Live Nude Girl's not officially out until 2009...

...but thanks to Jonathan Messinger at Time Out Chicago for doing some creative math and including a mention of the book in his year-end round-up of the Best of 2008.

Belated Mini-Tour and Blog Tour Recap; More Notices for In the Devil's Territory

Good News: In the Devil's Territory is for sale, half-off, at the Dzanc website.

Despite promising prompt mini-tour and blog tour recaps, I have posted nothing for a month. You might think this means I am lazy, but I would like to point out that I recently completed a fifty-page story comprised entirely of letters sent from Haiti to Florida and Virginia in the 1980's. You might think that this sounds boring, but I would like to point out that the letters bring news of (1) an illicit relationship between a 41-year-old missionary and the 18-year-old visitor who becomes his bride; (2) the fall of the Baby Doc regime; (3) instructions for raising razor wire above the walls of your gated compound; and (4) a bullet in an envelope.

Mini-tour recap: (1) Gosh, it was fun. In Kentucky, I got to kick it (picture here, from the Lexington Herald-Leader) with Jim Tomlinson, author of Things Kept, Things Left Behind, and Chekhov's true heir! High school students drove from faraway Cynthiana with their school librarian to hear us read! The Jessamine County library director took me on a tour of Centre College, and, in the Cracker Barrel, showed me the uniforms worn by their football team the evening they beat Harvard! (2) In North Carolina, I watched Barack Obama win the election on the hotel television! I watched Oprah Winfrey make a handkerchief of a stranger! I watched John McCain give a gracious concession speech! I visited the yellow-leafed campus of Wake Forest University! I read with Denzil Strickland, author of Swimmers in the Sea! The Winston-Salem Borders sold out of In the Devil's Territory! I partied late into the night with Sheryl Monks and Kevin Morgan Watson of Press53! At midnight, we ate Krispy Kremes!

Blog Tour Recap:

1. Sarah Weinman asked me to weigh in on the relationship between literature and crime fiction for her Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind blog, and much debate followed in the comments section, and on other blogs.

2. At Largehearted Boy, I gushed about David Bazan and Pedro the Lion.

3. At Laura Benedict's Notes from the Handbasket, I posted about ten books I'd like my children to read before they're grown.

4. Syntax of Things asked me to type a little about "The San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl Party," recently named one of the 100 Distinguished Sports Stories of 2007 by the editors of Best American Sports Writing 2008.

More Recent Notices in Newspapers, Magazines, and Blogs:

1. This review of Best American Mystery Stories in the London Metro suggests my story "A Day Meant to Do Less" is up to "tricks," while mystery blog The Little Professor prefers to say it has an "interesting narrative structure."

2. The Palm Beach Post, my hometown newspaper, said "A Love Story" was a "typically strange vignette from the mean streets of Palm Beach County," and "A Day Meant to Do Less" was "a stunning story."

3. Toledo Blade quotes me as saying: "The darkest things define us," which I'm pretty sure is a misparaphrase of a quote from a William Gay story I didn't quite succeed in properly remembering.

4. Lit blogger Katrina Denza writes: "I read a lot of short story collections and once in a while I come across one that does more than dazzle on the technical level, does more than introduce me to foreign lands, does more than show me a different side of humanity. Once in a while I come across a collection, such as this one, Kyle Minor’s “In the Devil’s Territory,” that does all those things and at the same time, reaches in and holds my heart all the way through, sometimes giving it a pinch or a jab, and other times stretching it, stretching, until I fear the very flesh of it might rip, then massaging it gently back to …to…well to a state of calm, but most definitely changed."

5. Jason Skipper at Third Coast Magazine writes: "Throughout this striking collection, we are reminded that everyone harbors a secret life, in one way or another. The stories live beyond the page, make you look around, in classrooms and grocery stores and churches, in living rooms and across kitchen tables. They make you wonder what people need to confess but cannot—and if they did, could we bear to
hear it?"

