Sorry for the radio silence. It was April then it was August and in between I’ve been everywhere, man, and I’m still going. Let’s see. Last week of April was Texas: I spent a few days at the Ransom Center at UT-Austin working in Don DeLillo’s archives for a piece that will come out this fall. Stole half a morning to spend with Denis Johnson’s papers, which I hardly had time to do more than browse and skim, it didn’t matter, I could not have gone to that place and then left without holding in my own hands the manuscripts of The Name of the World, Already Dead, the page-proofs of Jesus’ Son. (Ditto, for DeLillo, Great Jones Street and Point Omega; the piece I’m writing is about Pafko About the Wall.) I left Austin and drove to Tyler to see the first of two Dylan shows. First I stopped off at the East Texas Oil Museum. Then I got BBQ. Then I saw the show. Next day drove across the state to Abilene, afternoon stopover in Dallas, and then on May 1 the second show, last night of Dylan’s spring tour which also turned out to be the final night of his five-year Rough & Rowdy Ways tour. I wrote a big piece about Dylan and am waiting on edits now so no giving this away either. It’ll be here in full form soon enough (we hope).

Back to Portland, then Mexico City for my friend Mark’s wedding, then back to Portland to prep for my annual pilgrimage to Sewanee. I’d said that this year I wasn’t going to drive, I had a plane ticket booked and a rental car reserved, but in the end I canceled it all and drove. I wanted to be in my own car, which at this point feels less like an extension of my house than of my brain, and I wanted to cross this big beautiful stupid country twice again. I saw Sam and Grace in Boise, Nora and Nick and Sylvia in Salt Lake City, my sister in Evergreen, Sarah and Patrick in Denver. I was having trouble getting my Dylan story started. I had this purple pocket notebook with all my loose thoughts, and the setlists which were identical, and the fantasy I always have which is that the cross-country drive is a rolling residency, you’re finished with the road by happy hour every day and then you’ll just write until bedtime, right? Never. Not once ever has it been this way and I know that, or you would think that I would. But this isn’t about knowing it’s about wishing. I stopped for the night in Hays, Kansas after nearly getting blown off the road by a windstorm, got dinner at the openest proximal brewpub and sat next to a man who told me that he hates “the r-word,” he meant “retirement,” and that since he turned 60 he refuses to acknowledge aging forward, every year on his birthday he takes a year off his age but nobody else will keep track of the numbers, not even his wife, or maybe only his wife, whatever he said, then he talked for a long time about how much he loves A.I. and wasn’t I worried it was going to destroy my life and career. He didn’t see a connection between my “yes” answer to that question and my “no” answer when he asked don’t I love A.I. too. I mean this in all sincerity: he could not see a relationship between these answers, and I do think he was trying. He had the cognitive-psychic equivalent of smoker’s cough, cirrhosis. Aging backwards just to die young in someone else’s evil dream. I finished my chicken wings and left him alone with his life.

Lucas, Kansas is the home of S.P. Dinsmoor’s Garden of Eden, recommended to me by my friend Ed. It was the best thing I saw on my drive. Dinsmoor was a veteran of the Union Army who moved to Kansas and spent the rest of his life making large concrete sculptures depicting Bible stories and liberal populist causes. He was against lawyers, monopolies, racism, and sexism. He built a terraced pyramid so he could grow strawberries without having to bend down to pick them. He built his own mausoleum and had himself mummified with charcoal and interred in a glass coffin. His wife is in there too but he left her her privacy. On the tour I took, there was a family of five, husband and wife and three kids under 10, and he mentioned that he himself had been to this house twenty years ago, when he was around his son’s age. The tour guide asked him if Mr. Dinsmoor had changed much since then. “Oh yes,” he said. “That’s right,” she said. “That flaking on his face, that started about five years ago.”

I bought a souvenir mug emblazoned with one of Dinsmoor’s less politically inflammatory observations, still radical in its Kansas way: “It’s waste that makes people poor.” Not the whole truth, perhaps, but wholly true. I drove out of town on the famed Kansas Post Rock Scenic Byway, named for the local style of fence post the farmers use, cut from the local limestone. In Tonganoxie I saw at least 100 signs opposing the proposed data center.

But before all that, I’d spent a couple of hours at the K-18 Cafe, where I felt inspired to order pancakes, which I normally never would, and they were the best pancakes I’ve ever eaten in my life, fluffy as pillows and big as the plate, sunnyside eggs on top. I let them refill and refill my coffee and scratched out my Dylan draft and it was perfect. The lesson is that the road residency system works if you write first and drive second, though this did have me out on the highway through the busiest and hottest part of the day.

In Kansas City, Missouri I caught the penultimate show of True Green’s mini-tour, got a cool hat, ate a loaded hotdog. I hate driving through eastern Missouri and southern Illinois. Everything from the outer rings of St. Louis to the Kentucky state line is spiritually cursed. Spent a day with my mom in Nashville then off to Sewanee for six weeks to direct the MFA program’s summer session. It was our 20th anniversary and we had a huge celebration dinner: 200 people came from all over the country, every era of the program represented. Natasha Trethewey was the keynote speaker. The goal is to fully endow the program. We are not there yet but we are closer than we were. I was prouder and more terrified than I can tell you, up there in the suit I got married in, sharing with this packed ballroom the incredible story of what this program has accomplished in the last 7 years since I took it over, and what I think the next 5 or 7 or 10 years are going to look like, what they can look like if we all want it enough. Those pancakes and that Dylan notebook felt like they’d happened ten thousand years ago on the moon.

I taught a class on American fiction from 1970-the present. Our novels were James Welch’s Winter in the Blood, Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, Don DeLillo’s Pafko at the Wall, and Katie Kitamura’s Audition. I supplemented these with a whole mess of short stories, drawn mostly from The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story (John Freeman, ed.) but veering into my own stash of PDFs as the mood struck me and/or necessity dictated. John’s book is good but like any anthology it’s got its gaps, some of them gaping. We did Carver, Paley, Dybek, Bambara, Diaz, Allison, Lutz, Schutt, Hempel, Schiff, Hannah, Johnson, Berlin, Cisneros, Williams, Wolff, Chiang, Groff, Russell, Le Guin, Kincaid, Singer, Erdrich, Lipsyte. Some stuff I’m forgetting. On the last day of class, the students surprised me with two gifts drawn from the assigned reading: a can of Pet milk with a bow on it, and a framed print of the Shot Heard Round the World signed by both Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca. It’s one of the most thoughtful gifts I’ve ever gotten in my life, and again words sort of fail to express what it left me feeling, the gift itself and what apparently inspired the students to do it and the fact that 17 grad students managed to come up with this idea and execute it on what must have been a 2-3 week turnaround.

Another highlight of the summer was hosting a Dylan Deep Cuts listening session at the Sewanee library’s Ralston Listening Room. This was by quasi-request; I’d been talking about Dylan a lot because I was writing about him, and some people with varying levels of pre-existing knowledge/interest had been asking about where to start, where to go next, etc. So I booked an hour and programmed 50 minutes of music to give myself a little room to intro each of the dozen tracks, though I didn’t say much beyond noting what year it was from, whether live or in studio. I picked things that I love, that I thought the average non-freak might not have heard before, and that made best use of the Ralston Room itself. So there are big busy full-band electric tracks and there are spare solo acoustic tracks. The playlist is here if you want to check it out. Sorry you can’t go to the magic room but it’ll sound good on whatever you’re listening on.

I went to the Grand Old Opry. I went to Loretta Lynn’s house. I babysat a dog for a long weekend. I finished the Dylan piece and turned it in. My little cousin Ava turned 21. (I moved to New York City six weeks after she was born; her parents sold their dining room table so I could blow up an air mattress in their living room until I found a place of my own. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and her mom would be sitting on the couch, nursing her. Her family lives in Nashville now too, and she was home from Berklee School of Music for the summer, so we got to hang.) I finished a draft of my book proposal. Eric took me and Hornsby to the all-you-can-play arcade in Winchester. I turned 44.

I drove back across the Southeast and the Plains while jamming out to the new Muriel Spark biography. I spent a night in Topeka and the next day went back to Lucas, Kansas to see the Grassroots Art Center, which I’d not had time to stop at on the first visit. It’s a museum dedicated to folk art, which central Kansas became an unlikely hotbed for, largely because of the example set by Dinsmoor. People saw what he had done and decided to do their own. A lot of them work in concrete or the regional limestone from which those fence posts are also made. The woman who sold me my ticket told me that the artists at the Center were most often inspired to start creating after the onset of a catastrophic illness, a religious awakening, or retirement. Which is to say, when freed by force or opportunity from the drudgery of labor for capital, they found themselves cultivating the creativity that had been inside them all their lives. It says something beautiful about people and awful about America. It doesn’t say anything S.P. Dinsmoor didn’t already know. I wanted to go back to the K-18 but it was 97 degrees and well past pancake time. I had some jerky and an orange and a blue raz Buck Shot, drove five more hours, got tacos in Colorado.

Back to Evergreen to my sister’s. Amanda flew into Denver the next day, I picked her up. Mom and her husband Mark arrived a few hours later. We all drove to Steamboat Springs to spend the weekend celebrating Mom’s 70th. Had some great meals, did a trail ride, went to hot springs and a rodeo. Amanda and I made it back to Portland in two days: day one we stopped at Dinosaur National Monument and had amazing Mexican food in Vernal, Utah. Stopped for the night in Twin Falls where the smoke was too thick to see the sun go down. The next day we got breakfast at Goldstein’s in Boise, then powered through the bad air which persisted until we hit the Columbia River, at which point things cleared up and you could see Mount Hood from 100 miles away and the day was perfect and you would never know that half the West was burning down. We got home on July 28th. Two days ago the smoke caught up to us. Tomorrow we’re leaving for two weeks in Scotland. We get back on the 20th. I leave for New York City on September 5th: I’m teaching at Columbia again, a grad nonfiction class this time. I just finished up my syllabus but this is running long so I’ll tell you about it later.

This is my summer 2026 playlist. These are my notes thereon.

“Big Sky” by the Kinks - I left Salt Lake City at 6 in the morning (this was on the outbound) intending to drive through Southern Utah & make pilgrimage to Tacos La Pasadita in Green River, but I took a wrong turn leaving my friends’ house and the map app rerouted me without asking. All it knew was that I intended to end the day in Evergreen at my sister’s place, so it pointed me toward the other highway and though it was only 15 minutes before I realized what it had done it was too late to turn around and lose 30 minutes on what was already a 10-hour driving day, so I went through Wyoming and did not get my beloved tacos but at some point put Village Green Preservation Society into the CD changer and when this song came on realized I was where he was talking about or imagining, perhaps not unlike Kafka had.

“Somebody Wants to Send You a Message” by the Styrofoam Winos - One thing about my playlists is they repeat themselves a lot. A lot. Not songs so much, but artists. Low, the Silver Jews, the Grateful Dead, Spiritualized, Dylan, Michael Hurley—sometimes I think I’m making the same list over and over and if so that’s fine. Part of the point is to archive my attention over time. The Winos (and Humbird, also on here) are part of the new class of that idea. I remember hearing the Winos for the first time though not exactly when that was, early pandemic if not earlier. This is from their new one, Any River. Hilary said that at the release show almost the whole crowd was strangers, all singing along. She knew this record was gonna be bigger than the last one but she wasn’t expecting that. Big-hearted brilliant kids, their portrait fresh on the side of Grimey’s in East Nashville. We love to see it.

“War Dog” by Fey Fili - Fili is a West Virginian, young though I can’t say how young exactly because there is just about nothing written about her anywhere. No profiles, no reviews. She doesn’t even have a Wiki. Give it a minute. If you know her at all it’s from that Super Bowl commercial last year where she sang “Country Roads” for Rocket Mortgage. That was her debut, somehow. This summer saw her opening for Zach Bryan and near as I can tell she put out the High Valley Demos EP just to have something to point to. I don’t know if it exists on physical media. Are there tee shirts? I’d wear one. She has a Linktree on her Instagram but no website. No bio on the music apps. Wait and see where she’s at a year from now. You used to not know who Tyler Childers was either. Long live West Virginia, a place I have never really been. New Scott McClanahan book out btw.

“Solid Rock” live in Toronto 1980 by Bob Dylan - I’m double-dipping to include “Solid Rock” from my Dylan list because it accidentally got left off during the session. Woulda sounded so fucking good in that magic room.

“Spring Is a Fine Time” by Alela Diane - back in April I wrote about her forthcoming record In My Own Time, had an early single from it on that playlist. Now that the record is out I can say it is one of my favorites of the year and this is my favorite track from it. That’s Hurley leaving her a voicemail at the beginning. The song is about him. The whole album sort of is.

“Make Believe” by Humbird - their newest single, my favorite of their recent releases. Always interested in what these guys are up to. I met them briefly in Boise a couple of years ago. I was wearing their tee shirt which I’d bought at their show the day before, mere minutes before a high wind warning shut them down. They were very sweet and cool. A few nights later they played in Portland and I went again.

“Bye Bye Love” by Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty - I had the pleasure this summer of touring the Loretta Lynn Home and Coal Miner’s Daughter Museum out in Hurricane Mills, TN with my friends (also my colleagues) Wes and Emily. Wes gets credit for having the idea to make the visit, Emily for greenlighting it, and Dan (father of Wes, husband of Emily) for staying back with their other child, Ramona. The least I could do was drive. You might or might not be surprised to learn how much of the Coal Miner’s Daughter Museum is devoted to Conway Twitty. I was. I’d ballpark it at…14%? They had the reproduction of Loretta’s tour bus from the Coal Miner’s Daughter movie. Wes and I sat inside it and they asked me to plot a regional tour for when they’re a famous country singer. They would pick a city to start and then I would name six or eight cities we could go to from there in what order, eventually ending up back in New Haven, where Wes and their family live. I assume Wes assumes that since I drove them to Hurricane Mills in my car I would drive their bus when they have one. It’s a fair assumption. I’m not saying I will, but I am saying I would. I guess I could have mentioned earlier that Wes is 9.

“This and Not Some Other Way” by Jesse Welles - I had his song “Will the Computer Love the Sunset?” on the April playlist because I’d just seen him play Crystal Ballroom and had a great time. He was around Sewanee this summer and is a very nice guy. He won the local 5K on the 4th of July. I like the cover of “War Pigs” he’s been doing live lately. There’s another record coming, or it might be a video, later this year I think, from some sessions with Molly Tuttle and I forget who all else. Some murderers row. You can search up clips in the meantime, I think.

“Thousand Years” by Zoh Amba - I’m not sure what to say about this beyond the obvious, which is that she has swallowed the influence of Big Thief the way a python swallows a midsize dog: slowly. It’s gonna take a while to break down and metabolize, with not much for the snake to do meanwhile but lay there. Still there’s something to this that’s more than what it’s got stuck in its throat.

“Ruby, Are You Mad at Your Man?” by the Osborne Brothers - A sidelong Dylan reference cross-indexed with some JFK shit from my day in Dallas. I wrote 9000 words about Dylan and as mentioned am waiting to hear back. Meantime I will refer you to Philosophy of Modern Song.

“Silk Chiffon” by MUNA feat. Phoebe Bridgers - Has anyone ever sounded less persuasive saying “Life’s so fun?” than Bridgers does here? Not a complaint.

“No Shoe Fits (Floating Babies)” by Guided by Voices - As the other Bob says, “People don’t live or die, people just float.” This Bob can’t be kept up with. You just go down to the edge of his rising river, dip your bucket and see what’s there.

“Everything Grows” by Raffi - Wes’ little sister Ramona is just over a year old. Thus The Best of Raffi was a not insignificant part of my summer. I mean enough that my algorithm noticed. “Thanks a Lot”, “One Light, One Sun”, “Owl Singalong”, and “Love Bug” are all solid. The first two could easily be gospel-era Dylan, the latter two Hurley from whenever. Maybe the accent on “Day O” hasn’t aged so hot, but he’s doing Pete Seeger’s version so we can go a little easy. There’s a nice live version of “He’s Got the Whole World” on A Young Children’s Concert with Raffi, filmed in 1984, released in ’85, that’s probably Seeger, too. Raffi is 36 in the video, if you’re wondering. Wes figured that out. Wes likes to know when things happened, and how old everyone was at the time. We determined that I would have been 3 when this film was released. Did I see it when it was new? Almost certainly. My mom might know.

“MY NAME IS NIGHT” by Nirosta Steel - There’s some lore around this and I don’t know what it is, other than that the record was a long time coming, decades, and people who know who this is were waiting for it? Something like that. Sebastian kept talking about it so I gave it a go.

“I was a Fiend” by Memo PST - Summer needs some real aggression to it, at least a little, and Zoh Amba was holding it down ok until Peter sent me this.

“Please Don’t Cut My Hair” by Whip Appeal - I want to say Ed posted about these guys.

“Gallatin Road” (feat. Timbo) by Bronwyn - she played The Caverns in Pelham, TN. My friend Todd who owns said Caverns hooked me up with tickets so a bunch of us went. Bronwyn was opening for Melvin Seals, who plays as JGB, which I frankly find a bit sus, but whatever. Seals was fine, fun. She was killer, covered “Axilla” with a five-piece bluegrass band.

“W-P-L-J” live 9/25/71 by Jerry Garcia and Merle Saunders - As far as Jerry solo band keys guys go, I don’t think it gets better than Merle. Nicky Hopkins has his moments, and Keith is a whole separate case, but Merle. This is a novelty song from the 50s that I’d only ever heard Frank Zappa do before—a mean sarcastic version, a kind of dirty joke, like so many of Zappa’s covers. This version is also a joke, I think, but not a mean-spirited one.

“Lonely Island Pearl” by Johnnie & Jack - I refer you again to Philosophy of Modern Song, though the J&J entry is on “Poison Love” and my original interest had to do with a song called “Uncle John’s Bongos.” These guys are a revelation. As Dylan says in the book, they sing like brothers but they’re not. He would have been thinking of the Osbornes when he said that. I’ve got a 2 CD set of everything they recorded from the late 40s to the mid 60s. Even the bad stuff is great.

Only one new publication to share this issue, but it’s a doozy. I had the honor of writing the liner notes for Hail Disaster, the new album from True Green, which is the musical project of my dear friend Dan Hornsby. The record is a gem. I’ve talked about it here before but now it’s out so stream it, order a hard copy, and most definitely go see a show if Dan’s coming through your town. Beyond that, I’ll let my notes speak for themselves. They’re shared in full at the bottom of this letter.

Good things are in the works for the future. I’m turning in a short review next week, reporting two very different pieces for the same magazine at the end of this month, and I placed a couple of short stories recently so there’s new fiction on the horizon for later this year. Also, I wrote the introduction for a new edition of Rudy Wilson’s The Red Truck, which will be coming out from Cash4Gold Books this summer. I’ve been reading and traveling, heard a lot of great music: S.G. Goodman and Jesse Welles at the Crystal Ballroom; Forrest VanTuyl and The Delines at Polaris Hall; Geese, Amber Mark, Toody Cole & Her Band, Tune-Yards and Built to Spill at Treefort.

Those bands are all on the first half of this issue’s playlist, whose A Side (tracks 1-11) is essentially a spring tour diary and therefore also includes True Green, who I’ll see this summer, and Bob Dylan. I’m catching the last two shows of his spring tour in Texas (Tyler and Abilene) at the end of this month. The B Side (12-22) is the usual potpourri, starting with my favorite track from Bill Callahan’s My Days of 58, which is the best record he’s put out in at least a decade and an easy pick for one of my favorite albums of the year. I like Callahan but have never loved him the way I do, say, Berman or Malkmus or even Oldham, but this record is extraordinary: full of beauty and spirit, a finely-tempered rage expressed with admirably sane restraint, a smart wry incisive humor that eschews cynicism. Callahan refuses to adulterate his joy at being alive to make and share this music, and that purity crosses over into our pleasure in hearing it. “Empathy,” “Highway Born,” and “Lake Winnebago” are some other highlights, but you should listen to the whole thing.

Elsewhere on the B Side we find some finely agèd wisdom from Buffy Sainte-Marie, newish stuff from Dry Cleaning, Lily Seabird, and Alela Diane, whose new record, Who’s Keeping Time?, is out in May and not to be missed. I’ve been extremely lucky to hear a preview of the whole thing and I’ll have more to say about it when you can hear it too. Another easy best-of-’26 pick so mark your calendar, smash that pre-order, etc. “Drowsy Maggie” is a wild little Fred Firth & Henry Kaiser take on a folk standard. One day I’ll do a proper Kaiser deep dive. We find rage expressed with little to no restraint (this is also admirable) on Midland’s “Drinkin’ Problem”, Ratboys’ “Burn It Down”, Tyler Childers’ instant classic “Bitin’ List,” and a second Dead Moon track, “Fire in the Western World”, which I was lucky enough to see Toody play at Treefort. That song (and the album it originally appears on, 1992’s Strange Pray Tell) has an extended cameo in my first novel, The Gospel of Anarchy, which somehow turned 15 this year. I’d never heard it live before.

Missing from the playlist is an entry from my heart is a gentle boxer, a new project from Allegra Krieger, currently only available on Bandcamp. It’s a stark departure for her that reminds me in some ways of Young Prayer, my favorite Panda Bear record from 2004, which Pitchfork said at the time would “doubtless disappear and be rediscovered periodically as years pass” but never went anywhere for me. I come back to it far more than anything else from Animal Collective or their extended universe (or anything else from 2004). Early favorite tracks on gentle boxer include “Thrasher”, “I don’t care if you kill me” and “From a different place” which features some Anne Carson vocal samples from her “Essay on Threat” (hear Carson read it in its entirety here). But as with Callahan (in fact even more so) this record feels like a single large thought unfolding so your best bet is to play it through.

In late March I was down at Sewanee to host some events with Wright Thompson, about whom I cannot say enough good things. His most recent book, The Barn, is a monumental work of reporting, history, and moral reckoning that is also a true crime page-turner. You may already know his work at ESPN, perhaps the legendary profile “Michael Jordan Has Not Left the Building.” I am proud to say that I now know him as a guy whose taste in late 80s Grateful Dead is exquisite, and exquisitely Brent-forward.

I drove from Sewanee to Nashville and from there flew to Boise where I spent four (five? twenty?) blessèd days at Storyfort, the literary arm of the Treefort music festival. Got to catch up with a bunch of friends and meet writers whose work I admire (not, we hasten to add, mutually exclusive categories): Sam Lipsyte, Kevin Sampsell, Sophie Kemp, Megan Nolan, Kimberly King Parsons, Francesca Kritikos, Henry Hoke, Grace Lovera, Calvin Cummings, Julian Martinez, Matthew Binder, Nicole Treska, Gene Kwak, and many more. Thank you as always to Sam Berman, Storyfort mastermind and master of all ceremonies, a truly excellent writer in his own right. This was my second year attending and I want to go back forever. Zona Motel has a good and comprehensive write-up, so I won’t attempt to reduplicate their work, but I am going to steal this picture

they posted of me in conversation with Anika Jade Levy, because (Geese show notwithstanding) this was one of the high points of my time in Boise, indeed of my 2026 to date. During the Q&A someone (I think it was Max?) asked me how it felt to be in conversation with a former student who is now a published author in her own right. I could have just said “Old,” but instead I said that it feels amazing. It’s the absolute best-case scenario for what I do and it makes me happy every time it happens. (I did not say on the panel but will say here that any professor who would hesitate to say the same doesn’t belong anywhere near a creative writing classroom.) To further illustrate this point, two weeks after this photo was taken Anika was named a 5 Under 35 Honoree by the National Book Foundation, leaving me feeling exponentially prouder as well as older. Good job, Anika.

I want to take a minute to mention Lamb, a poet who I met at Treefort last year and whose work I’ve been following with interest ever since. He’s got an incredible ear, with more than a bit of Stevens in it, though I’d also be quick to mention Hopkins, Franz Wright, and Low. Lamb practices a radical spareness, an elipticality that can risk feeling like (but I don’t think is) self-censorship. It’s at least in part an aesthetic interest in quiet: dusk hush, empty churches. Or he’s pushing himself to the very edge of something not because he’s scared to cross over but because he’s interested in the edge itself. Sometimes his work reads like he’s telling secrets through gritted teeth but looking you square in the eye unblinking all the while. Lamb’s concerns are dark and complicatedly spiritual, I daresay theodicical at times, but anchored in a materiality that starts with his attention to sound and rhythm. His orientation toward Mystery is rooted in the real because the real is the realm where Mystery is experienced, where Revelation and Incarnation occur not as tears in the fabric of Being but as consummating, catalytic experiences of Being itself. Something along those lines. Anyway he’s one of my favorite poetry discoveries of the last few years. I was sorry we didn’t get to talk more but I continue to keep an eye out for his stuff (unsurprisingly, there’s recent work in Sarka, Soft Union, and Blue Arrangments, all journals keenly attuned to the wavelengths just described) and I look forward to the day that there’s a book to buy. Here’s one called “Latter Afternoon” that was in Cluny:

Good job, Lamb. I flew from Boise to Salt Lake City, rented a car and drove down to Moab to meet up with my wife and in-laws to celebrate their 50th anniversary by visiting some national parks. They’d already been to Capitol Reef while I was having POETRY TIME but together we saw Arches, Canyonlands, and—dipping down into Arizona—Antelope Canyon, which was breathtaking in a way I’m not sure how to begin to describe, so I won’t, I’ll just share a photo, which won’t do it justice either though it does capture something essential about the experience of touring the canyon if not of the canyon itself. If you want gorgeous photographs of important rocks taken by someone who knows both how to use a camera and why the given rocks are important, check out Rock Art: An American Story by my friend Stephen Alvarez. One of the great living nature photographers, he was just inducted into the Explorers Club! Good job, Stephen.

It was a great trip all around. As soon as we get home I got hit so hard with allergies that after five days I took a COVID test just to be sure. Allergies ate up a couple of weeks but I’m on the other side of it now (read = on a Claritin diet) though I still sound pretty frogged up. I’m working my way through Robert Polito’s After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace and Swirl & Vortex: The Collected Larry Levis. Going to Chicago this weekend. Texas at the end of the month as mentioned. Mexico City in mid-May for a friend’s wedding. One day during the week after Memorial Day I’ll hit the road for Sewanee and the next time you hear from me that’s probably where I’ll be.

HAIL DISASTER

I loved the first True Green record, My Lost Decade, a nine-song thirty-minute LO-FI marvel that split the difference between indie rock and bedroom pop. Dan Hornsby revealed an uncanny ability to conjure whole lives from scant handfuls of shrewdly chosen detail, which he delivered with almost pathological mellowness. My Lost Decade put me in mind of the great short story writers—Chekhov, Carver, Denis Johnson, Joy Williams—which by the way Dan also is. So let it be no slight to the debut if I observe that Hail Disaster is a warmer and a more cohesive album. It boasts more tracks (13) over more minutes (46), and the sound is bigger, more polished. Not “I heard it at Starbucks” polished, but expect more FI than last time.

Hail Disaster is a significant development but not a departure, a fresh chapter but hardly a hard break. Bright, pristine guitar welcomes us into “Italian Lightning,” a laconic comedy of continental dissolution. The fractured lullaby of “Falconry” glides on Tailer Ransom’s banjo like a raptor on a thermal. Lambent horns illuminate the shadows of “Sparrows and Lillies” like lighters sparked in the narthex of an abandoned church broken into on a dare. “Beatlemania” wouldn’t be out of place on a Silver Jews record—perhaps that underrated masterpiece, Tanglewood Numbers—which reminds me to mention that Dan Hornsby is one of the only contemporary musicians to successfully assimilate David Berman’s justifiably enormous influence without sinking into idolatry or imitation.

There’s a large cast, human and animal: Terry and his parrot, the falconer and his falcon, a flock of sparrows (ownerless), the smalltime hustlers of “Texas Instrument,” the beachcombers in “Bodysurfing,” Hamlet, Juliet, Yoko Ono, and the poor schmuck everyone calls “stupid Jonathan.” He’s not the only one suffering. Sonic warmth and puckish wordplay notwithstanding, these songs are dispatches from the eyes of storms. Or surveys of their aftermath. Just ask Bindi Sue Irwin, daughter of stingray-felled Steve, whose life and legacy are eulogized on “Bindi Sue.” “Terry’s Parrot” is about an uncle of Dan’s who died of AIDS in the 1990s, one of countless lives lost to the depraved malignity of the Reagan administration. And let’s be real: nobody who has ever genuinely wanted to “Consider the Priesthood” has needed—like the subject of this song—to be hectored into doing it. Dan’s vocals are mellow as ever, but the wisdom he’s sharing (also the jokes, stories, visions, and love) feels hard-won, wrested from the quenchless jaws of the disaster that his title hails.

