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.