Ravelings: Essays on Love, Loss, and Wonder

by Lisa Knopp

In Ravelings, Lisa Knopp takes up an older, opposing meaning of the verb “ravel”—“to entangle”—as she explores the deaths and departures of loved ones and the rituals by which we mourn and honor them, while contemplating her relationships with writing, spirituality, sense of home, aging, desire, and the relationship between body and mind. Entangled in these losses and changes, Knopp experiences wonder, joy, connectivity, and wholeness.In these nimble and companionable essays, Knopp considers hunger and fullness through ethical, disordered, and mindful eating; awakens to common magic through two chance encounters with a magician; and finds humility and empowerment as an unpartnered sixty-year-old woman in a ballroom dance class filled with young couples. Knopp comprehends her experiences with nuance, revealing time and again that the same ravel of text can encompass the blending in a single moment of the exotic and mundane, of fullness and want, of love and abhorrence, of desire and contentment, of freedom and bondage, of severance and connection, and of the creative act as both an evocation and an imposition.
 

210 pages, Paperback

Expected publication March 1, 2026

About the author

Lisa Knopp is the author of six books of creative nonfiction.

Her most recent, Bread: A Memoir of Hunger (University of Missouri Press 2016), explores eating disorders and disordered eating as the result of a complex tangle of genetic, biological, familial, psychology, spiritual, and cultural forces through research and personal story. What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte (University of Missouri Press) won the Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction in 2013 and was tied for second place in the 2013 ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) book awards.

Lisa’s essays have appeared in numerous literary publications including Missouri Review, Michigan Review, Iowa Review, Seneca Review, Gettysburg Review, Northwest Review, Cream City Review, Brevity, Connecticut Review, Shenandoah, Creative Nonfiction, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, and Georgia Review. Currently, she's working on a collection of essays called Like Salt or Love: Essays on Leaving home.

Lisa is a Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, where she teaches courses in creative nonfiction. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Please visit her website: http://www.lisaknopp.com/

Reviews

[Candy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Playing with the idea of "contranyms" - words with two conflicting meanings - Knopp's insightful essays blend joy and grief, pain and awakenings.

[Katherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very insightful collection of essays, at times it was a bit winded but overall, great read, great progression and the emotions and vividness of the different moments of life just fly off the pages.