-
Follow
Following
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
The Beautiful Anthology! I’m so pleased to be in this velvety book, exploring one of life’s hot topics alongside writers such as Gina Frangello, Melissa Febos, Greg Olear, Jessica Anya Blau, M. J. Fievre, Angela Tung, and more more more. Check out the trailer, with music by Rich Ferguson. And buy the book! It’s the only place my essay will live. I wrote about…
This spring, we went back to Isla Mujeres for our second time as a family and my third time overall. I left a copy of Currency at PocNa, the hostel where I stayed when I visited the island as a backpacker round about 1995. In the book, I pasted the same note that I have in the other copies I’ve sent out into the…
This past Thursday, at the invitation of SheWrites co-creator Deborah Siegel, I appeared at Women and Children First bookstore along with Teri Coyne, Audrey Niffenegger, Amina Gautier, and Emily Gray Tedrowe as part of a panel exploring modern-day heroines. I could diagram that sentence to show about twenty different sources of personal gratification: Women and Children First, where I spent many longing hours in…
The excellent music/lit blog Largeheartedboy allowed me to create a Currency play list for their Book Notes feature. I’ve always seen western music as playing an important part of Piv’s identity, and it certainly has been an important part of mine, so this was a fun assignment. For one of the entries, the song “Made in Thailand” by the Thai band Carabao, I found…
Last night, my excellent editor Gina Frangello was a guest on the TV show Chicago Tonight. Along with home-grown lit stars Audrey Niffenegger and Brigid Pasulka, Gina was supposed to recommend summer reads. Mark and I recorded the program, and I was all atwitter to see my friend and my book on the little screen. But we didn’t fast forward to the books segment….
(I posted this missive last week on The Nervous Breakdown last week, so if you read it there, skip this. If you haven’t heard of The Nervous Breakdown and you like to read short nonfiction on screen, you should totally check out the site. ) Getting ready for my recent trip to L.A., I told anyone who would listen that I’d never, ever been…
Well, Currency‘s been officially out for a little over six weeks now. I’ve read from it maybe a dozen times in a half-dozen different towns. I’ve gotten some reviews and done some interviews. I’ve been absolutely drunk on the kindness and enthusiasm of friends and acquaintances, and, despite attempts to keep my focus on my many book-related blessings, I’ve also succumbed to moments of…
First off, let me say that Currency officially hits the streets right about now. Dear visitor, I beg you not to judge this book on the absence of a dedicated web site. It is a hundred times better than its web presence, and although there’s little excuse for that in this day and age, isn’t it preferable to the reverse? Currency is exciting yet…
Now that CURRENCY has been published, a number of people are asking me tactful versions of the question How come this took so long? and Why with a small press? In this excerpt from an interview with Leah Tallen, Other Voices editor Gina Frangello explains better than I ever could. You can see the full interview at Knee-Jerk, and if you read it you’ll…
It’s a crazy-ass thing to want to publish a book. The work it takes. The struggling to figure it out, to process the criticism, to make it better, make it better, make it better yet after the umpteenth person has said “not quite right for us” or just “not quite.” And then if you’re lucky enough, and the manuscript gets set and bound, some…
Zoe Zolbrod 