Dispatch from a Week of Warmup Touring

In the Devil's Territory is doing pretty well in its first week. I'm hearing reports from around the country that it's well-stocked at Barnes & Noble, and my editor says they've shipped lots and lots of boxes. All good signs.

I'm on the road, doing a few readings in Kentucky and North Carolina, and, in-between, holing up in a hotel room to do some revisions on my novel.

Monday night I read in Nicholasville, Kentucky, one hour south of Lexington, at the Jessamine County Public Library. The crowd was small but enthusiastic, even though it was Election Eve and there was a University of Kentucky basketball game going on at the same time. The best part was that I got to read with Jim Tomlinson, author of the beautiful story collection Things Kept, Things Left Behind, which was chosen by George Saunders to win the Iowa Short Fiction Prize a few years back. I've been a fan of Jim's for a long time, so it was a treat to meet him and hear his work in his own voice (which was, upon reflection, pretty much like the voice I heard in my head as I read him before I ever heard his voice.)

On the way down, I stopped in Chillicothe, Ohio, and ate a late breakfast with my buddy from grad school, Don Pollock, whose story collection Knockemstiff is probably the most explosive book anybody in the world published in 2008. I also got to eat dinner in Nicholasville with Juliana Gaddis, the library's events director, and Ron Critchfield, the library director. We had barbeque and swapped stories. Juliana's was the best. Her parents were missionaries in Medellin, Columbia, at the height of the conflict between the American government and Pablo Escobar's drug cartel. As the feds began to seek extradition on Escobar's drug lords, the cartel let it be known that for every Columbian extradited, twenty Americans would be kidnapped. All the American businesses pulled out, but Juliana's parents stayed. They didn't tell their children about the kidnapping threat, and watched through the window of their compound every afternoon, as the children danced in short pants in December, thinking they were in paradise.

I'm also doing a "blog tour" this week, and the first post is up at Laura Benedict's Notes from the Handbasket blog, where I type about the ten books I hope my children will read before they're grown. Later this week I'll also post at Largehearted Boy, Sarah Weinman's Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, and The Syntax of Things.

If you live anywhere near Winston-Salem, North Carolina, please come out and see me read at the Borders at the Thruway Center, Friday night at 7 pm, with Denzil Strickland, author of the novel Swimmers in the Sea.

Also, don't forget that Kathy's new book of poetry Oneiromance is now available for sale. I've seen it. It's quite good.

Publication Weekend & Dispatch Review

In the Devil's Territory was officially published this weekend, although it's been in stores for a couple of weeks already. I'll be reading in North Carolina and Kentucky this week, and doing a "blog tour," too, writing guest posts at other people's blogs (and I'll post links here.)

Meantime, the book received a thoughtful and lovely review in the Columbus Dispatch last Sunday. Here it is:

Fiction: In the Devil's Territory
Six-pack of tales fresh, filling
Sunday, October 26, 2008 3:26 AM
By Margaret Quamme
For The Columbus Dispatch
There's a certain kind of story that, rightly or wrongly, is associated with college writing programs: polite, restrained, limited in scope and often concerned with subjects close to the experience of the young writer.

Kyle Minor, who received a master's degree in creative writing last year from Ohio State University and became a visiting writer at the University of Toledo, barrels right through the stereotype. The six stories collected for In the Devil's Territory are bold, diverse, complex and shockingly memorable.

The tales, many of which are set not just in the territory of the devil but in that of Southern Baptists, share a sense of the tension between being good and being right. The characters try for compassion and empathy, but neither comes easily to them.

Formally, the stories are surprisingly different.

The San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl Party focuses in microscopic detail on a couple of hours in the life of a family and finds powerful emotions bubbling up in ordinary acts. The narrator, whose wife is

on bed rest during a difficult pregnancy, tries with considerable frustration to prepare the special dessert she has requested:

"I pull the still soft ice cream from the freezer and dump it on top of the brownies and the not-warm fudge, and then I crush some almonds and throw them on top and rush the ugly mess I've made in the brownie bowl upstairs and hand it to my wife in her sickbed and rush to the bathroom and shut the door and stay longer than I know I should, because it is quiet in there."

