Echo Road Press

by Jeanine Boulay

Published March 2026

Set against the backdrop of Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery, What Keeps Us is a linked collection of short stories set across 160 years of New York City history. In post-Civil War Manhattan, a Black school principal keeps her community together while losing connection with her daughter. During the Great Depression, a young wife keeps a lie in order to find work, and through it, her own voice. As the pandemic claims the city, four seniors keep themselves safe, trading their newfound vitality for solitary survival. But it is Green-Wood Cemetery that keeps them all, along with its modern-day archivist, Rebecca. When Rebecca discovers that her own origin story may be hidden among the countless histories she guards, she learns how the work of remembering the forgotten becomes the work of understanding ourselves.

Like Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place and Elizabeth Stroud’s Olive Kitteridge, Jeanine Boulay’s What Keeps Us demonstrates how individual lives create the larger tapestry of shared humanity, exploring themes of resilience, chosen family, the power of place, and whose stories survive. Green-Wood Cemetery itself becomes a character—its Gothic arches, rolling hills, and weathered stones bearing witness to generations of women whose voices echo forward, asking what it means to be remembered and what it costs to be forgotten.

JEANINE BOULAY writes fiction exploring connections across time and place. For twenty years she lived and taught in Brooklyn, where Green-Wood Cemetery served as a sanctuary and the inspiration for What Keeps Us. Its historic domed Chapel was also the setting for her wedding. Boulay has been awarded numerous writing fellowships by New York Public Library’s Cullman Center Institute for Teachers and the Academy for Teachers, where she studied under Karen Russell, Ian Frazier, and others. Boulay now works in educational leadership in her native Massachusetts, where she lives beside Mount Wachusett with her husband, two young sons, and their pet axolotl, Xochitl.

She is currently at work on a novel set in an historic building at the base of Mount Wachusett — a building that once served as a vacation home for women working in Boston’s factories and now operates as a rehabilitation center for the ultra-wealthy.

What Keeps Us is a debut novel for both the author and Echo Road Press.