The fourteen essays collected in "Virginia’s Apple" explore pivotal episodes across poet and writer Judith Barrington’s life. Artfully crafted, each one stands alone, yet all are linked: Characters reappear; taken together, the pieces create a larger narrative. These stories are laced with humor and joy, and pulsing below the surface is the slow unfolding of delayed grief over her parents’ drowning when she was nineteen, revealing how such a loss can shape a life.