This is as much for me as anyone else. How do people remember their own AWP Schedules? (AWP is the annual conference for writers and writing programs. This year, it’s in Portland, March 27-31.)

Thursday: March 28

AWP Program Directors’ Plenary Assembly Thursday, 9:00–10:15 a.m., D136, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1 Thursday, 10:30 to 11:45 a.m., B113, Oregon Convention Center 

Speculative Nonfiction lunch 12 to 1:15

Attending: Ann Cummins’ panel Race, Gender, Politics, and the American Dream.’’ Poet Sherwin Bitsui, a last minute add to this panel, will be joining Shaniya Smith, Kara Thompson, Andy Levy Level 1, Room A 106 at the Oregon Convention Center, Thursday afternoon from 1:30 – 2:45.

Terrain.org Book Fair Table Sustainability: A Love Story Book signing. 3-4 on Thursday.

Mad Creek Book reading: The event will take place at Home, A Bar (719 SE Morrison St) on Thursday, March 28th from 6-8 p.m. Readings will likely be 5-10 minutes.

Friday, March 29

AWP offsite reading (event soon to be named) hosted by Rose Metal Press, The Cupboard Pamphlet, and DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.at Kelly’s Olympian

Saturday, March 30

Rose Metal Press Book Signing: 10:30  to 11:30 am: David Carlin and Nicole Walker signing special pre-release copies of The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet at the RMP table (5050)

Ohio State University Press/Mad Creek Books Book Fair Table: Sustainability: A Love Story Book signing. Saturday from 1:30-2:30.

AWP Conference: A Taxonomy of Nonfiction 3:15-4:30

AWP: Seneca Review will be at AWP in Portland! You can find us in the bookfair at T906. And on Saturday night, we’ll be hosting a reading with Wendy S. Walters, Nicole Walker, and Erica Trabold: 8:00pm at the Cardinal Club (18 NE 28th Ave, Portland, OR 97232, on 28th off of E Burnside). We hope to see you there!

 

 

I was invited to be a guest author at The Tucson Festival of Books a couple of weeks ago. I sat on two panels and moderated another. On the panel about memoir, a woman in the audience asked of the panelist, “what are your ages?” I responded, “45,” and waited for the other panelists to tell the audience their ages, shaving a year or two off with me. But they didn’t offer. What had I done? Outed myself as someone in their 40s? We can’t fake being 30 forever, fine young panelists , I wanted to say. (OK, one panelist was 37. She should have shouted loud and proud!)

It turns out the audience member didn’t ask, “what are your ages?” she asked, “what about agents?” Now I had been exposed as both old and deaf! Excellent beginning to the Q&A section.

The world of literary agents is a mysterious one. I was just going back through emails to my agent, trying to decipher how long it takes to get a rejection, when I found a list of publishers I sent him. What was I thinking? That he had not heard of certain presses? But I suppose authors get anxious and over-email their agents and agents, recognizing that anxiety is endemic to authors, give the authors a break. I am sorry, David, that I sent you that tone-deaf email!

After the panel, now that everyone knew my age and yet not my agent, a woman came up to me to ask why I didn’t go with a larger press. I told her I did have an agent for Sustainability: A Love Story but when Mad Creek Books, an imprint of Ohio State University Press, approached me about publishing with them (I had sent the manuscript to them before the agent picked up the book), my agent said, “go for it.” Sustainability is probably a little too weird for big presses. And that’s actual good. I have loved working with Mad Creek and my editor Kristen. At an earlier panel, the other panelists, who had big presses, had said that before the book came out, the big publisher had been very supportive but 4 weeks after release date, the book was considered old. Sustainability keeps chugging along, picking up contest positions and getting readers and being featured at book clubs. It would be hard, I think, for a small press book to win a big contest like National Book Award when the rules say you have to have books available to them by May to be considered for that year’s award (my book, which came out in August, didn’t have galleys until June). But Mad Creek Books has had starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus and reviews in the NYT and Washington Post. Every time some good news comes by, the press tweets or posts about it. The books don’t seem to become old news. They instead become part of the collection that makes the press its unique self. I love the series editors. I love the main editor. I love the press team, even though they’re small. I love that they make new posters for my book tours and talk me through foreign rights issues. Sustainability: A Love Story is in more people’s hands than I ever could have imagined. How could I ask for more?  Admittedly, I don’t know what working with a big press is like. And I keep refreshing my browser to see if my agent has any news. A big press would be fun because I’d reach different audiences but the way Mad Creek keeps championing Sustainability: A Love Story makes me feel truly sustained.

I’m trying to figure out my summer travel plans AND trying to post more on my website so here I am to kill two birds with one stone.

I have a new

book coming out June 19th. The After-Normal: 26 Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changi

ng Planet. David Carlin and I wrote this book together and Rose Metal Press will publish it on June 19th. I have readings set up for this book and Sustainability in California. My job? To remember where and when. So, thus far the plan is for me and the kids to put our bikes on the back of my car and drive to Los Angeles where we’ll stay with our good friend, Bek and Todd, and their guitar-jamming children. Perhaps we’ll ride our bike on the beach? I have a reading that Saturday at Book Soup (8818 Sunset BLVD) at 3:00 p.m. Then, I hope to get a reading somewhere halfway between LA and UC Davis where I’ll be for the Association of Thursday, June 27th from 8:00 to 9:30 p.m–for nighttime book buyers. Then, I read again at the Napa Book Mine at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday the 29th! I’m so grateful for this chance to do a mini-book tour and to take my kids and their bikes to LA, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Davis, and Napa. Books and bikes? Is there anything better? We leave Napa on the 3rd and head to SLC, getting in on the 4th. Then, we’re there for three days when I potentially leave for a cool institute training mission that is secret in nature at this moment. I’ll fly in and out of SLC so I can see my sisters and mom and the kids can hang with their cousins! If you read this post and are by one of these reading places, please come say ‘hi.’ I want to show the fine people at these book stores that independent presses do publish fun books. Climate change! Fun times! You’ll never see those two sentences together again.

I can’t sleep at night. I pretend it’s not because I’m dreaming of fire. I pretend I’m not thinking about the ticks that used to die in the cold but now it’s not cold enough for them to die so they suck the blood out of Moose in Maine. Maine people call them ghost moose and I’m not thinking that the white of moose, so lacking color because so lacking fur, now matches the skinny polar bear which we’re not supposed to think about because it’s so cliché.

So, instead, I organize and arrange my thoughts as I flip my pillow over to find the cool side. I make categories. Fruit: Apple, banana, Cutie™, durian, elderberry, fig. Cars: Alfa Romeo, Buick, Chevy, Dodge, Elon Musk, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Isuzu, Japan.

I get stuck on diseases: ALS, Bulemia,

It’s best when I get stuck on a letter. My mind rides around like a bicycle in a cul-de-sac. It’s exhausting, riding in circles.