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!