The First 649 Days

Eric LeMay is a multimedia artist and writer currently in remission from cancer. He is on the faculty at Ohio University, where he directs the creative writing program. He is also a host on the New Books Network. He is the author of five books, and his work has appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry Daily, the Best Food Writing series, and other venues.

"Eric LeMay's The First 649 Days is a work of breathtaking honesty and heart. LeMay captures life's singular moments-the birth of a child, unexpected illness, mortality-exquisitely, revealing the precarious beauty of our world through the eyes of his young son Ro. LeMay's inventive renderings are a brilliant reminder that our lives may harbor threat, disappointment, and grief, yet still shimmer with hope and wild beauty at every turn."-Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire "How to describe a book as so profoundly human as The First 649 Days? LeMay's archive of parenthood during a global pandemic reckons with many of life's heavier subjects-illness and mortality, anxiety about the future, the ever-present threat of gun violence-woven into the fabric of the small moments that, taken together, comprise the whole of our lives: bringing a newborn baby home, long walks in the Appalachian wilds, conversations over spoonfuls of sherbet. The essays in The First 649 Days are a celebration of love and its resilience in the face of unthinkable circumstances and a resonant contemporary record of our time." -Zoe Bossiere, author of Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir "The First 649 Days is worth its weight in gold, mined responsibly from the veins of Eric LeMay's heart. In its shine you may find yours. Perhaps you'll meet the parent you want to be or give voice to your silenced inner Hamlet. You may awaken with him at Fox Lake to the body's vulnerability or warm with gratitude for those nurses who can gentle terror. Certainly, this private reckoning invites communion, as the birds commune over feasts of seeds he presents as poetry on paper altars. How do you want to be remembered? we ask alongside him and, for his considerations, answer wiser."-Amy Wright, author of Paper Concert: A Conversation in the Round