About that title. It’s a line from a Bruce Witsiepe silkscreen made at the height of the AIDS crisis. Witsiepe’s work also contains the phrases “for I am twisted” and “let it come down.” All three are printed in white block letters over a muddy image of what I think is a monkey in a ruffled collar pulling on a rope connected to something out of frame. I don’t have provenance for “for I am twisted” (not biblical; I checked) but “let it come down” is from Macbeth, Act 3 Scene 3. It’s the First Murderer’s ironic reply to Banquo’s remark about the rain. The album’s stark title track brings Witsiepe’s phrases to haunting, meditative life. You may have noticed that the cover art also references Macbeth, by way of homage to a Sergei Eisenstein cartoon.

We encounter the Bard again in “Hamlet + Juliet,” which dares to imagine the un-dooming of two profoundly ill-starred lives. The song is narrated by Juliet and would likely be my favorite if I had to pick one, which, thankfully, I don’t. There are some lines toward the end that make me tear up a little every time I hear them. I take them for the ensouled heart, the viriditas, of True Green: “I don’t give a shit if it was meant to be / I don’t care about the stars or God’s cockamamie schemes / You’re handsome like a typo, I’m pretty like a smudge / We’ll push against the future, maybe it’ll budge.”

—Justin Taylor, October 2025

I did a deep dive into the work of Katherine Dunn. This piece took the better part of a year to research and write. Gratitude scarcely begins to describe what I feel for the editors at N+1 for giving it a home. It would mean a lot to me if you’d read it, and I think it will mean a lot to you to get to know the largely overlooked oeuvre of one of the best, weirdest writers that the Pacific Northwest has produced in the last fifty years. I also wrote the album bio for the new Iron & Wine record, out from Sub Pop in April. And, for The Harvard Review, a review of A Parish Chronicle, a late Halldor Laxness novel now appearing in English for the first time thanks to the good folks at Archipelago Books. And in case you missed them in last month’s missive, here is “Cold Open” aka the prologue to Reboot in the Brooklyn Rail, and my interview with Alaine Salierno Mason in The Sewanee Review, part of a special issue in tribute to Brad Watson.

I launched Reboot in paperback at the Franklin Park Reading series on January 12. Endless thanks to Penina Roth, who built this series from the ground up and has kept it thriving, welcoming, and fresh for going on two decades now. She is a tireless champion for literature, and for literary culture in New York City, and has been a supporter of my work for as long as I’ve had any work to go begging support for. She reminded me that my first Franklin Park reading was in December 2010, which would have been late in the same year that Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever came out, and a few short months before The Gospel of Anarchy. I loved being back at FP. I also loved roadtripping to Providence to read at Riff Raff Books with Emily Adrian, and to Kingston NY where Rough Draft Books had me in conversation with Ryan Chapman. It was wonderful visiting these incredible bookstores, seeing old friends who turned out on some bitterly cold nights, and driving around the northeast testing the limits of a rental Kia’s speaker system because RIP BOB WEIR. (This month’s playlist is a Weir extravaganza; elegiac annotated tracklist below but feel free to click through and throw it on now.)

On the drive back to the city from Kingston, I stopped in Dobbs Ferry to have coffee with John Williams, editor extraordinaire of the Washington Post Book World. We talked about pieces I might write for him over the course of the coming year. I’ve been a contributing writer at Book World for a few years now and John is one of the best editors I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. We had a lot to look forward to. That was January 15. The second week of February, as you probably know, the Post laid off more than 1/3 of its reporters across the entire paper, including the wholesale destruction of their sports and books sections. This means, among a lot of other grim things, that a country of 330 million people now has exactly one newspaper with a dedicated book review: the New York Times. The profession of book critic effectively no longer exists. It’s been years since it was anything like a “career” but we’re watching in real time as it is further de-professionalized from a side hustle into a hobby.

Which, of course, is increasingly true of literature itself. The Post collapse isn’t the cause of all this, but it is for me the moment at which the truth is no longer even plausibly deniable. As with climate collapse, we’ve passed the red lines, the cycles of destruction are accelerating, and this radical entropy cannot be chalked up to ignorance or misunderstanding. The science, so to speak, is clear. I recommend former WaPo book critic (and newly-minted New Yorker writer) Becca Rothfeld’s “The Death of Book World”, easily the best thing I’ve yet read about what’s been lost here. Also Lincoln Michel’s “Why Literature Needs a Punk Rock Mindset”, which makes a persuasive case for one way we can face the future. It’s not enough on its own, but it’s not nothing. And, of course you should read, subscribe to, and support the publications still making space for serious writing about serious literature, including but hardly limited to those—N+1, Sewanee Review, Harvard Review—that gave me those new bylines linked above.

This is worth saying plainly. The death of literature, and indeed of literacy, is a premeditated crime perpetrated by people for whom the damage and distress caused on the path to profit and control is a feature, not a bug. Again, this is also true of climate collapse. They want you and everyone you care about to become stupid, lonely, delusional, illiterate, and device-dependent. They want this because they hate you. Their vision of your life is immiseration, servitude, and death by early middle age. If that sounds hyperbolic, read Jeffrey Epstein’s letters to Peter Thiel and Joscha Bach. I don’t need you to believe me, but I do need you to understand what these sicko freaks believe about the future they’re building for themselves. May all their names be blotted out from the book of life.

Changing the subject, but not really, I want to talk about Bugonia, which I finally got around to watching. (NB: spoilers abound. To avoid these, scroll down until you see Marx and Yoko.) It runs long through the middle. It’s ham-handed, occasionally incoherent, and of course there are angles from which its politics are highly sus. But I like the logic of excess that governs Lanthimos’ work, how it rides on sheer energy and the strength of its images. I like that it is a highly controlled, formally precise exercise in making a crude mess. The entire plot line with the cop, for example, should feel totally unnecessary but instead becomes the warrant of the film’s reality (such as it is). One friend said the real subject of this film is that Lanthimos hates women. Another said Lanthimos’ wife forced him to shave Emma Stone’s head because she caught them having an affair during the shooting of Poor Things. The scene where Michelle Fuller (Stone) tries to explain that she’s actually a human woman even though she looks like a space alien is an incredible comic set piece, there and gone almost before you notice it. But the movie is barely about Michelle, she just happens to be at the center of it, which may or may not be a point in favor of my first friend’s position.

Anyway I don’t think the film’s politics are as sus as they first seem. Jesse Plemmons’ portrayal of Teddy Gatz invites an easy misreading as satire. I don’t think Lanthimos means it that way, but even if he is that doesn’t mean we have to take it that way. From his greasy hair to his shitty job to his self-castration to his ailing mother to his Male Loneliness(TM), we should insist on taking Gatz straight. He’s a highly representative, indeed realistic portrayal of the sort of person who becomes a degenerate loner due to unresolved personal trauma and self-radicalization on the internet. Sad desperate people become obsessed with stupid, bad ideas. And sometimes it turns them evil. (Not for nothing, but I wrote a whole-ass novel about this.) But they aren’t wrong to understand themselves as the victims of a malicious conspiracy perpetrated by a hateful cabal (see above). So the Teddys of the world are almost always simultaneously right in general and wrong in the particulars. And even if by chance right in the particulars, unequal to the scale of the problem. This is where the video game logic of conspiracy thinking always breaks down. Cf Teddy’s childish idea that once he uncovers the Andromedan conspiracy the aliens will simply HAVE TO negotiate with him. The boss of the dungeon has to hide the only weapon capable of defeating him somewhere in his dungeon and give you time to find it. Right? Of course not, idiot. Why would he do that? This is the thing that Eyes Wide Shut understands. And that Bugonia understands too, but which it expresses ironically by staging Teddy’s failure of understanding rather than through tracking Bill Hartford’s education.

The Zizekian reading of the ending (not the very ending, the ending of the plot) is that Teddy’s bomb doesn’t go off by accident. He kills himself rather than face the confrontation with absolute reality he has supposedly been after this whole time. The final confirmation of his beliefs represents the destruction of his inner life, which is entirely dependent on the search and investigation. The fact that his fantasies are real doesn’t make them not fantasies, nor does it make their collapse any less psychically damaging. So he dies in his belief rather than live to see that belief obliterated by the real.

See if you can spot the difference between these two images:

In light of the Epstein Files, you can read Bugonia as an allegory for Pizza Gate’s having been—as Zizek said of Heidegger’s Nazism—“not a simple mistake, but a right step in the wrong direction.” But really it’s a documentary about class: working full-time and still not being able to afford health car or a car. What happens when you’re cast in Eyes Wide Shut but you’re not Tom Cruise, you’re the janitor who mops up after the orgy, so when you stumble onto the forbidden truth nobody’s sending Sydney Pollack to give you a Scared Straight speech and let you off with a warning. It’s about having the Unabomber’s initials but not his engineering prowess or his contacts in the media. It’s about being victimized by monsters until all you know is monstrosity, so you start seeing monsters everywhere and become monstrous yourself and you’re wrong until you aren’t, at which point you learn that being able to identify a monster is hardly an advantage in a system built to protect and prize monstrosity.

Enough of this. Deep breath. New subject. I bring you glad tidings of jorts and rhythm guitar.

Bob Weir: a just exactly perfect memorial playlist

24 songs, 2 hours 33 minutes. The day I put this together we got our first full day of sun in I don’t know how long so I took a walk long enough to listen to the whole thing & made sure all the selections and sequencing were just exactly perfect. There are big things missing (“Music Never Stopped”, “Let It Grow”, “Throwing Stones”, anything over 15 minutes, anything with slide guitar) and each of these selections—other than “Oh Boy!”—could be swapped out for ten or twenty or fifty alternate versions just as good. But I have closed my vitamin D deficit and I stand by my sun-drenched judgment.

Promised Land, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2/26/73 - I never get tired of Spring ‘73 and I love this Chuck Berry cover. The way the Dead arrange this song, Bobby sings solo until the very last verse, circa 3:45 on this recording, when the narrator, having arrived in California, calls home. Now there are two voices singing “Los Angeles, give me Norfolk, Virginia / Tidewater four-ten-oh-nine / Tell the folks back home this is the promised land calling / The poor boy’s on the line.” The other singer is Jerry Garcia, of course, and this is an opener so it’s the first time that night the audience is hearing his voice. They go crazy. I wouldn’t call what Bob and Jerry are doing “harmony” exactly, it’s more like singing along together, the way you would with your best friend in your car.

Only a River - gorgeous track from Weir’s 2016 studio album Blue Mountain. He’s in Dylan mode all over this record, picking up fragments of folk songs (here “Shenandoah”, elsewhere “Little Maggie”, and so on) and integrating them into originals. Whole thing is worth a listen. He was 69 when this was released.

Saint of Circumstance, Nassau Coliseum 5/15/80 - May ‘80, in fact all of ‘80, is Peak Dead. This is a stellar performance of an underrated mid-period song, and a great case study in how the band evolved together. Bobby (and Brent! god love him) adopts a showboat rockstar attitude that Jerry never ever ever would, and sure it’s kinda cheesy but it whips the crowd into a frenzy and then that energy feeds back to Garcia, who goes into attack mode for his solo, which Weir btw is still underwriting with his rhythm playing, even as he keeps your eye on the birdie of his vamp and strut. If Weir’s scream at 3:54 doesn’t fix your day, nothing will.

Black-Throated Wind - studio version from Ace, Weir’s1972 solo album which, like most solo albums by members of the Dead, is a de facto Dead record. They’re all on it. I don’t understand why this song is not yet a country standard. It should be as canonical as “Drinkin’ Thing”, “If We Make It Through December”, or “The Race is On” which Weir does a great version of on Reckoning.

Dark Hollow and Cassidy - Speaking of Reckoning. Two Weir leads from the utterly monumental, un-over-estimatable album, about which an entire book could be written, ideally by me. “Dark Hollow” is a classic “trad. arranged by” cover (Bill Browning recorded it first, but I think he’s adapting something older) and “Cassidy” is one of Weir’s strongest originals. Reckoning was culled from a series of acoustic sets the band played in fall 1980 as part of their 15th anniversary celebration. This is either Radio City or the Warfield, I’m not sure, you could easily find out. Another great Bobby moment on Reckoning is his intro to Jesse Fuller’s “Monkey and the Engineer”, which he winkingly describes as “Another in our long list of tragedy songs….this one about tragedy narrowly averted.” Which needless to say is the exception not the rule.

Truckin’, 2/3/78 Wisconsin- Just had to pick one. Dig that whistle.

Greatest Story Ever Told, 4/3/22 - This is Radio City for sure. That’s Tyler Childers (b. 1991) guesting on lead vocals. Childers has the most unique voice in contemporary country music and he’s potentially one of the best songwriters working today, though he’s been wandering in the desert for years now. I take the long bet on Childers. If you’re looking for somewhere to start with him, go for Purgatory (which is excellent), Live on Red Barn Radio (which is perfect), and Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? which might well be the most bizarre baroque goofy and adventurous gospel record you ever hear. It’s the only good thing he’s released this decade and my faith in him abides forever because of it.

Silver Threads and Golden Needles, Fillmore East NYC, 5/15/70 - Ten years to the day before the “Saint of Circumstance” above. (And my father’s birthday, as it happens: 18 on this date, 28 on the other.) The narrator is a scorned wife, so you should really have a woman sing it: Wanda Jackson recorded the first version; Linda Ronstadt has a great one; so do Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, and Loretta Lynn from when they supergrouped for Honky Tonk Angels. But this ragged-but-right acoustic version of the Dead’s is my favorite. Weir finds a “She’s Acting Single, I’m Drinking Double”-type sorrow in the lyrics, which saves the performance from coming off like an eye roll and justifies its being sung by a man.

Oh Boy!, Berkeley 4/25/81 - Seems to have been a fundraiser for Sing Out! Presumably Pete Seeger was involved but I have no idea. Owsley “Bear” Stanley recorded this short set, which is billed as Jerry Garcia & Bob Weir (rare for them to appear as a duo) but Dead drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann are also pitching in, along with John Kahn, who played bass on a lot of Garcia solo projects. You should not need me to tell you this is a Buddy Holly cover but if you did, go listen to the original. It fucks twenty times harder than anything from 1957 has a right to. The same is true of “Not Fade Away”—the B-side to the “Oh Boy!” single—which the Dead covered in every decade of their career, turning Holly’s 2-minute ditty it into a psychedelic warhorse and band anthem, a love ode to and from their fans (on boots from the 90s the crowd chant of “you know our love will not fade away” can go on for four, five, six minutes) but that’s a Jerry song so we’ll talk about it some other time. If you told me that J. Edgar Hoover shot Holly’s plane down to try to prevent the 60s from happening, I’d believe you, because Buddy’s little growl on “Oh Boy!” has the whole Summer of Love inside it, not to mention the “Stray Cat Blues” and “If You Gotta Go, Go No (Or Else You Got To Stay All Night).” But Hoover waited too long; Dylan saw Holly play Duluth in 1959, two nights before the plane “crash.” The Beatles named themselves in homage to The Crickets and the first thing the Rolling Stones ever recorded was a cover of “Not Fade Away.” Anyway this ‘81 version is fun because everyone’s turning 40 now (except Weir, he’s 33) so nobody’s howling at the teenage moon, they’re just remembering—and having a laugh—about what it felt like to want to.

Jack Straw, Winterland 12/29/77 - The just exactly perfect brothers band. Plus Donna, doing her level best, as usual, to herd the cats.

When I Paint My Masterpiece, Cal Expo Center 5/27/93 - Jerry Garcia sings my favorite version of this Dylan song. The solo acoustic performance from Marin Veterans 2/28/86 is one of my favorite pieces of music ever recorded. It’s honestly annoying how when the Dead cover Dylan Jerry almost always gives Weir the vocal. It’s just—sorry—not as good. But Jerry’s genius with “Masterpiece” is to find and foreground all the beauty and sorrow and faith and joy of giving your life to art. He gives it the full Rilke, which is more than Dylan himself gave it. Weir retains Dylan’s touches of sarcasm and self-awareness: a truly faithful version of this song has to be both earnest and a little embarrassed about having caught yourself being earnest. Which is what Weir can do that Jerry either can’t or won’t. My preference for Garcia’s reading notwithstanding, we do in this case have to hand it to Weir. This performance from ‘93 is striking in that Weir seems to have a catch in his throat, maybe he’s getting sick or something. It makes him sound old (older than he’ll sound 20 years later on “Only a River”) and this gives it a Jerry-ish overlay of spiritual exhaustion, even as Weir sticks to the script and delivers Dylan’s cockeyed wisdom through his own shit-eating grin.

Playing In the Band, 7/29/88 - I don’t know where Laguna Seca is and I didn’t look. This wild version of “Playing” starts strong, slows to a crawl, then builds itself back up into a noise jam worthy of any “Caution” or “Viola Lee Blues” from 1968, or anything by Sonic Youth ever. There are versions of this song that earn every bit of their 20 or 40 minute run times. This one only needs to earn 12 and change, but boy howdy how it does.

Blackbird, Long Island, Fall ‘89 - Weir and Rob Wasserman are playing as a duo, opening for the Jerry Garcia Band. Six years later, when Garcia dies on August 9, 1995, Weir will be on tour with his band Ratdog. He will come out on stage alone and play this Beatles cover to open the show. You will be able to hear him crying on the bootleg. Nothing will be right in Deadworld for a very long time.

Eyes of the World, Oklahoma City 10/19/73 - Everyone thinks of this as a Jerry song, and it is, but the central riff is Weir and it’s his ability to listen to Jerry and work around him that makes the song (all the songs) possible. ‘73 is another Peak Dead year. I generally prefer spring to fall, but this show is killer. So is the three-night stand at Winterland, November 9, 10, 11.

Beat It On Down the Line, Carousel Ballroom SF, Valentine’s Day 1968 - A full minute of stage banter, then they rip through it (another Jesse Fuller favorite) like they think they’re the Minutemen or something else that doesn’t exist yet.

Samson and Delilah, Hartford May ‘77 - This whole show is spectacular.

Looks Like Rain, Oakland 12/26/79 - We are ON THE CUSP of 1980. We are geared up. We are ready. We have the just exactly perfect amount of cocaine and this song should be a country standard too.

El Paso, Oakland 10/10/76, Me & My Uncle (late 60s? this is from Skull & Roses) - it wouldn’t be Weirfest without these and don’t @ me about “Mexicali Blues”.

Estimated Prophet→Other One, Red Rocks 7/8/78 - There are better/longer/wilder “Other One”s, especially from 1972 (Europe; September) but they’re all half an hour long. (I refer you to my prior playlist set to: set two, ‘72.) “Estimated” gets a little woozy, like it’s been day-drinking in the heat. Then “Other One” explodes.

We Bid You Goodnight, Fillmore West 11/8/69 - A song of grief and jubilation. Weir, at 22, is the youngest person on the stage. He was 78 when he died.

Sugar Magnolia, Columbus Ohio, Halloween 1971 - Always good to go out on a high note. They usually played this as a closer or encore, and you can see why, but this version—from the first live Dead release I ever bought, not quite 16 years old, Aventura FL, spring 1998—is the second song of the second set, the first song having been a 23-minute “Dark Star” that altered for ever my entire understanding of what music could or should be. The main thing I remember about hearing this for the first time, other than that I loved it, is wondering how the guy who sings “Dark Star” could also be the guy who sings “Sugar Magnolia.” They don’t sound the same at all! But it has to be one guy, right, because this is the Grateful Dead and the lead singer of the Grateful Dead is Jerry Garcia. Everybody know that! But just listen: that cannot be the same guy. So okay, I guess there’s two guys. But if that’s true, Who’s this other guy?

It would have been better if I’d gotten this written two days ago, on the right side of the divide, or if I’d managed to write one a month ago, while Amanda and I were bouncing around New Zealand for a month on the trip of a lifetime, but of course the latter did not happen because, as I said: bouncing round, trip of lifetime. We hiked Tongariro Crossing, saw a sperm whale from a plane, ate a lot of savory hand pies. I got used to other-side driving pretty quickly; it’s easy to remember which side of the road to be on because it’s the one all the other cars going your way are on. Took longer to stop hitting my wipers when trying to signal, and to figure out how to gauge where the car actually was in space, but I got there. We had fish and chips and lobster (they call them crayfish) at roadside stands. We saw seal pups. We hiked the first stage of the Routeburn track, spent the night in a shelter on the mountain, then got turned back on account of weather. At the city museum in New Plymouth I liked the look of a jacket in an otherwise grim exhibit about the colonization of the island. Since the wall text bothered to mention the brand, I wondered if they were still a going concern. Turned out the store was around the corner and everything I wanted was on deep discount because it’s summer there. My winter look is settler-colonial chic. Sorry not sorry. We saw wild parrots and kiwi and tui and glowworms and longfin eel. The Milky Way at Lake Tekapo, if only for a few precious minutes before the clouds rolled in. We hiked along the coast in Abel Tasman National Park. I went to a pinball hall in Wellington and beat the Guns N Roses machine; when I won, it took my picture like at the end of Splash Mountain and then photoshopped me into an image where I was being congratulated by Slash. I took a picture of the picture (not pictured), gave the rest of my tokens to a ten-year-old and left to catch a ferry. We hiked Sealy Tarns at Mount Cook (see above). We went to a lakeside concession where the only thing they sell is alpine salmon sashimi (see below).

I read Lonesome Dove, David Copperfield, and All Our Yesterdays. I bought Claire Keegan’s first collection, Antarctica, which has a few great stories in it plus three set in the American south that are so wrongheaded I felt at least as ashamed of myself for reading them as I did on her behalf for having written them. I bought Pip Adam’s first collection, Everything We Hoped For, and liked it so much I picked up one of her novels, I’m Working on a Building. I knew the used bookstore in Dunedin was going to be good because it was called DEAD SOULS. I bought Muriel Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate in pocket paperback and a hardcover decommissioned library copy of Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s A Gilded Lapse of Time. She writes long erudite wrenching meditative poems about faith and grief, often grounded in deep readings of art and/or history, and/or mythology. The poems can feel a little chilly or unapproachable unless/until you give yourself over to them. She’s one of my favorites. It’s hard to talk about the trip in any comprehensive way because we did so much, went so many places, it was its own whole universe, not really what Schnackenberg means by a gilded lapse of time, or what Amitava Kumar means by A Time Outside of Time (his very fine novel) but both phrases come to mind so here they are.

Let’s do a little business.

This is your final reminder that Reboot is out in paperback on January 13. I will be supporting the release with some January events: the 12th in Brooklyn at the Franklin Park Reading Series; the 13th in Providence, RI at Riff Raff Books in conversation with Emily Adrian (whose Substack Secret Third Thing you should be reading); the 14th in Kingston, NY at Brunette wine bar with Ryan Chapman; the 23rd back in Portland in conversation with Natan Last about his new book, Across the Universe. Later in the spring I’ll be in Nashville and Boise. More about those later. I’d love to see you at one of these readings. Come say hello if you make it out.

A recap of what I published in 2025.

Fiction:

“A Star in the Book of Liars” appeared in Granta in February. My favorite of my own stories of the past few years and lead candidate for title story of my next collection if/when I ever get to publish one.

“Wild Silence” appeared in Epoch this fall. Extreme gratitude to J. Robert Lennon for giving it a home. I wrote a bit about its long gestation period in the August issue of this newsletter.

“What About This”, which first appeared in the Harvard Review in 2024, was anthologized in this year’s Best American Short Stories, edited by Celeste Ng.

“Cold Open”, an excerpt from Reboot, is in the current issue of The Brooklyn Rail. Thank you, Will Chancellor.

Nonfiction:

Back in January, Shy Watson interviewed me for The Creative Independent.

In September, Josh Cook interviewed me for his substack, Book(ish). I wrote a little thing for the Book(ish) YiR but it isn’t up yet.

“The Sentence Is a Place to Play”, a craft talk on acoustics and aesthetics, appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of The Sewanee Review. I also wrote a short piece for the SR website about Mary Gaitskill, and interviewed Alane Salierno Mason for the Fall 2025 issue, a special tribute to the life and work of Brad Watson, which I helped organize. For all this and much more, Adam Ross, Eric Smith, and Luke Gair cannot be thanked enough. If you do not subscribe to SR yet, do it now. Just take a minute and do it right now.

“Michael Hurley was the Folk Hero of Portland” appeared in the fall issue of Portland Monthly.

I reviewed Binnie Kirshenbaum’s Counting Backwards and Katie Kitamura’s Audition for The Washington Post. I loved both. The Kitamura I assume you’ve heard about by this point, but if the Kirshenbaum slipped under your radar, consider giving it a look. Back in March I made an early call that this would be the “feel-bad novel of the year.” Meant as a compliment, obviously. Now that the year is done I can confirm that my prediction was accurate.

I reviewed the most recent Carl Hiaasen for The New York Times. It sucks. I said so. “Mueller, She Wrote” caught a stray and got mad at me on Bluesky. That was fun.

And that was that.

Some recommendations, if you’re in the market:

My favorite debut novels of 2025: Flat Earth by Anika Jade Levy, Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno, and Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp.

Loved and Missed - novel by Susie Boyt. Wrenching, brilliant, beautiful, grim, profoundly pathic—instant classic in the personal canon.

Goddess Complex Sanjena Sathian’s excellent second novel, which came out in March, and which R.O. Kwon in the NYTBR described as “Haunting and hilarious, Goddess Complex is at once a satire, a Gothic tale, a novel of ideas, a character study.” All true.

Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs by John Berryman, edited by Shane McRae. Still working my way through this one but I’m so glad it exists.

“Jessie & Lady Jesus” - a short story by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips in The Baffler. I am a big ABP fan, have been for a long time. I got to hear her read and meet IRL for the first time when I was in New York this fall.

Either/Or magazine - a new lit journal I’m excited about, edited by the great essayist Barrett Swanson and featuring—among many wonderful pieces—debut fiction from the (also great) critic Becca Rothfeld.

“Large Language Muddle” - Literally the only thing you ever need to read about AI. And while we’re over at the N+1 website let us not fail to shout out Lisa Borst’s “New TV Novels,” a capacious and astute piece of criticism in which I was honored to find Reboot included.

“The Good Squad” by Daniel Kolitz. The article of the year. When your grandchildren have to study the first half of the 21st century in AP history, this will be assigned reading and several rightwing families will file lawsuits to prevent their kids from having to read it.

Old Trails - new album from Forrest Van Tuyl. A pleasure in any format but I recommend ordering the CD so you can play it in your car. Cranked up real good, it soon had me talking my way out of a ticket at the Wyoming/Nebraska line.

Snocaps S/T - Two Crutchfields, one Cook, and the only Lenderman. Sure Geese is great and all but give it five years and looking back it’ll be obvious that this was the stronger record.

What of Our Nature - Haley Hendrickx and Max Garcia Conover’s long-awaited second collaboration. Long-awaited by Emily, that is, who told me about the first one, Among Horses III, after this one came out. Dig both.

Life of the Record podcast - Always a solid listen but the Psychocandy episode is not to be missed.

Looking at the year to come, Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash is out on the 13th of this month. I read it in galleys and it’s killer. If you haven’t heard about it yet, you will soon. Halldor Laxness’ A Parish Chronicle (translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton) is coming in February courtesy of Archipelago books. And I just got a galley of Cecilia Eudave’s The Summer of the Serpent (Soho Press, June; translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers) and it went straight to the top of my TBR pile.

And Hail Disaster, the new True Green album, is coming in the spring. Sooner than later at this point, I think. Here are a couple of tracks from it. I wrote the liner notes for this record. I love it so much.

Happy new year.

My class at the Columbia MFA meets once a week on Wednesday evenings. I love my class. There are a dozen of them and we’ve got just enough room around the table for everyone. The first week I was here I had to get a new faculty ID. At the ID office the computer still had my old picture on file from Fall 2010. It was a four-week Master Class, my first graduate-level teaching experience. I was 28 years old. My first book had come out that February. I’d just met my now-wife. (We celebrated our 10th anniversary in July.) I direct an MFA program now. My fifth book will be out in paperback in January. I’m back in the classroom at Columbia for the first time since 2015, once more teaching a Master Class. Six weeks, this time. The theme is BIG MINIMALISM, we’re reading very short novels and very short stories. (More on this below.) Last night was week four. But what a wild feeling it was, there in the ID office, to see that stranger, that kid, staring back at me from the university computer. “It’s recognizably you,” the student employee said, “so if you want to we could just use that one. But the usual policy, I mean, when the picture is more than ten years old we’re supposed to…” If this new picture lasts me as long as the last one did, in the next one I’ll be 58 and it will be this version of me who looks like a kid.

