Merry Xmas
& to all a good night.
What a year. I’m back in Minnesota riding out the snow before heading out to Portland, OR later this week to co-teach a workshop at PNCA. I’ve also got a reading Saturday night, January 3rd, at 6pm with Sara Jaffe (author of Hurricane Envy) and Dao Strom at Word Virus Books.
My recent trip to New York was brief; the occasion was the Tables of Contents reading in Brooklyn at Insa. I don’t believe I’ve ever read at an event like that before— it was very fiction-forward and all in all a very festive affair. They made a desert inspired by page 61 of the book (!) and a cocktail with pistachio creme called “Fiction Exists.” I ended the evening at Hotel Mimosa with a cup of miso and flew out the next day.
Steph asked me over dinner how many events I did this year: maybe 12? A few of these took place online (like this one hosted by The Brooklyn Rail), so if you don’t count those, then the answer is closer to 8 or 9. It felt like a lot. When my last book came out in May 2020, I did not have the chance to travel and connect with people in person— there was no launch and bookstores were barely open for browsing; I remember beginning this year with great anticipation and uncertainty. In terms of programming expectations, I generally believe the quality of an event is more important than the total number of events; if a public program can’t be done well, then maybe it’s not worth doing because the amount of time and resources required to successfully execute something even relatively straight-forward is not insignificant.