Kathryn Schulz did not want to write a book about grief. Though she had penned an article about her father’s death for The New Yorker in 2017, she did not care to spend the many months it would take to write a memoir about the depth of her loss in that bleak landscape, the topography of grief.

But when it became clear to her, she said, that there was “a mirror-image story” she could tell – a parallel story of finding love – she felt captured by the concept.

Thus was born her memoir, Lost & Found, an exploration of loss in its many manifestations – from losing one’s phone, to losing an airplane, to losing a loved one – paired with her fairy tale-like story of meeting the woman she would ultimately marry, an equally compelling meditation on love, relationships and the wonder of finding one’s soulmate. It’s a book about the immense complexity of life, at once both beautiful and hard, both delightful and devastating – experiences conjoined, as she puts it, by the word “and.”

Schulz will read from her newly published memoir on Tuesday, May 3, at Open Space for Art & Community. Chip Giller, a Vashon resident and founder of the environmental news organization Grist, will join her on stage, asking her questions and inviting the audience to join in.

“My hope is that it will be a conversation,” Schulz said.

Schulz, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has a foothold in our region. She used to live in Oregon, was the editor of Seattle-based Grist and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for her article, “The Really Big One,” a look at the Northwest’s ill-preparedness for the massive earthquake that will someday rock the region.

Over the years, she has established herself as a wide-ranging, meticulous and prolific journalist, writing pieces in The New Yorker challenging society’s canonization of Thoreau and exploring the keen navigational ability of animals (and how humans are despoiling their destinations). Her most recent article – “‘Bambi’ Is Even Bleaker than You Thought” – is a deep dive into the dark and provocative book that gave rise to Hollywood’s most famous deer.

Schulz’s memoir is equally wide-ranging. Her section on loss examines her father’s large and expansive life, the history of his family’s wrenching escape from Nazi Germany (“losses of a different kind,” she writes), her utter adoration of him and the depth of her pain upon his death – a despair that left her feeling exhausted, useless and darkly aware of her own mortality.

She weaves into this personal history the impact of other kinds of loss, from the mundane – losing one’s keys – to the profound – losing one’s mind. She brings in literature, such as L. Frank Baum’s Dot and Tot of Merryland, where the children discover the “Valley of Lost Things,” as well as actuarial tables – the number of things we lose in the course of a day, a year, a lifetime, and the collective hours we spend searching for our lost things (about six solid months across one’s lifespan, she says).

And then there’s the “finding” section of the book – another romp through the deeply personal (finding her love), as well as the cerebral – the complex science, for instance, of search and rescue. She touches upon serendipitous finds, intentional finds, questionable pursuits of the

unattainable and, of course, the joy of discovery – again, weaving into this multi-faceted exploration philosophy, literature, poetry and her own often profound observations.

Mostly, though, she writes in the “finding” section about her courtship with and ultimate marriage to C., as she calls her partner, a brainy, literary Lutheran – at once both very different from her and very similar. The book is in large part a love story.

Throughout it all are wonderful turns of phrase, similes and metaphors, Schulz’s astonishing gift with words: “the king tide of grief,” “less noise than the moon when it sets” or this particularly rich sentence about her father’s absence on her wedding day: “As for my father, his loss was palpable to me throughout, but only in the way the moon is sometimes visible by day: faint and strangely beautiful, there because it is always there.”

How does one write a book like this, at once so personal and heartfelt, so expansive and erudite? “The short answer is that I read a lot,” Schulz said during an interview.

Some of that research was a return to books and poetry she already knew and loved. Grief literature, she added, was easy to come by. The “finding” section was a little more challenging, but there, too, she found research material, like “a 300-page book on the history of mathematical strategies for discovering missing American submarines” or books by cosmologists about the asteroid belt. “It was a strange and diverse set of reading,” she said.

The book really “clicked into place,” she added, during a conversation with C., who, in reflecting back to Schulz some of her musings, suggested the concept of “lost & found.” It was then that Schulz realized that the word “&” was critical to the book’s framework: A final chapter explores the meaning of the ampersand, its historic role in the alphabet and the duality it represents.

“That was immediately interesting,” Schulz recalled. “The moment she said it, this idea went from being a diptych to being a triptych and, more importantly, to becoming a book I wanted to write.”

As a writer, she struggles with structure and was thankful when this three-part structure fell into place. As for the poetry of the book, the beautiful turns of phrase, that comes naturally to Schulz: “Once the job is just to write sentences, I could do it all day – it’s so fun.”

Her best editor was, not surprisingly, C., also a writer. “That was a real joyful part of this,” she said. “I’d write by day and take the laptop up to bed at night and read to her what I’d done that day, like a little bedtime story.”

Schulz speaks like she writes – in long, rich, precise sentences, but with a warmth and kindness that suggests her desire to connect with others, with our shared humanity. And thus, at the end of our 45-minute interview, I shyly offered up my own story of love and loss – the fact that my mother fought a battle with cancer for two long years, dying one month before my son was born, some 27 years ago.

Schulz embraced my story instantly. “What an experience of ‘and,’” she said kindly. Expect other such stories at her reading on May 3 – stories about what makes life worth living, the messy beauty of it all.

Kathryn Schulz will read from her new book at the Open Space for Arts & Community at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 3. Tickets are $10; they’re available at www.openspacevashon.com.