It’s great being back in the city. I’m usually here for four or five days, usually in January. It’s never enough time to see everyone I want to see or eat all the food I want to eat or do what I did the other day, which was lay on the couch and read a book all day, because I’m here for long enough that I don’t constantly feel like the clock is running out on me. Though it is, of course. If you’re here and we haven’t managed to see each other yet, please do not take personally my having failed to get my shit together and reach out. Just reach out to me. I want to see you. I’m staying near Barclays Center. I can meet you anywhere.

Best American Short Stories 2025, in which my story “What About This” appears, is out on Tuesday. I’m excited to see the finished copy and find out what else is in it. I’m also excited to attend next week’s Selected Shorts event at Symphony Space celebrating the volume.

I wrote a piece honoring the life and music of Michael Hurley for the fall issue of Portland Monthly. As regular readers know, Snock is a big one for me. He shows up a lot on my playlists and is never too far from my mind. His posthumous record, Broken Homes and Gardens, is out now. Strong recommend. Also recommend this recent piece on Hurley in n+1, which covers some of the same ground as mine but is a bit more expansive and also serves as a review of the new record.

“Voice Is the God of Story” - I was interviewed by Josh Cook for his book(ish) newsletter. We talked about Reboot, revision, writing from and toward voice; also Tanglewood Numbers, which turns 20 this month, and the Delta Sky Lounge, where as it happens I am (yet again) currently sitting. In an hour I fly to Nashville to drive to Sewanee for a couple of days, then back to NYC on Wednesday to teach (and go to the BASS event), then Thursday I’m off to Lubbock to be a visiting writer at Texas Tech. Saturday I’m back in NYC for a couple more weeks. And then I’m going home.

Street date for the Reboot paperback is January 13, 2026. People don’t tend to make a huge deal about paperback launches, and that’s fine, but just to say: If anyone out there is interested in considering it/me for spring programming—events, interviews, reviews, excerpts, whatever—don’t be shy. I’m sure I want to do whatever it is you want me to do. Just ask me! They gave the novel this amazing new cover:

The first weekend I was here I got to read with a bunch of great young writers at the KGB Bar for the Car Crash Collective. I went to the launch party for Forever magazine #8. I went to Greenlight Bookstore to see Jonathan Lethem read from his New & Selected Stories. I went to the Patio reading series at TJ Byrnes to see my friends Alec Niedenthal, Anika Jade Levy, and John Wolfe read with Ashleigh Bryant Phillips and some other folks. I’ve been a fan of ABP for years but we’d never met in person.

I’ve been spending a lot of time at the Center for Fiction. I’ve not normally interested in “co-working spaces” but this place is so welcoming and comfortable (and, conveniently, five blocks from where I’m staying) that it feels very natural to walk up there most days and settle in for a few hours. After a long dry spell I’m finally—haltingly, but actually—writing fiction again. I’m waiting for final edits on a couple of projects that I’ll hopefully be able to link to in the dispatch after this one.

The best slice pizza I’ve eaten this trip was at the improbably/delightfully named Homeslice II on 4th Ave and Dean Street. It was also the cheapest. The best Neapolitan brick-oven style pizza was at a once-a-week sidewalk pop-up whose location and hours I was forbidden from revealing because my friends who live near it don’t want to see it get too big too fast. I was also impressed by this place Emily on Fulton Street; Willie and I split a pepperoni pie and an order of gochujang wings. And Frank Pepe’s of New Haven is excellent, but slightly irrelevant to this discourse insofar as it’s in New Haven. I’ve made a couple trips up there to see Emily (a person, not the pizza place on Fulton Street) and her family: Dan, Ramona, Sammy, and Wes, who was in a bit of a mood on that second visit but looked great in his werewolf costume and gave me a manicure in a lovely deep purple-red that I still can’t get out of my cuticles. At Grey Matter, the venerable used bookstore across the street from Yale, I scored a hardcover of John Ashbery’s collected art criticism for seven bucks.

The chicken parm at Milano Market (Broadway & 113th) is up to $16.50 but it is (a) as good as ever and (b) so big I made two meals out of it, which is not something I’m normally able to say about a sandwich. At $8.25 per meal it is a stone cold bargain. Golden Shanghai, at the corner of Bayard & Mott, is my new favorite restaurant in Chinatown. Their salt and pepper squid is better than Joe Ginger’s. I’ve been going there for years now but I think I just realized it’s my favorite. Golden Shanghai is another place I could meet you, if you’re trying to meet up with me. I went there with Todd after he took me to see his friends MMeadows play a secret show in the basement of a restaurant on Mulberry Street. I hadn’t been to a show this intimate in a long time. I went in with very little idea of what to expect. It was a knockout performance. Moody, heady, at once understated and baroque. And lead singer Kristin Slipp has to be heard live to be believed. I’m still not quite sure I believe it.

It’s been a banner week for Chinese food. Charley and I went to Oh Dumplings, which Amanda had recommended after going there with our friend Lydah a few weeks ago. Oh Dumplings is a hole in the wall on S Oxford Street just off of Lafayette. We split shrimp dumplings, beef dumplings, and a spicy sweet pork bing. I bought a jar of their chili oil to bring back to the apartment. A couple days later, Carlos and I went to Nom Wah Tea Parlor. We got rice noodle rolls and more dumplings and the best salt-and-pepper pork I’ve ever eaten.

I met up with Adam at BookCulture (Broadway & 112th) one Wednesday after his class let out but before mine started. I bought the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, which I started on the LIRR to JFK this morning. It’s my next big reading quest after completing John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series: 21 novels that I started collecting and reading in chronological order back in late 2023. I finished the last one, The Lonely Silver Rain, last night right before going out to meet Willie for the pizza and wings mentioned above. At the end of the novel, McGee is hosting a party on his houseboat and basically feeling good for a change, but he takes a quiet moment to himself to think about all the people who should be there but aren’t. The names of the dead run through his mind in a paragraph-long litany. I burst into tears.

I pulled myself together and finished the book, the series, the quest. I had a half hour walk to the restaurant so I put on Blood on the Tracks and thought about my father, who loved these books too. Now that I’ve read them I suspect his reasons for loving them would have been pretty different from mine. And of course my reason for reading them in the first place is him. I have a lot more to say about this, but while I was on my walk I made an Instagram post about finishing the series and an editor I work with saw it and wrote to me to commission a piece about my experience, so I’m saving my material for the assignment, which, if all goes well, you’ll be able to read sometime in January.

I’m in the process of leaving Spotify. Apple Music has far worse UX but considerably better sound and (comparatively) better business practices. I’m offering this issue’s playlist in both Spotify and Apple formats.

1. “You Should Know By Now”, Mmeadows - lead-off spot for the fresh new find.

2. “Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed”, Silver Jews - it’s the 20th anniversary of Tanglewood Numbers, as mentioned above. If you haven’t played this record all the way through lately, you should.

3. “County Line (feat. Alan Sparhawk)”, Chrissie Hynde - from her new covers record, Duets Special.

4. “Phish Pepsi”, Wednesday - from Bleeds, as if you needed me to tell you.

5. “Indian Chiefs and Hula Girls”, Michael Hurley - my favorite song from the latest and late Broken Homes and Gardens.

6. “Getting Killed”, Geese - All anyone in Brooklyn is talking about. (Well, this and polyamory.)

7. “Say So”, Augustus Pablo & King Tubby - a little cool down after all that getting killed.

8. “Walk Between the Raindrops”, James McMurtry - his newest single.

9. “Moanin’”, Bobby Timmons - came across it, feels real good.

10. “It Might Have Been”, Neil Young - another one from Neil’s vaults, and why not? I thought this was a cover but it seems to be an original. A Hank Williams homage I dare say.

11. “6 Months Later”, Megan Maroney - the grownups are trying to have a conversation but Wes wants it cranked up loud. He’s right tbh.

12. “The Whole of the Moon”, the Waterboys - I like this song.

13. “To Live Is to Fly”, Jackie O Motherfucker - great Townes cover from possibly the last people from whom I’d expect a Townes cover. This is on the 20th anniversary reissue of Flags of the Sacred Harp.

14. “Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation”, jasmine.4.t - I don’t know what this is or where I found it. Have not yet clicked through to find out if I like anything else about this group but I guess I should/will?

15. “All in Good Time”, Iron & Wine with Fiona Apple - not to bury the lede but I interviewed Sam Beam the other day for a thing I’m working on. Been digging deep into his catalogue old and new. This is from the most recent record.

16. “Midnight Moonlight”, Jerry Garcia Band live at Veteran’s Hall 3/22/78 - A particularly strong version of a JGB standard with a jam that goes harder and farther than expected. Jerry had laryngitis in January ‘78 and it permanently changed his singing voice, leaving it lower but fuller, with that sandpaper edge that defines the late-Jerry sound, from bops like “Touch of Gray” and “Iko Iko” to the Rilkean desolation of “Stella Blue” and “So Many Roads.” That sound is born here in Spring ‘78. You can still hear the gritty dregs of the January illness in his voice.

I want to close by sharing my syllabus for Big Minimalism. I previewed the book list in the last newsletter, but I thought people might be curious to see which flash fictions I picked to pair with the novels. If there’s something you want to check out and cannot acquire through legitimate means feel free to shoot me an email and I can get you a PDF. (Of the flash stuff, that is. Not bootlegging novels for you.) And if you do not care about the syllabus for a grad class you’re not taking, no hard feelings. I’ll catch you next time.

Big Minimalism: The Short Novel and the Very Short Story

Professor Justin Taylor

Dates: Sep. 24 - Oct. 29

Meeting Weds, 5:15pm-7:15pm, Dodge 411

Office hours: 4:15-5:15, Office F (or by appointment)

In this class, we’re going to look at compression and minimalism in both the novel and the story. We will accept William Blake’s invitation to “see a World in a Grain of Sand... And Eternity in an hour,” purge ourselves of the presumption that length is strictly correlative to depth of meaning or breadth of plot, and discover just how much can be done with just how little. We’ll read a selection of short novels/novellas alongside very short stories, to explore how spareness, swiftness, and lacunae operate at different scales. In posing this question we will learn craft lessons about structure, precision, editing, and control.

September 24 - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark (1961)

Allan Gurganus, “It Had Wings”

Leonard Michaels, “Murderers”

Rebecca Schiff, seven stories from The Bed Moved: “The Bed Moved,” “Longviewers,” “Men Against Violence,” “My Allergies Will Charm You,” “Keep an Eye On It,” “What We Bought,” “Third Person”

October 1 - That Smell, Sonallah Ibrahim translated by Robyn Creswell (1966; new trans. 2013)

Joy Williams, “Marabou”

Stuart Dybek, “Pet Milk”

Amy Hempel, six stories from The Collected Stories: “Breathing Jesus,” “To Those of You Who Missed Your Connecting Flights Out of O’Hare,” “And Lead Us Not Into Penn Station,” “Church Cancels Cow,” “The New Lodger,” “Memoir”

October 8 - Winter in the Blood, James Welch (1974)

Yasunari Kawabata, “five Palm-of-the-hand Stories” and “Gleanings from Snow Country”

Christine Schutt, “Weather Is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful”

Diane Williams, ten stories from The Collected Stories: “Science and Sin or Love and Understanding,” “A More Detailed Account of this Is Out of the Question,” “My Reaction to Life,” “The Dirty Necklace,” “Okeydoke,” “The Fuss,” “Thank You,” “The Suitor,” “Here’s Another Ending,” “All American”

October 15 - Mrs Caliban, Rachel Ingalls (1982)

James Purdy, three from the Collected Stories: “Mud Toe the Cannibal,” “Dawn,” “The Candles of Your Eyes”

Kimberly King Parsons, “In Our Circle” and “The Animal Part”

Garielle Lutz, seven stories from Stories in the Worst Way: “Being Good in October,” “Susceptibility,” “It Collects In Me,” “Mine,” “Steep,” “The Daughter,” “People Are Already Full”

October 22 - Lucy, Jamaica Kincaid (1990)

Grace Paley, five from the Collected Stories: “Wants,” “Living,” “A Conversation with My Father,” “In this Country, but in Another Language, My Aunt Refuses to Marry the Men Everyone Wants Her To,” “This Is a Story About my Friend George, the Toy Inventor”

John Keene, three stories from Counternarratives: “Persons and Places,” “Mannahatta,” “Anthropophagy”

Justin Torres, three chapters from We the Animals: “Never-never Time,” “We Wanted More,” “Trash Kites”

October 29 - Point Omega, Don DeLillo (2010)

Barry Hannah, “Even Greenland”

Lynne Tillman, “Save Me From the Pious and the Vengeful”

Kevin Brockmeier, stories 24-31 from The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories

Lucy Corin, from One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses

I’ve driven 5000 miles since I sent my last letter, not counting circling Iceland on the Ring Road. (Those were kilometers.) Portland to Nashville in mid-May. Stopped in Twin Falls, then Laramie, then Columbia, Missouri (800 mile day LOL) and then Nashville. Left the car behind, flew to Reykjavik where Amanda and I did a week of exploring before I did a week of teaching. (Writing Workshops hosts retreats all around the world. I’m teaching for them again in Dublin next May.) Flew Reykjavik to Nashville, drove to Sewanee. Six weeks of MFA summer session somehow came and went. Classes went well, friends paid visits. Listened to a lot of music, sang along to some. Chicken wings and chicken strips, fried pickles in both chip and spear varietal. At the Blue Chair, Hornsby ordered a gin and tonic and the bartender asked if he wanted it “neat.” Had a birthday in there somewhere. The girls down the block hosted parties. Our other neighbor owns a famous cave and gave a bunch of us free tickets to see Old Crow Medicine Show in his cave. We traded memoirs—mine about my father, his about an uncle and brother (and also his cave). We both quote the Silver Jews a lot and both our books end with the word “home.” Sewanee back to Nashville (90). Nashville to Tulsa (600) for the World of Bob Dylan Conference, where I was on a panel with Andrew Martin, Kimberly King Parsons, and Mark Doten, discussing Dylan’s influence on the contemporary novel. Met Double E flagger extraordinaire Ray Padgett and checked out the new Newport ‘65 exhibit at the Dylan Center, where, as you may recall, I spent some time last summer and wrote a big piece about for Bookforum. Saturday night there was a concert at Cain’s Ballroom celebrating the 60th anniversary of Dylan going electric: Lee Ranaldo, Nels Cline, Mikael Jorgensen, Steve Shelley, Robyn Hitchcock, Dean & Britta, Sunny War, Joy Harjo, Emma Swift, and John Doe. Spectacular show; if you want to hear more about it, check out Ray’s recap.

Tulsa to Golden, Colorado (700) to see my sister. Golden to Tremonton, Utah (a respectable 550) by way of Green River so I could make my now-annual pilgrimage to Tacos La Pasadita. Got up early in Tremonton, took a side trip to see Spiral Jetty and, uh, the Northrop Grumann Rocket Garden. From there to Boise (a laughable 260) where I stayed over to see friends, hit the best Jewish deli in the Mountain West, and rest up for the final push (430) home. Which is where I am how. Bit of a crash (not to say, as the kids do, a “crash out”) into stillness after all that velocity but Portland’s having a nice mild summer. Sunny yesterday, gray today. Did some yard work this week, got the car detailed and her oil changed. Eating Rainier cherries with the windows open. Don’t be denied, which is Neil not Bob, but even so. Or all the more.

I made this playlist for the drive home. The first half is songs about leaving, travel, and movement; the second half traces my route. Also this one of cuts from the deeper depths of Neil Young. Don’t be denied.

In June I published a review of Carl Hiaasen’s Fever Beach in the NYTBR. A miserable book to read but a fun piece to write. In the end I pulled some punches because the word limit meant I didn’t have the space to substantiate my biggest objection, namely that you cannot write a political satire set in contemporary Florida without addressing the fact that Miami-Dade County went red in 2024 for the first time since 1988, and why: (1) the explosion of crypto culture and its relation to real estate speculation; (2) rising anti-immigrant sentiment in established Latin American communities, particularly though not exclusively Cuban; and (3) the rightward shift of historically liberal Jewish communities like the one I grew up in, whose Zionism has slowly but surely eclipsed every other political/ethical principle they’ve ever held. A Florida novel that mentions none of these things is like a book set in the Sahara that doesn’t mention sand.

I’ve got a new short story in the excellent journal Epoch (print only). “Wild Silence” (yet another title borrowed from David Berman) has had perhaps the longest gestation period—and most troubled submission history—of any I’ve published, in part because the narrator is a writer writing about writing at a writing residency, which I was told any number of times to change or at least deemphasize. What mattered to me about this story from the first draft of the first page was the narrator’s voice. It was, first and finally, her in whom I believed and on whom I refused to give up, and this was what she had to say. Coincidentally, “Wild Silence” is set largely in Iceland, where I was when I first drafted it back in late 2016. It also has one of my favorite endings I’ve ever written. I hope you’ll read it and see for yourself.

I share my experience with this story as an example in my craft talk on revision. I tell the students that when you’re getting the same critique over and over from multiple editors, you should take it seriously because any one person can be wrong but a pattern rarely is. (This is also why most workshops mostly work.) But sometimes, I hasten to add, you should not take the critique in terms of its explicit instruction to change X element of the story, but rather as a sign that you have not yet pushed X element to its condition of necessity, to the point where an editor can accept or reject the story but cannot question the decisions that have made it what it is. Don’t be denied, baby. Sometimes when they say “cut” what you should hear is “double down.”

Nobody can decide for you when to take the note and when to double down. In most cases, I try to take the notes I’m given, if only to see what the exercise reveals to me about the editor’s point of view. It’s their magazine, after all, so my piece needs to serve their vision as well as my own. “Wild Silence” is one of I think three stories where I never considered taking the note. (The other two that come to mind are “A Night Out,” which is in Flings, and “The Bridge After It’s Gone,” which was in a recent issue of ZYZZYVA.) In each case, I kept doubling down, over and over, in pursuit of that necessity which in my mind already existed but apparently still needed proving on the page. When I found the editor who shared my vision I was thrilled, relieved, grateful, vindicated. But I also had to wonder, Would the version of the story that existed three or five years ago (which, at either time, I’d have told you was finished) have been accepted if I’d sent it to him then? I mean was the key difference having done the necessary work or having found the right reader? It’s probably some of both but there’s no way to know. What matters is the story has a home.

I am preparing to teach a six-week fall master class at the Columbia MFA, which by the way means I will be in the BIG APPLE from September 20 - November 5, so please let me know if you’ll be around and want to hang out. The class is called Big Minimalism and it will pair short novels with flash fictions to explore how theories and practices of minimalism work at different scales of execution. I’ll post the reading list when it’s ready. In the meantime, here are some good books I’ve read lately, the first four are new releases, the other two are not:

Fresh, Green Life by Sebastian Castillo - Very funny, very smart, gets weird so gradually you almost don’t notice how weird it’s getting and then you’re in high weirdville. A brief bravura performance, readable in one sitting though I’d suggest letting the first half settle before you dive into the second.

Dr Chizhevsky’s Chandelier: The Decline of the USSR and Other Heresies of the Twentieth Century by Dan Elkind - truly sui generis and excellent, billed as “experimental nonfiction” by its publisher, the great Repeater Books, it’s the story of the inventor of heliobiology that is also a history of Russian Jewish anarchism and mushroom foraging and Dan’s own story and much more besides.

Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian - I am betting you’ve already heard about this one. I am here to tell you it is as good as you’ve heard and in fact better. Also, as mentioned, she knew about the taco place in Green River.

God and Sex by Jon Raymond - Tore through this one. A quietly disquieting meditation on the nature of love, faith, art, and trees. Some of the best writing about the act of writing—what it actually feels like to go from not writing a book to writing a book to having written one—that I’ve ever read.

The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem - sort of like a Philip K. Dick-scripted episode of Futurama that speedruns The Matrix into The Man Who Was Thursday.

The Dreadful Lemon Sky by John D. MacDonald - Still working through the complete Travis McGee. This is 16 of 21 and did not disappoint. Next up, The Empty Copper Sea.

Well, Reboot is one year old. It’s a bittersweet anniversary. By most outward measures, the novel is a success. It got the best reviews of all my books, including the cover of the New York Times Book Review and Notable Book of the Year nods from the NYT and the Washington Post. There were excerpts in N+1 and Forever magazines. (Credit to Forever intern Jack Lamborn for the image above.) I got to travel a bunch for it, see old friends and make new ones—all the stuff you hope for. Then some stuff you don’t hope for. My editor was very publicly fired shortly after the book was published. In her absence, my publisher’s interest shall we say waned and they have since decided to push the paperback to February 2026 (sidebar: LOL) which is why I’m not telling you about a release date or launch events. Anyway, happy birthday to it. I hope you’ll consider picking up a copy if you haven’t. And of course my deepest gratitude to everyone who already has.

Okay. Enough poor-mouthing. My short story, “What About This,” which appeared in The Harvard Review in December, will be appearing in Best American Short Stories 2025, edited by Celeste Ng, available in October. This is my first time in BASS. I’m very excited and proud. I recently reviewed two excellent novels for the Washington Post: Binnie Kirshenbaum’s Counting Backwards and Katie Kitamura’s Audition. It was unusually serendipitous—and challenging—to review these two books so close to each other, for the same publication, given their considerable similarities: both focus on middle-aged childless hetero couples living in NYC, narrated by the wife. Oh and the last names of the writers put them literally side by side on my bookshelf. Of course, they diverge in pretty much every other way imaginable (theme, style, plot, tone, etc.) and each is a striking success on its own terms, so in the end it was just this weird little cosmic rhyme probably noticed by nobody other than me. And they both fall into that all-but-vanished category of book that Virginia Woolf called “novels for grown-up people.”

I was invited to be part of Storyfort this year (thank you, Sam Berman) which meant I got to spend five days in Boise hanging out with Anika Jade Levy, Taylor Lewandowski, Megan Nolan, Rosalind Margulies, Nathan Dragon, Raegan Bird, Kayla Jean, Harris Lahti, and a whole bunch of other writers. Other than Megan, Anika, and Taylor, I’d never met any of these people before, though I knew some of them through their work. Nearly all of them knew each other already, from different corners of indie lit and/or previous years at Storyfort. I picked up Nathan Dragon’s collection The Champ Is Here (published by Lahti’s Cash 4 Gold books) as well as Kayla Jean’s Cheap Seats, which Nathan and Rae published through their Blue Arrangements Press.

All the literary events were in the upstairs room at a restaurant a few blocks off the main drag in downtown Boise. It quickly came to feel like our living room, though there was (thank you, Sam) an actual audience for every event, so we weren’t just reading to each other. I ended up giving four readings/panels over the course of the festival and for my own reasons (see above) didn’t read from the novel once. Instead I made choices based on the nominal subject of the given conversation, my own mood in the moment, and what I thought would interest this group of writers I was having such a good time getting to know. I read my story from Forever magazine, the story that’ll be in BASS, this one that was in American Short Fiction a few years ago, and this one that was in BOMB (and from which this newsletter takes its name). It felt good to be part of a pack like that. Most of the time I spend most of my time alone.

So we all got festival passes and I got to see a bunch of shows, many of which I can’t even tell you what they were. I just kept going to stuff. But Taylor and I caught the Icelandic band Mum—at his insistence, and such a great call—and I went by myself to see Humbird play an afternoon set at the bandshell, which meant I happened to also be around for the reunited Be Your Own Pet, which was a lot of fun. I’ve been trying to see Humbird for over a year now. I bought a shirt from their merch table as their set was being threatened by a high wind warning. The next morning, after scraping myself off the floor of my hotel room, I threw it on and walked over to Goldstein’s, the best Jewish deli in the Mountain West, and who should be sitting at the counter but all three members of Humbird, who appreciated my wearing their shirt and we got to talking and it turns out we have some mutual friends and the band told me they were going to be at Mississippi Studios in Portland the following Thursday so I went and saw them a second time and it was just as good, maybe better. But before that—still in Boise—there was Jake Xerxes Fussell playing a gorgeous midnight set at a Christian coffee shop, and then Bright Eyes, who headlined Sunday night on the main stage to a packed outdoor crowd who sang along to every word.

I hadn’t seen Bright Eyes since 2005 when Conor Oberst did back to back acoustic/electric tours for the simultaneously released I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. I was living in Portland then (for the first time) and he came through twice and I went to both. I’d barely thought about Bright Eyes since those days, until a month or two ago when Oberst and Mike Mogis did an episode of Life of the Record about the making of I’m Wide Awake. I was shocked at how compelling I found the story, and that I still knew the record by heart. I don’t know that I would have stuck around Treefort a whole extra day just to see Oberst, but he’s Anika’s favorite and Sam comped me a bonus night at the hotel and I was able to change my flight for free and we all went together—all the writers who hadn’t had to leave town yet—and it was perfect.

A couple weeks later I saw Peter Rowan with the Sam Grisman Project at the Aladdin Theater. I had reached out to Peter for an interview for something I’m working on and he graciously invited me to come to the venue early to catch soundcheck and hang out before the show. I met his family, and Sam Grisman and most of Sam’s band. The Grisman Project played first, followed by a set with Peter focused on songs from his Old & In the Way era. I shouldn’t have to tell you that Peter is a living legend. Sitting in that little dressing room, him trying to get through a story about the day he first met Jerry Garcia while his wife gently interrupts to make sure he’s eating enough, is something I’ll remember for the rest of my life. That and hearing him play this song. He told me a funny story about meeting Dylan at Newport the night before he went electric. You won’t see that story in A Complete Unknown. You won’t see it here either. But maybe someday.

Maybe some of you caught Amanda Petrusich’s fantastic profile of Phish for The New Yorker. She spent nearly a year reporting, became close with the band, got a ton of access, and is a brilliant writer about the music itself—which is where a lot of these otherwise serviceable musician profiles stumble. I think this will be the definitive piece on this band for the foreseeable future. But if you want to read a longer, darker, access-free, utterly non-definitive piece of immersion journalism about the same subject, consider my own “Pieces of the Big Thing: Phish at Orange Beach,” which I published in The Baffler in the fall of 2022. Though ambivalence about the band is one of the piece’s central subjects, writing it cured me of mine. I’ve seen fifteen Phish shows since publishing this, most recently six of the eight dates on their Spring ‘25 tour: 4/18 and 19 in Seattle, the 20th in Portland, and the 24th, 25th, and 26th at the Hollywood Bowl in L.A. The show on the 26th was my 26th Phish show.

I love traveling to see music. You’re on a trip but you don’t feel touristy pressure to do anything because you’ve already got the major thing you’re doing, so you sleep in and hang out with friends and try to find good places to eat and do a lot of walking and by cocktail hour it’s time to head to the show. In Seattle I stayed with one of my oldest closest friends and we mostly hung out with her cats all day. She saw Phish with me for the first time at Big Cypress when we were high school seniors in 1999, and hadn’t been back since, but she came with me both nights and had a good time. At the show, the woman in the seat next to mine gave me a commemorative friendship bracelet she’d made; the next night she gave me another. In Portland I went by myself but someone had given me his ticket to give away so I miracled it to a family of five who’d driven all the way up from Grants Pass—they had these three girls who were all between 5 and 10, and they’d gotten tickets for the kids but not yet for themselves. So I gave them my extra and we all hugged and high fived. Later, a guy dressed as a penguin bought me a beer because I let him cut me in the beer line.

In L.A. I met up with my friends Dan and Isaac. We all went together to the Bowl shows here in 2023. (Dan was also there for night one of Orange Beach in ‘22.) We stayed in a very janky hotel I’d found for us on the same block as the Amoeba Records on Hollywood Boulevard because I wanted to be close enough to walk to and from the Bowl. Last time we got an AirBnB but now they’re all renting by the month to people who lost their homes in the wildfires. My friend Menal (another Big Cypress alum) took us to a great dumpling spot around the corner from where we were staying, and came to the show on Saturday. Sunday we had brunch in Thai town with Julia Hannafin, whose novel Cascade also recently had its first birthday. We went to Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles. The Frolic Room. Counterpoint Books & Records. The Clark Street Diner. Sincerely Syria. Cash bars set up on folding tables on Highland Park Avenue just south of the Bowl. Street corner taco stands. We walked everywhere. My phone tells me I hit at least 25,000 steps per day. I didn’t get into a car between Friday afternoon and Monday afternoon. That’s impressive for anywhere, let alone L.A.

Now I’m back home. On Sunday May 4th I went to the little park across from Mississippi Records for the public memorial for Michael Hurley (z”l), who died April 1st. Aroung 50 artists covered his songs backed by his band The Croakers. People told stories, smoked joints and burned sage, ate free chili and pie, cried, cheered, sang along. Kids and dogs in abundance. It was really special. This is lowkey one of his best songs.

