An Author Asked Me for Coffee.

Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

Something happened and I need to tell you about it because I have been quietly vibrating about it ever since and I think putting it into words might help me process it. Or it might just make me more excited. Either way.

Rhoda Bangerter asked me for coffee. Author to author. She reached out and said let's talk. And I want you to understand who Rhoda Bangerter is before I continue.

I

☕ WHO JUST ASKED ME FOR COFFEE

Rhoda Bangerter

Author of Holding the Fort Abroad: A Guide for Families Apart · Published 2021 · Summertime Publishing

Rhoda Bangerter is the author of Holding the Fort Abroad — a guide for families where one partner travels or lives abroad for work while the other stays home managing everything alone. It was published in 2021 and made Summertime Publishing's Top Ten that year. It has been recommended by therapists, psychologists, expat community founders, and families living exactly the experience it describes.

Her book sits in the same world mine does — the world of families navigating distance, identity, and the particular weight of holding a life together when the person you built it with is somewhere else. She also lives in Switzerland. We are, as it turns out, writing from the same geography and a very similar emotional territory.

And she asked me for coffee.

There is something about being seen by a peer (not a reader, not a follower, not someone you pitched to) but another author who read about your work and thought: I want to sit across a table from this person. That lands differently. It feels less like recognition and more like belonging. Like being let into a room you did not know you were allowed in yet.

I have been writing in a space that sometimes feels quite solitary. You put the work out, you hope it reaches people, and most of the time you are doing all of that from your desk with a lukewarm drink and no guarantee that anyone is paying attention. And then someone who has done the same thing, from the same country, in the same field, says: I see you. Let's talk.

Being asked for coffee by another author is not a small thing. It is one writer saying to another: your work is worth a conversation. I do not take that lightly.

We have not had the coffee yet. These things are calendar-dependent and life-dependent and I have learned not to count anything until it is actually happening. But the invitation exists. And the invitation, honestly, is already something.

When it happens, I will tell you all about it. What we talked about, what she is working on, what it feels like to sit across from someone whose book you have read and whose world overlaps with yours in ways that feel less like coincidence and more like the field finding its people.

Rhoda: thank you for reaching out. For seeing the work and deciding it was worth a conversation. I cannot wait for that coffee.

And if you want to find out more about her work while we wait — Holding the Fort Abroad is available on Amazon.

Excited, grateful, and already thinking about what to wear,

Jessica Gabrielzyk

✦ PARENTING UNPACKED · JUNE 24TH · TWO AUTHORS · ONE COFFEE · WATCH THIS SPACE ✦

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk is a Brazilian writer living in Switzerland. She moved there with her husband and daughter, who was three months old at the time and had strong opinions about the whole thing even then.

She writes about change.

The visible kind and the kind that happens inside a person, while everything on the outside looks fine.

Her first book, Maternity Abroad, explored what it means to become a mother far from the system you trusted. It has reached readers in more than fifteen countries across five continents. Parenting Unpacked, her second book, follows the experience of parenting through major life disruption, whether that's an international move, a career loss, a new baby, or a life that simply stops responding the way it used to. My First American Coloring Book was created to help toddlers engage with daily life in the United States through play and familiar imagery.

She is a member of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and the International Academy of Brazilian Literature.

She writes for the parent who is still inside it, getting through the day, and wondering somewhere underneath all of it who they are becoming.

When she is not writing, she is walking forty minutes uphill with a stroller, telling herself the exercise is the point.

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