Goodbye Hills, Hello Night also spans a short period, but -- with its violence external, not internal -- it pushes the limits of what we can accept as readers. Its narrator, writing from prison, explains what happened when a night of "rousting" went too far.

"Pile four or five boys into an old green Impala, white leather seats, old eight-track player, wake up some vagrants. That's rousting."

The remarkable achievement of the story, horrifying as it is, is that it's possible to get inside the narrator's mind and feel at home there.

Minor sometimes arcs across large reaches of time. The title story of the volume starts in East Berlin in 1961, as a young woman heroically helps her parents and aunt swim to freedom in West Berlin, and moves on to Palm Beach, Fla., in 1987, when the woman has become a tyrannical teacher -- then on to the present. It's a compact reflection on identity, and on the differences in how a life looks from inside and outside.

A Day Meant To Do Less, the most ambitious story in the collection, takes on the same theme. Two closely observed and painful sections of a scene in which a minister tries to bathe his demented mother flank a long, painful section describing that mother's hard life, as the story brings together the author's concerns with inner and outer violence.

The range is impressive. Even more impressive is the thoughtfulness with which Minor explores the limits of our understanding of ourselves and one another; and the compassion that sometimes, briefly, reaches across those limits.

Practice practice practice

Lots of exciting things are afoot for November, including, for example, the election and the publication Kyle’s book. Live Nude Girl, on the other hand, won’t come out until a couple months after that. But my first solo poetry collection, Oneiromance (an epithalamion) is out right….now. You can see the front of the cover on Amazon and the Switchback website and etc, but you can see the super-pretty way the image wraps around from the front to the back right…here.

One of the tricks of The Live Nude Girl in the Devil’s Territory tour is to team up and read with a talented local writer everywhere we go. I’ll be doing a test run of that technique this Sunday night at 7:00 at the Hideout in Chicago, where I’ll be reading with the lovely and amazing Brandi Homan, editor in chief of Switchback Books, whose poetry collection Hard Reds just came out last summer. Also? There will be puppets and a band. So if any of you happen to live in Chicago or its environs, consider checking it out!

Do unto others

This post is not really about our book tour, but if you ask other people to support your readings, then you should support the readings of other people, don't you think?

That is why, if you live in or near Chicago, I am encouraging you to go Myopic Books at 7:00 pm tomorrow night to hear Elizabeth Ellen and Geoffrey Forsyth read short short fiction from their respective collections A PECULIAR FEELING OF RESTLESSNESS and IN THE LAND OF THE FREE. Their reading is not part of a tour per se, but Elizabeth is coming all the way from Michigan, and Geoffrey is coming all the way from the suburbs.

Both of them are fantastic writers. Here are some sources other than me that say so:

"Elizabeth's work is intimate. She gets right in there and gives you what she's got." --Kelly Spitzer, Smokelong Quarterly

"Geoffrey Forsyth has a wonderful way of merging reality with the just slightly off kilter magical realism to create a world that we'd love to live in." --Dan Wickett, Emerging Writers Network

I will be there for sure, so if you are too, come say hi.

Jealousy and Indignation

There is no novelist I admire more than Philip Roth. His novel American Pastoral might be the best novel of the twentieth century, and there is great debate about whether it is even his best novel. When the New York Times polled contemporary novelists about which they believed was the best novel of the last 25 years, American Pastoral was one of the runners-up to Toni Morrison's Beloved. Roth's novels actually received more best novel votes than Morrison's, but the Roth vote was deeply divided among partisans of this Roth or that. Of twenty-one novels that received more than one "best" vote from the Times panelists, six were written by Roth.

