When Stephanie “Yarn Harlot” Pearl-McPhee takes the mic at a reading, the room often roars as if Eric Clapton had hit the stage. If you’re not a knitter, you won’t believe me. If you are, you cleared your calendar when New York Times bestselling author Pearl-McPhee announced that All Wound Up: The Yarn Harlot Writes for a Spin would soon be published, just on the off chance she’d make it to Baltimore. And lucky you, she’s on her way.

All Wound Up is Pearl-McPhee’s third collection of essays. It might be the first, however, that contains a good deal of content about non-knitting life. Pieces like “Ode to a Washer: A Love Story in Three Parts” and “That Sort of Mother” channel a modern-day Canadian Erma Bombeck, as Pearl-McPhee finds the humor in laundry and parenting. In “October,” Pearl-McPhee waxes lyrical about appreciating what we have. These essays exquisitely capture the absurdities of life, no matter your hobby of choice.

But there is plenty in All Wound Up for Pearl-McPhee’s core audience, the tens of thousands who hit her blog on a daily basis. She writes about “converting useless time into clothing.” She pens a “Dear John” letter to a wrap cardigan she abandoned without finishing. She rails about what she’d like to say to non-knitters who ask foolish questions like, “You know you can buy socks at Walmart, right?”

While the essays are full of advice for knitters, All Wound Up isn’t a how-to or book of patterns. Some of the funniest bits have previously been on the blog, like “A Little Demoralizing,” which is about her husband Joe getting his truck stuck in his parents’ driveway. But that’s not a downside, since Pearl-McPhee has honed them to razor sharpness for publication. Plus, the hardback form makes it easier to shove these gems into other readers’ hands.

City Paper caught up with Pearl-McPhee by phone shortly before her book tour began.

City Paper: When your work first started to hit print [in 2004], it seemed like you had a new book out every few months. Then there was a three-year gap between your last title and All Wound Up. Why?

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee: I actually wrote two books in that interval. The first one didn’t make the cut. . . . I like to think of myself as a humorist and that book was not funny. It wasn’t a bad book, but it wasn’t a funny book. So it’s in the drawer. This one got written instead. Right now I look at [the drawer book] and it reads incredibly dramatically. Even though every word in it is true, I feel like if I sent it to an editor, she would say it was hugely overwritten. You can’t have that much drama. Nobody would believe it. The uncle can have an incident but the mother-in-law can’t go to the hospital the same day. They would tell me that the plot was hopelessly contrived. But that was my life, man.

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