a moment in the day: fourth

Lying in bed in the mostly dark listening to the occasional boom. This was, of course, a very different Fourth of July. Not devoid of fireworks but nothing like the war-zone bombast of the past. 

Good.

I'm already fading away to sleep, but the relative quiet of the neighborhood tonight takes my brain to two places. First to the fact that we, at least in these more thoughtful parts of the country, just don’t want to celebrate this fraught history and tormented, tormenting place. And second, that I miss the little boy who I used to have to take into the bathroom with the loud ceiling fan and sing to on Fourth of Julys past.

a moment in the day: book

Maybe it's the nitrous talking but I think I'm in love with this book.

I'm reclining in the dentist chair getting a filling. Maybe it's silly to do nitrous for a filling, but I haven't had to get a filling in forever and god, I'd probably do nitrous for a cleaning if I didn’t feel like it was excessive. Just knowing I could get a little gas while they were hunting around in my mouth made the days leading up to this less stressful. Nitrous in my nose and an audiobook in my ears, anything to keep my brain occupied, to force it away from doing that thing where it thinks about the gruesome things they're doing in there, in my mouth.

Jessica Anya Blau is filling my ears with words. Her book is Shopgirls, and right now the girls are in a car, singing an ode to the air-freshener hanging from the rearview mirror.

I started singing loud and clear, pushing my voice out through my nose the way Barbra Streisand does.

"Dear Jesus, Air-Freshener Jesus, help us find a spot—a spot—a spot—big enouuuugh for this carrrrrr."

How is it that I feel good and relaxed right now? Maybe it's the nitrous or maybe it's Air-Freshener Jesus, or maybe it's the fact that my dentist and I talked books before she went in for the novocaine jab. Told me what she's reading right now (Elizabeth Strout's Tell Me Everything), told me she bought it because of a staff recommendation at a bookstore, told me the best way to buy books is from the staff recommendation written on a shelf-talker hanging from a shelf in an independent bookstore. "The best way!" she said. I said, "It's because you're getting a recommendation from a human who you know loves books!" And she pointed at me and fist bumped at me in the dentist chair.

Now as I lie with her hands in my mouth, I can hear the murmur of her voice, and the hygienist's voice, through the sound of Shopgirls in my ears. Chatting as they work. The murmur of the dentist sounds distinctly like, "in the book" and I realize with some nitrous-heightened sense of profundity that the dentist is talking about books while I'm reading a book so I have book on top of book in my ears. The murmurs somehow tell me that they're discussing Tell Me Everything, their conversation sparking off of our own. I'm fixated on their murmurs even as I'm able to concentrate on the shopgirls in my ears, and the fact of this moment seems to tell me everything about the world, at least about the good part of the world, and the dentist could be distracted by her book like I'm being distracted by my book but I don't care! Sometimes in the middle of this high stress world, things can be beautiful, and because of that, I'm certain that my book and the dentist's book, they're both the very best book in the whole wide book.

a moment in the day: fan

Ninety-one degrees, and my portable air conditioner is fighting the added heat of my second-floor, poorly insulated attic-turned-office at the very end of the work day. I don't know why I didn't think of this yesterday when it was ninety-six, but now I'm hauling out the box fan in an attempt to drag some of the cooler air over from the quarter of the room that the air conditioner's magic reaches.

Plug the thing in, start to walk away, yank the plug out somehow with my foot, step back over, plug it back in. Angle the thing toward my desk and then go sit down into the rush of relative comfort.

And it occurs to me. This is the first time I've taken the fan out since Nicholas. This is the first time in I couldn't say how long—years maybe—that I turned on a fan and aimed it at me instead of at a little warm body curled sleeping on his pillows at my feet.

Book Cover: Love

A while back, I was contacted by writer / publisher / literary powerhouse Jenny Forrester to design a cover for a new project. I was excited to work with Jenny because I love her writing (particularly her beautiful memoir Narrow River, Wide Sky) and her magazine Mountain Bluebird. 

Her new book was going to be called The Book of Solitude: The Art of Cherishing Spaciousness. From the beginning of the project, she had an idea of what she wanted the cover to look like. She was interested using handmade paper as the background, and she knew roughly how she wanted the text to be presented over that background. 

The minute she mentioned handmade paper, I thought, I know exactly what to do. I contacted friend and fellow writer Beth Kephart, for whose book Wife | Daughter | Self I designed a cover using her husband's beautiful art back in 2020. Along with being an elegant writer and teacher, Beth makes hand-crafted paper! She even wrote a book about it: My Life in Paper.

Beth's handmade paper is beautiful and she makes journals and other lovely things and sells them through her Etsy shop here. I contacted her about Jenny's book project and she found us some gorgeous paper for Jenny to choose from, and when Jenny had made her choice, Beth photographed it for my use.