Debates about which novel is better or best might miss the point -- we go to the novel because each one offers us a singular experience -- but there is no disputing that some writers do more with the form than others. In Roth's case, he has tried everything. Early in his career, he wrote a classic coming-of-age novella ("Goodbye, Columbus"), an uncharacteristically (for him) Jamesian bloat (Letting Go), several screwing-around comic novels (Our Gang, The Great American Novel, The Breast), and the twentieth century's definitive dramatic monologue (Portnoy's Complaint.) Portnoy alone, or even "Goodbye, Columbus," would be a career-defining accomplishment for almost any writer. But Roth didn't even begin to hit his stride until he wrote his first Nathan Zuckerman book, The Ghost Writer, the first of nine (to date) starring Roth's alter-ego, a novelist whose career we watch unfold alongside Roth's. The Zuckerman books themselves have great range, from the postmodern play with the Bernard Malamud and Anne Frank stories in The Ghost Writer to the Stephen Dixonesque alternative storylines of The Counterlife to the mature observer-narrator strategies of the American trilogy written in the 1990's-- American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain, which constitute Roth's best and most important work-- to the deep reckonings with mortality and the will to be vital in old age in the final Zuckerman book, Exit Ghost.

Note that we haven't yet even discussed vast and important swaths of Roth's body of work. I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention the dark, frank sexual reckonings of the Kepesh books, or the timeless meditation on death in Everyman, or the play with biography and identity in the "Philip Roth" series, or the profane wisdom of the standalone Sabbath's Theater (my favorite, favorite Roth novel.)

So it is with high expectation that I went to the bookstore last week and bought the audiobook version of Roth's latest, Indignation. I bought the audiobook because the print version won't be available for a few weeks, and I couldn't wait any longer. I have now listened to it three times, twice straight-through, and I can tell you that although I thought it might be impossible for Roth to avoid repeating himself -- he's nearly thirty books into his career, he's in his late seventies, and he's exhausted nearly every narrative and structural strategy available to novelists of any generation and invented several new ones -- I was wrong. Indignation is something new altogether, a didactic anti-war tract masquerading as a ghost story masquerading as a bildungsroman. Boxes within boxes within boxes, yet the reader is never put-off or confused -- such is Roth's undersung craft of clarity. It is a feat he achieves by way of structure, mostly, and also by avoiding the temptation to overcook the language. Despite a profusion of omniscient novelistic conceits, the narrative throughout remains firmly grounded in psychological realism. Whenever we are with a character, we inhabit the character fully. We buy every word. Every moment is fully realized, is deeply believable, and ultimately contributes to the deep emotional payoff the novel's ending offers the reader.

I fear giving a proper review here, because this is one of those novels whose unfolding secrets open out not only onto pleasures, but also onto thematic discoveries, and I don't want to rob the reader of either. But I do want to say, for the reader wary of tricks, Indignation isn't a trickster novel. Indignation is a profoundly moral novel that takes narrative strategies often deployed toward base ends and transforms them into something artful, tragic, and deeply beautiful.

What has all this to do with my book or our tour (the ostensible subject of this blog, yes?) The title of this post is "Jealousy and Indignation," and, frankly, I'm jealous jealous jealous of Roth's skill, his craft, his intelligence, his willingness to take big risks, and his ability late in life to turn nearly everything he writes into something of immediate and lasting importance. And I'm indignant at my own inability, at age 32, to be as good as he is, and at the whole of our literature, broad and deep as it can be, to not often fail the tests of seriousness, entertainment, and clarity that Roth passes with such fluency every twelve to eighteen months. (It took me four years to write my first modest book of stories!)

This morning I'm working again on what I hope will be the final revision of my first novel, a manuscript that owes much to what I have learned about novel-making and novel-structuring from Philip Roth. Once again, I aim for the standard of risk-taking, ambition, and excellence he continues to raise, and, knowing that I will fall short, hope that straining toward his height and reach will cause my inevitable failure to be a noble and worthy one, far better than any lesser success I could have achieved had I been chasing a lesser champion.

