This is the noise you make when you get a starred review from Kirkus
And other midsummer thoughts
- Last week I came home from the public pool and sat on the kitchen couch with my second cup of tea and checked email on my phone. My husband was in the back room, his office, when he heard me making a gasping noise. It sounded like distress. Or joy. It could have gone either way.
“What happened?” he asked.
I handed him the phone. It was an email from Midas PR, the marketing firm working with Galiot Press. SEX OF THE MIDWEST got a starred review from Kirkus. That was the gasp.
If you’re a writer person, you know that a starred review from Kirkus is kind of a big deal. I was trying to think of a metaphor for the non-writing world. Maybe like being ranked number one in the preseason? Or getting a standing ovation when your movie premieres at Cannes? As in those metaphors, the starred review could mean a lot. Maybe you’ll make it to the Super Bowl. Or maybe it means nothing. Maybe your quarterback will get injured and your whole season will go down the toilet. There’s no way to know for sure.
Nonetheless, it’s not something I really ever expected to happen. And it is a joy, especially for this book and these stories which are so, so close to my heart. And in the review, which you can read here, they compared the stories to Olive Kitteridge and to Spoon River Anthology and (gasp, again) to Chaucer. CHAUCER!!!
- For the first time since we planted our nectarine tree almost ten years ago, we got a bounty of fruit this year. This is no doubt because we finally remembered in the fall to spray for the leaf fungus it tends to get. We felt so virtuous last October with our organic fungal spray, but we had no idea if it would pay off. It did.
We’ve been eating nectarines for the past couple of weeks. Some of the fruit look absolutely perfect on the tree and then when you pick them, develop spots of rot. Or they fall off before they ripen. Or I pick them and they’re full of ants or beetles. Out of all the fruits, only 2 or 3 have been perfect and whole. This does not make them any less delicious. I cut around the rotten spots. I wash off the ants and the beetles. I cut them up and put them in a bowl and eat them all day long. I am smug with fruit.
- This week, we also did the big cover reveal for SEX OF THE MIDWEST. The cover is a thing of beauty and I’m so grateful to the folks at Faceout Studios for its design. It’s funny, I’ve been looking at the cover for a while now, in the design phases and then on my phone. It already feels familiar. It already feels like, “Yes, that’s my book.” I think that is a good thing.
- The church bells that have gone off next door every 15 minutes from eight in the morning until eight at night stopped this week and we didn’t even notice. Our neighbor a couple of blocks down the street asked us if we’d noticed last night. My husband and I looked at each other, puzzled. Then realized, oh, it has been quiet, hasn’t it?
We didn’t quite believe it until Sunday morning, when, sure enough, come eight o’clock, there were no church bells.
When we tell people that the bells next door ring every 15 minutes (it’s Big Ben style, so you can tell whether it’s quarter after, half past, quarter til, or on the hour), they are horrified. And when they first started going off every 15 minutes after the church replaced their steeple, we were also horrified. The bells were LOUD at first. My husband had to go outside in his bathrobe one morning as the priest was standing outside the church to greet the parishioners and ask him to turn the volume down. They also occasionally glitched and would start at six in the morning instead of eight.
Over the years, though, we got used to the bells. They were a nice way to tell the time. We could always tell how late we’d slept in as we heard the eight o’clock bells. They’re not a beautiful sound, because they’re not real bells, but a recording. But they were familiar. They became part of the soundtrack of our lives.
Now they appear to be gone, I can only guess because for the first time since we’ve lived here, the new priest now lives in the rectory right next door to the church instead of up on the Hilltop. Perhaps he found the bells horrifying and turned them off. Now that we’ve noticed, the world feels a little quieter.
- I assumed the photo on the cover of SEX OF THE MIDWEST was a photo of Madison, the town where I live and which is the inspiration for many of the stories. The photo looks like Madison. There are two French Empire buildings on the cover. We have one French Empire building on Main Street. I had already been a little disturbed by the flecking paint on one of the buildings in the photo. Which isn’t to say that some buildings in Madison don’t have flecking paint. But what does the flecking paint imply? Decay? Ruin? Madison is not a dying town and neither is Lanier, the fictional town in SEX OF THE MIDWEST.
A big part of what I was trying to do in the stories in the book was to push against the predominant narratives of small town America. I wanted to create a counter-narrative that was more in line with my actual experience living in a small town. Did I succeed? I don’t know. I can already see how, to some extent, the existing narrative is so powerful that it overrides everything else. At any rate, now that the book is going out into the world, the amount of control I have over what people see in it begins to diminish. That’s a very strange feeling.
- All of the book stuff this week happened against the backdrop of preparing to return to the classroom after almost nine months on sabbatical. I spent more time than I ever would have liked to going through a training course for our new learning management system. The fact that such a thing as a learning management system exists in the first place feels like a battle already fought and lost.
The seduction of the learning management system is great. It is a better system than the one we used before. It will do all kinds of wonderful things! It has something called Speed Grading®! Even after the training course, I don’t totally understand what Speed Grading® is, but as someone who hates grading (everyone hates grading) it sounds very attractive.
Then I sat down one morning and re-read
’s essay in his book, Inciting Joy, on teaching and learning. It’s called “Dispatch from the Ruins,” and I’m so grateful every time I absorb it’s wisdom. Ross Gay’s essay is the opposite of a learning management system. He talked about classrooms as labs of wonder and care and places where we practice community-minded bewilderment.
Oh, right, that’s what I want in my teaching, I remembered. Community-minded bewilderment. Not Speed Grading®. In fact, I’d really rather not have any grading at all. Instead, I’m thinking about how we can have fun this semester. How we can get lost together and maybe see some interesting things along the way. When I think about teaching that way, the dread I feel about going back into the classroom begins to fade just a little bit.
- Really, I assumed that the photo on the cover was Madison because it was beautiful and I tend to assume that all things beautiful are Madison. I tell people sometimes that Madison is the center of the universe and I’m only half-joking.
When people ask me what the book is about, I still don’t really know what to say. Obviously the title implies a lot of sex, which there is not, and so that’s confusing. Sometimes when people ask me what the book is about (and perhaps if I’ve had a drink or two) I just smile like an insane person. The book makes me giddy because I love it so much.
Of course, I need to get better at talking about the book, though the introvert in me would also just like to designate that task to someone else. My husband, maybe. What I want to say is that the book is a love letter to small towns, which it is.
- All summer long I’ve found black on my fingers and my hands in the morning as I sit down to write and I cannot for the life of me identify the source. Is it a leaking pen? Smeared pencil lead from a drawing? Or black watercolor paint? I have no idea.
This morning the black is on the pads of my fingers and the computer keys and the mouse pad and I am choosing not to be bothered by it. I’m remembering the analog world of typewriters, where the ink was always getting onto your skin or the paper or the keys. I’m remembering the world where writing was a physical thing in the form of black smudges leaking out onto everything you touched. That feels like a good world to return to.
Pre-orders for SEX OF THE MIDWEST coming very soon. When they do, it will be at this link. In the meantime, you can go mark the book as “to-read” on Goodreads, here.
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Congrats Robyn, and you’ve made me jealous…
of the nectarines. 😇
So exciting, and the blurbs too! Congratulations, Robyn!