I’m catching up on a mountain of work and getting ready for my annual summer pilgrimage to Sewanee, which is complicated this year by the fact that I’m teaching for a week at a retreat in Iceland first, and Amanda and I are doing a weeklong roadtrip around Iceland for a week before that, which means I need to get my car to Nashville a week before that. So I’ll be leaving Portland on probably the 18th of May, to get to Nashville by the 22nd so I can catch my flight on the 23rd. By the time I get to Sewanee, I’ll have already been on the road for 3 weeks. It’ll be August before I get back home. I’ll be gone for a good chunk of the fall as well.

Bittersweet is where I started this missive and it looks like it’s where I’m going to end. It’s hard to explain the strange mixture of gratitude for these opportunities and queasiness that the main reason I can take them is because 90% of the time it doesn’t matter where I am. It’s a cold kind of freedom that, as I get older, feels more and more like despair. I’d like to trade it away but so far haven’t been able to figure out how or for what. So I’m trying to stay cognizant of the fact that it is, at the end of the day, a considerable luxury I’m talking about. I’m not complaining, for example, about having the time and money to go to all of these concerts and vacations. Or about my amazing students & colleagues who I cannot wait to see. In the end these things are easier to do than to think about doing. Once it happens it’ll just be what’s happening and then soon enough it’s what happened. I guess you can live your whole life that way and I guess I am.

I’m an email box, a hotel or house guest, a road ghost. You’ll see me for a day or two when I’m passing through, or I’ll send a dispatch from somewhere, like this one, and you’ll click a couple of the links, maybe send a note to let me know you liked something. I’ll write you back. From somewhere. I’ll be somewhere. And then I’ll be somewhere else.

I’ve got a new short story up at Granta: “A Star in the Book of Liars.” It’s about South Florida in the ‘90s, the draining of the Everglades, a wildly inappropriate relationship, and the long half-lives of secrets, by which I mean it is a story about time. And a craft talk in the new issue of The Sewanee Review, “The Sentence Is a Place to Play: An Argument for Acoustics, Attention, and Ardor.” I’ve been giving versions of this talk (with its obvious debt to Garielle Lutz) for years now. It feels good to have a definitive version in print, though I’ve since adapted it again for a couple of recent class visits. The talk is only excerpted online, but if you’ve ever considered subscribing to the Sewanee Review now is a great time to do so. This issue also has poems by Ed Skoog, an essay by Ryan Chapman, and new fiction from Laura van den Berg, Michael Knight, and Daniela Garvue. Regular readers of this newsletter may recall that Daniela was my student at U Montana some years back, and that I’m a big fan of her music. Her fiction, too. This story is a killer. And there will be more good stuff coming from SR this year, including a big exciting project I'm pitching in on and can’t talk about yet. I also contributed a piece to SR’s “Marginalia” series, on Mary Gaitskill (this you can read online).

Well the sky was gray-black until noon and then it hailed for twenty minutes and then it was blue as heaven for two hours and now it’s hailing again, so I guess we’re getting close to spring. Some books I mentioned in the looking-ahead section of December’s letter are now out in the world or about to be: Karen Russell’s The Antidote, Alex Higley’s True Failure, Sophie Kemp’s Paradise Logic, Nell Zink’s Sister Europe, All of which I’ve read and love and you will love as well.

I’m also excited about The Amulet, “a new literary magazine of spirituality, religion, and mysticism for seekers and skeptics alike.” Under normal circumstances this would sound like the kiss of death itself but the debut issue has new work by Cesar Aira, K-Ming Chang, Missouri Williams, and Sheila Heti, plus a new translation of the last canto of the last book of the Divine Comedy—as promising a start as you could ask for, imho.

I’ve been working through The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud. I read one or two each night before bed, sometimes I’ll pick it up first thing in the morning as well. I can see why Flannery O’Connor was so impressed by him. The stories are bleak as far as subject-matter. Illness, poverty, and trauma (from war, genocide, & immigration) all abound. It’s an endless succession of luckless lovelorn refugee grocers and tailors hardluck scholars and layabouts, soaked to the bone in an endless stream of Jewish tears, like as not their own. And yet the stories are hilarious—some of the funniest I’ve read in recent memory. I love the brash buoyant brio of Malamud’s sentences, the way he breaks the bones of English on the wheel of Yiddish, and the crispness of his tragicomic vision, which, as with O’Connor, is coterminous with his spiritual-moral vision and deployed in strategic counterpoise to the messiness of the lives being lived on the page. I’m 26 stories into a collection of 53, so at the halfway point in terms of TOC but barely 1/3 of the way through in terms of page-count. I can’t give a comprehensive view of the book, other than to note that he clearly experiences some kind of shift or breakthrough as the ‘40s slide into the ‘50s. He hits the stride that produces “The First Seven Years,” “The Mourners,” “The Prison,” and “The Loan,” all of which (along with the peerless title story) end up in The Magic Barrel. Other stories from this era, such as “The Death of Me” (1953), “Riding Pants” (1953), and “An Apology” (1957) are as good as anything in MB. Some end up in his next collection, Idiots First (1963), while others stay uncollected for decades.

Reading Malamud, you can see the stage being set for the second half of the 20th century in American Jewish literature. (Yes, Saul Bellow is already four novels and a National Book Award into his career by the time Malamud debuts, but even so.) Grace Paley’s first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man, is published a year after The Magic Barrel, in 1959, the same year as Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus. Though Paley and Roth debut in the same year, there’s a near-generational split between them: she’s 37 and he’s 26. (Malamud was 44 when he published The Magic Barrel; he’s a year older than Bellow, who’d made his own debut with Dangling Man at a modestly precocious 29.) Paley’s New York shares a lot with Malamud’s, as does her high-octane Yiddish-English vernacular. She’s a bit hipper than he is—hip to feminism as well as the burgeoning counterculture—but if I told you that the opening above was hers and the one below was his, you wouldn’t immediately call bullshit.

In Roth, you see the outright rejection of certain pieties that Malamud, however much fun he may poke at them, upholds. There are constitutive aspects of Jewish experience, identity, and faith (another thing that piqued O’Connor’s interest) which Malamud is eager to see bent but loathe to see broken. Paley isn’t so dutiful as he is, but neither is she interested in wreaking havoc. Roth, the wicked son, sweeps all the dishes from the Seder table and jerks off onto the spilled bitter herbs. In 1964 Bellow publishes Herzog. In ‘66 we get Cynthia Ozick’s first novel, Trust, as well as Stanley Elkin’s collection, Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers. 1969 brings Portnoy’s Complaint, but it also brings Leonard Michaels’ first collection, Going Places, a significant milestone, though no cult classic like his second collection, 1975’s I Would Have Saved Them If I Could. My point, I suppose, is that you can draw a straight line from Malamud to Michaels, but it runs through Roth.

The other big thing Michaels and Malamud share—with each other and with O’Connor—is a knack for perfect final lines. I love Leonard Michaels, but I admit he’s hit or miss. Still, even if I roll my eyes at his plays for shock value (which always ages fastest and worst), or if a story’s animating impulse fizzles out partway through, he has this way of finding an ending that—while it may not wholly redeem the story—snaps the work into supreme and resonant focus, justifying his (and my) refusal to give up when maybe we should have. There is a lot to be learned, in craft terms, from a story that you judge unsuccessful with an ending that you nonetheless cannot help but envy. Which reminds me: 1978 will bring us Barry Hannah’s Airships, not a Jewish book, but urged into this world by Gordon Lish and blurbed by both Roth and Ozick. Hannah will eventually win the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story in 2003, joining Bellow (‘89) and Paley (‘94), soon to be followed by Ozick herself in ‘08.

There are clearly major and minor entries in this Malamud collection. How could there not be? The only short story writers I can think of offhand who have no minor entries in their catalogues are Denis Johnson and O’Connor herself; O’Connor who wrote 30 perfect stories in a dozen years then died at age 39 in 1964; Johnson, who only published 16 of them—all perfect—in a career that spanned five decades but was mostly devoted to novels, plays, and poems. But another thing to love about Malamud is how (like Michaels) even the lesser stories drive toward moments of ultimacy, a consummation of the work on the terms it has set for itself that also, in some way, reframes the understanding of what those terms were. This is what all the strongest practitioners of the short story are able to do—it might well be the defining element of their strength. To paraphrase Joy Williams, A good novel may skate by with a bad ending. A short story? Never.

This playlist takes its title from my new short story, which takes its title from the Walter Becker song you’ll find at track 9. Newish releases from Daughter of Swords, True Green, Cymande, Mayflies USA, Sunny War, Frog, and Nick Hustles. Deep cut covers from Garth Hudson, Barry Goldberg, Prince, and the Dead. Some old school aggro shit that’s back on my mind, because I’m feeling pretty aggro pretty much all of the time these days: DJ Shadow, Squarepusher, Melt-Banana, Robbie Fulks at or near his pissiest, and DJ/rupture who I’d all but forgotten and whose work is for whatever reason all but erased from the web.

AWP is in Los Angeles at the end of this month. I won’t be there, because I’m going to be at Storyfort in Boise, Idaho. I’m appearing on a panel with Ariana Reines and Taylor Lewandowski, but mostly hanging out and going to see a ton of music, including one band (Frog) on the list above. The organizer of the festival keeps telling me to make sure I bring a bathing suit. I’m going to, though I’ve made a point of not asking why I should. I’ve got a couple of pieces forthcoming in the Washington Post Book World next month, and one in the NYTBR in (I think?) May, by which time I’ll be making ready to decamp for Tennessee and this tree should be full of leaves.

The current show at the Drawing Center is overstuffed and incoherent, featuring too many things that are not drawings, including several of those awful Kaws mice with the X-ed out eyes. On the other hand, admission is free, it’s next to impossible to find a bathroom in Tribeca, and there are some gems if you bother to look for them, including work by Hilma af Klint, R. Crumb, Harvey Pekar, and Henry Darger:

It’s been a weird month. I spent Christmas week with family in Altadena, walked around Eaton Canyon to get some fresh air. My sister-in-law’s house is okay, but almost every other place we went that week is gone now. The building at Sewanee where I work when I’m down there took some damage in an arctic blast, radically accelerating infrastructural problems that have been accruing for years. Everyone had to clear out and now we’re trying to determine how much work needs to be done and when and if it’s ok to be back in there in the meantime. I sent a lot of emails about floorboards last week. Floorboards and pipes. Probably will this week, too.

Speaking of Sewanee, I had the privilege of being in conversation with my dear friend and colleague Adam Ross, editor of The Sewanee Review, for the magazine’s podcast. We discuss his excellent novel, Playworld, which is out this month from Knopf and has been taking the literary world by storm.

I was interviewed for The Creative Independent by my friend Shy Watson. We talked about writing practice, research methods, courting chaos, child actors, and teaching. This was exciting for me not only because the publicity for Reboot is pretty much all died down at this point, but because I’ve been a regular reader of TCI for a long time. One cool thing about their setup is readers can highlight passages and the most-highlighted stuff gets shown on the site:

A few days after New Year’s I lit out for the east coast to spend a week in Manchester, NH teaching at the Mountainview low-res, where I co-ran a nonfiction workshop with Adrienne Raphel and gave a craft talk on revision, in which I reiterated several of the points made in this interview, including those quoted above, plus some stuff about Bob Dylan. I’ve been teaching at Mountainview since 2017, am now among the longest-serving member of its core faculty. All jobs have their pluses and minuses; one big plus with this job is reuniting with my colleagues for this annual weird week in our frantic cocoon. We spend all day in a university building that looks likes an unused set from Severance and then we spend half the night sipping wine (or tea! we’re all getting older) in a back corner of the lobby of a Hilton Garden Inn. The little gym had a Peloton that I managed to ride every day even though the half-busted seat kept slipping and I’d finish each ride three inches lower than I started. They had an outdoor hot tub that we went in on the night it hit zero degrees. The week is a supersaturation of communal living and shop talk and life updates and crisis management and just talking—talking about whatever, talking forever. If we didn’t have to get up the next morning and do the job they hired us for, most of us would stay up all night talking every night. In keeping with Mountainview tradition, I read new work at the faculty reading, a story just short enough that I was able to read it in its entirety, which is my favorite way to give a reading: no set-up, no jump cuts, nothing that “you need to know.” Just start at the start and end at the end.

I rarely eat sweets. It might sound stupid to say it this way but sugar bores me. I’ll eat a courtesy bite of dessert if we’re out to dinner, and maybe twice a year I want an ice cream cone, but mostly it feels like something that has nothing to do with me, like a Spanish-language guidebook to the architecture of Rome. But on this trip to NYC I was staying on the same block as the Hungarian Pastry Shop, which is one of my favorite places in the world and my brain’s stupid rules don’t apply there so I had cookies for breakfast every day. I love their poppyseed hamantaschen, the linzer torts with raspberry goo, those pink or green sandwich leaf cookies with the chocolate in the middle that are exactly like the ones I used to get from the Publix bakery when I was a kid (if you asked nicely you could have one for free) and the spinach pie, one of two savory items on their menu, the other being a cheddar biscuit that I’ve never gotten around to trying. I love that whatever else changes in the city, the war for the soul of humanity is still being waged on the walls of their windowless bathroom.

These are my favorite cookies to get at the Hungarian; I consider this a perfect complete meal:

I was good about boozing on this trip, easier than usual because nearly everyone was attempting some version of Dry January. Damp January it seemed like to me (you know who you are) but whatever. I did get goofy one night because I met my agent for a drink at a wine bar that turned out to be three drinks thanks to a very amiable bartender who insisted that we finish the bottle we’d been ordering from by the glass, then I went downtown to meet my friend Alec who was drinking negronis so I got onboard with him and was going to order dinner but it was 20 bucks for a smashburger and we’d already split a popcorn chicken appetizer thing so I thought I’d skate through, but by the time I got back to 110th street I knew it had to be Koronet pizza, which isn’t the best but is the biggest, and more than good enough for midnight on what I think was Tuesday:

Hard to say what this was but I had it for breakfast on Wednesday at a coffee shop near where we used to live on Smith Street. That’s Isaac in the background.

Dim sum lunch with Tracy at Nom Wah Tea Parlor on Doyers Street on Thursday. Everything we ordered was great but the soup dumplings and salt-and-pepper shrimp were truly exceptional. I love this place.

Friday I got this everything bagel with chicken salad, tomato and red onion at a random place I picked because I needed to meet Adrienne somewhere near where we were going to meet our other friends. A woman in line behind me changed her order from whatever it had been to this after seeing mine. We were both so right.

I’d gone to MoMA right when it opened because they’re showing Christian Marclay’s The Clock right now and I’d never seen it. I caught around two hours before I had to leave to go get this bagel and then meet my friends for our planned visit to the Kafka exhibit at the Morgan Library. Which I had chosen as my desired New York Group Art Activity and I’m sorry to say it was underwhelming and expensive so I felt bad about having urged us all to go there, especially since mostly we just wanted to see each other and hang out and talk. So we left the Morgan and posted up at an Irish bar in the east 30s where we spent the next three (four?) hours bullshitting and nursing Guinesses as slowly as humanly possible just to hold our table (not that there was any competition) until it was time to find a Korean BBQ place to have dinner (good job, Adalena).

I loved The Clock. If I hadn’t had to go meet the gang I would have stayed all day. If I ever get the chance to do the full 24 hours I’ll take it in a heartbeat. It felt ecstatic, transcendent, to be simultaneously instantiated in time and released from time. The perpetual attention to the passing minutes paradoxically combined with the non-narrative propulsion of the clips, the way that little eddies of meaning would gather and release, and the whole history of cinema (more or less) revealing itself to you out of order and free of annotation. So many flashes of recognition but also the sense that it doesn’t matter whether you can or can’t identify any given actor/scene/film, because either way it’s going to be gone in a moment and there’s going to be something else to recognize or not. The frame of reference you bring is rewarded for depth and breadth, but said frame’s shallowness or narrowness goes unpenalized. You do not need to recognize anything. Maybe it would be better if you didn’t.

A collage that is a kaleidoscope that is also a wave. (And RIP David Lynch btw.)

I didn’t look at my phone once while watching The Clock. A few times it occurred to me to check the time to make sure I wouldn’t be late to meet my friends, then I would remember that I didn’t need to check the time, I already knew the time, because the subject of the film I was watching was what time it is at this very moment. It was 10:48 when I got into the theater, 11:24 when I got a seat, and 12:39 when I left. I had meant to leave at 12:30 but found it difficult to tear myself away. I was worried about missing the next turn of the next minute, yearning for whatever one o’clock would bring, knowing I would not be there to see it. Leaving felt like dying—the clock goes on without you—and I wanted to cry as I rose to my feet and started for the exit, knowing that even before I reached the door my seat would be filled by someone who’d been standing for a long time waiting for a seat to open, just as I had done when I’d first arrived, and that that was like dying too. Then I was out in the bright main hall of the museum and even though I was running late I popped upstairs to the Rothko room. I didn’t have time to sit with the work, but I couldn’t be that close and not at least share its air for a minute. There was some Matisse thing happening too, I kind of saw it, but I had to hurry to get south and east to eat my beautiful chicken salad bagel and then inflict that silly Kafka thing on everyone. The Clock is showing at MoMA until February 17th. You should go if you can.

This marked-up page proof from a Philip Roth essay was my favorite thing at the Kafka exhibit, save for the woman who overheard me talking about the story “A Country Doctor” and interjected to ask me to explain to her what I like about it and how it works. In the words of the late great Denis Johnson, I’ll never forget you…you were my mother.

I’ve been working on a new project that has driven me even deeper than usual into some of my longest-standing musical obsessions, which, paradoxically, has made me want to spend more of what I guess I’ll call my leisure time listening to things that are less familiar. In which I have less of a stake. I’m not sick of what I love—not even close, it’s the not-being-sick that is the sickness—but I’m restless. I asked my friend Brittany for help. She sent me this playlist which I’m still getting to know and am liking a lot so far. It opens doors I wouldn’t have known to wonder about walking through. She also encouraged me in my ongoing reacquaintance with Herbie Hancock. Headhunters rules of course, but what about 1980’s Mr. Hands, and the live album with Chick Corea that I found at the record store for eight bucks, and 1983’s Future Shock, a track from which makes appears on this playlist that I put together for January.

The Caretaker is a Mark Fisher favorite. I used to not get it but now I get it. RIP Garth Hudson. Unbelievable that none of them are left. The Fall, why not. Johnnie & Jack, I refer you to Bob Dylan’s Philosophy of Modern Song. Pauline Oliveros was mentioned by Allegra Krieger in some promo thing she made where you choose three songs, though she chose “Horse Sings from Cloud”, a 20-minute song from a 2-track album called Accordion & Voice. It’s gorgeous. I had it on here for a while but worried people might get bored with it and bail on the whole playlist. But you should give it a listen. I saw Krieger when she came through in December; she’s back in February with Christian Lee Hutson and I’m gonna go see her again.

Alex Chilton, rarely a bad idea. Arooj Aftab I’d not heard of until my friend John took me to see her at the Aladdin last week. It was a cool show, a lot of her songs are in Urdu but not this one. Her 2023 record, Love in Exile, with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily, is great. I’m seeing Quasi on Wednesday in the middle of the afternoon as part of a fundraiser for a local dog shelter I’ve gotten obsessed with. Brad Mehldau was playing while I was in NYC but I didn’t get to go. Little Walter, I refer you to Bob Dylan’s Philosophy of Modern Song. I don’t know why I keep thinking about Little Feat lately but I saw Phish play this song at MSG 12/30/10 though that’s not why I thought of it/them lately. Geoff & Maria Muldaur was a nice find. I fucking love this Herbie Hancock song. More Caretaker and more Band to close. Was gonna go with “The Weight” but I love how front and center the accordion is here. That’s Garth. This is Hilma af Klint:

What should we speak of
When we are old as you? When we shall hear
The rain and wind beat dark December

—Cymbeline, Act 3 Scene 3

I think about these lines all the time. It’s Arviragus’ speech, while he’s pretending to be Cadwal, while they’re in the cave because—who knows. Cymbeline is one of the most convoluted plays in all of Shakespeare. Harold Bloom calls it Shakespeare’s “pungent self-parody” of his own corpus, and finds distorted auto-pastiches of Lear, Othello, Measure for Measure, and much else strewn throughout. He quotes Samuel Johnson’s assertion that “To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names, and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.” Bloom says Johnson is “both right and wrong: the incongruities are blatantly there, but they are more than usually deliberate. […] Shakespeare wants us to remark his freestyle audacity, his improviser’s freedom from the scruples that sank without trace Ben Jonson’s laborious tragedies.”

Now, Bloom is a wildly uneven reader of Shakespeare—a lot of the time it’s himself he’s searching for, and finding, in the text—but when he’s good he’s hard to beat, and even when he’s bad I find he’s usually provocatively bad in a productive way, which, incidentally, is more or less the argument he’s putting forward here about Cymbeline: that for all of its folly and confusion, it is not an imbecile work, and that criticism of it is not wasted but rather warranted precisely because we rarely see Shakespeare working in such a muddled mode. But it is too gross for aggravation. You’ve got to take it in the spirit that it’s offered if you’re going to take it at all. And you have to believe that the fact that it exists is of more interest than the question of whether it ultimately succeeds or fails. (Every Deadhead understands this.)

Bloom is correct in both his criticism of Johnson’s criticism and in his reading of the play. Cymbeline is a covers set. It’s a late night back porch jam. When the book is not open in front of me the only things I can remember about it are (1) the three lines quoted above, (2) Iachimo perving on Imogen while she’s sleeping, and (3) that the god Jupiter shows up at some point to sing a song about thunder. (Note: That last one can’t be right.) But a few fragments are plenty. You know how much poetry that I read at 19 can still today claim even three measly lines’ worth of my mental real estate? It’s a short list: some Elizabeth Bishop, Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s “Supernatural Love”, literally all of David Berman’s Actual Air, a couple of things my friend Peter wrote when we lived together, and Silvius’ “So holy and so perfect is my love” speech from As You Like It, which is all of six lines long and which I used as an epigraph to my first book, by which point I knew it was being delivered ironically, which is more than I can say for the version of myself that bothered to memorize it. Anyway, the rain and wind have been beating dark December here in Portland since September. In Berman’s immortal words in “Punks in the Beerlight”: Let’s not kid ourselves, it gets really, really bad.

Thank you as always for reading. I launched this project a year ago and I’m grateful to those who have been here from the start & stuck with me, as well as to those who have joined up since. I would love it if you’d tell a friend about this and/or drop me a line to say hi.

I don’t talk much about my day job on here, but since 2020 I’ve been the director of an MFA program with an unusual structure: we meet for six weeks in the summer in Sewanee, TN and are remote for the rest of the year. It’s a great job, if often a lonely one, since I live on the other side of the country from my campus and am rarely in a classroom. Most of my job is reading and sending emails, which can leave my sense of the relationship between what I do all day and what the program accomplishes feeling a bit…abstract. But every December I write a letter to our students, alums, faculty, colleagues, and supporters where I recap the publishing successes our people have had over the year, and every year it renews my faith in what this work is for. (I also ask them for money.) I’m not trying to claim other peoples’ achievements for myself or even for the institution, but this kind of aggregation helps reify that abstract notion of the MFA program as a community—which it is—and gives us a reason to celebrate each others’ successes. These things are very important to me. Especially in dark December. And as near as I can tell, 2024 was the most successful year in Sewanee MFA history for faculty, student, alum, and guest publications. If you’ll indulge me, I’m going to give you an abridged version of what went out in our holiday newsletter. (And I’m not going to ask you for money.) I expect that many of the names in the faculty/friends block will be familiar. The names in the student block may or may not be, but if they aren’t, it is my pleasure to introduce them here.

FACULTY, FRIENDS & GUESTS — Ryan Chapman’s novel The Audacity came out in April, and close on its heels came my novel, Reboot. Emily Adrian published a nonfiction book, Daughterhood, with Autofocus Books in August. September brought Jamie Quatro’s novel, Two-Step Devil, and Diane Seuss’ new collection, Modern Poetry, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Jill McCorkle—namesake of our First Year Full Tuition Fiction Scholarship—published a new story collection, Old Crimes, in January. Tracy O’Neill published her memoir, Woman of Interest, mere weeks after her visit to Sewanee as the 2024 John Grammer Fellow. Samantha Harvey, who paid a virtual visit to Jamie’s fiction workshop, won the Booker Prize for her novel, Orbital. Sewanee Review editor Adam Ross’ novel, Playworld, will be out in January. Tiana Clark’s poetry collection, Scorched Earth, will be out in March. Kevin Wilson’s novel, Run for the Hills, will be out in May. Emily Adrian’s novel, Seduction Theory, will be out in August. Nickole Brown will direct the first Hellbender Gathering of Poets in Black Mountain, North Carolina in October.

STUDENTS & ALUMS — Leslie Baird, L’23, sold her debut novel, Salome, to Putnam for publication in 2026. Maggie Bailey, L’17, published Quilty as Charged, the second novel in her Measure Twice Mysteries series. Hannah S. Palmer, L’11, published The Pool Is Closed: Segregation, Summertime, and the Search for a Place to Swim with the Louisiana State University Press. Heidi Siegrist, L’17, published All Y’all: Queering Southernness in US Fiction, 1980-2022 with the University of North Carolina Press. Isabelle Puckette, L’22, and Stewart Love, L’22, published the second issue of their annual magazine, Gavialidae. In 2025, Robyn Leigh Lear, L’24, will publish her collection, Ekphrasis as Divination: An Incantation Catalogue, and she continues her work as creative director of April Gloaming Press.

A dozen of my favorite books of the year (caveat: all books named in the Sewanee block—my love for them notwithstanding—are excluded here on account of having appeared above):

Amitava Kumar’s My Beloved Life, Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small, Fredric Jameson’s The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present, John D. MacDonald’s The Scarlet Ruse, Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, Megan Nolan’s Ordinary Human Failings (which I reviewed), Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, Brad Watson’s There Is Happiness (reviewed that one too), Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, Julia Hannafin’s Cascade, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression, and two by Mike Nagel that I’m counting as one: Duplex and Cul de sac.

A dozen of my favorite re-reads of the year:

Mary Gaitskill’s Because They Wanted To, Don DeLillo’s Running Dog, Denis Johnson’s Angels, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, Stanley G. Crawford’s Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine, Richard III, Bob Dylan’s Chronicles Vol. 1, Raymond Carver’s Cathedral, James Welch’s The Death of Jim Loney, Joy Williams’ short stories—indiscriminate dipping in and out of all her collections as the spirit moved me, but special shoutout to “Rot”, “Congress”, “Gurdjieff in the Sunshine State”, “Preparations for a Collie”, and “Escapes”—the Collected Elizabeth Bishop, and (LOL) Ulysses.

A dozen of my favorite albums of the year:

Sofia Wolfson’s Imposing on a Hometown, True Green’s My Lost Decade, Allegra Krieger’s Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine (more on this below), Christian Lee Hutson’s Paradise Pop. 10, the Styrofoam Winos’ Real Time, Dylan & the Band’s Tour ‘74 Box Set, Phish’s Spectrum ‘97, T Bone Burnett’s The Other Side, Humbird’s Right On, Charlie Parr’s Little Sun, Joni Mitchell’s Archives Vol. 4: The Asylum Years, and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ Long After Dark Deluxe Edition.

A dozen books I’m looking forward to in 2025 (caveat: Some of these I am excited to read and some of them I have already read and am excited for you to read):

Nell Zink’s Sister Europe, Anika Jade Levy’s Flat Earth, Sophie Kemp’s Paradise Logic, Karen Russell’s The Antidote, Alex Higley’s True Failure, Sophie Madeline Dess’ What You Make of Me, Vauhini Vara’s Searches, Lincoln Michel’s Metallic Realms, Catherine Lacey’s The Mobius Book, Ed Park’s An Oral History of Atlantis, Kevin Maloney’s Horse Girl Fever, and Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs.

Music I’m looking forward to in 2025:

I don’t know enough about what’s coming to make a real list, but I’m hoping for another Alan Sparhawk solo album, I’m stoked for Forrest Vantuyl’s album, I want to see a True Green show, I want to see a Styrofoam Winos show, I want to see Allegra Krieger at Polaris Hall again—this time with Christian Lee Hutson—on Feb 19, and I want Phish to announce their spring tour early enough that I can plan my cross-country drive around catching some shows.

The two best concerts I saw this year took place within a five-day span in early December. Michael Hurley with A.C. Sapphire at the Showdown on 12/5—a newish country-focused venue near the Aladdin Theater—and then Allegra Krieger and Marisa Anderson at Polaris Hall (still my favorite venue in Portland) on 12/10.

