where i'm calling from

Between friends, are these actual miles?

Sandy, OR

I have a friend who has a great line about the anti-climactic weirdness of publishing a book, which he first heard from a teacher of his: the storm before the calm. That is, you spend the months in the run-up to publication trying to get press, setting up events, hoping for the moon and stars, fearing the worst. You’ve got that special glow that comes from being a person with a book coming out. Then you throw it its little birthday party and everyone presses the like button and then a few days later you’re just another person who wrote a book and your book is just another book that someone wrote. I’m not complaining, mind you, I’m just saying how it is. (As Carver puts it in “Gazebo”: “ ‘Duane,’ Holly goes. In this too she was right.”)

At the Bookforum spring issue launch party at the N+1 office, May 3rd.

That said, I’m thrilled and humbled and honestly a bit gobsmacked to report that, one month after publication, Reboot has been—and seems to still be—thriving. I got to tour it for a couple of weeks, saw old friends & made new ones at a run of events in L.A., Portland, Seattle, New York City, and Minneapolis. And now, as I turn my attention away from being “a novelist” and toward being “the director of the MFA program”, I take a lot of comfort in my sense that the novel’s life may yet continue without my active encouragement or even awareness.

Here’s a quick roundup of press I did (or got) since I sent the last issue of this newsletter.

There was a smart review of Reboot in the Chicago Review of Books, as well as a generous mention in The Maris Review (thank you, Maris!), and Powell’s City of Books where it was a Pick of the Month for April (thank you, Keith M.!)

I wrote a short piece about "Five of my favorite second novels by authors I love" for Shepherd.com, and an appreciation of Alice Munro, whose stories had a depth most novelists only dream of, for the Washington Post.

A second excerpt from the novel was published by Forever magazine, which is edited by Madeline Cash and Anika Jade Levy, two amazing young writers with debut novels coming out next year. (The other excerpt is in N+1.) Anika was my conversation partner at a reading at Threes Brewing in Brooklyn, where I got to meet some of her students from the freshman writing studio she teaches at Pratt. This was especially meaningful to me because I first met Anika when she was a freshman in my writing studio at Pratt. It was a whole circle of life thing. It ruled.

I went on Slate's "Working Overtime" podcast with Isaac Butler and June Thomas. I was also interviewed on Jonesy with Ken Jones on KBOO Portland. I’m part of the core cast of season five of Lit Hub's  Cosmic Library podcast, alongside novelist Tayari Jones, scholar Andrew Kahn, New Yorker editor Deborah Treisman, and critic Becca Rothfeld, whose All Things Are Too Small is one of my favorite books of the year. I was happy to see it reviewed in the same issue of the New York Times Book Review as mine, by my old grad school mentor, the novelist and critic David Gates. We (that is, Becca and I) were lucky enough to both make Editors’ Choice, which led editor Gregory Cowles to deliver this lede:

I couldn’t agree more with Greg’s suggestion and will add that Rothfeld has a Substack of her own, which I subscribe to and recommend.

And speaking of ledes, not to bury mine but Reboot didn’t just get a great review in the NYTBR, it got the cover, and I’m trying to find something flip to say about that but I can’t think of anything because it’s one of those career/life-goal moments that every writer dreams about and now it has happened to me and I’m grateful for it and that is the thing that there is to say. I was especially grateful to have been in NYC on my tour when it happened. Here’s me seeing it in print for the first time at brunch with my editor on Saturday morning:

Photo by Lisa Lucas, secret hero of my life.

This past Friday I gave a reading at the Raymond Carver Festival in Clatskanie, Oregon (Carver’s birthplace) and for the first time in 2024 elected to read from unpublished work rather than from Reboot. It was a small moment that felt like a big one. On May 23, there will be a big moment that will feel like a small one. I will get in my car, start it, and drive toward the highway. I’ll spend the next nine or ten days driving southeast toward Sewanee, TN, to direct the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program from June 3 - July 15. After that, I’ll meet Amanda in Nashville and we’ll spend a couple of weeks driving back west, hitting a bunch of national parks along the way. It’ll be nearly August before I’m home again.

She knows

My route Southeast will take me first to Twin Falls, Idaho, then to Salt Lake City where I’m reading with Ashley Farmer at Bar-X on May 24th at 7PM, then to Denver to see my sister for a couple of days. After that, a stopover in Wichita before I spend a few days in Tulsa at the Bob Dylan Center, which I’ve wanted to visit since it opened. I’m planning to write about it, but that’s all I’ll say for the time being. I’m also writing a couple of reviews right now, and there will be new fiction before the summer’s out. More news on all that when there’s news. After Tulsa, I might grind out the ten hours to Nashville or I might stop somewhere around Memphis and rest. Either way, I’ll be in Sewanee on June 1. I’m teaching a six-week seminar on The Short Novel. Here’s the reading list:

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo (translated by Douglas Weatherford), Log of the SS the Mrs Unguentine by Stanley G. Crawford

I’m always a bit apprehensive about the summer program because I don’t like being anyone’s boss, but once I get there and things get going the program mostly runs itself. Then I get to focus on teaching my class (which is the best part) and enjoying our faculty reading series, hosting our special guests—this summer we’ve got Tracy O’Neill, Jill McCorkle, and Ross White—and throwing hangouts on the big front porch of the sprawling old house that the school rents for me and my colleague Ryan Chapman. There are afternoon storms and it stays light out late and a bunch of the faculty are bringing their dogs.

