Signing off

A week after the final reading of the book tour, and a couple of months removed, now, from the days when we were on the road for weeks at a time, it seems profitable to reflect upon the experience. I didn't know Kathleen Rooney very well when I called to ask if she might be interested in joining forces. I asked her because (1) I enjoyed and admired her writing, (2) our books were coming out around the same time, and (3) she seemed like she would be a hard-working tour partner, and that if we worked together, we could introduce more readers to each other's work.

What I hadn't anticipated was how extraordinary a tour partner Kathy would be. She was quite frankly better than I was at almost every aspect of putting the tour together. Her organizational skills are unmatched by anyone I've ever met, and she proved to be very good at implementation, too. Most of all, I was impressed by her skill with people. Her network is vast, and it's not a superficial vastness. In city after city, we were greeted by her many friends, and I felt lucky that some of that goodwill and enthusiasm could extend to my book, as well.

My greatest admiration for Kathy would probably extend to her reserves of energy and strength. I couldn't match her drive, her stamina, nor her will for optimism. I admire all three, and wish I could match them.

In addition to the things I thought the tour would offer -- the opportunity to connect with more readers, the opportunity to interact with booksellers and critics, the opportunity to get to know other writers -- the tour also provided me with an opportunity to reexamine and reevaluate what kind of writer I want to be, and what role I hoped writing would play in my professional life. On grounds of my personal life, the tour proved to be ill-timed. Right around the beginning of the tour, I learned that I had been laid off from my teaching position at the university where I had been working, and I felt the heaviness of the loss throughout the tour. My wife had given up her teaching post so I could take the one I had now lost, and I spent the weeks on the road in daily worry about whether one of us could find something that would provide money enough for us to live, and, perhaps more importantly, health insurance, since our youngest child was born quite premature and therefore has a suspect immune system.

I had long treated my writing as a purely artistic prerogative, believing that teaching would provide income and time enough to let me write whatever I wanted, even if what I wanted was only to write unremunerative short stories and poems, and even if it meant only publishing books on small presses. But going on tour, and interacting with writers who have found ways to make a living largely on the strength of their writing, made me think that it might be possible to do the same, especially since my aesthetic interests had recently turned more sharply toward the novel and toward reportage.

The other example of a writerly life I saw on tour and admired was that of the writer who chooses a concurrent career path that is completely outside any traditional writerly career path -- writer/physicians, writer/attorneys, writer/civil servants, writer/special effects technicians -- career paths that enable writers to become what Dana Gioia called "Spies in the House of Commerce."

My own post-In the Devil's Territory work has been driven by frequent investigative trips to Haiti, where I have been working on a narrative nonfiction book and a novel. In the Devil's Territory was a book largely concerned with the world of my childhood, but now I feel like I want to create pieces of writing that engage more fully with the world outside myself. In Haiti, where there is a breakdown in the rule of law, and where what is at stake daily is literal life and death, I have seen how closely intertwined public policy can be with human misery. And I have also seen how people with basic, ground-level skills -- nurses, dentists, physicians, agriculturalists, structural engineers -- can ease human misery in specific places, and vastly change the quality of the lives of people. I want my writing to begin to more broadly engage both of these matters, micro- and macro-, and also to achieve a broad enough audience that what is discovered might have some traction beyond the pleasures of literature.

I also want to begin to cultivate at least one of these extra-writerly disciplines on my own, as a means of liberation from dependence on the academy, as a means of deepening the knowledge base that informs the authority of my writing, and, most importantly, as a means of making possible a front-line human response that I can offer independent of my work as a writer. Toward that end, I'm going to spend some time in the next year exploring some of those disciplines in preparation for choosing one as a parallel career path.

It is no exaggeration to credit the people I met on tour, and most of all Kathy, as catalysts for varieties of active reflection that will no doubt shape the kind of writer I will become, going forward. Traveling to 25 cities, meeting hundreds of people of diverse inclinations, eating and drinking at many tables, enjoying conviviality, engaging in occasional arguments about things that matter, and pushing past physical and psychological exhaustion to achieve a marathon of interaction with other people (an area that, I'll admit, is far from my strength), all of it I'll count among the most valuable, extraordinary, and life-shaping experiences of my life.

I am extraordinarily grateful to everyone who opened their home to us, to everyone who came to a reading, to everyone who bought a book, to everyone who followed the blog, to my family for being gracious about my long absences, and most of all to Kathy for being my better in so many ways on a 25-city tour the likes of which very few people are ever able to experience. I feel very lucky.

