a generous review/interview for Tell the Truth. Make It Matter., and more

We rented a car and we drove. To Columbus, Ohio, through Terra Haute, to St. Louis, Joplin, Oklahoma City, Santa Fe, Ruidoso, Marfa, Fort Worth, Hope, Memphis, Lexington, Charleston, WV, and then, yesterday, home.

It was research. It was escape. It was a necessary immersion in our country.

It was our anniversary, too. Thirty-two years together.

While we were gone, Serena Agusto-Cox, a poet, reader, and reviewer kindly reviewed our new memoir workbook, Tell the Truth. Make it Matter., then asked me questions for an interview. We had not brought a computer with us, and so I tapped out words with two fingers on a borrowed couch and hoped any nonsense might be forgiven.

I am always enormously grateful to Serena for doing so much, so kindly, so consistently, even as her own career takes off with a first major reading and more and more yeses from journals.

The review is here.

The interview is here.

Gratitude is everywhere.

We also learned, as we drove into Memphis (fittingly enough) of the stellar SLJ review given to the anthology, Behind the Music, which is the brainchild of K.M. Walton. "This anthology about music hits all the right notes," the reviewer wrote, and we are all so happy about that.

My review of Julia Fierro's The Gypsy Moth Summer appeared in the Chicago Tribune.

And I received word that Love: A Philadelphia Affair will be available as a $12 paperback from Temple University Press come October.

I return to 2,000 photos to sort through (this one above was taken in New Mexico), an enormously interesting memoir to review for the Chicago Tribune, a promised story to the Inquirer, and a novel, now half-written, that requires its second half.

A novel that has found its second half.

I must settle down and make room for it. I must remember, in other words, how to sit in one place and think, for I am accustomed to rumbling now.