Book Tour Thoughts, Day 2-3

On Thursday I had lunch with my friend Steve, and took a long walk with my friend Arwen, who took me to the site where George Floyd was murdered, where there is now a large memorial—it once was a closed intersection taken over by the Uprising, but the mayor bulldozed it open. I should have taken more pictures but that shyness came over me, the urge to just be there and behold the place and feel what had happened there, to not produce it as an image. There is a beautiful mural around the corner and there are two welded large power fists in the center of two intersections topped with Black liberation flags. And on the pavement is a long, long list of names of Black people killed by police.

Each of my friends had stories about what it was like to live through this, and they all told me that what was really the awfulness was the white supremacists flowing into the city with guns, burning things down, looting. And the city bears those scars. At the main intersection of Lake and Hennepin, my friend Kate explained, all of the anchor stores—Urban Outfitters, H&M—simply left. They had money to stay, to provide jobs, and instead they left and didn’t return. The neighborhoods have changed, there are mostly empty storefronts in what was a vibrant artsy area. It all feels different now.

So I heard stories about 2020 and the aftermath. And I also got to enjoy the fact that I’ve known these friends, Steve and Arwen, for more than half my life. We have a long timeline. Arwen wondered if maybe we have that thread together, that sense of always being connected and able to pick up where we left off, because we wrote letters to each other. I wrote letters, a lot of them, to both Steve and Arwen, and I know their handwriting and their minds through what they wrote, though I also wrote a lot of letters to people I’m no longer connected to. Here’s Steve looking very epically Minnesotan:

The day was magic, and in the middle of the afternoon I went back to my hotel to teach a zoom Magazine Writing class with a special guest, Tim Nudd, who has been writing for magazines like People and AdWeek and Ad Age, where he is the Creativity Editor, and he had so many smart things to say and I learned so much. And also: Tim was my high school boyfriend, and we’ve remained friends, and it’s a pleasure that I never anticipated about being in my fifties: this long shared timeline and the pleasure of keeping connection, of knowing people through decades and being known.

And then I met Kate Hopper for dinner, and we talked about writing and living and having kids in college, Kate who I first met through a panel on motherhood and writing at AWP, or maybe first through Literary Mama. She’s a great writer and another long-time friend. And then the reading at Magers & Quinn was amazing, and I got to hear fantastic new work she wrote, and Kate brought some of her students, and she asked great questions. And one of her students said she completely got the arc of the book, the arc I was trying to make, and that I had worried was too dim or implicit or visible only to me.

I was so worried about this string of events and now I realize I have needed this so much, that this particular string of connections in this particular city has been a refueling, and I am so lucky this is part of what I get to do. I am also grateful for my job, but breaks are necessary, because academic culture can be tight and competitive and grudgy and weird. It doesn’t have to be, but it often is.

I didn’t get to see the Friendship Bridge, which I am obsessed with, that arcs from the Walker Art Museum’s sculpture garden over the highway and lands in Loring Park. I have a line of it tattooed on my arm, and I have an essay about it in Love and Industry. But then I woke up this morning and Kate had texted me that she’s going to give a copy of the essay to the wife of the man who designed it, Siah Armajani, who was one of her dad’s students at Macalaster! He has sadly passed away. My mind is blown.

Kate and I talked about obsessions and the danger of too much research, where a writer can sometimes use research to pivot away from the an essay that gets too close and hard to themselves. And yet I think letting myself be obsessed by things has been so important, that it is a specific kind of love that is very sustaining.

It’s a privilege to get to grow older, one that is very much affected by race and income. Not everybody gets these years.

A few extras…

• I’m part of an anthology of writing about Long Covid, called the Long Covid Reader, put out by Long Haul Publishing, which is about to launch a Kickstarter to fund publication. You can sign up here for the Long Covid Reader Kickstarter waitlist.
• If you missed seeing me read and want to watch a video of me reading from Love and Industry, here’s my YouTube channel with three of the videos from social media “live” events.
• I’m also part of the Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023 edited by Victoria Buitron, which releases on Oct. 3, 2023 from Woodhall Press.
• This is the site I use to track Covid wastewater levels across the country, updated daily.