With warm wishes,

Kyle Minor
May 27, 2009

The Live Nude Girl in the Devil's Territory Tour...

...is over. And can I just say that if I have to sign one more naked torso with a Sharpie, I'll poke myself in the eye? Kidding! We love our fans. Some of them are here……and here: But as all good things must, the 25-city traveling literary circus that was our tour has come to an end, and it's hard to think of a better way for it to have done so than at the Book Cellar (thanks, Suzy!) in the company of Zach "Featherproof" Plague… …and Gina "Other Voices" Frangello: I was so excited, I wore a dress that matched my book cover:

It's kind of pleasing that something so fun and awesome ended at the (relative) beginning of something else so fun and awesome: the Pilcrow Lit Festival—be sure to check it out all week long, including tonight at Innertown Pub for the Quickies Reading Series, where I’ll be reading a story from Rose Metal Press’s A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness alongside tons of other fantastic writers including RMP’s Geoffrey Forsyth whose short short chapbook In the Land of the Free is not to be missed.

Also, even though the tour proper has reached its conclusion, stay tuned to the blog, which will continue to meet your one-stop-shopping needs for all future Live Nude Girl and In the Devil’s Territory news.

Before I bid you 'bye for now, here is a picture of Clark "Vince is Back" Harding who flew in all the way from L.A. in time to attend this reading in a turn of events that thrilled my love of things coming unexpectedly full circle: Kyle and I crashed at his place on the very first night of the LNGitDT tour, and last night, he crashed with Martin and me. Such symmetry. He also bought a copy of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City at the Book Cellar last night so he could re-read it, and he highly recommends you do the same. Thanks, Clark, and thanks everyone, everywhere, for everything.

LNG in the June 2009 issue of Esquire!

A gentleman wrote to Esquire's Stacey Grenrock Woods that "I finally convinced my girlfriend to let me take pictures of her naked, but in every one she looks awkward. Is there some kind of pose or trick to make them look sexier?" In order to provide him with the necessary answers, SGW quoted yours truly. The column's not available online, but you can see it pictured to the left here, and pick up the whole issue in a bookstore near you. While you're already there picking up a copy of Live Nude Girl, of course, and In the Devil's Territory while you're at it. Further reasons to get this issue of the mag include, but are not limited to: 1) Megan Fox on the cover, 2) a 10-page feature on how to be a more skillful drinker, and 3) a What I've Learned questionnaire answered by Christopher Walken. Thanks, Esquire!

The Erotica Readers and Writers Association…

…just posted a great review of Live Nude Girl. Reviewer Rob Hardy says “It is, as you’d expect, poetic on many pages, but it is also funny, the work of an amused and alert writer who has a point of observation on the model’s stand that is unique and is seldom so deeply considered…” You can check out the whole review here.

Open Correspondence from the Senator

Last week, Jeremy Schmall sent me a copy of his high-concept (it comes in a file folder!) chapbook Open Correspondence from the Senator in the mail because he said he would when we met him in Brooklyn. I read most of it on the train today and really enjoyed it and its high production values, courtesy of x-ing books. And, because I said I would, I took it to work and read a tiny bit of it there—see? It blends right in. Thanks, Jeremy!

All Travelers Are Lost: Recommendations from Across the Land

In his essay “On Lullabies,” Federico García Lorca talks about the difficulty of attempting to describe his travels, and about “trying to avoid the sort of ugly erudite data that tire out audiences; it is emotional data I shall try to emphasize.”

On the tour, I got to see a lot of people I love, and to meet a lot of new ones: These people in turn told me about a lot of things that they liked that they thought that I would also like—to read, to watch, to hear, to drink, to eat, to use, to do, etc. Here, because lists and geographic regions are two of my fave ways to organize information, is a list of some of that data, a haphazard and organic look at what came up when we were where:

In LA:

To Read:
Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, nonfiction by P.W. Singer
Feed, a YA novel by MT Anderson
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a novel by Shirley Jackson (read it; loved it)
The Haunting of Hill House, a novel by Shirley Jackson (read it; loved it)
Double Takes: Pairs of Contemporary Short Stories, an anthology edited by T.C. Boyle
Pride of Baghdad, a graphic novel by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon
Pretty much anything by T.C. Boyle