Of Titles and Covers

I was warned: In the Devil's Territory is a terrible title for your book. People will think you've written a potboiler, a supernatural thriller, the Exorcist exiled in hell. The designer will give you an M. Night Shyamalan book cover, or maybe one of those Otto Dix paintings like "Sailor and Girl," the one they chose for Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater, or "Stormtroops Advancing Under Gas," or "Triumph of Death" -- some post-World War I nightmare of crawling through wrecked houses, of Lustmord, of trenchfooted men crawling through fields tainted with mustard gas.

The people who told me these things told me these things because I asked, and I asked because I trusted their advice, their smarts, their instincts about books and book publishing. And certainly they were right in some ways. My book is full of horrors, but they aren't supernatural horrors. They are humanly scaled: the woman suffering from dementia who believes the man giving her a bath is the cousin she watched murder his brother in a Kentucky tobacco field when she was a child; the husband who believes his ill and pregnant wife will die before Christmas and take their unborn child with her; the Cold War hero who flees East Berlin, three times swimming back and forth across the Spree River with her elderly relatives on her back so she can make her way to West Palm Beach, Florida, and ruin the lives of fifth grade boys.

But I did like the edge of the title, the way that it juxtaposes the all-too-human choices the characters make against the possibility of evil. Many of the characters are from an enclave of evangelical Christians in West Palm Beach, Florida, and would be familiar with the New Testament story that served as the imaginative starting point for Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ, in which the devil tempts Christ by offering him dominion over the earth, the territory that was the devil's own.

I originally used the title for the book's concluding story, the one about the Cold War hero, the teacher, whose early act of goodness did not assure that the rest of her life would not be lived out in pettiness. That story spans five decades and two continents, and occupies at least three points of view, two of which are progressive as the characters age, and one of which is in first person and might well be the reconstructor of everyone else's. It is built more like a novel than a short story -- it has a complex structure, there are lots of characters, and the thematic concerns of the story lie largely in the spaces between the concurrent stories. It seemed right, then, to choose a title that spoke to the story's thematic concerns rather than a title lifted from a setting or a character or a bit of metaphorically resonant language from somewhere within the story.

I had been re-reading Flannery O'Connor's "Mystery and Manners," and although my work does not share her theological predispositions, I do admire the fierceness of her work, and the clear-eyed way she is willing to account for our darknesses, and, temperamentally, I felt one of the book's subheads, "In the Devil's Territory," accounted for an idea that formed a context for the characters in my book and their struggles. Mine were characters full with their own capacities for selfishness, and full of conflictedness about their own good-doings, and all of it as they trod the territory the devil had claimed as his own. And a second resonance: Each story turns upon one or more moral choices or upon a memory of a past failure of goodness, and despite the characters' occasional embrace of a tenuous redemption, they're all constantly reminded how, in the words of one character's father: "You're far from home now, buddy."

With all of this in mind, I kept my title, but with fear and trembling. Everything would be in the hands of the book designer now. And that's where I got hugely lucky. Dzanc's Steven Seighman came through with a series of designs I loved. He read every story, and decided that the image that best represented them was a door that led to a dark place, a symbol of the choices that confront each focal character in each of the stories. The design we settled upon took as its centerpiece a photograph of a front porch somewhere in Appalachia, a porch that looked pretty nearly like how I imagined the front of Franny's house in the story "A Day Meant to Do Less," and he finished it with a red font that tipped its hat to the luridity of the title without taking it too far over the top. I'm really happy with his work. I feel like it in many ways captures the tone of the book, and most of all, I'm grateful that he rescued the title I wanted so badly to keep.

Index Nominum

Evidently, the word “index” comes from the Latin index meaning “forefinger, pointer” and is related to the Latin indicare for “point out.” The first usage as a noun meaning “list of a book’s contents” showed up in 1580, and the first usage as a verb, as in “to compile an index” arrived in 1720.

