I just feel like my brain has been a blur and depressed, and all this horrible stuff happening everywhere. But this book kicked me back into focus.” MW: I really think it has to do with the fact that people have zero expectations for this book. It’s not like picking up the new Ann Patchett or the new Jonathan Franzen. They just have no idea what to expect, so they approach it with great openness and then are surprised by the whole thing.  It’s so great that we were allowed to include the color snapshot section, because I think that makes it even more like it’s a person inside. It looks like a skinny little book, but actually it’s a person.***Baltimore Events Friday January 31 6 pm – 7 pm, Bird in Hand Café & Bookstore, Reading and conversation with Emma SnyderSaturday February 111:30 am – 1:30 pm, Gilman Hall 132, JHU Homewood Campus Seminar and Conversation on Collaboration, Creative Citizenship, and the Collective Lyric “I”: Naomi and Marion join Dora Malech (editor in chief, The Hopkins Review) Jennifer Stager &Leila Easa (guest editors of Locating a Collective Lyric “I”: A Special Folio for The Hopkins Review); Sasha-Mae Eccleston, Pia Hargrove, Bethany Dixon, Michele Carlson, Steven Leyva & Jennifer Keohane, Ella Gonzalez, and Allesandra Amin.