To Ride:
The Metro (rode it; loved it)

To Visit:
The Museum of Death
In San Francisco:

To Read:
Effi Briest by Theodore Fontane
A Miracle, a Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers by Lawrence Weschler
Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin by Lawrence Weschler
Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology by Lawrence Weschler
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo by Peter Orner
Esther Stories by Peter Orner:
In Portland: To Read:
“Detroit Arcadia: Exploring the Post-American Landscape,” an article by Rebecca Solnit in Harper’s (read it; loved it)

In Seattle:

To Read:
Ouisconsin: the Dead in Our Clouds, poetry by Bryan Tomasovich
All About Lulu, a novel by Jonathan Evison:
In Bellingham:
To Read:
Valley of the Dolls, a novel by Jacqueline Susann

To Watch:
The Naked Kiss by Samuel Fuller
Shock Corridor by Samuel Fuller

In Tacoma:
To Read:
“Writer, Reader, Words,” an essay by Jeanette Winterson (read it; loved it): "The serious writer cannot be in competition for sales and attention from the ever expanding leisure industry. She can only offer what she has ever offered; an exceptional sensibility combined with an exceptional control over words." Yes.

To Listen To:
Centro-matic (listened to it; loved it)

In Minneapolis:

To Read:
Exposure, a novel by Kathryn Harrison

To Watch:
The Danish Poet, a short film
Belly

To Listen to:
Laura Nyro
Wendy Waldman

To Drink at:
Kochanski’s Concertina Bar on the south side of Milwaukee (formerly Art’s Concertina Bar)
Grumpy's, near the Loft, which featured prominently in the short story Rebecca Kanner read (drank there; loved it):
In Milwaukee:

To Read:
Ada, Or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
The Dark Half by Stephen King

To Watch:
Along Came Polly

In Chicago:

To Read:
Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems, an anthology edited by Joy Katz and Kevin Prufer
The Bodyfeel Lexicon, poems by Jessica Bozek
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a novel by D. H. Lawrence
Specs, a literary magazine
You Must Be This Happy to Enter, short stories by Elizabeth Crane (read it; loved it)

To Watch:
Metropolitan
Gossip Girl

In Boston:
To Read:
Slice, a literary magazine
The Normal School, a literary magazine
How Sassy Changed My Life: a Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time by Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer

In Provincetown:

To Read:
The Man Who Loved Flowers, a short story by Stephen King from the collection Night Shift

To Drink at:
The Governor Bradford (drank there; loved it):

In Providence:

To Read:
Last Days, a novel by Brian Evenson:

On the Winding Stair, short stories by Joanna Howard

To Look at:
The art of Ben Watkins

To Listen To:
Keith and the Girl

In New York:
To Read:
Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs by Ellen Kennedy (read it; loved it)
The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution, nonfiction by Denis Dutton
Chilly Scenes of Winter, a novel by Anne Beattie
Gigantic Sequins, a literary magazine
The Agriculture Reader, a literary magazine
Official Correspondence from the Senator, a chapbook by Jeremy Schmall
Recessionwire.com
Jeremy Hoffeld in New York, a blog by Jeremy Hoffeld in New York (read it; love it):

To Watch:
The Cross and the Switchblade
WALL-E
Ratatouille

To Look at:
The art of Judy Pfaff

To Listen To:
GG Allin

To Drink:
Negroni: 1 part gin, 1 part sweet vermouth, and 1 part bitter (normally Campari), recommended by Brendan:
Kombucha recommended by Tao Lin:
To Attend:
The In the Flesh Reading Series
Lit Crawl NY

To Wear:
Other people’s stylish glasses, like Jeremy here, wearing Jeremy's glasses:

In Baltimore:
To Read:
Megillat Esther, by JT Waldman

To Learn How to Cook:
Almond-crusted tomato sandwiches

To Visit in Memphis:
The Crystal Grotto
The Peabody Hotel, containing the ducks

In DC:

To Read:
How Soccer Explains the World: an Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer
Books from the small press Beothuk

“Rod Blagojevich Writes 25 Things About Himself on Facebook” on McSweeneys by Sean Carman (read it; loved it)

“Maybe You Can Go Home Again” by Sean Carman at the Inside Higher Ed blog (read it; loved it)

To Learn How to Cook:
Shweji, a Burmese dessert:
To Visit in NYC:
The Grolier Club, America's oldest and largest society for bibliophiles and enthusiasts in the graphic arts

