There is truly nothing more fulfilling to a writer than knowing your book found a reader who connects with it as something longed-for. And this week I learned that it’s even more exhilarating if the reader pulls out a quote from the book that describes the motivation for writing it. On Instagram, the writer Leah De Forest did just that! . . .
My latest Art & Kinship installment is on Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s second novel, The Tree Doctor, and her work more broadly. Also, death, ghosts, sex, and a cherry tree named Einstein. Here’s how it begins: I first encountered Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s work in her engaging, quietly profound, and beautifully and wryly observed Letter From a Japanese Crematorium, written soon after her grandmother’s funeral. . . .
My latest newsletter is on Boy Erased author Garrard Conley’s first novel, All the World Beside, a singular and magnificent work of art: tender, hopeful, shot through with dour fundamentalist judgment and a painful sense of separation, but also numinous and earthly connection. Also considered: the sins of the fathers, Puritan ancestors, epigenetics, queer kinship, and the musicality of his prose.
I’m teaching a creative writing workshop—Family Stories We (Tell Ourselves We) Can’t Tell—for the Miami Book Fair, as part of the festivities around the 2024 Miami Big Read featuring Madeline Miller’s Circe. We’ll gather in person at the Miami-Dade Wolfson campus. The workshop is priced for accessibility and size-limited for intimacy. For more details, or to register, go to the Miami Book Fair site.