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!