In Chicago (again):
To Attend:
Theatre productions (especially Sketchbook) by Collaboraction

In Fayetteville:
To Read:
Night of the Gun, a memoir by David Carr
The Last Fine Time, a memoir by Verlyn Klinkenbourg
Linebreak, a literary magazine

To Watch:
Meet Me in St. Louis
Ordinary People

To Wear:
Your scarf over your head when a winter storm blows in suddenly and you’ve forgotten your umbrella:

In Memphis:
To Read:
The Book Thief, a YA novel by Markus Zusak
The Territory of Men: a Memoir by Joelle Fraser
The Man Who Turned Into Himself: a Novel by David Ambrose

To Watch:
The Visitor

To Listen To:
Cry Softly, Lonely One by Roy Orbison

To Visit:
Stax Museum of American Soul Music

In Edwardsville:

To read:
Cradle Song, poetry by Stacey Lynn Brown

To Wash With:
Milk Milk soap from Fresh

In Champaign-Urbana:
To Read:
Anything by Richard Powers, but especially The Gold Bug Variations and The Echo Maker

In Bellingham again:
To Read:
Blessing of the Animals, a collection of essays by Brenda Miller
Cool for You, poems by Eileen Myles
American Husband, poems by Kary Wayson
No Sweeter Fat, poems by Nancy Pagh
Body Language, short stories by Kelly Magee
“On Difficulty in Poetry,” an essay by Reginald Shepherd (read it; loved it)
“Captivity,” an essay by Sherman Alexie
Sayonara Mrs. Kackleman, a kids’ book by Maira Kalman

To Eat:
Ritter Sport Dark Chocolate with Marzipan

To Know About and Maybe Try to Go to Sometime:
Hedgebrook: a rural retreat on Whidbey Island for Women Writers

In Chicago again:

To Read:
Inside a Red Corvette: a 90s Mix Tape, a poetry chapbook by Becca Klaver of Switchback Books from Greying Ghost Press (read it; loved it)
a / long / division a poetry chapbook by Hanna Andrews of Switchback Books from Tilt Press (read it; loved it):
The Man without Qualities, a novel by Robert Musil

In Ann Arbor:
To Read:
Big World, short stories by Mary Miller, from Short Flight/Long Drive Books
The Sicily Papers, a travel memoir by Michelle Orange, from Short Flight/Long Drive Books
Walking Dead, a zombie comic created by Robert Kirkman
Murder (a violet), poems by Ray McDaniel
Saltwater Empire, poems by Ray McDaniel
Anything by Mike Alber

To Watch:
Quarantine
Let the Right One In

To Eat:
Grilled peanut butter sandwiches with garlic salt

To Visit:
Big Jar Books in Philadelphia (which I can’t totally tell if it exists)
Detroit

In Chicago again:

To Read:
Cinema Muto, poems by Jesse Lee Kercheval
This Must Be the Place, poems by Alice George
Bestiary, poems by Elise Paschen
Strange Trades, poems by Kristy Odelius
Ender’s Game, a novel by Orson Scott Card
Wisecrack: Feminism & Comedy, a literary magazine
The Fifth Child, a novel by Doris Lessing (read it; loved it)

To Watch:
Silent films from Wisconsin Bioscope

In Carlsbad, California:
To Read:
Hardboiled novels by Ross Macdonald
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a novel by Agatha Christie
Why Did I Ever?, a novel by Mary Robison
Reader’s Block, a novel by David Markson
Wittgenstein’s Mistress, a novel by David Markson
Cloud Atlas, a novel by David Mitchell
Deer Head Nation, poems by K. Silem Mohammad
My Life, poems by Lyn Hejinian
Candy in Action, a novel by Matthue Roth
A Harper’s article about the NYC sewage/wastewater system (something about the Big
Flush)
Hit Wave, a chapbook by Jon Leon (from Kitchen Press)
Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the1990s edited by Mark Wallace and Steven
Marks
Haze, poems by Mark Wallace
The Temporary Worker Rides a Subway, poems by Mark Wallace (read it; loved it)
speculations descending therefrom a poetry chapbook by K. Lorraine Graham (read it; loved it)
Telling the Future Off by Stephanie Young
Books from Tougher Disguises Press
Books by James Meetze
Accidental Hedonist, a food blog
The Traveler’s Lunchbox, a food blog by Melissa Kronenthal