This was my fourth or fifth time seeing Hurley, and my favorite performance of his to date. At 83 years old—he’s six months younger than Dylan; his birthday is today, actually; Happy Birthday, Snock!—we could forgive him a lot, but he doesn’t need it. He’s lowkey one of the great living guitar players and his voice is as strong as ever. In a space as intimate as the Showdown you can see how much breath work goes into his singing. He played a lot of classics, including a gorgeous “You Got to Find Me” opener, “Letter to Neon”, “I Paint a Design”, “The Portland Water” which naturally provoked an audience singalong, and a song called “Clatskanie”, which, when I saw him play it at the Aladdin last year, I had thought he was improvising on the spot. Guess not. Full setlist here. I hope to hell somebody bootlegged it.

The Showdown has a capacity of 250 and I’d guess this show was…85% full? It wasn’t elbow to elbow, but it was cozy. Maybe half the crowd were the expected grayhair indie elders in hoodies like so many ghosts of my own Christmas future (maybe not as far in the future as I’d like to think) but the other half had to be under 30, some under 25, and to be honest I thought maybe they were just there to make the scene since it’s a cool new venue, but they were totally locked in to what Hurley was doing. A few songs in, a couple of girls decided to goad their group into a little dance party; soon after, one of Hurley’s band members popped down from the stage and brought them all to the front. Speaking of Hurley’s band: it was him on guitar, a drummer, a multi-instrumentalist who mostly played saxophone, and a woman who for the first half hour I thought was a dancer—possibly even an audience member who’d jumped on stage, because she really wasn’t dancing per se, just kind of swaying, at least from what I could see—but then I realized she was the second percussionist. Her instrument was tap shoes! She of course is the one who saw the crew dancing in the back and brought them forward. That mood proved infectious and gradually a large circle formed, pushing toward the middle and back out like a slow-motion hora that was sort of also maybe a conga line. The kids are all right.

I mentioned Allegra Krieger in my last issue of this letter—she was on my fall sampler playlist—and since then, her new record, Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, made a bunch of best-of-2024 lists, including Rolling Stone’s and mine, so I was shocked that this show was undersold. The hall was at least half empty during Marisa Anderson’s set, which is a shame because she’s amazing. This is the second time I’ve seen her at Polaris Hall, an ideal venue—in terms of sound quality, size, and vibe—for her compositions for solo electric guitar. Well Marisa’s local so maybe people felt like they’d have other chances, or maybe it was just a cold gross Tuesday night in December (rain and wind, check) and I’m sure it’s a drag playing to so much empty space, but for those of us who were there the intimacy of it made it all the more special. Polaris isn’t a lot bigger than the Showdown (300 standing, I think) and when I go there it’s usually packed and I end up toward the back. Not only did I get a seat for Anderson’s set (there are benches along the walls) it was a front row unobstructed view. The crowd filled in for Krieger’s set but the room never felt more than half full to me. Which, again, I know is a drag from an artist’s emotional/financial perspective, but (again again) it underscored just how lucky were we happy few who made it out. If you get the chance to see her, don’t fuck it up. It’s not too cold, it’s not too rainy, you aren’t too tired. Just go. Same goes for Hurley. She’s not gonna spend the rest of her life playing half-full 300-cap venues on Tuesday night, and Hurley, as mentioned—happy 83rd birthday! Get it while it’s there for getting, cause Don’t it always seem to go… You know?

At the end of her set Krieger mentioned that her merch delivery hadn’t arrived so the band was out of almost everything. All they had for sale were some cassette tapes and a bunch of DIY tour shirts that they’d spent the last couple of days making by hand. Naturally, I had to have one of those. And though I’d never met Krieger before, we have mutual friends in the Styrofoam Winos, who had sent me bearing their regards, so I passed those along and bought a shirt that I think is extremely cool but which turned out, upon investigation at home, to be both a deep V-neck and a small. I can’t really wear it but it’s a nice souvenir so no regrets. I also picked up Marisa Anderson’s Traditional and Public Domain Songs on vinyl.

Happy holidays, happy new year. Catch you in January.

Some good news: Reboot is a New York Times Notable Book of 2024. It has also been named a Best Book of 2024 by the Washington Post and Bookshop.org. I’ve taken it to book festivals in Brooklyn, Vegas, Nashville, Austin, and Miami. Brooklyn I told you about last time. Since then, I’ve been to the Museum of Neon and a karaoke bar in a double-wide, eaten tacos for breakfast and (not for breakfast) shrimp as thick as steaks. I was on some panels, signed some books, saw a lot of old friends and made some new ones. I finally published the big Dylan piece I’ve been working on all year. Also published a couple of new stories. Good bit of Bob in one of those as well. Caveat lector: after this I’m gonna lay off Dylan for a while. Really and truly, I promise. But I worked hard on these pieces & am proud of them and it’s not my fault they both came out in the same month, so please indulge me just this once more and then, hand to God, I’ll give him a rest.

“The Lines, They Are A-Changin'” appears in the fall issue of Bookforum. You can read it in full online, where, I’m happy to say, it has been the most-read piece on the site since the issue dropped. The piece is one part reported feature about the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, one part omnibus review of the first books published based on work done in the Archive, and one part personal essay about my own deep dive into Bob’s back pages:

You know all that Walter Benjamin shit about the ineradicable irreproducible aura of the original? I wanted to OD on it. I wanted to see, like Hubble telescope photos of the births of galaxies, the ground zeroes where the letters had flowed from the point of the pen and bled into the grain of the paper and became the words that became the lines that became the songs.

The two new short stories are both print-only, at least for now. I hope you are able to get your hands on them. (If this turns out to be impossible, but you’re desperate to read them, email me.) In the meantime, I’ll share a bit about how and why each one got written.

“The Bridge After It’s Gone” appears in ZYZZYVA #128, the “Long Form” issue. It is 10,000 words long and was actually sold as a novella, though I think it may have been contextually demoted to “long story” since the issue’s other three pieces of fiction—by Bill Cheng, Lucy Corin, and Michael Jaime-Becerra—are all at least double its length.

The title of my story is adapted from a variant lyric in Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”, one of my favorite songs of his, for reasons I can never quite find the words to explain. Other than these 10,000 words, that is. The song comes out of the Basement Tapes era, ie 1967. There’s a laconic surrealism complicating—sometimes ironizing, never wholly undermining—the roughhewn rootsiness of this material. A hedge against its slipping into folk piety. Dylan, of course, had already inherited, epitomized, and disowned that tradition by the time he was 25. Now he and the Band were going to, oops, invent Americana. And as it happens, the folk tradition is already rich in the laconic and surreal: “The Cuckoo”, “Three Nights Drunk”, “Swing and Turn Jubilee”, “Jenny Jenkins”, “Shady Grove”, just to name the first few that spring to mind.

This is the well from which “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” is drawn. The same well that yielded up “Million Dollar Bash”, “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread”, “Lo and Behold!”, and all of those character-songs: “Quinn the Eskimo”, “Ruben Remus”, “Please Mrs. Henry”, etc. Throwback sounds and notions notwithstanding, there’s a distinctly modern sensibility at work here. The magic inheres in that paradox, if it is one, which it might not be, though paradox is a major motif of Dylan’s, especially here. Parallax, actually, is likely the better word. This is folk music for a world in which John Ashbery is already a decade into his career and the New Yorker is serializing Donald Barthelme’s Snow White in its entirety—ie 1967, as I said—now 57 years ago, and 57 years before that it was 1910, in November of which year Tolstoy died, and then in December—according to Virginia Woolf, anyway—human character changed.

My god but it’s been a long 20th century.

“You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” might be Dylan at his most Ashberian. The song is the household god of my long short story, though the story doesn’t take place in a house. It is set in the Catskills at a former sleep away camp-turned-event venue where a group of college friends have gathered for a wedding weekend. The present action occurs the night before the wedding but the narrative roves widely in time and point of view. It skips from character to character, tracking their perspectives on each other, their individual and collective pasts, presents, and futures. Relaxin’ and parallaxin’.

The first draft of this story was written in March 2020 during the first weeks of sheltering in place. It was 3600 words long, its governing chronal and perspectival logics already established. Also its plot architecture: it always began where it begins and always ended where it ends—the last line is right there in the first draft. (Brag.) Over the years, I folded in some realtime history of the pandemic era as we lived through it but mostly I focused on the characters: finding places to filigree details and expand moments, tease out echoes and correspondences, put more and more pressure on those governing logics, which are the twin engines driving a story that is in a lot of ways deliberately inert. Writing this story was like growing crystals for a geode that I’d already shattered.

I’ve been wanting to call something “The Bridge After It’s Gone” since 2006, when I was in a coffee shop on Avenue A, listening to some Dylan on a generation one iPod, leafing through Ashbery’s The Mooring of Starting Out and hoping (LOL) to get inspired to write a poem and I heard the lines, “We’ll climb that bridge after it’s gone / After we’re way past it” and wrote them down at the top of my blank notebook page to save for later. “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”’s lyrics have never fully stabilized. The version that contains these lines is on Greatest Hits Vol 2, which came out in 1971; it had been a hit for the Byrds a few years earlier but Dylan had never released a recording of his own. (The first official version of the widely-bootlegged Basement Tapes would come out in 1975.) Some of this history is recounted in the story itself, by the character to whom the song is most meaningful, though she seems to be misremembering which version is on which release. She thinks of a pirated LP her father owned (likely 1969’s Great White Wonder, the album that, oops, invented the rock bootleg) on which the song does not appear, and wouldn’t contain this lyric even if it did, since he wrote it for the ‘71 recording.

The other new story, “What About This” appears in The Harvard Review #62 (Fall 2024). Another borrowed title: that of Frank Stanford’s Collected Poems. (Could go without saying but Bob has a walk-on in this one too.) I wrote this story two years ago almost to the day, at the end of a fall semester spent at Sewanee (where I usually only teach in summer) while living in a little university housing village populated mostly by seminary students. It was a great semester for teaching but a tough one for writing. A few days before I was due to pack up and go home I took my copy of Barry Hannah’s Long. Last. Happy: New & Collected Stories, to a coffee shop two towns over and sat there getting cranked up on espresso and his sentences for probably two hours until this came screaming out of me over the course of hour three. The story is narrated (wouldn’t you know it?) by an AWOL seminary student and I have no shame about confessing the Hannah pastiche. He has always been one of my big ones. Long. Last. Happy. was the first book I was ever asked to review for the New York Times. Hell, it’s my own name and quote on the cover of the paperback, which is the edition I had with me, and I’m not saying that to brag (much). I’m saying that I didn’t go to that coffee shop just to fly my key-kite in Hannah’s lightning storm and hope for a jolt, though that alone would have been reason enough. (Allan Gurganus once told me he keeps a copy of Airships on his desk for the same reason.) I was trying to face something down that I could sense but not see or name. The other day in Miami, on a panel we were on together, Garth Risk Hallberg quoted Jung to the effect that instead of fleeing the shadow you should turn and ask it what it wants. Was this that? Maybe not. But writing “What About This” broke a dry spell that badly needed breaking, and was grand fun besides.

A lot of great music has come out this year, a lot of it by artists I’ve been tracking for a long time and who I talk about pretty regularly on here. Some of it is fresh from the studio and some of it is fresh from the vaults. A few new discoveries as well.

“(I’m Gonna Get Over This) Some Day” - I saw T Bone Burnett at the Aladdin Theater in September. I was trying to get an interview and I didn’t. He has a powerful understated charisma that radiated from the stage. I liked The Other Side, his new album, OK at first but the songs opened up after hearing him play it live in its entirety. This is my favorite song from it. “Everything and Nothing” is not far behind.

“Can U Hear” may test you at first. It took me a while to get what Alan Sparhawk is doing with White Roses, My God, his first album since the death of his wife and Low co-founder Mimi Parker. I profiled Alan for The New Yorker back in April, and then Subpop ended up asking me to write the album bio for this record, so I spent a lot of time with it and have come to love it. Here’s a taste of what I wrote:

Trying to trace influences is a dodgy business, and fishing for comp titles is even worse. But let’s say you’re looking for forebears and fellow travelers to help situate WHITE ROSES, MY GOD. Just to start with a curveball, how about Childish Gambino, whose “Me and Your Mama”, Sparhawk has been known to cover live with The Derecho Rhythm Section, the funk quartet he plays in with his son? Or what about upstart weirdos extraordinaire 100 Gecs? Are those nods to fellow-Minnesotan Prince (maybe the Camille songs in particular?) in song titles like “Not the 1” and “Can U Hear”?

The new Allegra Krieger record, Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, is a significant level-up for a young singer-songwriter already among the best of her cohort. In terms of vocals, lyrics, and overall vibe, “I’m So Happy I Cannot Face Tomorrow” may make that case most clearly. Ditto Haley Heyndrickx’s “Foxglove” from Seed of a Seed, her first new album in six years (well worth the wait), and “Don’t Mind Me” by the Styrofoam Winos, an eclectic trio who wear their considerable talents with a grin and shrug, though when I saw them play over the summer they all traded instruments between every song, apparently just to let us know they could. This is off their new record, Real Time, which I love. You might have heard these guys backing MJ Lenderman on the “Long Black Veil” cover that closes out his Live and Loose. Speaking of which: No Manning Fireworks on here: I like the album almost as much as the rest of you seem to, but at this point who still needs to be told?

This version of “Wedding Song”, from the Seattle Forum on February 9, 1974 is harrowing and uncanny. Dylan is singing one of the most heart-on-sleeve love songs he ever wrote in a voice that sounds like it is seething with white-hot rage. Like maybe he’s trying to murder love the way Macbeth murdered sleep. This is one of two songs I’ve included from the (LOL) 27-disc Tour ‘74 box set that is the main reason why I invested in a CD player a few months back.

Dylan sings every song like it’s a car he’s driving. Sometimes it’s an old beater he might park by the side of the road and sleep in. Sometimes it’s a minivan stuck in traffic while the kids squabble in the back. Sometimes it’s an ambulance with siren wailing on the wrong side of the road racing against the bleed-out of the guy on the gurney. Sometimes it’s a luxury sedan he’s thinking about leasing and sometimes it’s a sports car he just stole and, having done so, might stick to the speed limit for fear of drawing the heat or might do donuts in a Walmart parking lot at midnight because who fucking cares. You just never know, and the thing is, neither does he until he does it.

Forrest VanTuyl knows what I mean by that and that’s why I stuck him next to Bob. “The County” is a gorgeous, deceptively simple song that reveals more depth and complexity the more time you spend with it. The acoustic precision of the verses has a touch of Keats, though I bet if you asked Forrest he’d mention Robert Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee” before “To Autumn”—though he might well mention both. I first got to know Forrest as a player in his wife Margo Cilker’s band a few years ago. The last time Amanda and I saw them play, they did a couple of the songs he’s been writing for a record that I think is coming out sometime next year. I’ve heard it and it’s killer. We will fete it properly when occasion permits.

The Secret Sisters’ “Paperweight” is one of those bright-eyed, kinda-goofy-but-also-earnest love songs you can only get away with in country music. It risks mawkishness without succumbing to it, and its power derives not from the fact that it didn’t succumb, but from the fact that the risk was real. (Also true of “Wedding Song.”)

Nina Simone’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is one of about 150 songs you can listen to at the Bob Dylan Center on a jukebox curated by Elvis Costello. As mentioned in my piece, some saintly soul reproduced the juke for Spotify.

Justin Golden is a Piedmont bluesman out of Richmond, VA. His last album of originals came out in 2022 but two albums of folk and blues standards, Golden Country Vols 1 and 2, came out this year. I chose one song from each: “Midnight Special” and “Sitting On Top of the World.” Great songs with storied histories, which also means they’re pretty shopworn. He makes them new.

“gin tonic” - I had never heard of Dan Reeder until two months ago and now someone tells me something about him just about every other day. Seems good?

Aerial M was a Dave Pajo project from the ‘90s. Gorgeous slow-build instrumental postrock featuring a pre-Silver Jews Cassie Berman. Their Peel Session was released this year for the first time by Drag City. “Safeless” is from that session.

I said to my father-in-law the other day that Tom Petty might be the musician I like the most about whom I think the least. We were sitting in his truck in the Publix parking lot while the ladies were inside hunting up spinach and blue cheese, and some minor hit of Petty’s came on the Chris Stapleton channel on Sirius XM. Petty had been on my mind because I’d recently listened to the Life of the Record episode about the making of Long After Dark, recorded for the occasion of its deluxe reissue for whatever anniversary it is. Originally, I picked “Stories We Could Tell” off the bonus disc, then I went for “A Wasted Life”, since it’s such an odd downbeat song for Petty, and in its way a daring closer. But then I went with “Finding Out”, just to kick out the jams a little after all that gorgeous slow-build instrumental postrock.

“Traveling” is a gem of a Joni demo from the Hejira sessions. Also the title of Ann Powers’ recent biography of Mitchell. She reads the songs closely and puts a lot of herself into the story, making it an affable, non-redundant companion to David Yaffe’s more straightforward Reckless Daughter. I read Traveling while traveling, quickly and with much pleasure and admiration.

“When My Boy Walks Down the Street” — My friend Charley took me to see the Magnetic Fields play 69 Love Songs at Revolution Hall. They do it over two nights and we went to night one so we got the first 34, of which this is #26.

“Tears of Rage” - Jimi does Dylan but not the one you’re thinking of. I’d never heard this until very recently. It’s spare and relaxed and astonishing. I’ve been listening to it every day.

“Everything and Nothing” - T Bone redux, see above.

“Falling in Love with Somebody Better” strikes me as the most old-illuminati hotties-like song on the new illuminati hotties album. I don’t begrudge the growth and I dig the new record, but man I miss the batshit brattiness of the early stuff.

Billy Strings had a big year. Sang with Molly Tuttle and Post Malone, played two nights with Phish, had a baby, did Maron, is staying clean. He’s on a record that’s coming out next year with T Bone Burnett and Ringo Starr. “Seven Weeks in County”, from Highway Prayers, is like the VanTuyl and Secret Sisters songs in that it is a marvel of economy, precision, and vision that happens to also be rich in hard homespun wisdom come by honestly. And a singalong besides.

Speaking of singalongs, here’s “Maggie’s Farm” from a few nights after that “Wedding Song”, at another venue called the Forum, this one in Inglewood, CA on Valentine’s Day. This “Maggie” is more bop than blister. Rick Danko’s bass is going bonkers. They’re having a blast but also stoked that it’s the last night of tour. This is from disc 27, so I haven’t actually heard it on the CD player yet, because I’m listening in order and as of this writing am only up to disc 22.

“Sitting On Top of the World” - Justin Golden again. Fun fact: my short story “Gregory’s Year”, the last entry in my collection Flings, ends with a guy playing “Sitting On Top of the World” for his girlfriend. The last line in the book is the name of this song.

Of course it is Elizabeth Bishop’s phrase, from “Crusoe in England,” though I would have first read it in Christine Schutt’s A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer, where she borrows it for the title of a beautiful, inscrutable, foul story that, happily, you can read right here. (She gives us our dek.) Actually I wouldn’t have read the Schutt first; my Complete Elizabeth Bishop is from a 101 poetry workshop in what must have been 2001. It was many years and states later that I fell in love with Schutt’s work (sorry, MP). At a certain point it occurred to me to source the title of this story, which I’d figured would be Emily Dickinson because she’s a big one for Schutt, but instead it led me back to this Bishop book I’ve owned since I was 19.

Amanda and I spent a week in New York City. It was wonderful as always: noisy, hectic, dysfunctional, a fortune. Almost everyone was in a great mood even as they made their lives sound miserable. Rent up, subway sucks, jobs scarce, pay bad, childcare hell, indicted mayor, lantern flies. Everyone wants to get out and can’t or wants to stay and can’t. I am very very glad that these are not my problems. And still I miss it.

I was on a panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival; I got to see my friends Anika Jade and Madeline Cash read at a weird loft for a magazine that maybe doesn’t exist or else exists as the reading (unclear, didn’t ask); I ducked into the Drawing Center to get out of the rain and wound up staying for an hour; I hung out with my friend Lisa’s cats (also with Lisa); I walked Prospect Park from top to bottom and met up at the Picnic House with some colleagues and students from the low-res MFA; I had coffee with Sofia Wolfson, whose album Imposing on a Hometown I’ve mentioned several times before—it’s one of my favorites of the year; I got invited to a luncheon celebrating Czech literature at the Bohemian National Hall, where I had nothing to contribute but my presence and they fed us goulash and schnitzel and I met the future of Czech literature and ran into some people I hadn’t seen in years. I saw a white ladder all covered with water, etc.

I had dinner with my friend Adam and his family south of Windsor Terrace near where they live now and because the kids are little we met at 530. After we ate I walked them back to their building and then it was maybe 730 and I was on my own again. I caught a Q train heading not exactly toward Williamsburg where I was staying, but toward a towardness I wasn’t exactly rushing toward. I’d been trying for several days to pick up the new Tony Tulathimutte but three bookstores hadn’t had it. I wondered if Unnameable Books might. I always try to get there at least once when I’m in town, so I hopped off the Q at 7th Ave and it was, I don’t know, a ten minute walk to the store. Well after 8 by this point but Unnameable is open till 11. There was a reading happening in the back garden. Someone was explaining how we have to resist surveillance—not just the devices and the networks, but the way in which the knowledge of their presence deforms our relation to ourselves. She was right and I listened for a while. Unnameable didn’t have Tony’s book either but they did have the newish Verso edition of Adorno’s Minima Moralia. I’ve read most of this book in bits and pieces over the years but hadn’t owned my own copy or read it front to back before, which is what I’m doing now. New York!

The next day I drove up to Vassar with my friend Tracy O’Neill to visit her class, which had read Reboot, and my friend Ryan Chapman’s class, which had read the title story from Flings. I’d never been there before. Unsurprisingly, a beautiful campus. (Elizabeth Bishop is an alum; this might have been what got me thinking about her.) Their art museum has a Rothko, a Pollock, an eerie and gorgeous Alice Neel, ample requisite Hudson River School.

It is always a privilege to meet with groups of students who have read my work and are excited to talk about it. It is an honor—and humbling—to be read and read well. And to think that something of mine might be some small part of a young writer’s developing sense of what’s possible—what’s worthwhile—in the discipline. That they might some day have cause to write a line about Reboot like mine above re Bishop: I first read it in a workshop in what must have been 2024, and the guy who wrote it actually came to class, I think my prof knew him somehow; weird to think now that I’ve owned this book since I was 19.

Not to put myself in the same tier as Elizabeth B., only to say that a lot of what turns out to be foundational to any writer’s or reader’s life is out of their control. It’s what is assigned to you by the teachers you happen to have wherever you happen to have gone to school, a choice that was like as not partially or entirely out of your hands as well. You go where you can afford to go, where you can get in; you go somewhere because you want to be near your family—or because you don’t. When you get there you sign up for a class based on a course number, or the time of day it meets, or a three-line description in a catalog. You can’t expect that the novelist Ryan Chapman is going to bring in Justin Taylor to talk about a short story of his from ten years ago and that, even though it’s an obviously auto-fictionish story about Portland hipsters in the mid-aughts, Justin will spend a considerable amount of time claiming it’s actually a stealth homage to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves which he was assigned in a Modernist literature class when he was your age, seasoned with a bit of Mary Gaitskill’s “Heaven”, which he has long suspected is a stealth homage to To the Lighthouse, but that he wrote it in the formal style of one of those late Barry Hannah stories (lot of momentum, no section breaks) as a response to his own first book (which you have not read) because that one was riven with Lishy white-space and he wanted to see if he could do it a different way.

Maybe you don’t get anything out of such a talk other than a list of names, or the revelation that you don’t need to run from your influences: you can run through them instead. You can cross-breed them like plants or pit them against each other like scorpions in a jar. Maybe what you get is a powerful negative example: middle-aged white guy blathering for 45 minutes about self-indulgent bullshit. You vow to never, ever become such a person. These are all plausible, worthwhile outcomes. My point is that the outcome isn’t up to me, isn’t knowable to me, anymore than the teacher to whom Reboot is dedicated could have known (or I could have known) that the semester I spent in his lit seminar would become one of the most important intellectual and aesthetic experiences of my life and 20 years later I’d more or less scaffold a novel with his syllabus. I was just a guy trying to take a cool-sounding class and he was just a guy trying to teach one. Which is what I am now, what my friends are. One can’t and shouldn’t focus too much on this idea of future-retrospective value, because it’s totally pointless and more than a little bit vain. But it would be dishonest, and I think a mistake, to neglect or disavow it entirely. We’re creative writing teachers, not doctors: this isn’t life or death shit. But the people we’re working with are people who mostly want to be writers, not doctors, so for them it actually kind of is.

What I’m trying to say is that I hope I gave the Vassar students something useful because what they gave me was an incredible gift. Two gifts, in fact, in one day—dayenu.

After the class visits we had dinner with Amitava Kumar, whose novel My Beloved Life I recently read and greatly enjoyed. And more than enjoyed, admired—for its quiet poise and lucidity, for how it is packed with detail yet uncluttered (“And what noticing!” as James Wood rightly had it), for its surehanded modulation of narrative time and scope: holding in the same hands a man’s life and the sweep of a country’s century, the reverberations of that life and century in the life of that man’s daughter. If someone asks me for a Best of ‘24 list, this will be on it.

Another thing I did while I was in New York was meet up with two editors for whom I write book reviews. One I’d never met in person before and the other I’ve been working with for many years. It got me thinking about my parallel career as a book critic. Parallel, that is, to both my teaching and my fiction-writing, with the relationship to the former rather less fraught than to the latter. I mentioned this in passing in the “Standing In the Doorway…” essay I published here last month. It also came up on the Brooklyn Book Festival panel. I forget the question that provoked it, but I said that the reason I write book reviews and literary criticism (themselves separate though related practices; set that aside for now) is because I find it creatively rewarding in itself. I love the way it invites me to attend to a given work, engage it on its terms and tease out my own reactions thereto, then re-convert that refractive inwardness into something shareable, public. (I may not have said all of this on stage at the panel.)

I think there is unique literary-cultural value in fiction writers writing about each other’s work. This value is separate from the value of criticism produced by self-identified professional critics. I don’t expect, or even hope, to match or best the best we have—Becca Rothfeld, Christian Lorentzen, and Parul Sehgal, for a start—because my referential frameworks, my motivations for writing, and my method of approach are all different from theirs in a way that theirs—however distinct in style and prerogative—are fundamentally aligned with each other’s. What I mean is that the novelist-critic’s calls are always coming from inside the house.

My own critical practice is modeled (however aspirationally) on that of other novelists: my teacher David Gates, who btw loved Rothfeld’s book which along with Kumar’s is one of the best books published in ‘24; Lorrie Moore, whose See What Can Be Done I cannot recommend highly enough; Joy Williams’ rare bracing interventions and encomia; ditto Mary Gaitskill’s and Zadie Smith’s. Or books like Martin Amis’s Moronic Inferno. I get why some writers mostly avoid writing criticism or foreswear it entirely. They feel it’s compromising in some way, ethically or artistically, or they simply don’t want to be responsible for another writer’s failure or success. All fair enough. But I wish more would take the risk. We all write to be read, and reviews and criticism are some of the most substantial proof we ever get that someone is actually reading us. I cherish the smartest and/or most surprising reviews my books have gotten. These are not necessarily the most positive reviews, they’re the ones that told me something about my own work that I didn’t already know. I want to do that for other writers as best I can.

This is what a book of my collected criticism would look like if it were bought today. It’s not exhaustive, but it’s everything I’d want to see gathered and preserved. With a few notable exceptions, the longer pieces (2500+ words) are career retrospectives on major living/recently deceased American writers. The shorter pieces mostly focus on debuts. I’m not presuming that the fossil record of Justin Taylor’s critical attention has any specific value, now or in the eventual historical sense. But I am suggesting that it could, as a catalog of my reverence or dissent for—or, more accurately, my agon with—the writers in the generations before mine, those who came up alongside me, and lately some of those in the generation below.

This screenshot is a user profile. It’s a ghost map and a rap sheet. It’s a shadow history of my first five books, recording not only the evolution of my aesthetic interests and thinking about literature (including limitations, biases, and lacunae) but my actual working life. Who let me write for them and how often and about what and at what length. Total critical output year on year. As you might imagine, that measure is inversely correlated to the one in the screenshot of my uncollected short fiction that I am not showing you. When that wasn’t working, I did this. When I couldn’t sell or finish a book, when I couldn’t find an adjunct class but still needed dental work, I did this. (If I really wanted to press this point I’d have put the word rates next to the word counts.)