Have you ever made an index? I spent much of my three-day weekend so far poring over the first pages of Live Nude Girl that my publisher sent me in order to a) find and fix any errors, and b) start compiling an index. I say “start compiling” because although I now have a draft of an index, I’ll have to go through the entire manuscript at least once more before I can say the book is truly indexed because the current pagination might change based on my edits. So while I can say that “Kiki of Montparnasse” appears on p. 148 at the moment, I can’t say that she will stay there for the next go-round.

Anyway, starting to make the index took hours and hours and was tedious, tiresome, and painstaking. “Boticelli, Sandro” definitely gets an entry, and so do “Picasso, Pablo” and “Siddal, Elizabeth.” “Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida” gets an entry, of course, but does “Drake’s Devil Dogs”? Does “Fenway Park”? Does “Starbucks”? It’s tricky business. But it was also kind of fascinating and rewarding in a really meticulous and obsessive kind of way. So if you come to one of the cities where Kyle and I are reading, and you happen to pick up a copy of Live Nude Girl, please be sure to take a peek at p.177 where the index, according to the current round of page proofs, is poised to start.

The Author Photo in Hell's Kitchen

I'm told that I'm not photogenic, and the photographs have confirmed it, most of the time. So I was surely pessimistic about the author's photo shoot. It would be terrible. It would be ugly.

I was wrong.

My good fortune was the intervention of a favorite teacher, a writer I admire named Erin McGraw, who introduced me to the best author's photographer in New York, Miriam Berkley.

I met Miriam at her apartment in Hell's Kitchen, a storybook kind of place, with books crammed in every crevice, bookshelves lining the halls, books packed two and three deep on every shelf. Before we went outside to shoot, she showed me pictures she had taken of Stephen Hawking and Margaret Atwood. She told me about an afternoon with Bernard Malamud; we talked about his late novel Dubin's Lives.

In short, she was the sort of person I didn't think existed anymore -- an artist among artists, interested in artists, spending her life documenting theirs. It is not hard to imagine her thriving among the generation of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Maxwell Perkins. Gertrude Stein would likely have written an incomprehensible book and attributed its authorship to her.

We went up onto the roof of her apartment building. It had been raining, and every time the wind blew, sheets of water fell on her head from the higher buildings surrounding the roof. I could feel the cold in my bones. The conditions were terrible, but Miriam was willing to stay outside as long as I was. For an hour we worked in the wet and the cold, catching the new light with every shifting of the clouds and the sun, standing, sitting, squatting, leaning, Miriam giving instructions all the way: A little to the left, a little to the right, give me serious, smile, don't smile, give me hunky. I tried to pretend that the camera was a friend, a girlfriend, a lover, a brother, my mother, my wife. I felt very foolish, but I was determined to try everything. She was working so hard for me, I didn't want to let her down.

In the end, I was very happy. The photo is as flattering as a photo of me could be. And despite the exhaustion of working in the wet and cold, I left feeling the same kind of happy I feel after a pleasant evening with friends. Miriam was good company -- smart, interesting, tough-minded, open to trying things. I hope I'll get to work with her again.

How This Tour Came To Be A Tour

The first time I saw Kathy's name in print was the day my contributor's galley copy of Random House's Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers arrived in my mailbox at Ohio State University, where I was teaching and taking graduate classes. The first thing I did when the book arrived was flip to my own essay, "You Shall Go Out with Joy and Be Led Forth with Peace," and make sure I hadn't committed any embarrassing typos to the page. The second thing I did was read the essays with the most evocative titles, and there was no more evocative title in the book than "Live Nude Girl." I didn't know what to expect, with a title like that, but I was taken from sentence one by the confident, elegant prose of this Kathleen Rooney, and especially by the story she told, which put me, for the first time, in the mind of an artist's model, one who liked her job and did it well.