To Watch:
“Kittens Inspired by Kittens” on Youtube (watched it; cracked up)
The Haunting (the 1963 version)
Gidget

To Listen To:
“It Never Rains in Southern California” by Albert Hammond (listened to it; cracked up)
Something Cool by June Christy
Wanda Jackson (listened to it; cracked up/squirmed with discomfort)
Keith Jarrett
The Pernice Brothers

To Eat:
Persian Cucumbers (especially in drinks) (ate/drank them; loved them)
Bee Pollen (ate it; felt healthy)

To Floss With:
Crest Mint Glide

To Write With:
Stablio Point 88 Fineliner pens

To Consider as a Potential Future Pet:
Parrotlets

To Someday Name a Cat:
Pianoface (but Lorraine gets first dibs)

In Carbondale, IL:

To Read:
The Only World, poems by Lynda Hull (read it; loved it)
Transparent Gestures, poems by Rodney Jones
The Unborn, poems by Rodney Jones
Things That Happen Once, poems by Rodney Jones
Carolina Ghost Woods, poems by Judy Jordan
My Psychic, poems by James Kimbrell
Isabella Moon, a novel by Laura Benedict:
Calling Mr. Lonelyhearts, a novel by Laura Benedict
Town Smokes, short stories by Pinckney Benedict:
Dogs of God, a novel by Pinckney Benedict
The Wrecking Yard, short stories by Pinckney Benedict
Reveries of the Solitary Walker by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Anything by the poet Jack Gilbert
I Am Legend, a novella by Richard Matheson
Hell House, a novel by Richard Matheson
Grimalkin and Other Poems by Thomas Lynch
The Night the Ghost Got In, a short story by James Thurber
Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in Modern Horror Film by Carol J. Clover
Leaving Iowa, by Michael Meyerhoffer

To Watch:
Feasting on Asphalt on the Food Network by Alton Brown
L’il Pimp (a Laffs from the Hood Production)
Count Yorga
Planet of the Vampires
Pick-Up
Killer Shrews
The Giant Gila Monster
It’s Alive
Phantom of the Paradise

To Attend:
Duff’s Reading Series in St. Louis

In Indianapolis, IN:
To Read:
Modern Love, a fiction chapbook by Andrew Scott, from Sunny Outside Press
Freight Stories, a literary magazine for contemporary fiction

To Join:
Andrew’s Book Club, a book club for short story collections, run by Andrew Scott

Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School...

...has some rock-solid rules for their monthly Figure Drawing Spectacular: 1. This is a participation-only drawing class. No looky-loos! 2. Respect your model. Don't make gross comments. Don't ask her out. 3. No messy or stinky mediums. How do I know? Thanks to Carol Guess (whose prose poetry collection Tinderbox Lawn is not to be missed), who sent the flier all the way from Hamsterdam to Chicago, where it looks really nice on the fridge. Thanks, Carol!

The April issue of ARTnews...

...has a write-up--with pictures!--of Live Nude Girl in their "Art Talk" section. Sharing real estate there are Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Yoko Ono. Not bad. Thanks to Ann Landi for the write-up and to Beth Rooney and Salvatore Del Deo for the images.

One Hundred Things I Loved About Touring the United States with Kathleen Rooney (Part One: The First Fifty)

1. Riding the Metro from the Green Line at the airport to the Blue Line to the Red Line to Hollywood, a surprisingly fun hours-long trip that allowed us to take in a whole lot of the city, including plenty of the parts where people tell you not to go. My favorite was South Central, where people were nicer and more helpful than almost any other place in any other city in the world. Michael Moore was right about South Central Los Angeles. It's a vibrant community, not a hellhole, and I liked it plenty.

2. Not Touring the Museum of Death (a relief!)

3. Standing on Cowboy Gene Autry's Walk of Fame star.

4. Meeting a bookstore employee at L.A.'s Skylight Books, remarking upon how friendly she was, liking her intensely, learning later that she was the fiction writer and anthologist K. Kvashay-Boyle, who I had already admired on the page.

5. Kicking it with Clark Harding, screenwriter and Antarctic explorer.

6. Talking shop with Joshuah Bearman, admiring his new beard and bow tie, learning about the legend of Master Legend, the Orlando-area vigilante crimefighter.