This list also offers a glimpse of what a small group of preeminent publications thought was important during the 2010s and 2020s. Some of you know the biz well enough to read the names of specific editors behind the names of the magazines: who was working where when, who likes me and who thinks I’m full of shit. NYTBR has always been pretty good to me; Bookforum has been my most consistent and generous home. WaPo work started about a year ago and is going great. Harper’s every now and then: I can’t always capture their interest but when I do they give me the space I need. I’m hoping to write for The Point again soon: the Portis piece I did for them was a blast to work on and it got a huge reaction when it came out. Note too the publications that do not appear here. Some I’ve never pitched, some have never acknowledged the pitches I’ve sent. A few have asked me for stuff when I haven’t had anything to say and/or the time to say it. So it goes.

Whatever else it is or isn’t, this list catalogs for posterity’s judgment what books were deemed worthy of coverage, and of what kind and by whom, when they were new. If we assume a future where that might matter to someone, whether a young novelist or a historian of 21st century American fiction, this is my contribution (so far) to their work. The actual content of the reviews, i.e. the artistic/intellectual value of said contribution, will be judged by posterity as well, but separately, and I say that with full understanding that consignment to oblivion is as legitimate a judgment as any other.

Let’s close this out on a lighter note with some music stuff (sorry, Charley). Allegra Krieger made a playlist from material in the Smithsonian Folkways Archives as part of their People’s Picks series. It’s wild. Also wild is “Cardinals at the Window,” a 136-song benefit comp for flood relief in Western North Carolina. Ten bucks (or donate more) with 100% of proceeds split evenly between Community Foundation of Western North Carolina, Rural Organizing and Resilience (ROAR), and BeLoved Asheville.

And here’s one of mine. I was digging around in Joni Mitchell’s Archive releases and noticed that early on she covered some of the same folk songs Dylan did. (No surprise there, everybody covered them.) So I paired up their versions of what I could find: “House of the Rising Sun”, “Tell Old Bill”, “Copper Kettle”, “Dink’s Song.” Then I remembered that bizarre Dylan cover of “Big Yellow Taxi” so I threw his and hers on as well. Then I got a little loose: two Guthrie covers but not of the same song, her “Pastures of Plenty” vs. his “I Ain’t Got No Home”; ditto Cash, with her “Me and My Uncle” (!!!) to his “Ring of Fire.” Then her original song, “Coyote”, which she wrote while on tour with Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. In the intro to this live version she talks about having finished writing it the night before. Paired that with his “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” from the same tour.

Thanks as always for reading.

As promised a few weeks ago, here is the full text of the essay that I read from at the Pickathon music festival on August 4. It was first published in The Northwest Review Vol. 52 No. 02 (Winter 2023) and has heretofore been available in print only. Consider this the semi-formal inauguration of what is shaping up to be an unusually Bob-forward fall in what is, under normal circumstances, already a pretty Bob-forward newsletter and life. I’ve got a novella coming out in the next ZYZZYVA that takes its title from “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”, “All Along the Watchtower” has a cameo in a short story that’ll be in the next Harvard Review, and I wrote about my visit to the Bob Dylan Center for an upcoming issue of Bookforum. These pieces were written each for their own reasons years apart from and without reference to each other. Now they’re all coming out in a cluster. So why not one more?

Standing in the Doorway -> Craft Talk -> Jam -> Craft Talk -> Not Fade Away

*

Driving out from Portland to the coast to see my friend Ed one afternoon in the first fall of the pandemic, I turn on the satellite radio which came free for three months with the new car. My dad liked to call it “sat radio” for short; he liked anything that made you feel, however slightly, like an insider. Like someone in the know. On the Grateful Dead channel the host says, “January 7, 1978, a very special night, because Jerry has laryngitis, so this is a whole set of Bobby songs, with some extra help from Donna.”

A year or so later I’m in South Florida. Golf courses, subdivisions, office parks and strip malls, occasional feed n seed. “Dancing Queen” plays on sat radio in the rental car as we wait in the motor queue at the National Cemetery. Palm trees and drainage canals, headstones in neat white rows. We’ve come to bury Mom’s father, my Grandpa Jack. 

Diarmid MacCulloch, in his epic history of the church, reports that Evagrius advised, “Never give a shape to the divine as such when you pray, nor allow your mind to be imprinted in any form, but go immaterial to the Immaterial and you will understand.” He was accused of Origenism by the Council of Constantinople in 553, making him the second person in Church history to be posthumously condemned; the first, naturally, having been Origen himself.

Rukeyser: The fragments join in me with their own music

From Grandpa’s apartment I will take a dark blue throw pillow with a butterfly pattern that I’ll keep in my office, and a sky-blue Guy Harvey baseball cap. Blue was his favorite color. I’ll find the program from his funeral one day when I’m scrounging in my bag for a bookmark. It’s still in my copy of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife.

*

The other day a few of us were languidly defending our stupid love of jam bands to the rest of the group chat. I told them that the thing I value most in music is virtuosity captured in a moment of self-surprise. I want to witness genius restored to profound sustained unknowing, I said, and after I saw it on the screen I realized that this is what I value most in writing, too. Probably also religion. It felt like a huge breakthrough and I thought I should write a whole essay about it but what else was there to say? 

Thank you for coming to my craft talk.

*

Jack was 96 years old. He spoke Yiddish until he started kindergarten. If you asked how he was doing he said, “I live a pain-free life.” But that first year of hard quarantine wrecked his brain; he didn’t leave his apartment, couldn’t tell the days apart, started trying to call us with the TV remote. After he got vaccinated and could see people again he got back some of what he’d lost, but the deep damage was done. In conversation he was lucid and attentive, but if there was a lull he would start singing to himself. It was always the same three songs, segueing in and out of each other like the thickening mist in his mind was some jam band having a goof: “Ode to Joy,” the Mickey Mouse Club theme song, and a song I did not recognize but eventually discovered to be Edgar Guest’s “A Patriotic Wish,” which I believe he learned in the army. This jam lasted months. Every once in a while he’d throw in a verse from the “Fugue for Tinhorns” from Guys and Dolls. We had to move him to the memory care wing of the assisted living place, where he caught covid within a week. Technically, he survived it. They told us that he was no longer infectious or symptomatic when he succumbed to the pneumonia that he had contracted while his immune system was weakened by the first disease. 

*

Chrissie Hynde spent lockdown recording Dylan covers which she first posted to Youtube and then released as Standing in the Doorway: Chrissie Hynde Sings Bob Dylan. Here’s the track list:

“In the Summertime”, “You’re a Big Girl Now”, “Standing in the Doorway”, “Sweetheart Like You”, “Blind Willie McTell”, “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”, “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight”, “Tomorrow Is a Long Time”, “Every Grain of Sand.”

It’s unbelievable how good this album is, how wild and attentive and true. Her fidelity is a form of re-imagination and listening to this record is an act of simultaneous instantiation and self-estrangement, like praying, and I wish I knew what I meant by that exactly, if I mean it’s a prayer or that I’m praying to it, or through it, or what.

Exodus 29:25 but it’s just me in my office with this record on repeat. 

I stop when I ought to or when I have to; never because I’ve had enough.

*

Jack joined the army in 1943 when he turned eighteen. Five years earlier, in 1938, he was a camper at Camp Kinderwelt—rare treat for a city kid—and the experience so impressed him that 83 years later, in May of 2021, he remembered his counselor’s name: Ralph Nagnowitz. He said it with the same awe that the kids in Roth’s Nemesis say “Bucky Cantor.” Grandpa said he had looked up Ralph Nagnowitz some years ago, to try to see what ever became of him; he said Ralph appears in the 1940 census but none thereafter, which almost certainly means that he died in the war. It was amazing, Grandpa thought, what could change in five years: you’re 13 and then you’re 18; it’s 1938 and then it’s 1943. 

In the fall of 2020 I wrote in an essay that, given the duration of the shutdown and the actuarial realities, I might never see Jack alive again. But I did see him, in May of ’21. I was in Florida researching a hollow earth cult and spent a few days with him before I drove across the Everglades. On the way back east, since I was running early and it was almost on my way to the airport, I stopped by again and we sat together on his building’s front patio for about an hour,  just talking, him sometimes singing. When it was time for me to leave I hugged him and said I’d see him again soon and got into my rental car and sat in the parking lot sobbing because I knew it wasn’t true. And it wasn’t. The mist thickened through the summer and by October he was gone. 

*

I just spent a week trying to find a copy of The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto. I didn’t want to have to order it, I wanted to pull it from a shelf. I called every secular and most of the Christian bookstores in Portland, got nothing, then my friend Craig told me about this store up in Saint John’s I had never heard of. He said they were maybe Episcopalians but definitely cool. The drive was a half hour through perfect post-storm afternoon light, a ceiling of pregnant bright-dark clouds, and when I got to the store it was half off of everything and a customer was wearing a red tee shirt that said PORN KILLS LOVE in big white letters and the new owner’s toddler was running around and they had two copies of the Otto, which was perfect because my friend Cheston also wanted one—he had come to meet me when he got off work—and there it was, the minor miracle of commerce I’d been pining for. Here’s everything I bought: 

The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto; Heavenly Questions by Gjertrud Schnackenberg; The Finishing School by Muriel Spark; The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich, which Cheston said had changed his life a little; Flannery O’Connor: In Celebration of Genius, edited by Sarah Gordon, which counts my old prof Padgett Powell among its contributors; Lanzarote by Michel Houellebecq; In the Presence of Schopenhauer by Michel Houellebecq; The Death of Adam by Marilynne Robinson, a first edition hardcover in great shape, six bucks after the discount; Sestets by Charles Wright; Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham.

*

The other thing I could have said to the group chat is that jam bands are indefensible. That that’s the whole point of them. The freedom that comes from that surrender. You trade a serviceable indifference for an impossible love. As subject-positions go, this seems like a good one. It even feels right right now to say that it’s biblical, like Chrissie Hynde’s Bob Dylan covers or the sea at night. 

*

Picking up a book from my shelf, say Padgett Powell’s A Woman Named Drown or The Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale, and trying to ballpark the odds that I am, at this moment, the only person alive on earth with this book in-hand, reading these words in this order, bringing this lost voice briefly back to vanished life.

I used to think this about Harry Crews but he’s a Penguin Classic now. I used to think it could never become true for Barry Hannah but lately suspect it has. I doubt I’m ever the only person revisiting Airships or Ray, but Hey Jack? High Lonesome? 

Or B.H. Fairchild, who my friend Eric told me to read. He said, “Start with ‘Beauty,’ that’s the one they’ll remember him for if anyone remembers him for anything.” Or Wright Morris, who my friend Alex turned me onto; Willie chimed in too, I think. I guess these guys are also reading those guys, I mean at least enough to recommend. Ed might mention Evan S. Connell or what’s her face, Peter Taylor’s wife, a poet; he says you can’t find her anywhere but she’s pretty good.

It sounds sad and it is sad but there’s a goodness to it too, this wanting to be alone with something and then achieving that aloneness, or at least being able to believe for a while that you did. To have stood alone with the pattern before your eyes, as Kierkegaard says, and he’s talking about Jesus but you can sub in whatever it is you’re willing to be alone with, whatever it is that someone else made that for a while you invite to be your life. 

*

Schnackenberg, from that book I bought:

And myriads appear, self-multiply,

And multiply again: Let this be X,

Let this be X times X, and let there be

More myriads of zeroes grain by grain

In sacks of sand where one by one by one

More sacks of sand are filled with other grains,

Let numbers coalesce and re-emerge

Unharmed by coalescence and unchanged;

And always let a higher number form

And every single number have a name:

*

It feels right right now to say that I hold with Augustine that evil has no positive quality, that it exists solely as the palpable absence of the good.

I want to publish a book of my collected literary criticism. I also want to publish a book of one hundred short essays about one hundred Grateful Dead songs. I want to call it 100 Grateful Dead Songs after the classic dorm room poster and I want it to be a small-trim hardcover that mimics the look of James Wood’s How Fiction Works. That seems like it should be enough nonfiction for a lifetime, for mine anyway. More than either of these books the book I hope to publish is a Collected Stories. The two collections that I’ve already published, plus the two or three (unclear)  that could be gathered out of what I’ve written since.

Eleanor, that’s her name. Eleanor Ross Taylor.

And Padgett Powell’s not dead by the way, I didn’t mean to suggest that earlier, I only meant that not many people have read that book I mentioned, or they aren’t reading it lately. I emailed him this morning to ask about a writer named Peter Christopher, who he and Crews both knew, who had a debut book in ’89 and then died in ’08 without having published another. For a long time Christopher was a guy you could read and be the only person who was reading him. And when I say you I don’t mean me because I didn’t know a thing about him. I just found out. This little press in Minnesota is putting the collection back out along with a whole unpublished second collection: this is his Collected Stories, his life’s work and his afterlife, 268 pages, paperback original, $16.95.

*

I was writing a piece of criticism and had cause to quote a line from the Denis Johnson story “Triumph Over the Grave.” It’s the one where the narrator says, “Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light. It’s not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie—although it has to be admitted that the clouds can descend, take you up, carry you to all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don’t get back to where you came from for years and years.” I suggested that Johnson’s lines were a stealth ars poetica. I wrote, “I don’t know if you could write Tree of Smoke this way but you could certainly write Jesus’ Son or The Name of the World, at least if you happen to have lived an extremely interesting life and to also be a genius blessed by God.” My editor read this as a joke, which it wasn’t, and cut it for space, which was fair. I had blown my word count and my darling needed killing; some of them always do. If my book of criticism ever gets published I plan to dedicate it to this editor, who will have commissioned no less than twenty of the however many pieces it ends up containing. Maybe this piece will be in there as well. 

*

The pomposity of this, what I’m doing right now. It’s okay, we can talk about it. The insularity,  the bloat, the begging of narrowness to open out into depth, the fitful grasping, the allusions and teases and high-low referential swerves, the whole fake slouch of it and my unbearable whiteness and constant winks at the camera and lack of interest in resolving contradictions within my own thinking or even hitting a baseline level of aesthetic consistency.

It’s indefensible. I feel perfect.

Typing on my phone while walking laps around the drained reservoir and maybe as long as the words move through me and my body keeps moving I can invite this to be my life for a while, I can ask for more life into a time without boundaries, because eternity is not a location beyond time but rather a condition within it, as someone somewhere once said and it was me in one of my uncollected stories, I was ripping off some Jewish mystic, probably Scholem or Heschel, possibly my friend Josh. 

Here’s something Eileen Myles said in their recent essay FOR NOW:

It really takes so much time to become a writer and you have to be able to roll in time itself, that was my experience, it seems to me, like a dog likes to roll in dead fish at the beach. Or a dog (my dog) stands in the shit of a stable underneath the body of a horse (trembling) and feels awe. Cause there’s so much shit and so much horse. But if you’re somebody that wants to do that with your life which is just waste your time moment to moment, I mean it’s great, I thought I will waste it being a poet, I threw the gauntlet down and what happened after was nothing and nothing is where I work. 

Deuteronomy 6:9 but make it this. 

*

And someone on the group chat asked, Do you think of yourself as having literary influences? Like, is that part of how you conceive of your work? It was a good question and people had great answers. Since the chat is a sanctified space, an ark, I won’t be sharing any of their names or wisdom, but I feel okay about including my own reply: 

Absolutely. Huge part of it. One of the biggest questions I think about wrt my own work and really with all art, is where/when/how originality springs out of the emulative or derivative. I think there's real value in discipleship, but I am also increasingly suspicious of the desire to be part of a movement/group/scene. And acutely skeptical of any given guru's desire to be a guru. Maybe because when I was younger I valued both of those things so highly, and I think of my process of artistic maturation as a movement away from other people’s values/judgments about my work or their desires on my behalf. What they want to imagine me as. Where they can see me fit. I don't care about any of that anymore, though I remain basically a people-pleaser and push-over in my personal life. I had a teacher in grad school who once accused me of "just looking for a team to be on," and of caring far less about which team it was than about being on it. He was a mediocre teacher and kind of a prick but he had me dead to rights on that one. I've never forgotten it, and spent a long time determinedly growing out of it, just squashing that urge. But I kind of draw the line at squashing the way influence flows through the work itself, because I still see that as basically inevitable and fundamentally interesting. Harold Bloom's idea of agon across the ages between writers and between bodies of work feels true to me. I mean I want it to be true. Also why I love cover songs in general and jam bands in particular. Very interested in fucking around and finding out; maybe more interested in the fucking than the finding, if I really had to choose.

The chat’s on Discord, by the way. I’m not some monster who would send this as a text.

*

Listening to Standing in the Doorway again and let me put it this way: if God decided to cut an album of Dylan covers, and He didn’t want to sound too much like Jerry Garcia, this is the album He would record. 

*

I’m writing this on 5/15/22, what would have been my father’s 70th birthday if he had not died horribly and alone in March of 2017. What those five years are, what they’ve been. I’m probably not going to mention Dad again but his death is the name of my permission. Maybe you know the name of yours.

*

Here’s something I said recently to a student about revision: 

“Kill your darlings” is often understood as an injunction, i.e. “you must kill them,” but I think it is better understood as a state of mind, i.e. “you must be willing to kill them.” It’s worth recalling that when Abraham is told to sacrifice Isaac in Genesis 22, the angel intervenes to save them both: Isaac from death, Abraham from murder. God didn’t want Isaac’s life, he just wanted to know that he had Abraham’s unlimited loyalty—or faith, depending how you interpret the story. Jewish theologians have tended to argue that Abraham knew in his heart that God would never force him to go through with the sacrifice, so for them the issue is trust, which Abraham had; some Christian theologians (Kierkegaard, must acutely) have argued that Abraham must not have known, because certainty would have meant not needing to have faith.

*

How from the sky this country is just geometry homework: rectangles and lines, nautilus shells of on- and/or off-ramps (that’s calculus; I never took it) and I was sipping coffee somewhere above the mountains outside of Salt Like City, in or outbound who knows now, thinking NRBQ is the yacht-rock of alt-country and then repeating the line a few times, weighing whether I liked it enough to dig my phone out of my bag and pull up Notes and type it into the scratch file, where it found itself preceded by a fragment—from the jalapeño chicken pinwheels to the snowcapped peaks—and followed by this note about another old prof:

Mark wrote this amazing book-length poem about a boyfriend who died of AIDS at 25. I read it after watching the Trey Anastasio documentary. It—the book-length poem—was like watching a second, much better movie. Some double feature. There’s a part in the doc where Trey’s friend dies of cancer and you’re supposed to cry and I might have let myself, but I knew I was going to read Mark’s book after and I wasn’t going to cheapen those tears by having cried once already over the fucking Trey doc. Trey’s friend looked right at the camera and said that he had just poured liquid LSD into his chemo port and I couldn’t tell if he was kidding but fwiw I’d like it to be true.

And just because something was born somewhere doesn’t mean it can survive there. You can save some of your darlings (see above) if you evacuate them from the jurisdiction where their sentence was handed down. You can turn them into emigrants and refugees. You can build an ark for darlings and set sail. I’m not promising the dove will come, I’m saying you can wait and see. 

*

And I want to state for the record that while writing has been consistently analogized to music throughout this essay I do not mean to suggest that writing should literally aspire to the condition of live performance, that it should commit unrevised spontaneity to the page. Try to write prose like Jerry plays, you’re gonna end up on some cringe shit like Bukowski. My friend Sam says he doesn’t trust writers who say they don’t revise. He says, “They’re either lying or their sentences suck.” That’s true, give or take a miracle. And you could write a paper on the epic jams of Sam’s sentences, which in fact I did some years ago, it was published by Bomb magazine and is linked on my website if anyone wants to see. I’d put “Cremains” or “The Republic of Empathy” up there with the Live/Dead “Dark Star” or the “Shakedown Street” from New Haven, October ’79.  

*

Thank you coming to my craft talk. This cruise aboard my ark of darlings. The dove is coming but first here are some of my notes for 100 Grateful Dead Songs: 

6) “Viola Lee Blues” 4/26/69, the one on Fallout from the Phil Zone — how the highest I’ve ever been in my life was the twenty minutes I spent listening to this song alone in my room after smoking salvia in either 2002 or 2003.

9) “Cold Jordan” 5/15/70 at the Fillmore East — Dad’s 18th birthday, not that he was there or would have wanted to hear the show, but whenever I put it on I think of him, try to imagine what he might have been doing that night he came of age in Florida, could ask Mom she might know but don’t think I will ask.

31) July 19, 1987, Dylan & the Dead at Autzen stadium, Eugene OR — their only joint performance of “Heart of Mine.” You can stream it on Archive.org. It sounds absolutely awful in the most wonderful way.

40) “Not Fade Away,” 10/31/71 released as Dick’s Picks 2 — I was fifteen when I bought the CD with my Best Buy employee discount, spring ’98 I think, and we were moving my grandparents into a new apartment they’d bought and I wandered off to sit by the retention pond behind the building and there was an exposed drainage pipe and with my house key I scratched my name and the name of my summer camp girlfriend into the metal, trapped us in a heart and captioned it NOT FADE AWAY which even at the time I knew better than to truly believe, though that undercurrent of unbelief in no way lessened the pleasure of writing it or of seeing it written or of knowing it would disappear when the waters rose.

*

A life lived not in expectation but in hope, maybe hope of nothing in particular.

Rukeyser (reprise): The fragments join in me with their own music

Schnackenberg: A quest for truth but not for certainty

Dylan: Sometimes I turn and there’s someone there, other times it’s only me

Myles (reprise): I threw the gauntlet down and what happened after was nothing and nothing is where I work

Psalm 91 but make it about the group chat.

John 12:32 but make it Chrissie Hynde singing “Every Grain of Sand.”

*

I took last month off because I was busy but August is the first week of January of the summer—one big Out of Office.

I reviewed There Is Happiness: New and Selected Stories by Brad Watson for the Washington Post, and Misrecognition by Madison Newbound for the New York Times. I liked them both. Watson was on the young side of elder statesman (64) when he died in 2020. I asked to write about this one as soon as I saw it announced. Newbound is a debut novelist about whom I knew nothing until they sent me her book. As near as I can tell, I am the only person who has reviewed Misrecognition. I just checked the publisher’s website. Under the “Raves & Reviews” tab it’s me and a bunch of pre-publication blurbs. Not that I expected it to land on Obama’s summer reading list, but I’m sorry to see it slipping through the cracks. If that is what’s happening. Maybe she’ll rally after August.

I read at Pickathon on August 4th, likely my only non-Reboot reading of the year. I read from a lyric essay (I know, I know) called “Standing in the Doorway -> Craft Talk -> Jam -> Craft Talk -> Not Fade Away” which appeared in the Northwest Review in print only in early 2023. The last time I did Pickathon, in 2022, I read from the piece that shares its title with this newsletter. (Both, as we know, borrowed from David Berman Z”L; last week marked the fifth anniversary of his death.) That piece went over well and “Standing in the Doorway” has a similar format. They’ve both got music stuff in them and are written in bite-size sections so it doesn’t super matter if you tune out for a minute or wander in in the middle, which is good when you’re reading on an outdoor stage at 10AM on the Sunday of a music festival that has been going since Thursday.

Of the acts I saw, my favorite new discoveries were J.D. Simo, PACKS, Durand Jones, and Two Runner, whose set I actually missed but have been listening to since. I saw Jess Williamson twice, but that wasn’t a discovery—I expected her to be good and she was. After my reading, a few people asked me where they could read the rest of it. I gave away my physical copy of the magazine to a rabbi and was telling the other folks, Well if you email me I can send you a PDF. Then I thought why not just put it here? But it’s around 4,000 words so I don’t want to paste it to the bottom of this letter. I want it to be its own thing. I’ll send it out sometime soon.

I’ve been getting into Ellen Gilchrist, who died at the beginning of the year, whose stories are stranger and dirtier and more contemporary than I’d expected them to be. Also creaky and sus in spots and sometimes too cute by half. Her NYT obit described her as “a Southern writer with a sharp, sometimes indulgent eye for her region’s foibles and eccentricities.” That’s closer to right than wrong, though the blithe equivocation of “her region” with “the South” is doing a lot of work—too much, and done poorly at that. Gilchrist was born in Mississippi and studied with Eudora Welty, but “her region”, so far as I can tell from what I’ve read so far, starts in bourgeois New Orleans and bleeds up into the Ozarks. She rarely goes east of St. Louis unless she’s got business in Indianapolis.

She’s amazing at endings. Even the lesser stories stop on the strangest dimes and thereby nearly redeem themselves. Nearly. It’s exciting to find a new (to you) writer and map their territory. It’s like opening a new area in a video game. Eventually, of course, you find the map, and now you can see where the borders are, if not every last secret contained within them.

I started with Drunk with Love (1986) and then picked up her impeccably titled debut, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (1981). Both books have covers featuring paintings by Ginny Crouch Stanford (that’s Frank’s widow) of women holding seashells. I’ve also got a copy of Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle (1989) and Falling Through Space (1987), which is culled from her journals. We’re on a break right now but I’ll get to those. After that we’ll see if I keep going. Probably not gonna mess with the novels.

I’ve been re-reading a lot of Joy Williams stories and DeLillo’s Running Dog, which is as funny and strange as I remembered it being, but much better as a novel than I had recalled. DeLillo’s ‘70s novels don’t exactly have plots. They have premises and then those premises have emanations. Radial matrices, if you will. I revere these books, but they’re hardly built to keep you on the edge of your seat. Only…this one seems like it is? The sentences are stripped down (for DeLillo, that is), the scenes are short, there’s sex and gunplay, the whole thing moves.

I rewatched Masked & Anonymous. I’m replaying Hollow Knight and learning to make pizza.

I’m going to buy a picnic table and a CD player.

I’ll tell you about July.

If you ever find yourself in central Tennessee for seven weeks and toward the end of your run are getting a little stir crazy and your friend Emily has never been to Alabama and you want to come up with a day trip, try starting with the Unclaimed Baggage store in Scottsboro. I bought a stupid tee shirt for $3 and found a hardcover copy of Barry Hannah’s Ray, signed and dated 1991, for $4. It is inscribed, “To Jesus Ramon Rodriguez, All happiest wishes to a fellow scribe.” Emily found a winter coat. I think it was ten bucks.

They have a small museum of their wildest finds: a cowboy hat signed by Gary Sinise, some Judaica belonging to refugees from Nazi Germany (presumably it was their children or grandchildren who lost the prayer book and menorah in their airline baggage), and Hoggle from Labyrinth. I mean the actual one—or one of the ones—that appears in the movie. Someone put him on a plane and never came to claim him. There’s a Jamaican BBQ truck in the parking lot. Lunch special is $20, which seems pricey but it’s big enough to split. The ribs were good but the curried cabbage was the star.

I’ve long wanted to go to Sand Mountain to see the snake-handlers. At a 4th of July party I was talking about this with a retired religion professor. He told me snake-handling is on the wane and that the few folks still doing it probably wouldn’t be open to visitors. He recommended the Shape Note Singing (aka Sacred Harp) at Liberty Baptist Church in Henagar, so that’s where we went after Unclaimed Baggage.

Sacred Harp is sung unaccompanied by the entire congregation. The songs are short because you have to go through each one twice: first without the words, just notes (do-re-etc.) and melody, getting the harmonies right. This is the tuning of the sacred harp. They do it once this way and then they sing it with the words. Anyone can sign up to lead a song, you can choose any song you want from the hymnal, and when it’s your turn you get called up to the center of the room—not not like karaoke. I’d heard recordings of it before and was never really moved by it, I mean if gospel music is going to save my soul—which it may yet—it is not going to be this gospel music, but I figured it would feel different, more powerful, at once embodied and uncanny, in person.

And it did.

We saw kids as young as six or seven take turns leading, and some longhaired countryboys and tatted punx and grandpas in their souvenir Trump rally tee shirts and one guy whose motorized wheelchair was able to raise him a few feet in the air so he now sat more or less at average height of a standing man and so could be seen by the congregation and take his turn. Collection boxes went around and I pulled out a twenty but the boxes somehow kept missing us. Emily said later that she thought this was on purpose. They wanted us to understand that this was not some show we’d paid to see: it was their lives. It could be our lives too, but it wasn’t. Maybe if we went back a second time they’d let us give. But we weren’t going to do that, at least not before next summer. Or I might never see that place again.

We listened for about an hour and then we went to see Russell Cave National Monument and then I accidentally took us over a bad mountain road in the middle of nowhere and it was kind of dicey for a half hour but the road eventually spit us out where I’d thought it would, in South Pittsburgh, TN, near the Lodge Cast Iron factory store. North from there to Jasper where we stopped at the awful brewpub with the amazing view of the Tennessee valley (not pictured).