I wrote Kathy and told her I liked her work. We struck up an occasional correspondence, and over the next few years I kept running into her poems and essays in the literary journals I most admired. My novella "A Day Meant to Do Less" appeared in the Gettysburg Review alongside the work of a fiction writer I liked, Martin Seay, and soon I found out he was Kathy's husband. I read and enjoyed her first nonfiction book, a smart critical study of Oprah's Book Club titled Reading with Oprah. She left her position teaching at a liberal arts college on the West Coast, and her successor was one of my best buddies, who reported how she was a generous teacher and everyone seemed to miss having her around. I found out about her generosity firsthand when a visiting writer at our university pulled out of a teaching gig. I called Kathy and asked her to fill in, and with less than a week's notice, she bailed us out. I sat in on her class, learned something, and got an essay out of what I learned, which will appear in January in Dinty Moore's Brevity Magazine.

At dinner that evening (Beirut restaurant in North Toledo; Mediterranean cuisine!) we talked about what we had been talking about for awhile, which was the difficulty in connecting with readers, and the responsibility of writers to do it themselves. By then we both had books under contract that we expected would come out around the same time. And by then we both had begun to build audiences. We figured if we could merge those audiences, we'd right away double each other's readership. We also figured we could do what indie bands have been doing for decades: tour relentlessly; team up with good bands (in our case, writers) of local acclaim; put on a good show; sell some merchandise; make some friends; have a good time; leave the road with pluses all around.

We were lucky. Both books had found homes with good publishers willing to try something new. We sat down with our publicists and editors and brainstormed. We emailed and phone conferenced. We made lots of lists. We talked about our favorite writers and asked them to join us. Many of them said yes. We love them even more now. Their generosity, happily, matches their talent.

Now it's August, and the hard work continues unabated. There are still plenty of details to nail down. We have to find ways to reach the local media in each city. On a book tour, the media coverage often nets more new readers than the reading itself. And we want to give something back to each city that hosts us, so we have to find venues for free community writing workshops we plan to offer.

If all of this sounds fun to you, let me assure you: It's crazy fun, at least for me. I like working with Kathy, with Melissa and Dan (our publicists), and with the writers we plan to read alongside. I like dreaming 25 good evenings with readers who care about stories enough to come hear them read aloud. I like feeling connected to the writers whose live readings have most moved me, among them Lawrence Weschler, Mary Gaitskill, Edward P. Jones, John Edgar Wideman, and John Dufresne. Most of all, I like the idea of touring with a writer I admire, and learning city by city how to do a thing I plan to do the rest of my life. It's going to be fun, all of it.

The Tour Diary Is Live

Today is the soft launch of the tour diary for the Spring 2009 Live Nude Girl In the Devil's Territory Tour, a 25-city traveling literary circus headlined by Kathleen Rooney, author of the memoir Live Nude Girl, and Kyle Minor, author of the story collection In the Devil's Territory. A special guest will join us in each city, among them Daniel Handler a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, Steve Almond, and Joshuah Bearman.

Kathy and I plan to post updates, pictures, anecdotes, and mini-essays from the road. We're hoping to bring a little of the DIY indie rock aesthetic to the book tour, to make new friends, and connect with readers. It's plenty hard to write a book, and now that they're written and (very soon, now) published, we want people to read them.

This blog will probably become a little more active in November, when I do a weeklong warmup tour through North Carolina and Kentucky, and then it will get red-hot in the Spring, when the tour proper gets going. Dates are tentative, but it looks like we'll start in February, with a West Coast leg stretching from Los Angeles to Vancouver, BC, hitting San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, along the way. Then we'll work our way across the northern Midwest until we get to the AWP Conference in Chicago. Then to the Northeast -- Boston, Provincetown, Providence, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Charlottesville, Virginia. In between, we'll do plenty of one-off dates throughout the Midwest.

Our publishers have been most generous with tour support, and we're contributing our own speaking fees from engagements at colleges and universities in order to pay for the rest of it. We're stretching the dollars by sleeping on the couches of friends and strangers, eating modestly, and choosing economical transportation. We will try to offer a free community writing workshop in each city, and, hopefully, we'll do interviews with newspapers, radio, and television outlets in each city, as many as we can, anyone who will have us.

I'll post more information as it becomes available, and I suspect Kathy will be checking in soon, too. We hope to see you this spring!