Book Tour Thoughts

I am on a plane, heading to Minneapolis as part of nine days in the Midwest to promote Love & Industry: A Midwestern Workbook. I hope that I've left myself enough downtime between events. Promoting books is one of those things that I never feel like I do enough of, though the years have shown me that my favorite way of reaching new folks is offering free or low-cost classes online. And yet here I am, setting up readings and Q&As, in that kind of low-boil dread fugue that comes from being an introvert trying to make myself visible. And assuming that there will be one person at the reading and then that I’ll have to apologize to my co-readers Heidi Czerwiec and Jeannine Ouellette for all this work on an event that didn’t go anywhere. My therapist asked me the other day (because we were talking about worst-case scenarios and my tendency to focus on them) what my life would look like, worst-case, and I said, “Oh it’d be bad for everyone. The earth would be just a hunk of rock with no ecosystem or atmosphere floating in space.” And then we had a good laugh.

Allison K. Williams is running a class this weekend that looks amazing, with a massive spreadsheet of all the things you can do as an author to promote your book. I should probably pay for it, but I’m in a weird headspace: due to a personal glitch in family life—not my story, but someone I love is trying to work some things out, and my job is to bring in money so I’m the sole breadwinner till some medical and job things get worked out, but I have a good job, so I shouldn’t worry about money, but I do, only because I have a history of the consequences of scraping by. But then is not now. Then is not now.

So I guess this post is about showing up, doing it anyway, as my friend Barbara says. I am going to see some folks in the midwest I haven’t seen for a long time. I am going to get to be in Midwestern cities and hopefully make new friends. I am going to be anxious at each of my readings because of Covid. I have an air filter that is the size of a medium-sized watermelon in two pieces, one in my suitcase and one in my carry-on. I have asked that folks mask, and I am bringing a packet of surgical masks as the minimum to offer unmasked folks, and some N-95s for me, and some Iota Carrageenan spray before being in public, and some Enovid spray for afterward. Theses things, as my friend Yannik reminds me, are not nothing—I am being careful. And I got boostered in August, and I’m probably safer right now than I would be in my classrooms on the campus where I teach, where about 25 percent of my students have covid.

As it turns out the event, at Moon Palace Books, was incredible. My friend Arwen came, my friend from when we were 20 and working at the same coffeeshop on Hennepin long ago whenI took a semester off of school to get my shit together, and it turns out that break that felt so low-down and awful gave me so much good in my life.

So that, now that I think about it, is a reminder that breaks are good, that deciding to do something different is good, that the person I love needs this break, and this is why I have “And it is good when you get to no further” tattooed on my left arm, which is a line from a poem on a Minneapolis bridge, which is the subject of an essay in my book, “Homage to a Bridge.”

And friends and especially Carleton grads I haven’t seen in decades—and some I never met on campus!—came out on a Wednesday night to hear us, and I got to hug people. And I was so grateful. And Moon Palace is gorgeous, and it was also incredible to learn the story of how Moon Palace Books was basically a home and staging area for the Black Lives Matters protestors in 2020 after George Floyd was killed by police, and that the police precinct building next door was the one set on fire. The intersection is coming back and filled with beautiful moving impactful art made my artists and murals wheat-pasted up, and it felt like holy ground to be there.

I wish I lived in Minneapolis again, but the city exists, as do my friends here. So this, I guess, is what Minneapolis reminds me of: the power of people working together. That I don’t have to do anything alone. That I walk through life perpetually overwhelmed because I start each day assuming I’m alone in this, that the weight of whatever is too much, and then I remember: friends. Strangers. People.

I’m at Magers & Quinn tonight with the fantastic Kate Hopper, and then onto three events in Illinois and time to see my parents, and then to Ball State in Indiana, and then home. Here’s everything I’m doing, including a visit to Columbus in Feb., and if you want me to zoom into a book club or come to your town to talk about anything, let’s talk. Thanks for reading.