First Sentence Fridays: Kate Washington’s Midstream

“First Sentence Fridays” is a new series at Avidly, highlighting the prose and process of new books.

Avidly: What’s the first sentence of your book? No cheating!

Kate Washington: “Anchorless, my body floated free, jolted by cold as the surf tossed me back and forth.”

What’s something  you remember about writing this sentence? Where were you? When in the book writing did you write it?

I worked really hard to get to this sentence, and as I recall it was the very last one I wrote in the entire book! I just checked my old drafts, and the very day before I turned in final revisions, a totally different sentence came first. (That one is now the second sentence.) I wrote it at my dining room table on a hot August day, trying to recapture the feeling of being in cold water.

Now that it’s all written and done, what occurs to you about how your first sentence connects to the book as a whole? In the ideas, style, experience?

I was very deliberate about how this sentence connects to the book’s themes. Midstream is all about the experience of being in water and how it changed me. The narrative covers my project of swimming or dunking in 50 natural bodies of water leading up to my 50^th birthday. In early drafts I started with a declarative, second-person description of the project, but it felt distanced and (literally) dry.

I realized I had to start in water, so the reader felt they were there too. I also wanted a sense of disorientation, that I was untethered and unsure of my ground. That’s why I started with “anchorless” and moving with the waves. Opening with an image of not quite knowing who or where I am also deliberately bookends my last sentence. No spoilers, but at the end I’ve just taken my last swim and I’m headed home—the last word of the book, meant to convey that I’ve come home to myself.

Tell us one or two very specific details about how you like to write: home/office/café; soundtrack or silence; favorite mug; favorite hoodie; preferred mode of pencil/pen/notebook/font/software?

I write on my laptop and I almost always have music on. I always have ice water in a big insulated metal tumbler. It has a California sticker on it, and on my laptop there’s a sticker of a quail (our state bird, also featured in my one and only tattoo).

Okay we are gonna need more specific intel about your music. What kind?

I am all over the place genre-wise and often put on Jason Isbell (24 Frames is the one that gets me started writing) and let spotify take it from there. But when I really need to focus (no words) I usually do Chopin’s nocturnes.

Tell us one other thing you worked hard on in this book and are proud of!

I really worked to create patterns without boring repetition. The book’s conceit is essentially repetitive, a real pitfall. As one of my best friends (and my best critical reader!) said, every dunk is more or less the same: I feel bad, I get in cold water, I feel better. That’s also the basic plot! There were three main ways I handled this problem. First, I decided early on that the book would not cover all 50 swims, just the thematically significant ones (though there’s an appendix listing them for the curious). Second, I included sensory detail for each swim and varied the kinds of sensation to draw readers in. Third, I cut like crazy in revisions, including an entire chapter that I axed very late in revisions. But I also read the entire book aloud, twice, and did a lot of detailed line editing that way.

What’s your favorite sentence in the book? What do you like about it?

“Tumbling under, bubbles streaming out of my nose, I was a mermaid calling out to my mother to watch me, a daughter grinning after my dad tossed me off a high bank, a big sister competing with my little brother to swim the farthest while we held our breath, a mother rating her daughter’s handstands, a woman in my element.”

This sentence is in the last chapter, depicting my last swim. Each part calls back to something in the book and to the most important people in my life, ending with myself. I like that it includes sensation (bubbles), encapsulates my personal history with water, and ends with my integrated self, but also that it sounds fun. It’s an answer to the disoriented first sentence: I’m in the water again, but now I know who and where I am.

Share the love: what’s a first sentence written by someone else (any genre!) that you think is great?

I mean…you can’t beat Donna Tartt’s classic opener to The Secret History, one of the few I have memorized, but that feels too obvious. As a Victorianist book lover by training and at heart, I am very fond of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot and its simple opener: “To start with, look at all the books.” I always do!

Kate Washington is the author of Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America.

Order Midstream: A Life Remade in 50 Swims today! Out July 7, 2026, from Beacon Press! Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org‍ ‍
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