There's a dead bird on the cover of humorist Sloane Crosley's newest collection of essays, "Look Alive Out There." Or maybe the bird's alive. It's hard to tell, and that's the point, the 39-year-old author says: "Pardon the pun, but it dovetails nicely with the title."

The image also points to a problem all writers face: The process of putting an experience into words robs it of some of its vitality. But comedy is often only apparent in retrospect, once a stressful or even perilous experience is safely in the rearview mirror.

Crosley, who has written two other essay collections and a novel, brings her comic perspective to a variety of predicaments in "Look Alive Out There" — including the mundane (having a cab stolen from her by a handicapped woman) and the mortal (nearly dying on a mountain).

Q: As a personal essayist, do you take a lot of notes during your day-to-day life?

A: No, I think that would make me relatively insufferable to be around. I'm already in a danger zone with my friends. If we're going to the movies and my friend is late and I'm like, "You're late," I'll get a "Well, why don't you write an essay about it?" Having said that, I think there's a way — as both a human being and a writer — that I move through the world, which is with one eye open and one eye kinda cocked. I'm totally willing, if I'm in a foreign city, to go down that dark alley with you, but I will also be complaining the entire time.

Q: But you're not risk-averse. You went mountain climbing in Ecuador without proper preparation or equipment and nearly died! Were your parents horrified to read that story?

A: If I had called them when I was on my way and said, "So, I'm going to go up this active volcano with a guide that doesn't speak English in a foreign country," I think they would have been concerned. But once it's in the past and you're writing about it, you're clearly in front of a laptop with all your fingers intact, suddenly everything becomes amusing or funny. In a weird way, humor essays share a little bit of DNA with survival tales or addiction memoirs.

Q: You tweeted that your story about deciding to freeze your eggs is the most personal essay you've written. Why does it feel especially intimate to you?

A: There's both an emotion and an urgency to that essay, because this is exactly what is truly going on in my life right now.

Q: It's like you're still on the mountain. This isn't like the other essays, where you are writing about something from a safe place in the future.

A: Yeah, there's not that scrim between the process of writing it and where I find myself personally.

Q: What are you going to write next?

A: I'm working on a novel now. I absolutely love writing essays, but there's also something incredibly gratifying about having to make everything up, and having this entire world that you're crafting that, even as the writer, you can escape into. That's something you only get with fiction.

Q: I think a lot of people read your nonfiction to escape, too.

A: ("Look Alive Out There") isn't so much escapism as it is reminding you of your other problems, having the freedom to be annoyed by things that aren't nuclear fallout and Donald Trump. You are also allowed to be annoyed when a woman in a wheelchair and her husband steal your cab.