Revelations & anticipations

A book cover, Kenyon, & camaraderie

If you’ve known me for even thirty seconds, you know already that I cannot affect a cool detachment about anything. A bite of good food, the presence of a nice view, a bird or a flower or a nifty rock—I emote. So imagine my current level of delight—off the charts—to be able to share with you the cover of Heading North:

Cover design by Savannah Adams, Braddock Avenue Books.

I started writing this novel in 2012, and while I’ve imagined the book as a book for a long time, this step makes the whole thing feel entirely different. Real in a new and startling way. You can preorder it from the Braddock Avenue Books website. Preorders are incredibly important to authors and presses, so as an added bit of incentive, from now until August 1, I will contribute $2 for every preorder of the book to the Friends for Life Bike Rally to support people living with HIV/AIDS. (In three weeks, I’ll be pedalling my heart out on the 6-day, 660km Bike Rally from Toronto to Montreal for this cause, so you get two things: a book delivery in November & a little sense of doing good.)

But isn’t that cover lovely?

Let me continue to enthuse:

I write to you today three days distant from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, where I had the privilege to be the Peter Taylor Fellow for Cleyvis Natera’s fiction workshop and to work with and be among a staggeringly talented bunch of writers.

It is hard to quantify what it means to be so thoroughly immersed in a group of people that understands so well what it is you do. Perhaps other people live this all the time, but I largely don’t; I have plenty of supportive, lovely folks in my life, and I get to teach writing to many lovely students each year, but I’m the only fiction faculty in my department and there are only two of us who teach creative writing. In the summer, I mostly see my spouse and my cats, none of whom worry daily about plot¹ structure. So for seven days, to be so much among that shared shorthand and understood at a gesture or a glance, was a proper gift.

And with such abounding, indefatigable glee:

My workshop organized a reading for our particular workshop after the twelve-hour day, after the KRWW-wide evening reading, so we could experience each other’s more polished work, our favorite pieces, in addition to the new work that is the heart of the Kenyon model. And for an hour, we read to each other in a room on the third floor of Ascension Hall, which features wooden paneling and detailing, leather armchairs, a dais with a trio of throne-like chairs, and a bounty of stained glass. What a grand, grand thing, this whole week.

Ascension Hall stained glass detail.

A few things:

• I will be rolling out many new reading recommendations that stem, in one way or another, from my Kenyon experience, but since I started reading Michelle Hart’s What We Do In The Dark pretty much the moment I got my copy, I will start here. The lucid, crisp prose style is easy to drop into, and its directness is a striking counterpoint to the complex layers of grief and longing evident in the narrator, Mallory. It’s a novel about complicated relationships (troubled and troubling, at times, which is very propulsive), and the authorial choices with regard to style and organization put the spotlight squarely on story so that Mallory’s experiences are foremost in mind. It’s incredibly moreish.

• The Tour de France is in full gallop, and the stage that will end after I send this newsletter out promises to be intense. And you may care about that or not. But here are a pair of photo galleries from the tour courtesy of Escape Collective—one of roadside spectators with some insight by the photographers, Ashley and Jered Gruber, and one of three days of images in the mountains that captures the entire race feeling: the athletes and the spectators and the stunning places Le Tour goes. If you’d like to go on a mini-vacation or do a little people-watching from your desk, go to these links and have an escape.

• I took my book charkha to Kenyon, put it on the desk in my room, and didn’t touch it again until it was time to pack it up. But I won’t say I wasn’t making anything that week; I was making friends.

1. Roo definitely plots, but he certainly doesn’t worry about it.