She told me, when she sent the pictures, that it had photographed darker, grayer than the actual paper and gave me permission to alter it for my use. I did a lot of work on that paper, actually, lightening it, brightening it, removing the background. That took some doing because I wanted to leave the paper edges looking delicate and as beautifully... I don't how the word for it... tattered as they are. Then Jenny wanted her book to be square, so I photoshopped the rectangular paper into square.

Jenny was interested in the title text swooping through the layout. She even sent me a sketch of her thoughts. When I'm working with an author or publisher very hands on, I love stuff like this.

I explored fonts and colors and experimented with laying the text out in a way that had Jenny's swoop in mind. I sent her samples that included one with a circular title as well.

When Jenny first contacted me about the project and we were starting to explore possibilities, she was still deep in the process of writing the book. Time went by and I worked on other projects. A year went by, in fact. When she was ready and came back to me to continue working, the title had changed. It was now Love with a subtitle of The Art of Cherishing the World.

She said, "I love the flowing of the waterfall of the title. 'Love' in a waterfall will be a challenge but maybe?"

It was too much of a challenge to make look good, but if I let the subtitle be the waterfall, love, particularly with the slant of its letter V, was the perfect word through which the waterfall could flow.

I tried that love with different fonts and played around with the space between the letters...

...until I found a layout we both liked. Then as a last step, Jenny asked me if I'd be able to make the text look debossed (the opposite of embossed, where the lettering is pressed into the paper). To do that, I experimented with adding shadow and lightness until it looked right. The hard thing about this is that the text is light yellow and white. Lighter colors tend to pop and dark colors recede. Even when the light and shadow are applied correctly, it tends to create an optical illusion where one minute it looks debossed, the next it doesn't. Next I played with the lettering so that it wasn't all one shade of yellow or one shade of white across the words, and I also brought up a little of the texture of the paper underneath to add to the effect.

In the end, we were both happy with what we had...

...but then the project took an eleventh hour turn when folks Jenny consulted with didn't like our doing the cover against a paper background and we went back to square one.

Plot twist!

Or, if you're talking about a project in terms of one to ten, maybe we could say square five? We kept the fonts and the layout, lost the paper and debossing stuff. Lost some of the text too. She decided to remove the mention of the book award finalist and the blurb snippet and add a tagline: as ideological battles escalate, what are we to do? We discussed an illustration of the mountains, which is not only a prominent figure in her book but a strong part of her, if you'll excuse the markety expression, brand.

What we ended up with was a much simpler, elegant style cover, and my final touch was to add the sun shining through and behind the big O in Love.

Love: The Art of Cherishing the World will be out this coming August. And in the meantime, Jenny is putting out yet another book (I don't know how she does all that she does): a writing instruction manual and manifesto called Brilliant: The Art of Literary Radiance. She will be in Portland celebrating its launch and her wonderful literary magazine Mountain Bluebird on June 6 and 7 at BOLD Coffee and Books (start time 7 PM). If you're in Portland and free, come out and have a gander at the many lovely things Jenny has been doing. More information on Jenny is here.

And here's a little snippet of Love:

*

Adam kisses me when I sit down again, puts his hands on the small of my back which isn’t small but in his large, capable, and calloused hands feels small. I wish I were free of body shame like the activists in the disembodied bubbled digital world, but I’m only human … raised in particular ways … having had particular experiences inside my body and because of my body…

Later, when I tell my friend named Fun about Adam and his hands, she says, “Those men who work with their hands …” I tell her Adam is meaty with a yummy belly, that he’s sturdy, strong. Fun says, “I just love a meaty man.”

Adam doesn’t push his tongue into my mouth, the way some Adams do. He’s a decent kisser with sweet, whiskeyed lips.

He’s shit-faced, he says. “But I can handle my liquor, I’m not saying that.” I nod. Of course, he can handle his liquor—that’s what we’re supposed to do, we’re supposed to be able to handle things, like everything, even the poison that is alcohol. The Devil’s Bar is the devil’s bar.

I say, “It’s fun making out with you.”

He takes a swig of his drink, and says, “We’re not making out.”

I listen to how people define things. I wonder what his definition of making out is.

“Kissing then?”

I’m painfully aware of My Pool Mate watching me and this public display of affection. I hope I don’t look too awkward, but the reality is that I’m in my late 50s and so is Adam and so, it probably disgusts some people to see us acting like teenagers. Part of me thinks, fight ageism, and the other part thinks, what in the actual fuck are you doing?

a moment in the life of my book: trumpet

I've written up a little blog post about a lovely moment in my day, a moment about my book, and I'm sharing it to Instagram. My publisher Laura Stanfill, in a fun, dinnertime strategy session recently, had the clever suggestion that I make a graphic to go along with these blog moments I like to write, and I have that all plugged in, now, and ready to release it to my Instagram feed. But my hand on the mouse hesitates and my cursor over the go button hovers and waits. 