7. Walking San Francisco.

8. Eating all the foods of the world in San Francisco, including (a first!) Taiwanese.

9. Eating said foods of the world with George Awad, host and tour guide extraordinaire.

10. In the Mission, meeting a Guatemalan man in a Mexican restaurant who was reading a library edition of Isaac Bashevis Singer's stories, translated into Spanish from an English edition translated from Yiddish. Also: having this moment with this man without either of us actually using words the other knew. Hooray for Isaac Bashevis Singer!

11. Meeting Peter Orner, buying his book, reading it later that night, wishing I had read it before I met him so I could have talked with him about it when I met him.

12. Reading with Daniel Handler.

13. Drinking with Daniel Handler.

14. Eating lots of meals with Kathleen Rooney (hereafter I'll refer to her as Kathy), whose vegetarian ways helped nudge me toward eating more healthily, and thereby feeling better than I would otherwise have felt, and also probably keeping me from falling ill while on the road. The first of many admirable things I learned, in fact, from traveling with her.

15. Bitching about the weather in Portland but sort of liking Portland anyway.

16. Bitching about the semi-creepy guys in Portland who came out on account of the idea of "Live Nude Girl," but sort of liking the semi-creepy guys in Portland anyway.

17. Meeting Jonathan Evison, the hardest working man in fiction publishing. He brought tiny hot dogs and Twinkies to our reading at the University Bookstore in Seattle. He invited everyone at the reading to the after-party. Even the bookstore employees followed us over. No debauchery followed, so far as I could tell. What did was plenty of warm conversation, jokes, talk about literature, talk about the economy. A theology professor held forth in one corner about the death of God, and a factory worker held forth in another about gaming the Washington state unemployment system. I wrote a blog post about Jonathan Evison wearing rouge, but turns out he doesn't wear any. He is gifted with the natural coloration of an Abercrombie and Fitch model. I took notes but couldn't figure out how to replicate the genetics.

18. Watching Kathy cycle through her material before settling on the crowd-pleasing piece -- the essay on photography -- that became her standard reading material. Watching her progress as a reader from good to very good to, by day six or so, world-class pro.

19. Taking a chance in Bellingham, and reading from "A Love Story," a slower story about a closeted gay man who is also a fundamentalist preacher, and connecting with several people in the audience in a way that the slicker, more thrilling work never could quite match.

20. Hanging out with Carol and Elizabeth, poets extraordinaire, in Bellingham. Sitting around their table and working, the four of us, like we were real writers, and enjoying the quiet communion of that time of work.

21. Eating Indian food and gossiping in Tacoma with Jason Skipper, author of one of the most beautiful not-yet-published novels in America.

22. Fighting with the gas station attendant outside SeaTac, and making our flight only because of Kathy's uber-organization.

23. Regarding with sheer pleasure the magenta binder of maps, directions, expenditures, and receipts that Kathy collated with a care not unlike the care she invests in making and publishing beautiful books for other people at Rose Metal Press.

24. Flying over Big Sky country, reading Amy Wilentz's grossly underrated The Rainy Season, which is the best account by anyone anywhere of the pivotal late '80's in Haiti.

25. Learning that Minneapolis is one of the best cities in the world. The people are warm there, the politics are just right, and when you read at the Book Loft, they put your name in pink letters on the streetside marquee, and send a photographer to follow you all night and give you a CD-ROM full of pictures before you leave.

26. Learning that Rebecca Kanner, our guest reader in Minneapolis, was as cool in person as she seemed to be from her work. Loving her, loving her, loving her.

27. Hanging out afterward at a dive bar with Rebecca's friends, whose stories and regalements included talk of intercontinental expeditions, detainments by Uzbekistani police officers, bribes paid, motorcycles wrecked on icy ponds, and heroin dens disrupted by the vice of virtue.

28. MegaBussing for eight dollars one way, Minneapolis to Milwaukee.

29. Watching Kathy skillfully defuse a semi-skillful MegaBus proposition, a thing of dicey sketchy beauty I hadn't known enough about the world to imagine possible.

30. Eating strips of bacon wrapped in cheese wrapped in egg rolls, deep friend, and washed down with pitchers of beer, in Milwaukee, with the poet Drew Blanchard.

31. Talking Peruvian poetry, political violence, and the Shining Path, while drinking Peruvian drinks with a Peruvian poet (in Milwaukee!)