I’m apprehensive about the road trip too—it’s the longest I’ve ever done solo, by a lot—but mostly excited. I’ve set it up to alternate long and short driving days, and I usually get a lot of writing done in hotels. I dig the impersonality of them. It helps me get out of my own way. So I’m planning for this to sort of be a residency-on-wheels where I either get up early and write before check-out then drive all day, or drive early and then have the afternoon and evening to write. We’ll see if any of that happens. But I am working on two new projects—one fiction, one non—so it’s not as though I’ll be hurting for options.

Metro-North

I would, however, love it if you wanted to send me stuff to listen to on my drives. Send me your favorite podcast, album, audiobook, Dead show, or playlist. Even after this trip, I’ll be on the road a lot this summer: back and forth between Sewanee and Nashville (a good 90 minutes each way; worse with traffic) and then the whole drive back to Portland. As a thank you in advance, here are some things I’ve been listening to:

—Imposing on a Hometown by Sofia Wolfson. I met Sofia at my Brooklyn reading and afterward she sent me a preview of her new record, which is out May 31. I love it. Four of the ten tracks are up at Bandcamp now.

—Mimi by Corridor. One of three recent Sub Pop releases I picked up on vinyl recently, but I don’t think Iron & Wine or J. Mascis need me to vouch for them. These guys were news to me and their record is a blast. The guys on r/indieheads are going apeshit about it and I can see why. Great sound, amazing cover art—here’s the artist.

—Margo Cilker’s OurVinyl Session. Four song solo set kicking off with a revelatory new version of “Tehachapi.” She’s playing the Americana Harvest Fest on Sauvie Island on August 15 and we’ve already got it on our calendar. I’m considering it my own (unofficial) homecoming show.

—The Lit Century podcast with Catherine Nichols. This is always a great listen. Catherine is among the most capacious and original thinkers I’ve ever encountered. She picks excellent guests and the conversations aren’t like anything you hear anywhere else. I was going to save the latest for my road trip but instead I listened to it while running errands yesterday because I couldn’t wait to find out what she and Amitava Kumar made of Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. The episode before this one, with Daniel Saldana Paris and Wah-Ming Chang, talking about Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, is a banger too. They all are, is my point. I put both these episodes, and the one about Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (with J. Robert Lennon and V.V. Ganeshananthan), on my summer syllabus as recommended supplemental material for the books in question.

—This amazing playlist that Sarah Crowder made for me after we had an email exchange about Jason Molina, birds, and British folk music. She wrote to me when she was researching this post for One Stone, her Substack, which I recommend.

self-explanatory

—I love Jerry Garcia’s Bob Dylan covers, but I have to confess myself a dissenter from his “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” The way he takes a slow spare sad song and makes it even slower sadder and more spare feels redundant to me. And the results are kinda boring. There’s a new JGB release: two songs recorded at the Keystone in Berkeley on 2/13/76, and the first track is a 19-minute “Knockin’” that I’m sorry to say doesn’t do much to change my opinion. But the second track is a fantastic rendition of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” which, at 18:41, is possibly the longest version of the song he ever did. Me being me, I usually listen to both, but you can skip ahead to Jimmy, it’s cool.

—Smithsonian Folkways made a playlist of Charlie Parr’s guitar influences as part of their promotion of his (stellar) new album Little Sun.

—And speaking of Dylan. The deluxe editions of his Bootleg Series releases come and go from Spotify, so get ‘em while they’re here. Right now, all 8 discs of Trouble No More: 1979-1981 (aka The Gospel Era) are available to stream. I know it sounds like affected contrarian bullshit, but I love this era of Dylan. Earnestly. (And yes, it is also affected contrarian bullshit, but still.) His backing band is first-rate and he’s on fire with energy and conviction, which I love hearing separate from the question of whether I share the particular convictions being expressed. There’s a wide selection from across three major tours and rehearsal sessions, as well as complete concerts from Toronto and London. I love every version of “Solid Rock”, “Slow Train”, “Every Grain of Sand” (especially Lakeland FL ‘81), and “Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Nobody.” He attacks “Saved” and “Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” with a ferocity that makes the album version of “Highway 61 Revisited” sound like, well, Jerry Garcia doing “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” At some point in the next ten days I am going to get in my car one morning, put this on, and not stop driving until it ends eight hours later. If that’s more than you’re up for, try putting it on on random and letting it bounce you around a while. See if doesn’t convert you, just a little.

Thanks as always for reading.