Book Tour Thoughts, Days 4-6

I’m at my parents’ house in New Lenox, Illinois, once a farm town and now an ever-expanding exurb whose edges will soon meet the towns around it. It makes sense that I’d come home to promote Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook, as this is where my sense of home is rooted.

On Sunday I got to lead a small class on writing memoir at the Plainfield Public Library. My friend from high school, Carl Gilmore, is president of the library board, and he helped me make the connection to set it up. My mom came with me, and I re-met Linda, a friend I’d first met in 2011 at College of DuPage. She talked about her work and I got to recommend Drew Lanham’s book, Home Place: A Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, as something that might inspire her. We had talked about walking, how we both love to walk outside, and I read a bit from “The Third Eye of the Oyster,” which is coming out from River Teeth and is in the book. In that class I also suggested the assignment of writing an essay in a day, first part of the Essay Daily “What Happened” project that inspired Supremely Tiny Acts.

Afterward we went to have coffee with Carl at a cafe on the main street in Plainfield. It was really nice—nice to overlap again with someone who knew me way back when, nice to put up the tent poles of memory with another person. We also talked about similar experiences of fractious debates with high school friends on social media starting in 2016.

.Then the next day I went with my parents to a COOOOL coffee shop in New Lenox called Gost Coffee. Believe me when I tell you that “cool coffee shop” and “New Lenox” were two concepts I never thought would overlap. I told my mom that if this would have been here 30 years ago, my whole life would’ve been different. Opening a cool coffeeshop in a majority-Republican town is a vital and revolutionary act and I’m not even joking. Outside there was a car rally and a guy was parked with this absolutely amazing Black Bean camper that had its own solar panels and I want one!

Yesterday I posted on Facebook about wondering for the millionth time whether I have ADHD. I had seen a quote from Ijeuma Oluo that completely reminded me of me.

And this morning the replies continued to roll in, people—all creative folks—sharing their experiences. Wow: I’m gonna have to get evaluated, as this is what it’s like for me to be in the world: I am overwhelmed, I have constantly too much stimuli, I scare and yell at myself to focus, I do focus at great cost, I can think at several levels at once, and it’s exhausting. I always feel like I’m barely compensating and trying so hard to look normal. In the classroom, of course, I’ve made it work for me: the connections that exist everywhere are the very definition of any essay, and everything feels like it’s connected to everything else. I thought that was just the price of being alive. All these folks posted about how much meds have helped them. I don’t want to be on a stimulant but it seems there are other options.

After a rest day, I had an amazing final reading for this mini-tour: at my hometown library in New Lenox, Illinois. I’d try to do a reading there in 2010 for my second book and didn’t get the word out well, so I was figuring this would be something similar. But surprise! Lots of folks came, including my parents, my sister-in-law, my parents’ friend Kathy, my friend from all through school Dianna and her mom who was my math teacher, my fifth grade English teacher Mrs. Stevenson, my friend Justin, a young writer from town named Nathan, and a few other folks from town. I can die happy. Everyone was so kind and we all introduced ourselves and figured out who went to school when and who had which teachers.

Tomorrow I am headed to a visit for a few talks and a reading at Ball State University in Indiana and then home. I am SO glad I did this, but I’m also so exhausted. I have definitely not seen this many people in person since 2019, which was really nice. So that’s the final push for the third book in three years, and first book I’ve promoted with a lot of in-person readings in over a decade. I’m glad I did it—it feels like each book is its own person, separate from me, and I have to do right by them. So I am very grateful to have seen all these folks, and now I will sleep until springtime.

I had hopes to maybe do some in-person events with spontaneous live feeds, but NOPE. You have to plan that way in advance, I’ve learned, you have to have a hosting site that’s not your own zoom account, and you have to do far fewer events to focus on a few big ones with tech help. Thank you for following along with me!

Extra Nuts and Bolts

• Ahah! It turns out that Long Covid is a biological illness. Well. We coulda told you that years ago but a potential thing to test for is a welcome development.
• I’m excited about this book event next week, the in-person and online book launch event for Sara Ahmed’s The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. I’m interested to see how the virtual and in-person thing works, with the goal of doing that in the future.