When the summer session ended, Amanda met me in Nashville to share the drive home. It was an amazing trip, in large part because Amanda is the best vacation-planner you will ever meet. The best planner of anything, really. It’s not just that she is a master of organization, it’s that she has exceptionally good ideas about where we should go and what we should do when we get there. A vision worth executing as well as the executive function to execute her vision. I’m mentioning this because I can get a little cranky and pre-exhausted about the prospect of taking two weeks to get home after being gone for nearly two months. I mean…it’s a lot. But once we start the trip it always ends up being one of the high points of our year. Last year we took the north route: saw friends in Chicago and Minneapolis, hiked around Theodore Roosevelt National Park, then drove across Montana, which I’d never seen east of Missoula.

This time we went southwest. Stopped first at Gateway Arch, skirting the northern border of Gilchrist country. We spent a night in Kansas City, then met my mom and sister for a few days at Rocky Mountain National Park. We did a few small hikes and one big one. We saw herds of elk on mountaintops and by the side of the road and one moose on the far side of a meadow.

After the Rockies, we continued on our own to Grand Teton. We passed through Laramie, where Brad Watson lived and taught for the last fifteen years of his life. Our phones lost service for long stretches of road (not a complaint) and when we stopped to get lunch in some small town they lit up with the news that Biden had dropped out of the Presidential race. We found a Mexican restaurant and I ate some chile verde that was as memorable as any mountain vista. (Side note: I’ve never eaten better Mexican food outside of Mexico than I ate this summer in Wyoming and Utah.)

In the Tetons we hiked the Forks of Cascade Canyon at Jenny Lake and saw this moose close up. In Yellowstone we saw black and grizzly bears, bison and more elk. A family of wolves on a distant hillside, mother and pups, barely more than gray dots in our binoculars. The wolf watchers had spotting scopes that cost more than the computer on which I’m writing this. They were happy to offer us a look and to explain what we were looking at: they knew every dot by its name. One woman asked another what she did for a living and the first woman replied, “I don’t do anything. I do this.” Like the Sacred Harp, wolf watching makes more sense in practice than in theory. It is hard to describe almost to the point of not being worth describing, but when you’re there it’s obvious why for some people it becomes The Thing.

They told us Old Faithful has gotten less faithful. It makes the crowds mad when they have to wait. We stood next to some chatty Mennonites who had stayed up all night driving here, just to see this, before they went on to a wedding or their new house or whatever it was they said. Three or four kids. Lucky for them we didn’t have to wait long. The next day, during a ranger talk, I noticed that a man in a wheelchair had decorated his entire prosthetic leg with a section of a Bosch painting, like a wraparound tattoo from ankle to knee. It’s the kind of detail you’d want to put into a short story, though I cannot imagine how you’d do it without it seeming cheesy and overwrought. Still, maybe I’ll try my luck.

The trip ended on a bit of a down note because so much of the region where we live is on fire and we are all so fucked. We visited Craters of the Moon en route to Boise. It was too smoky by then to hike much or to see much even if you were willing to hike. There were lava cones with pockets of ice at the bottom. There were thousands of acres of gray desolation and small brilliant patches of flowers. There was a cave full of bats but we didn’t have a permit. I bought a coffee mug.

We had a great breakfast in Boise at Goldstein’s, where they make the bagels from scratch and most of the menu items are named for Phish songs. (Phish, btw, is killing it this summer.) Then we drove through Malheur County and the path of the Durkee fire. Whole hillsides were blackened and in some cases still burning. It eased up around Hood River and by the time we got home the skies were clear. The cat was happy to see us. The abandoned Walmart on 82nd and Holgate is now a Vietnamese grocery supercenter. It has its own foodcourt. Banh mi is $6.50. So it wasn’t all bad news.

It’s good to be home.

Summer days are long but the weeks are short. I’m down here in Sewanee, TN, directing this MFA summer program and our session is somehow already half over. I turn 42 on Saturday. Seems fine?

A few quick media hits: I was interviewed by my friend Taylor Lewandowski for the Brooklyn Rail, and appeared on this podcast with my friend & colleague, Emily Adrian. The Cosmic Library podcast, which I joined as part of the cast of season five, has now posted all of its episodes. I wrote a letter about my love of writing longhand for Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words of Summer. I will be reading at Mirror House Nashville’s farewell show on 6/28 with my friend Hilary Bell, though I daresay the big draw for that one will be the music sets by the Styrofoam Winos and Cassie Berman. Reboot is out there living its life. I’m basically done being a novelist for now. Back to being a professor and an admin, book critic for a few hours here and there. Come fall I will be a novelist again at 4 or 5 festivals around the country but I’m not yet supposed to say which ones.

It feels like a lifetime ago that I drove across the country when in fact it was barely a month. I left Portland on 5/22, arrived in Sewanee on 6/1. I love the sound system in my car. Kicked things off with my dad’s burned CD of Beggars Banquet (little ritual I have) then went for the Slanted & Enchanted b-sides disc, some Dead shows, playlists that friends made for me, the Spectrum ‘97 box (start with disc 2, perfect hour of music) and plenty of Dylan. All of it for more hours per day than I would have thought I had the capacity for, which is saying something because I already knew I have far more capacity than most people for listening to music as a primary activity, so it was a surprise to surprise myself with wanting even more. Not background noise, not filler, not vibe-set. It’s main thing like reading a book. Well I guess driving is the main thing, but the attention that requires pays dividends all around, so your ears and mind and heart are all keyed up and tuned in and can take you to this other place that also is exactly where you are. The car is a cave in the deep woods of the highway, velocity for trees and stone.

I went by myself to see a late showing of I Saw the TV Glow at the local indie theater in Salt Lake City. I thought it was great and I loved how Lynch-ishly inscrutable it was, like it could have meant anything or nothing or fragments of lots of things or whatever I needed it to, which could also be nothing beyond being some arresting images in a beautiful punishing sequence. Then the group of young queer kids who’d sat in front of me said on their way out of the theater, “Well that was a bit obvious as a metaphor for trans experience, but it was fun at least.” I thought, Oh.

Stellar tacos in Green River, Utah (thank you, Emily). Spent a couple days with my sister in Golden, CO (that’s her dog and fire up above). Caught a bluegrass band in Wichita at a dive bar called John Barleycorn’s where the door guy kind of lied about the food menu because he thought if I left to eat somewhere else I might not come back for the show. It was ten bucks to get in and they only had microwaveable pizzas and bags of chips and I was pissed but then some guy had a smoker hitched to the back of his car and got some red hots cooking and that’s what I had for dinner, $4 whiskey sodas, band was fine.

Bought a couple of bloodstones at a crystal shop in a small Colorado town I forget the name of (near Rifle) that caught my eye because the user reviews on Google maps made the owner sound insane. People accused her of charging too much, of following them around the store as though they were shoplifting. But these were all locals complaining and she responded to each one, reminded them that in fact they HAD shoplifted, or were drunk at the time, etc. She called them by their names. The owner wasn’t there but I had a nice conversation with the woman who was. She gave me a free selenite to go with my bloodstones.

I became a devotee of the LOVE’s gas station chain. I downloaded their app which gets you 10 cents off every gallon of gas you buy at LOVE’s. A few days into the trip I bought a purple honeycomb silicon seat pad from the section of their store that’s just for truckers. My lower back pain drained away so quickly it felt like pulling the plug at the end of a bath. Whirlpool at the base of my spine, going & gone.

I spent several days in Tulsa in the archives of the Bob Dylan Center, which was a truly special experience that I’m trying to write about elsewhere so hopefully there’ll be a link to share later this summer but I can tell you that the public-facing portion of the Center, ie the museum, is worth the trip. There are four or five major exhibits spread across the two floors. Tons to see, hear, read, do. I spent about four hours in there, could have spent three more. You could do it in two if you had to. You’d get the gist.

But I was going to tell you about the listening room. Ralston is one of the jewels in Sewanee’s crown and one of my favorite things about being here is booking listening sessions. There are plain wood chairs that all face the portrait of the guy the room is named for and I love to sit there in the stillness at the center of the sound. You can ask them for anything. Tracy O’Neill came to visit our program & read from her excellent new memoir so while she was here I booked a session for us. She chose Mahalia Jackson, a London Symphony Orchestra performance of Stravinsky’s The Firebird, and the Rolling Stones. The following week, I booked a session for my fiction class. I asked each student to choose a song, sequenced their selections, and then, since there are only 8 of them and we had a whole hour, added some stuff that I thought would show off what the space is capable of. You can check out our playlist here.

I’ve long felt that the Silver Jews’ “The Poor, the Fair, and the Good” is one of David Berman’s most profound compositions and hearing it in this room confirmed this belief forever. Talk about a house with many mansions. I could spend days wandering around inside this song. The spareness of the lyrics in terms of total line-count relative to the complexity of image and thought contained within each line, and the way that supersaturation is expressed by the dense layers of the music, its ambling tension and push-pull builds and the sea of it all parting for the duet vocal to kick in at 1:20—it’s exquisite. It’s unreal. Just as it’s unreal that Tanglewood Numbers is 19 years old or that David has been gone for five.

My friend Daniela made a record with her group, The Pettifoggers. She wrote to me the other day with a writing question and mentioned in passing that she’d put out this record, Small Claims, last year. So I threw it on and hot damn. I’ve been recommending it to everyone. This issue’s title comes from her song “Nebraska”, an ode to her home state, a big patch of map that I did not drive through in May, indeed have only ever been once, a decade ago now. Story for another day.

In my car there are now two Dylan CDs that I picked up for two bucks apiece in a record store in West Nashville: John Wesley Harding and Time Out of Mind. Thirty years between them: ‘67 and ‘97. JWH came out the same year as Surrealistic Pillow, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and Are You Experienced? TOoM came out the same year as OK Computer, Wu-Tang Forever, and Brighten the Corners. I put JWH into the player right away and ended up listening to it straight through nine or ten times. It just kept restarting when it finished and I couldn’t see a reason to turn it off. Increasingly convinced it’s a top 5 Dylan record. I ended up lending it to my friend Jamie, so now TOoM is on the loop. Every time I listen to “Highlands” it gets weirder—both better and worse at once but always deeper. The thing that I thought I Saw the TV Glow was is what this actually is. And “Standing in the Doorway” belongs in any conversation about Dylan’s say 20 best songs.

Last time I mentioned Sofia Wolfson’s Imposing on a Hometown but it wasn’t out yet. Now it is. I’ve been listening to it constantly, to the point where I’m starting to suspect it’ll be my most-played album of the year when the stats come in. Spotify doesn’t know about the CD player in my car. Bob better watch his ass.

Pair of high-energy Dead shows from April ‘89 (thank you, Adam) and this slow loopy one from Portland, OR July 26, 1972, never officially released. It came on the satellite radio channel while I was trying to get out of Arkansas my last night on the road. I couldn’t believe the molasses in “El Paso” and Bobby feuding with the sound guy basically all night. They hit “Tennessee Jed” just as I hit the bridge over the Mississippi and crossed into Memphis. Signs and wonders, man. But you can believe anything when you’ve been alone in a car for long enough. That’s kind of the whole point.

*

Thanks as always for reading. Some highlights/outtakes:

I have a friend who has a great line about the anti-climactic weirdness of publishing a book, which he first heard from a teacher of his: the storm before the calm. That is, you spend the months in the run-up to publication trying to get press, setting up events, hoping for the moon and stars, fearing the worst. You’ve got that special glow that comes from being a person with a book coming out. Then you throw it its little birthday party and everyone presses the like button and then a few days later you’re just another person who wrote a book and your book is just another book that someone wrote. I’m not complaining, mind you, I’m just saying how it is. (As Carver puts it in “Gazebo”: “ ‘Duane,’ Holly goes. In this too she was right.”)

That said, I’m thrilled and humbled and honestly a bit gobsmacked to report that, one month after publication, Reboot has been—and seems to still be—thriving. I got to tour it for a couple of weeks, saw old friends & made new ones at a run of events in L.A., Portland, Seattle, New York City, and Minneapolis. And now, as I turn my attention away from being “a novelist” and toward being “the director of the MFA program”, I take a lot of comfort in my sense that the novel’s life may yet continue without my active encouragement or even awareness.

Here’s a quick roundup of press I did (or got) since I sent the last issue of this newsletter.

There was a smart review of Reboot in the Chicago Review of Books, as well as a generous mention in The Maris Review (thank you, Maris!), and Powell’s City of Books where it was a Pick of the Month for April (thank you, Keith M.!)

I wrote a short piece about "Five of my favorite second novels by authors I love" for Shepherd.com, and an appreciation of Alice Munro, whose stories had a depth most novelists only dream of, for the Washington Post.

A second excerpt from the novel was published by Forever magazine, which is edited by Madeline Cash and Anika Jade Levy, two amazing young writers with debut novels coming out next year. (The other excerpt is in N+1.) Anika was my conversation partner at a reading at Threes Brewing in Brooklyn, where I got to meet some of her students from the freshman writing studio she teaches at Pratt. This was especially meaningful to me because I first met Anika when she was a freshman in my writing studio at Pratt. It was a whole circle of life thing. It ruled.

I went on Slate's "Working Overtime" podcast with Isaac Butler and June Thomas. I was also interviewed on Jonesy with Ken Jones on KBOO Portland. I’m part of the core cast of season five of Lit Hub's  Cosmic Library podcast, alongside novelist Tayari Jones, scholar Andrew Kahn, New Yorker editor Deborah Treisman, and critic Becca Rothfeld, whose All Things Are Too Small is one of my favorite books of the year. I was happy to see it reviewed in the same issue of the New York Times Book Review as mine, by my old grad school mentor, the novelist and critic David Gates. We (that is, Becca and I) were lucky enough to both make Editors’ Choice, which led editor Gregory Cowles to deliver this lede:

I couldn’t agree more with Greg’s suggestion and will add that Rothfeld has a Substack of her own, which I subscribe to and recommend.

And speaking of ledes, not to bury mine but Reboot didn’t just get a great review in the NYTBR, it got the cover, and I’m trying to find something flip to say about that but I can’t think of anything because it’s one of those career/life-goal moments that every writer dreams about and now it has happened to me and I’m grateful for it and that is the thing that there is to say. I was especially grateful to have been in NYC on my tour when it happened. Here’s me seeing it in print for the first time at brunch with my editor on Saturday morning:

This past Friday I gave a reading at the Raymond Carver Festival in Clatskanie, Oregon (Carver’s birthplace) and for the first time in 2024 elected to read from unpublished work rather than from Reboot. It was a small moment that felt like a big one. On May 23, there will be a big moment that will feel like a small one. I will get in my car, start it, and drive toward the highway. I’ll spend the next nine or ten days driving southeast toward Sewanee, TN, to direct the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program from June 3 - July 15. After that, I’ll meet Amanda in Nashville and we’ll spend a couple of weeks driving back west, hitting a bunch of national parks along the way. It’ll be nearly August before I’m home again.

My route Southeast will take me first to Twin Falls, Idaho, then to Salt Lake City where I’m reading with Ashley Farmer at Bar-X on May 24th at 7PM, then to Denver to see my sister for a couple of days. After that, a stopover in Wichita before I spend a few days in Tulsa at the Bob Dylan Center, which I’ve wanted to visit since it opened. I’m planning to write about it, but that’s all I’ll say for the time being. I’m also writing a couple of reviews right now, and there will be new fiction before the summer’s out. More news on all that when there’s news. After Tulsa, I might grind out the ten hours to Nashville or I might stop somewhere around Memphis and rest. Either way, I’ll be in Sewanee on June 1. I’m teaching a six-week seminar on The Short Novel. Here’s the reading list:

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo (translated by Douglas Weatherford), Log of the SS the Mrs Unguentine by Stanley G. Crawford

I’m always a bit apprehensive about the summer program because I don’t like being anyone’s boss, but once I get there and things get going the program mostly runs itself. Then I get to focus on teaching my class (which is the best part) and enjoying our faculty reading series, hosting our special guests—this summer we’ve got Tracy O’Neill, Jill McCorkle, and Ross White—and throwing hangouts on the big front porch of the sprawling old house that the school rents for me and my colleague Ryan Chapman. There are afternoon storms and it stays light out late and a bunch of the faculty are bringing their dogs.

I’m apprehensive about the road trip too—it’s the longest I’ve ever done solo, by a lot—but mostly excited. I’ve set it up to alternate long and short driving days, and I usually get a lot of writing done in hotels. I dig the impersonality of them. It helps me get out of my own way. So I’m planning for this to sort of be a residency-on-wheels where I either get up early and write before check-out then drive all day, or drive early and then have the afternoon and evening to write. We’ll see if any of that happens. But I am working on two new projects—one fiction, one non—so it’s not as though I’ll be hurting for options.

I would, however, love it if you wanted to send me stuff to listen to on my drives. Send me your favorite podcast, album, audiobook, Dead show, or playlist. Even after this trip, I’ll be on the road a lot this summer: back and forth between Sewanee and Nashville (a good 90 minutes each way; worse with traffic) and then the whole drive back to Portland. As a thank you in advance, here are some things I’ve been listening to:

—Imposing on a Hometown by Sofia Wolfson. I met Sofia at my Brooklyn reading and afterward she sent me a preview of her new record, which is out May 31. I love it. Four of the ten tracks are up at Bandcamp now.

—Mimi by Corridor. One of three recent Sub Pop releases I picked up on vinyl recently, but I don’t think Iron & Wine or J. Mascis need me to vouch for them. These guys were news to me and their record is a blast. The guys on r/indieheads are going apeshit about it and I can see why. Great sound, amazing cover art—here’s the artist.

—Margo Cilker’s OurVinyl Session. Four song solo set kicking off with a revelatory new version of “Tehachapi.” She’s playing the Americana Harvest Fest on Sauvie Island on August 15 and we’ve already got it on our calendar. I’m considering it my own (unofficial) homecoming show.

—The Lit Century podcast with Catherine Nichols. This is always a great listen. Catherine is among the most capacious and original thinkers I’ve ever encountered. She picks excellent guests and the conversations aren’t like anything you hear anywhere else. I was going to save the latest for my road trip but instead I listened to it while running errands yesterday because I couldn’t wait to find out what she and Amitava Kumar made of Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. The episode before this one, with Daniel Saldana Paris and Wah-Ming Chang, talking about Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, is a banger too. They all are, is my point. I put both these episodes, and the one about Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (with J. Robert Lennon and V.V. Ganeshananthan), on my summer syllabus as recommended supplemental material for the books in question.

—This amazing playlist that Sarah Crowder made for me after we had an email exchange about Jason Molina, birds, and British folk music. She wrote to me when she was researching this post for One Stone, her Substack, which I recommend.

—I love Jerry Garcia’s Bob Dylan covers, but I have to confess myself a dissenter from his “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” The way he takes a slow spare sad song and makes it even slower sadder and more spare feels redundant to me. And the results are kinda boring. There’s a new JGB release: two songs recorded at the Keystone in Berkeley on 2/13/76, and the first track is a 19-minute “Knockin’” that I’m sorry to say doesn’t do much to change my opinion. But the second track is a fantastic rendition of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” which, at 18:41, is possibly the longest version of the song he ever did. Me being me, I usually listen to both, but you can skip ahead to Jimmy, it’s cool.

—Smithsonian Folkways made a playlist of Charlie Parr’s guitar influences as part of their promotion of his (stellar) new album Little Sun.

—And speaking of Dylan. The deluxe editions of his Bootleg Series releases come and go from Spotify, so get ‘em while they’re here. Right now, all 8 discs of Trouble No More: 1979-1981 (aka The Gospel Era) are available to stream. I know it sounds like affected contrarian bullshit, but I love this era of Dylan. Earnestly. (And yes, it is also affected contrarian bullshit, but still.) His backing band is first-rate and he’s on fire with energy and conviction, which I love hearing separate from the question of whether I share the particular convictions being expressed. There’s a wide selection from across three major tours and rehearsal sessions, as well as complete concerts from Toronto and London. I love every version of “Solid Rock”, “Slow Train”, “Every Grain of Sand” (especially Lakeland FL ‘81), and “Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Nobody.” He attacks “Saved” and “Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” with a ferocity that makes the album version of “Highway 61 Revisited” sound like, well, Jerry Garcia doing “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” At some point in the next ten days I am going to get in my car one morning, put this on, and not stop driving until it ends eight hours later. If that’s more than you’re up for, try putting it on on random and letting it bounce you around a while. See if doesn’t convert you, just a little.

Thanks as always for reading.

When I launched this newsletter, I said it would be monthly-ish. This has been a big month for me, so I’m doing two. On April 11, my profile of Low’s Alan Sparhawk was published by The New Yorker. Today, April 23, is publication day for Reboot, my second novel. I know I’ve been telling you that in every issue since January. But this week I’ve got a bunch of exciting new stuff to share—reviews, interviews, an excerpt—and I am going to shamelessly implore you for the last time to please please please buy a copy. (Future imploring will occur, but less often and with more shame.) I also want to remind you that the REBOOT SPRING TOUR is officially underway. I kicked things off this past weekend at the L.A. Times Book Festival. There’s now an official tour graphic, which is just below, but you can get more detailed info on any given event, as well as any changes or additions, by checking my website or my Instagram.

Now I’m going to round up some of the recent press that Reboot has gotten and say some pretty earnest, hopefully interesting, ultimately self-congratulatory things about the people and entities that published the pieces.

TL;DR VERSION:

“Shibboleth Gold,” an excerpt from Reboot, in N+1.

“The Pilgrim’s (Lack of) Progress, Or, Sorry I Took So Long to Finish My Novel, Or, On the Value of Restarting”, an essay in Lit Hub. (Title theirs; I submitted it as “The Author’s Apology for His Book.”)

In conversation with Adam Ross on The Sewanee Review podcast.

Interviewed by Lincoln Michel for his Counter Craft newsletter.

Reviews: New York Times Book Review; Bookforum; Washington Post.

I made you a playlist: “in rotation, April” kicks off with the biggest bop on the amazing new Charlie Parr album, Little Sun. There are a few entries linked to Reboot in variously obvious or obscure ways: “Silver Threads and Golden Needles”, this particular recording of “Goodnight, Irene”, the latest Guided By Voices, and Taylor Swift’s newfound interest in poetry. Her new record is weirdly both a little uneven and a little one-note. It has taken some deserved knocks—personally, I’d like to see her get over her infatuation with Lana Del Rey and go back to writing something we can sing along to, or even, hope of hopes, brush the dust off her banjo—but in this family we don’t turn on people because they’re TRYING SOMETHING, so I picked a B-side dirge with a title giving just enough Mazursky to raise an eyebrow. If you dig the Humbird song, clickthru to the new record, it’s great. “Kill Devil Falls” came on randomly the other day and I realized I’d never paid attention to the lyrics before because I’d only ever heard it live and also who cares. But the studio version is lyrically legible and, I think, a cleverly organized and economical story song. J.J. Cale cuz I’ve got Tulsa on the brain. More Mike Scott, Spiritualized, Townes, Robert Earl, and Japanese shoegaze—go figure. Thanks for listening.

TAYLOR’S VERSION:

“Shibboleth Gold,” an excerpt from Reboot, in N+1. My relationship with these guys goes back nearly to their founding. I was an intern at The Nation when they launched, and one of my bosses connected me to Ben Kunkel, who invited me to the issue #1 release party, and to a Vampire Weekend show sponsored by eMusic, which come to think of it might not have been an N+1 event at all but rather just been Ben being nice to me. I pitched them a review of the then-new Nirvana box set, With the Lights Out, and this became the first piece of serious writing that I ever published as well as my most impressive byline for years to come. It probably helped get me into graduate school. That reminds me: there used to be a line in Reboot where Molly Webster, explaining that the freelance rate she gets for writing pop culture hot takes doesn’t come close to covering her student loan debt, remarks “MFA vs. NYC?—Why not both!?!?” We cut the joke because my editor rightly found it too obscure, but old school heads know what I’m talking about. (As it happens, “Why not both!?!” is what I did, the former being the thing that made the latter possible.) It is always a privilege & thrill when my work appears in their pages/pixels, and I still think N+1 is one of the most impressive bylines you can have.

This essay for Lit Hub started its life as the preface to Reboot. I was going for a whole Amis-preface-to-Money-meets-Roth-preface-to-Operation Shylock thing that didn’t work out. I’m glad it found a second life here, though it’s worth noting that this is not the title I submitted it with. In my mind it is still called, pace Bunyan, “The Author’s Apology for His Book.”

Speaking of privilege & thrill, I got to have a conversation with my friend and colleague, Adam Ross, editor of The Sewanee Review, for the magazine’s podcast. I started writing for Adam not too long after he became SR’s editor. He’s published a number of my short stories, for which I am grateful, and I wrote a craft talk for him that will be out later this year. But he’s also given me the space and encouragement to do the kind of longform criticism that people say doesn’t exist anymore. If not for the grace of editors like him, those people would be right.

Lincoln Michel interviewed me for his Counter Craft newsletter. Lincoln and I came up in the writing world together and I’ve always been impressed by the way he brings his literary values to bear on his speculative instincts and genre enthusiasms. It’s easy to look around in 2024 and see why someone would do what he does, because his sensibility (broadly construed) is enjoying widespread popularity, critical acclaim, and commercial success: Kelly Link, Ed Park, Percival Everett, Charles Yu, Carmen Maria Machado, Karen Russell, Joshua Cohen, Marie-Helene Bertino, Catherine Lacey, E. Lily Yu—the list goes on and on. But Lincoln was ahead of the curve on this; as Alex Jones said in a slightly different context, he was “Out here on day one.” In fact, while I was listening to Justin Torres in conversation with Nadxieli Nieto at the L.A. Times Book Festival this weekend, it occurred to me that we’re living through a golden age of innovative and experimental literature, and it’s happening front and center of the industry and the culture. I thought, I should write an essay about this; then I thought, No, Lincoln should write an essay about this. Maybe he will? Maybe he already did? My point is that he’s exactly the kind of reader who I hoped would love Reboot, and it means a lot that he took the time to talk with me about how I wrote it.

There was a great review of Reboot by Joshua Ferris in the New York Times Book Review this Sunday. What a gift it is when they send the guy from the generation above yours who made his name with a DeLillo homage/burlesque to review your DeLillo homage/burlesque and he thinks you did a pretty solid job. You can read the whole thing here. This is my favorite part:

I write a lot of book reviews. It’s a big part of my identity as a writer, and a not inconsiderable part of how I make a living. Some writers don’t write reviews and/or don’t read reviews of their own work. I get why. But I do both. I’m less concerned with whether a book review is positive or negative than with the depth and quality of engagement between the critic and the work. I try to bring good faith and my best attention to the criticism I write, whether it’s 600 words in a daily paper or 6,000 words for a literary quarterly. To me, that’s what criticism is: a record of good attention paid in good faith. To see my fiction treated with real rigor and care, to read the record of someone else’s sojourn through the world I dreamed into being and lived alone in for so long, is incredibly rare and truly special. And to be blunt, it is not something I’ve experienced very often in my career. Most writers don’t. And just to show I’m serious, here’s a pretty negative review by Sam Sacks in the Wall Street Journal. I disagree with his verdict, obviously, but his positions are hardly indefensible—especially the part where he praises my intelligence and says I’ve updated Philip Roth’s notion of “the indigenous American berserk.” On that much we can agree to agree.

Still, one likes to be liked, and prefers praise to criticism. Here is Angelo Hernandez-Sias’ “Hollywood Babble On” in the new issue of Bookforum, another one of my favorite magazines to read and in which to publish. I’m helping them launch the new issue on May 3, and just in case that fact has you thinking this whole thing smells a little funny, let me just say that they didn’t tell me a review was even coming, let alone who was writing it, and they didn’t ask me to read at their party until after the piece came out. Michael Miller has been a friend and mentor to me since he was at Time Out New York back when that existed, and I’ve written more pieces on a more consistent basis for him than any other editor I’ve ever worked with. But he plays fair. Anyway, Angelo’s piece is one of the most substantive reviews my work has ever gotten and I’m grateful to him for it. Here’s the same thing that the WSJ critic found so pointless and irritating as explained by somebody who thought it was worthwhile and cool:

And speaking of the most substantive reviews I’ve ever gotten, here’s Mark Athitakis in the Washington Post. He calls the novel “a very serious story about the perniciousness of conspiracy thinking, wrapped in a very funny yarn about the shallowness of celebrity culture.” What else could you ask for? Well, how about this: he goes on to say that I am “funnier than DeLillo”, which, well—holy shit. He notes that this “may seem like faint praise” but it doesn’t feel that way to me. DeLillo can be extremely funny! Frankly, I have my own doubts as to whether his assertion is true, but I’m grateful for it either way. Moreover, this review sees very clearly not just that DeLillo is a big influence on this novel, but which DeLillo and why. Although Cosmopolis is the novel that Reboot name-checks and riffs on (and though there are a few Underworld Easter Eggs in the text) it was DeLillo’s quartet of mid ‘70s novels—End Zone, Running Dog, Players, and especially Great Jones Street—that I looked to most often for guidance and inspiration. Without Bucky Wunderlick, there is no David Crader, who, in one draft of Reboot, was trying to convince Shayne to work with him on an adaptation of Great Jones Street and had memorized Bucky’s “lone mellow promise of an island” speech from the end of GJS to help sell the idea. The version of David I ultimately settled on wouldn’t be interested in doing that, but you can find traces of GJS is in David’s meditation on the nature of fame and Grace’s more cryptic/oracular pronouncements when he is talking with her at her father’s grave.