32. Spending more less the last of a buddy's record advance while all-night carousing on Division Street, in Chicago.

33. Playing uno with my brother and sister-in-law, in Chicago.

34. Reading to a packed-out bar on the north side, in Chicago.

35. Standing three inches from three Vincent van Gogh self-portraits, in Chicago.

36. Reading with real true personal hero Roy Kesey, in Chicago, and also oversleeping in the bed next to Roy Kesey's, both of us snoring I'm told, in Chicago.

37. Talking Postevangelical Literature, comic books, the sexual lives of the ladies of the cloth, and the apocolypse, with Pinckney Benedict, David McGlynn, Scott Kaukonen, and Angela Pneuman, while a standing room only audience egged us on, in Chicago.

38. Meeting Beth Rooney, soon-to-be-famous photographer, in Chicago.

39. Dammit, I really loved Chicago.

40. Finally meeting Martin Seay, Kathy's husband and author of a manuscript for a novel whose ambition seems to me to rival William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, and Dan Brown's the Da Vinci Code, and both at once, and maybe it will appeal to both audiences, and maybe I just got in on the ground floor -- Fanboy #1. I'm claiming it. This was also in Chicago.

41. The unexpected beauty of Boston from the vista the airplane achieves upon approach -- the buildings, the harbor, the crazy cow path road shapes.

42. Reading with Steve Almond, whose generosity extended to gifts of rarish sweet candies in a paper dime store bag.

43. A magical evening in Provincetown, among the best and smallest crowd of the tour, a crowd that interrupted the reading to cheer or praise the work, and a crowd that brought beer.

44. A magical evening in Provincetown (Part II), at the townie bar, where a drag queen regaled us with stories from his wedding and his cab company, and then bought copies of both our books.

45. Eating avocado wraps the next morning in Provincetown, while sitting on a bench in the beach sand, overlooking the bay, contemplating the Atlantic beyond, dreaming of New York City.

46. Walking Provincetown one last time, among the ghosts of summers past, all the way to the lighthouse.

47. Hearing the good news that Kathy was going to be a guest on Talk of the Nation!!!

48. Sleeping an extra hour in the car while Kate and Kathy navigated Boston's downtown one-ways and got us safely to the rental car drop-off.

49. Reading V.S. Naipaul on a Chinatown bus full with people for whom English is not language number one, and discussing politics in Chad with a woman from Chad, who said, "Would you ever like to visit Chad?" (Yes, I would!)

50. Arriving in New York! Drinking coffee in Chinatown! Hopping the subway to Brooklyn!

In our next installment: 25 Readings in One Day! Tao Lin! Tacos! Snow Falling in Memphis! Snowplows Necessary In Arkansas! A Birthday Party! Interstates! Aaron Burch!

The Short Review and Bookslut on In the Devil's Territory

There's an extraordinarily generous new review of In the Devil's Territory by British critic Susannah Rickards up at The Short Review. Rickards writes: "Everyone who reads or writes short fiction should take a look at this debut collection. Missing out on it would be like missing out on Greene, Carver, Munro . . ." More here.



And there's a new post about the book and particularly the story "A Day Meant to Do Less" at the Bookslut blog. Nina MacLaughlin writes: "In Kyle Minor’s debut collection In the Devil’s Territory (which came out late last year; which I’ve written about elsewhere; which more than warrants continued discussion), sex weaves in and out of the stories, a powerful, destructive force, a location of massive self-deception and self-denial. The sexual situations Minor sets up are baleful, uncomfortable, sad. He explores the shadowy pockets of our hearts and heads, the places we avoid, because what we find there is weird, off, wrong, and sort of scary." More here.

Live Nude Girl gets 8 out of 10 nipples....

...from Campus Progress! To give some sense of scale, this occurs on the same page where the new Decemberists album gets "8 out of 10 dog-eared 19th-century Penny Dreadfuls" and U2 gets "9 out of 10 earnest rock stars."

Read Caroline Hagood's review in its entirety here.

Imitation is the sincerest form...

...of affectionate mockery, hence my co-workers' leaving a copy of the hot new book, Live Nude Boy: Shake It, Shake it, Shake It, Till You Can't Shake No More, on my chair for me to find when I made my triumphant return yesterday morning: Thanks, guys! Also waiting for me? The following sign, courtesy of Sendy......and peanut-butter blondies......courtesy of Jeffrey. If you are curious about how he made the culinary magic happen, then might I suggest you take a look at Jeffrey's blog? Welcome to the working week.