I will be reading and talking about the weirdness of writing about one’s own life and loved ones with Jennifer Boylan at New York’s The Strand on Tuesday, May 28th, at 7:00 PM. Jenny’s new book is Stuck in the Middle With You; mine is the paperback edition of We Learn Nothing. We’re old friends who invariably regress into a couple of 14-year-old spazzes around each other; it should be a good time.
John Moore/ Getty Images
I have an essay on the allure of war in the June issue of The Men’s Journal, on newsstands now. It is also available online.
As part of my ongoing quest for ways to make money as a writer in the 21st century, I am undertaking an experiment: offering a new essay as a 99¢ downloadable pdf file. The essay, “Up in the Air,” is a short one (around 1500 words, the length of one of my New York Times op-eds) but it’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever written. It’s about what Kim Stanley Robinson calls “the time without skin”–those in-between times in our lives (between careers, homes, or relationships) when we’re deprived of the anesthetizing comfort of our daily habits or any certainty about the future, and have to confront all the dreadful Big-Picture questions we hoped we’d put behind us for good. It even includes an old, previously-unpublished-online cartoon as illustration.
My first essay written for the New York Times‘s “Draft” blog, on the dangers of certainty, runs today.
I have a new essay in Modern Farmer magazine, about the farm where I grew up.
I am the least illustrious interviewee featured in my friend Jennifer Finney Boylan’s new book, Stuck In the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders. (Other interviewees include Edward Albee and Richard Russo.) Although I have zero interest in “parenting” I was up late last night reading this book. The title is somewhat misleading; it is, like my own book, about the somewhat mixed experience of being alive, and it is, like all of Jenny’s work, smart and funny and moving. It even made me faintly envious, in a safely abstract way, of her domestic family life.
There will be a reading/release party for the paperback edition of We Learn Nothing on Thursday, April 18th, 7:00 PM at Atomic Books, in Baltimore, MD. Dash Shaw will also be reading from his new graphic novel, New School. This date also happens to be Tim’s 18th Stabbiversary, so an air of festive abandon is expected to prevail. For more information: https://www.facebook.
Publication date for the paperback edition of We Learn Nothing is April 9th.