OK I think that’s it. Thank you to everyone who has helped me bring this book into the world. If you’re reading this, that means you.

Regular readers might have noticed several passing mentions in recent months of a piece of writing that I thought would be out by now. Well, it’s out now, and it was worth all the extra time it took to get it right. Today you can find me at the top of The New Yorker website, which is a pretty special place to be. It’s my first time writing for the magazine since they last bought a piece of my fiction in 2015.

“The Heart of Low” is a profile of Alan Sparhawk, co-founder of one of my favorite bands. Low’s 30th anniversary was in 2023, and in mid-2022 I started thinking about a piece that would celebrate their living legacy and singular body of work. Then Mimi Parker, Low’s co-founder and Alan’s wife, died in November of that year. I can remember exactly where I was when I saw the news. I was sitting in the beat-up recliner chair in the drafty living room of the furnished university apartment that had come with the teaching fellowship I was on that semester. I was scrolling social media and the news stopped me cold. I started crying immediately, moaned I’d just been hit or burned. I wasn’t crying for the abruptly scotched prospect of my little essay, but because I had spent a lot of the lockdown listening to Low’s music on repeat at high volume: its desolate beauty and rich dark depths consoled and sustained me like very little else did in those days. I had invested a lot more than I knew—and I knew I had invested a lot—in the post-pandemic dream of hearing Alan and Mimi’s perfect uncanny harmonies live on stage again. Now it was never going to happen.

As luck or fate or grace would have it, in early 2023 an editor at The New Yorker reached out to me. She’d liked my Margo Cilker profile in the Oxford American’s most recent music issue and wondered if I had any ideas to pitch her. I told her more or less what I just told you, with the proviso that there was no way that this brilliant musician, so recently a widower, would be ready to talk to a journalist. Still, at her encouragement, I wrote a proper pitch and it got greenlit and we decided I would at least introduce myself, see how that went, maybe try to do the piece sometime later in the year. Alan’s publicist at Sub Pop got back to me almost immediately. She wasn’t sure what he’d be up for either, but she put me in touch with him, and to my utter astonishment he said sure, I could come out to Duluth and talk to him whenever. I was astonished because I didn’t yet know him. In retrospect, it’s not surprising at all: he is one of the most open-hearted, empathetic, generous people I’ve ever met. Two weeks later I was on a plane to Minneapolis and two days after that I was sitting at Alan and Mimi’s table in their practice space in Duluth, eating a legendary sandwich and talking with one of my heroes about how the death of his wife had tested his faith in God.

I’m gonna cut myself off in a minute because I want you to go read the profile, not my Behind the Music episode about how it got written. But I have to say that writing this piece has been one of the highlights of my career to date, and it would not have been possible without the encouragement, support, and practical assistance of a lot of people, starting with Carla Blumenkranz, the editor who commissioned it; Amanda Petrusich, the New Yorker’s staff music critic, who has been a friend for a long time; and Bekah Z. Flynn at Sub Pop, who vetted me carefully before letting me anywhere near her client, but once she decided to trust me, trusted me completely, not only with the delicacy of the situation but also that the piece really was going to come out, that this hadn’t all been for nothing.

I talked to Alan off and on over the course of a year, but I also talked to a lot of other people. Some of them are quoted in the piece—Phoebe Bridgers (!), Sharon Van Etten, Perfume Genius—and some aren’t. Imagine having to cut Corin Tucker, Charlie Parr, and Ben Gibbard just for space! Philip Harder, the director of Cue the Strings, has known the band for decades; his film is gorgeous, you should see it if you can. Jessica Hopper—whose music criticism sets a gold standard and whose editorial direction of the American Music Series at the University of Texas Press is the reason we have books like Quantum Criminals and Go Ahead in the Rain—gave me what amounted to a graduate education in the band’s history as well as (whether she knew it or not) how to do a piece like this right. She also mailed me some free books, which are beautiful.

In the first draft I quoted literally everybody who talked to me, and it fell to my wise and patient editor to explain why that wasn’t going to work. I could fill an entire issue of this newsletter—or a monograph—with profound stuff Alan said about the nature of composition, performance, faith, and grief; with things other people said about the power and importance of Low’s music. Maybe someday I will do that. But for now, please read the piece, please listen to some Low and think of Mimi, and please also don’t forget that I have a novel coming out in 12 days that you can still preorder and come see me if I’m visiting your city—tour schedule posted below for ease of reference. Second NYC date just got added. XOXOXO

REBOOT SPRING TOUR

SATURDAY APRIL 20 — LOS ANGELES, CA — LA Times Book Festival: 3:30pm-4:30pm Taper Hall 101 . “Thicker than Water: Modern Families, Modern Problems” panel with Ruth Madievsky, Edan Lepucki, and Alexandra Tanner. Tickets required, see site for details.

TUESDAY APRIL 23 — PORTLAND, OR — Publication day! West Coast launch: Powell’s City of Books, 7 PM (1005 W Burnside) in conversation with Jon Raymond.

WEDNESDAY APRIL 24 — SEATTLE, WA: Third Place Books—Ravenna, 7PM (6504 20th Ave NE).

MONDAY APRIL 29 — VANCOUVER, WA — Columbia Writers Series: Clark College, 11 AM (Penguin Union Building (PUB) 258 A-B). I will be helping my old friend Andrew Leland celebrate his stellar book, The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight. This university event is free and open to the public.

WEDNESDAY MAY 1 — NEW YORK CITY— East Coast launch: McNally Jackson—Seaport, 6:30 PM (4 Fulton Street) in conversation with Andrew Martin. Most McNally events require RSVP these days, but the May events aren’t posted yet, so check back on this one and make sure you can get in.

THURSDAY MAY 2 — DOUBLE-HEADER

      DAY GAME - BRONXVILLE, NY: Sarah Lawrence College MFA program—Slonim House, 2 PM. I will be giving a Craft talk called “The Sentence Is a Place to Play.” This university event is free and open to the public. Books will be for sale courtesy of Transom Books.

      NIGHT GAME - BROOKLYN, NY: Threes Brewing, 333 Douglas Street, 6:30 PM, in conversation with Anika Jade Levy. Books will be for sale.

MONDAY MAY 6 — MINNEAPOLIS, MN— No Coast launch: Milkweed Coffee, 6 PM (3822 E. Lake Street) in conversation with Dan Hornsby. Books will be for sale courtesy of Moon Palace Books.

FRIDAY MAY 10 — PORTLAND, OR (reprise): Powell’s City of Books, 7 PM (1005 W Burnside). Celebrating Julia Hannafin’s stunning debut novel, Cascade.

FRIDAY MAY 17 - CLATSKANIE, OR: I will be part of the Raymond Carver Writing Festival. Their website does not yet reflect this but they gave me a bumper sticker and assure me it is true. Details TK.

A full tour schedule with venues, dates, times, and conversation partners is provided further down in this post, but heads up if you’re in Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, New York, or Minneapolis, I would love to see you at one of these events. My last book was released at the height of the pandemic. I didn’t get to travel, reunite with old friends, make new friends, stay in weird hotels, buy stuff at the bookstores hosting me, or close down the locals’ favorite local. It was a brutally lonely way to promote a memoir about grief.

Reboot is a novel about old friends and fresh starts, a picaresque with a touch of gray. Its governing logic is velocity. I can’t wait to launch it into the world and myself into the world along with it.

Now here is a pitiful, heartfelt plea: it would mean SO MUCH to me if you would pre-order Reboot. Order it from the store where you’re planning to see me read, or from another indie bookseller that you like, or from Bookshop.org where it’s 10% off, or anywhere else books are sold. Bookstores take notice when a title is being anticipated, and all the preorders get counted as week one sales, so it gives the book a nice push out of the gate, which makes the publisher happy. I would really, really, really appreciate it if you would consider doing this. That in mind,

Here is a BOGO PROMO offer: Send me a screenshot of your receipt for a Reboot preorder and I will mail you a signed copy of Riding with the Ghost. I did a round of this already via social media and it went well. I’ve got about a dozen hardcovers left, maybe 20 paperbacks. This is what it looked like when I started:

A few weeks ago I recorded my audiobook. Next week we’re doing pickups.

It’s rare for a fiction writer to get to narrate their own audiobook. With memoirs, they like having the author up the intimacy factor by giving their own voice to what is already a personal/confessional story. You are the “I”, after all, or part of you is, or was at one time... Well, you know what I (“I”) mean. With fiction, the audio audience apparently likes a bit of a performance, so the publisher prefers to hire an actor. I’m not an actor, but I did write a novel about a former child actor, and I was one of those. That kid’s skillset continues to serve me well as a public speaker, teacher, interviewer (or -ee) and presenter of my own work.

All my work is written from the voice and for the ear. By the time you read anything I’ve published, whether it’s a novel or a half-page book review or this substack, I’ve read it aloud to myself somewhere between three and three hundred times, revising for tone, syntax, rhythm, stress, and breath. I don’t believe that aesthetics are merely the buff and polish on “what happens" in a given piece of writing. I believe that aesthetics are a huge part of “what happens.” I believe that sentences are events—participatory, durational experiences—and that how something means is essential to what it means. I’m not saying it’s the only way to write, but it’s what works for me, and because I understand my writing as always already being (among other things) a performance, and myself as the performer for whom the part was written, I’m loath to cede that ground to anyone else.

I’ve been lucky with audiobooks. First, in that Flings even got one. As my editor at the time put it, audiobooks for story collections are “rarer than hens’ teeth.” Then, because Riding with the Ghost was a memoir, the case for myself for straightforward, though finding a studio to record in was not. (Pandemic, remember?) The audio engineer and I spent a few distanced-yet-intimate days together in an otherwise vacant recording studio, me in the booth and him at the boards, both of us masked any time we had to be in the same room. A director in our headphones managed everything remotely from L.A.

With Reboot, I was warned that I probably wouldn’t get to record the audiobook, but in the end the executive producer showed me mercy, possibly because we’d worked together on RwtG, so she knew that I was capable as well as eager. She sent me a few pros’ audition reels but left the choice to me. I’m grateful to her for that. And for the record, I did listen to the reels. They were decent. Still, it was not a difficult decision to cast myself.

What do I mean by capable? Well, first you have to be able to block out several full workdays to spend in the studio. Then there’s the energy involved. Sitting on a stool and talking doesn’t seem like it would be a considerable physical or mental challenge, but in fact it’s both. It requires massive reserves of stamina and attention. You have to be able to present—and, yes, perform—material you have laid eyes on in months or years. Even though it’s your own writing, it’s essentially a cold read. (Another advantage of writing the way that I do: if you write toward the music of language then the text is necessarily a kind of musical score. You follow the syllable stresses, rhythms, punctuation, and breath of each line and it will sound the way it’s supposed to sound. It has to.) You have to be letter-perfect to the final approved text. You have to keep mistakes to a minimum because every tongue stumble or cough or improvised change of “cannot” to “can’t” means you have to pause, go back, do the line again. It eats studio time and it pulls you out of the zone. You have to take direction from the audio engineer and the director, who are often informing you that you do not know how to pronounce a word that you were certain you knew how to pronounce, or, as mentioned, telling you you fucked up on that last line so let’s roll back and take it from etc. You have to keep your voice clear and steady for six or eight hours for as many days as it takes to get through the book.

We had the studio for three full days, and I’ll go ahead and brag here that we finished in two and a half. And that we only needed the half because we were so far ahead of schedule the first two days that we knocked off early to rest my voice. The engineer told me that the average pace for audiobooks is 10-15 pages an hour. I was coming in around 25. That’s great for the production schedule but it means a lot more wear and tear on the throat. I can’t count how many Halls and cups of Throat Comfort tea with gobs of honey I consumed during these sessions. Outside of studio hours, I stopped speaking altogether.

Here’s the REBOOT TOUR SCHEDULE. Soon there will be a cute Instagrammable graphic version of this, and I will post reminders (on social, not here) about individual events as they approach, but for now:

SATURDAY APRIL 20 — LOS ANGELES, CA — LA Times Book Festival

3:30pm-4:30pm Taper Hall 101 . “Thicker than Water: Modern Families, Modern Problems” panel with Ruth Madievsky, Edan Lepucki, and Alexandra Tanner. Tickets required, see site for details.

TUESDAY APRIL 23 — PORTLAND, OR — Publication day! West Coast launch

Powell’s City of Books, 7 PM (1005 W Burnside) in conversation with Jon Raymond, author of the brilliant slacker sci-fi noir, Denial, as well as the screenplays of all your favorite Kelly Reichardt movie, the short stories a bunch of those movies are based on, and a lot more besides.

WEDNESDAY APRIL 24 — SEATTLE, WA

Third Place Books—Ravenna, 7PM (6504 20th Ave NE). This one’s a solo show. I’ll be covering The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert in its entirety.

MONDAY APRIL 29 — VANCOUVER, WA — Columbia Writers Series

Clark College, 11 AM (Penguin Union Building (PUB) 258 A-B). I will be helping my old friend Andrew Leland celebrate his stellar book, The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight. This university event is free and open to the public.

WEDNESDAY MAY 1 — NEW YORK CITY— East Coast launch

McNally Jackson—Seaport, 6:30 PM (4 Fulton Street) in conversation with Andrew Martin, author of the excellent story collection Cool for America, and Early Work, the kunstlerroman that seven out of ten literary men my age wish we’d had the chops and audacity to write back when we were still young enough to qualify as sad young literary men. Most McNally events require RSVP these days, but the May events aren’t posted yet, so check back on this one and make sure you can get in.

THURSDAY MAY 2 — BRONXVILLE, NY

Sarah Lawrence College MFA program—Slonim House, 2 PM. I will be giving a Craft talk called “The Sentence Is a Place to Play.” If, a few minutes ago, when you were reading my musings on aesthetics, you thought, I wish this lasted for 35 minutes and was followed by a Q&A then this is the event for you. This university event is free and open to the public. Books will be for sale courtesy of Transom Books.

MONDAY MAY 6 — MINNEAPOLIS, MN— No Coast launch

Milkweed Coffee, 6 PM (3822 E. Lake Street) in conversation with Dan Hornsby, author of Via Negativa and Sucker, two books I loved, and which he followed up with a slyly wise and disarming indie rock album. Books will be for sale courtesy of Moon Palace Books.

FRIDAY MAY 10 — PORTLAND, OR (reprise)

Powell’s City of Books, 7 PM (1005 W Burnside). Celebrating Julia Hannafin’s stunning debut novel, Cascade, which is also the debut novel for its publisher, the awesome new indie Great Place Books. I loved this book from the first time I read it—years ago, in manuscript—and am truly looking forward to helping introduce it, and Julia, and Great Place, to the rest of you.

Here’s a new mix I made. I started by picking the 20 most recent songs I “liked” on Spotify that weren’t Dylan or the Dead (though Dylan & The Dead makes an appearance, sorry not sorry) then I filled in the holes and vibed it into a sequence. I tried to be less precious about this than I usually am. (As a bonus: here’s the same “recently liked songs” game played only with Dylan and Dead. Real sicko shit.)

Some of these are things I’ve been listening to lately on vinyl: Bardo Pond, Wes Montgomery, Spiritualized, and the Beatles, though I went with Wilson Pickett’s cover of “Hey Jude” rather than the original. That’s Duane Allman on guitar! The biggest surprise might be Springsteen, who I’ve always liked well enough, but only just well enough. I stumbled onto this collection of so-called “Songs of Celebration” from his Live Series and surprised myself by listening to the whole thing and digging every minute of it. “My Love Will Not Let You Down” is from Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, NJ, 7/15/99. “Rosalita” from the Capitol Theater on 9/20/78 is great too, but it breaks ten minutes and I’m trying—really trying—to be reasonable.

Allegra Krieger is a recent discovery so I gave her two slots: “Circles” from her 2017 debut album of the same name, and “Lingering” off of her most recent. New Adrianne Lenker is always good news. We’re all waiting on the new Haley Hendrickx. I got obsessed with Walter Becker’s “Book of Liars” for a while and ended up writing a short story about it. I had only ever heard M.C. Taylor’s version of “Smoke Rings” and thought it was his song until the other day when he posted about his love of this David Wiffen album. Michael Hurley supplies this issue of the Abridged Abyss with its hed and dek. The rest are just good songs.

Thanks as always for reading and for (please please please) preordering Reboot. Hope to see you out there (“out there”) in April and May.

Report cards

I reviewed Megan Nolan’s Ordinary Human Failings for the Washington Post, part of my ongoing gig as a contributing writer to their books page. Since WaPo’s paywall is basically unscalable, I’m screencapping my favorite paragraph from the review (from my Word doc, not the published version, I can’t scale it either ):

(A bit more of me on Trevor here.)

There was a second piece I thought I’d be linking to this month but it’s still impending so, you know, thoughts and prayers.

In the meantime, Reboot has been getting some generous notices, most recently this profile in Publishers Weekly, and a tour is shaping up: L.A. the weekend of 4/20; Portland on 4/23 in conversation with Jon Raymond at Powell’s downtown; 4/24 at Third Place Books (Ravenna) in Seattle; 4/29 in Vancouver WA at Clark College in conversation with Andrew Leland about his book In the Country of the Blind; McNally Jackson (Seaport’s version) on May 1; and back in Portland on May 10 (→Powell’s reprise) in conversation with Julia Hannafin about their amazing debut novel, Cascade, which I had the privilege of reading early and blurbing.

You’re thinking to yourself that I have failed to provide key details like precise locations and times—and why not just slap it all together in a convenient JPEG that can be shared on social media? Save that sort of sanity and competence for the March issue. Hopefully by then there will be a couple more dates on the schedule. And not to put too fine a point on it, but if you’re a person who books writers for stuff, I’d be just chuffed if you’d consider me for a talk/reading/class visit/&c.

Oh and I joined Instagram. Less chat, more cat.

Here’s what I said about Julia’s novel:

Another debut novel, out the same day as Cascade (April 16), is Norma by Sarah Mintz, from the Canadian indie press Invisible Publishing. I had never heard of this press or this author, the book just showed up at my house, like so many (too many) books do. I gave it what was meant to be a cursory peek before consigning it to the purgatory of the ARC pile. Instead, this happened:

Mintz published a short essay about the writing of Norma, its (and her) relationship to Jewishness and postmodernism, with particular attention to Stanley Elkin’s novella The Bailbondsman, which I’d never read before but picked up on account of Mintz’s interest. (Caveat emptor: racism, some of it the subject of Elkin’s satire and some of it alas seemingly Elkin’s own.) Elkin, one of the funniest writers of the 20th century and a true genius at the level of the line—think Amis, Hannah, Faulkner, Woolf—is at this point so marginal a figure that part of the pleasure of reading him is feeling like you’ve got him all to yourself. I suggest starting with either The Living End, The Franchiser, or his only story collection, the impeccably titled Cries & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers (1965), which I own in an edition with a cover so insane that I’m going to stop writing this and go get it so I can show you:

Gone are the days, boy. There’s a later edition of this book (Dalkey Archive reissue?) with a preface in which Elkin claims to have invented the Polish joke. Just in case there’s any residual confusion about what we’re dealing with here.

About that vault (disambiguation)

I’ve got twenty (20) short stories sitting on my hard drive, all but three of them published since Flings came out in 2014. The urge to write stories comes to me far less often than it used to but the stories tend to come faster when they come at all. That’s a mixed blessing: they have an organic velocity and internal coherence that I prize highly (and used to have to work had to achieve) but they’re tougher to revise because they already know what they want to be when they get here. And they do still need revising, if only to become better versions of themselves.

The short story is still my favorite form, but sometimes it occurs to me that between my two extant collections and the 20 on my hard drive (setting aside juvenilia and misfires) I’ve produced just shy of 50 stories over the course of my career. I look at that number and am proud of it, but I also sometimes think, How many more of these fucking things am I supposed to write? At this point, one or two a year feels like plenty.

That said, I’d really like to publish a third collection, and there are reasons to think that I may get the chance to do so, but who knows when, or what portion of the aforementioned 20 stories will be included. (I’d guess between half and a third.) In the meantime, some of these stories are available online in the archives of the journals/magazines/websites that published them. Others aren’t.

One that isn’t is called “Medical Lake”, a jumped-up flash fiction (~1200 words) that I gave to my friends Anika Jade Levy and Madeline Cash for the second issue of their magazine, Forever. At the time (deep pandemic) I was going a little out of my mind (not special) and feeling extreme antipathy toward social media and the internet in general. I liked that Forever was small circulation, very under the radar. #1 was a staple-bound zine that Madeline mailed to me. Then #2 came out, with my story in it, perfect-bound with a cover by Ryan Trecartin, which should have been a clue as to where things were heading. That’s not a dig.

You may not need me to tell you that Forever is on the radar now. I mentioned Madeline’s collection Earth Angel in my 2023 recap; she has a story in the new issue of the Sewanee Review. Anika sold her novel, which will be out next year from Catapult. Forever is about to publish issue #6. They’ve got a lot to be proud of. They’ve grown the zine into a full-color glossy, kind of a zoomer Parkett on good acid and bad speed (also not a dig; art direction by Nat Ruiz) full of writing that resonates with what you used to find in the New York Tyrant and can still find in NOON or X-RAY LIT, but it doesn’t feel beholden to any of those things. I’m somewhere on the edge of that Venn diagram, insofar as I was in the Tyrant twice, NOON never (not for lack of trying), and I assume the kids at X-RAY have no idea who I am. It meant a lot to me that they published this story.

Anyway, back to issue #2: because I was being insane about the internet, I told them not to post my story to their website. I was emphatic that it be in print only; it felt imperative to only be read by people with the wherewithal to get their hands on a physical copy of the magazine. These days I feel more ambivalent than antipathetic re internet stuff (see above re Instagram), Forever #2 is totally sold out so you can’t get one, and it has lately occurred to me that one function of this newsletter could be to give new life to old writing during its who-knows-how-long (perhaps forever) limbo between magazine and book. So we’re gonna try it.

Here is my story “Medical Lake” from Forever #2. For the foreseeable future, this is the only place you’ll find it. It’s one of those ones like I was talking about earlier: velocity and coherence. I’m not saying it’s genius, but it moves. And is about movement, whatever else it’s about. I hope you like it. As a reminder (hi, Mom) you have been reading nonfiction up to this point and what follows is fiction, so please metabolize the narrative “I” accordingly. “Medical Lake” is from a series of shortish place-based stories written loosely in the spirit of the Texas/Florida/South Carolina sequence in Padgett Powell’s collection Typical (1991). The other places treated in said series are Indianapolis, Missoula, and the Florida Panhandle: all places where I’ve spent enough time to feel like more than a tourist but still far from a local. I tried to do Iceland too but it wound up 7000 words long and kind of about Florida anyway and nobody will publish it. Maybe someday it’ll find its forever home. Or maybe I’ll just post it here.

MEDICAL LAKE

I asked for spinach instead of lettuce, for a wheat wrap instead of a footlong, lite mayo but you know what make it double roast beef because there is such a thing as limits. I was trying to be better but a man has limits as to what he can self-inflict. I hadn’t expected to reach mine here, at this rest stop by Medical Lake, Washington, but I was hungry and less than halfway to Bozeman,  Montana, where certain humiliations awaited. I’m loath to discuss those. “Maybe good,” I told the sandwich maven, “if you add some bacon, too.”

“This one fat wrap,” she said, perhaps admiringly, grudging the tortilla through its final fold and tuck.

“I’m eating half for dinner,” I lied. I was going to eat the whole thing in my parked car immediately subsequent to this transaction. I paid up and set out for the lot.

Across from the rest stop was the fulfillment center, blue smile swooping along its highway side. It was a huge and hulking thing that appeared diminutive and forlorn against the gray flat West, with nothing for miles in any direction save this rest stop and, I assumed, the town of Medical Lake and the lake that it was named for, though neither town nor lake were visible from where I stood. The fulfillment center looked like a prison and even had a prison’s narrow winding approach road down which, I now saw, a small figure walking against traffic. Not that there was traffic. 

I chewed and watched the road, savoring the squish of lite mayo between my teeth, struggling to swallow the golf ball of beef mash in my mouth. I pictured its pinkness against the pink of my esophagus—lightless gully of my gullet, acid aquifer of my gut—doing like it says in The Secret until I successfully sucked it down.

I went back into the rest stop to hit the Starbucks, my balled-up wrap wrapper in-hand, bound for their waste basket instead of my backseat; I was glad.

I had got my latte and was walking back to my car when I saw that the figure from the fulfillment center had made it to the edge of the rest stop parking lot. She wore Doc Martens, black jeans and turtleneck, pink hair peeking from beneath a black watch cap pulled tight over her ears. Breath puffing in the cold as she walked, though some of that was the vape pen she puffed on, its red eye in bruised contrast to her wardrobe and the leaden sky.

I sipped my latte, leaned on my car—a kelly green Camry—and played cool.

She had been living in Medical Lake, she told me, and working at the fulfillment center, though she’d just now quit. “Unfulfilling,” she quipped through a vape cloud. She was looking to get to Billings and I told her I was good for most of that way.

I admit I was already starting to get ideas: loud music and someone to talk to, pushing 90 on I-90 in high camaraderie, verge of cahoots. After that who knew. Maybe she had pierced nipples and four hundred dollars rolled up in her sock. Maybe Bozeman and Billings both could be avoided. I mean I didn’t know what she was headed for but I figured one thing we had in common was that neither of us was eager to meet our fates. Maybe, I thought, we’ll turn north and disappear right up the Idaho stovepipe, blasting Robert Earl Keen as we cruise past Sandpoint and Bonners Ferry, gone like smoke, blown away toward some new life beyond the Canada line.

Is there even a crossing up there? I had never been and not to spoil my story but I still have not.

Because it might have been the latte in combination with the double roast beef or it might have been that the lite mayo had sat out on the counter for some hours, but my stomach was doing elevator drops by the time we hit Idaho and the last thing I wanted was to shit myself at the top of Fourth of July Pass, so we stopped at another rest stop, another Starbucks, this one in Coeur d’Alene, and I bought Sheena—which was her name; mine’s Howie—a can of cold brew, stuck two bucks in the tip jar and begged the barista for the bathroom code.

The barista gave me a look like she didn’t like my face—and sure, I was sweating, likely a bit peaked—but she yielded up the blessed numbers and soon I was sighing as I sagged onto the cold white throne to inaugurate an evacuation so vast it left me breathless, sort of windswept, clenched and rubbery, a steely flaccidness disrupted by seizures of dispatch that came on like orgasms and crashed like trucks.

I found out later that I popped a blood vessel in my left eye, and I guess I must have been moaning, because all of a sudden I heard the electronic door lock beep, its innards in motion. I swept my hands across my junk but made no move to stand.

The barista stood in the doorway with a Naloxone syringe unsheathed and gleaming in her food-grade-gloved hand.

“Hoo oh,” she said. “Sorry but it was fifteen minutes so I figured.” She backed out, fist over her face to spare me her giggles and herself the smell. The door closed, the lock grumbled, I was safe again.

When we got back on the road, Sheena drove while I nursed a raspberry SmartWater. There was snow in the pass but not much. We had something but it wasn’t camaraderie; cahoots were out of the question; they were as far from us as that Canada line.

I allowed myself to drift toward a weak recuperative sleep and as I drifted my thoughts were not of Sheena nor of Lookout Pass, the next one, which was coming up fast, nor yet of the humiliations I had suffered this day nor those that awaited me in Bozeman. Neither did I think of my burning nethers and wretched guts.

What I thought of was the time in fourth grade when I won the class poetry bowl by writing that the sky was like a Goodwill blanket the size of forever, tucking us in to the great big bed of the world.

I remembered the ten dollar bill I was awarded for my winning poem and how proud I was handing it to my mother so she could see it for herself because she was, she said, so proud, and just had to see it, had to hold it for a minute, and how I did not allow myself to know in my mind what I already knew in my hammering heart.

I had never won anything before I won the poetry bowl and I have never won anything since.

I don’t know what Mom spent my money on but I can guess, like I can guess that Sheena’s got stories like mine and worse, but there was one thing I did wonder about and could not half hazard a guess at, I mean it was my real last thought, not what I said earlier about my poem, though that was close.

My thought was, What makes a lake medical? 

I would still like to know.