The nice thing about just sharing a moment from my blog is that it always feels appropriately small. Discrete. Adding this graphic makes it seem so big, and for a second I feel oddly ashamed somehow. Like, who am I to trumpet this so loudly, to make it so big on the page? 

It is too much? It's too much. Is it too much? Stop it, you're going to have to get comfortable with playing your trumpet. You do have a book coming out, you are going to have to, you know, help promote it. What is it they say, that writers make lousy promoters? But it's that tension between the comfort of quiet and the wish to have our voices heard that makes us writers in the first place. 

Come on. Be a writer. Play your trumpet. Press go.

a moment in the life of my book: zing

The morning news is nothing but bad as I listen to the radio at the start of my day. But then there's a ding in the inside pocket of my hoodie. I pull out my phone. It's Liz Prato, Forest Avenue Press's editor in chief. She's texted both me and Forest Ave. publisher Laura Stanfill together. It's just the word yay with a line of exclamation points and a screenshot of my book up on Edelweiss.  

Gives me a little warmth inside. Edelweiss is the website where booksellers go to discover and order books for bookstores. Liz has found the product listing for Who Killed One the Gun? and has been so sweet to text me and Laura to say so. 

I put a heart react on her screenshot and text back, "Eeeeee" with three blue hearts. Blue because the book cover is mostly blue. 

This strange era, where you can communicate with people through color-coded digital hearts.

I put my phone back in my pocket and continue working at my computer, but in a moment there's a zzzing in my pocket, not a ding but a zzzing. Ding means a text and zzzing means a react, and I pull the phone out again. The zzzing was Liz putting a heart react on my three blue hearts. Hearts on top of hearts.

Then she texts, "It gets realer all the time."

And my goodness, it does. All the tiny, tiny moments in the life of this book that isn't even born yet. I text back with a word that's not just real but more than real: "I know! Surreal. Does it ever get less surreal / exciting / scary / exciting (with more than one book, I mean)?"

Because Liz is a veteran in the book game, with a short story collection, an anthology she curated, and two collections of essays, not to mention a novel coming out next year through our beloved Forest Avenue Press.

"I don't think so," she tells me, with a laughy emoji. She says that there are certain things you get more comfortable with, but every book is a different experience. She says she hopes she never gets to the place where she thinks, "Yeah, I've got another book coming out, that's just what my job is."

I hope that for her too. And if there's a book for me beyond this one, I hope it for me too. Even with the scary part. Because the scary part holds hands with the lovely part. I need to remember that. As I worry over bad reviews or no reviews or, OK, just bad reviews, because no reviews mean no bad reviews, and there I go obsessing over the scary part again. 

I put a heart on Liz's text and put my phone back in my pocket. I'm loving the dings and the zzzings but I have to get back to work. Even so, I sit for just a moment with the sweetness I feel that she reached out to me about my book.

And, zzzing!, there goes another one. Maybe Laura catching up with our conversation. I leave my phone for the moment and continue with my typing. The morning news is nothing but bad, but I have a heart in my pocket.

a moment in the life of my book: strategy meeting

What other publisher comes to you for a strategizing session for your upcoming book bearing a delicious homemade beans-and-rice lunch? Laura and I sit around my dining room table with bowls and spoons, paper and pens, a stack of one sheets for my book, a newly-minted advance reader copy. I have a list of things to talk about but we're mostly free-wheeling our conversation, bouncing back and forth with thoughts and ideas.

We do the math, me counting aloud on my fingers, and find that we're less than six months out from publication. That time frame seems both really long and really short.

Laura's telling me one of the things we want to research is mystery reviewers and bloggers. I point my spoon at her and say science fiction too, and she nods. My book is a genre-bender: literary fiction, mystery, sci-fi. The sci-fi part feels less conspicuous because the trappings of the novel are so soaked in noir and old-time detective fiction—but what are time loops if not sci-fi? It's funny, though, how time loops are science fiction and not fantasy. Time loops trace their roots back to time machine stories, and that is straight-up science fiction. But often time loop scenarios are allowed to exist with no explanation as to why the phenomenon is happening, whether through something sciencey or magical. The time loops just... happen. My book Who Killed One the Gun? pretty much falls into that category. There's a why-do-you-think-this-is-happening discussion in one scene, with one character posing a theory, but that theory is just a theory, and it, too, falls into a nebulous place between science and magic. Which... when you get deep down into it, doesn't all of science turn into magic?

That all sounds pretty poetic in my brain, but when I try to describe the way the genres of mystery and science fiction live in my book, I find it's hard to put it into words.

"I mean, my book might not be wearing a sci-fi dress," I say, "but it’s wearing its underwear."