Prior to reading from A Northern Spring last night (Tuesday, which you'll see in a bit is an important detail), at the University Club Readings by Writers series in St. Paul, with Rick Robbins, Ben Drevlow, and Christina Olson, hosted by Tim Nolan, I stopped at a local pub for some cheese curds and a Guinness. A girl scout, trailed by her dad and his wagon full of cookies, sold me two boxes of these (see photo)—a cash sale—which I brought to the reading and distributed to the audience. At the end of the reading, there was one cookie left, which almost everyone refused, which common lore says is a Minnesota/Midwest thing (this refusal to take the last one of anything). Until I found the one who didn't refuse, who with his mouthful said, "I'm not from Minnesota."

I seriously thought the reading was Thursday. I happened to check social media and discovered that I was two-days wrong about that. I had, however, after the botched reading in Seattle, revamped the plan. I condensed and consolidated things, meaning the material I would read would capture the spirit of A Northern Spring more so than its verbatimness. Again, I thought, This must be what novelists do—what they learn to do early on. Aside from a prose paragraph that I'd accidentally pasted twice into my reading sheets (when I started reading it, what first must have seemed like intentional repetition to the both the audience and me was quickly unmasked as unintentional deja vu, and I apologized, and meta-like explained exactly what had happened with my two reading plans to date), things went according to plan. I have started to read primarily from printed 8x11 sheets instead of from the book itself, as doing allows for me to read the condensing and consolidating smoothly. I go back to my damaged—my prematurely aged—reading copy for a poem or two when it works.

This reading was for Rick (Richard Robbins) a kind of living legacy. He had been an MFA professor and mentor to me, Ben, Christina, and four others in attendance—seven total of his flock. The evening came full circle when we returned to the bar where I'd purchased the cookies for after-reading food, drinks, and fellowship. Also in attendance at the after meet-up were two colleagues of mine from Normandale CC—one a longtime former hallmate—who knew Christina from their time at Mankato. I do kind of love when the "it's a small world" cliché lets us know that clichés are clichés because at core, in there well-trod hearts, they hold a truth.

The cover of A Northern Spring does such an excellent job of interpreting the book visually. The first thing I see in this image is an egg, before I see that the egg is made of flora. An egg is potential. It can hatch life for individuals. It can sustain life for species. Louis Cyphre (look him up) says, "You know, some religions think that the egg is the symbol of the soul, did you know that?"

An egg is fragile approached with hardly any force at all from the sides, almost indestructible when approached with great and sustained force at each of its poles. This egg emerges from the darkest dark and its casing is not made of calcium carbonate crystals but of flowers that mimic lungs (perhaps hemispheres), the red-orange flowers like opening hearts in mirror image, north and south.

The potential and precariousness here are great in equal measure. It's hard to imagine a different cover being a better fit for the the book. All the credit goes to Joel W. Coggins, gracious and thoughtful human, cover designer extraordinaire.

On the last day of AWP, the public can pay a small fee to visit the book fair. This makes the conference a lot less insidery—a lot more like a enclosed mall of booksellers, bookmakers, book lovers, wordsmiths, a kind of carnival of entities dedicated to wordsmithery, to books. I can imagine more beautiful rows than the AWP rows. Rows covered by glass in an open-air market. Rows along some Seine. The AWP rows are not those, but the people who populate them are the same as would populate the more picturesque, iconic rows of memory, of the imagination. When the doors open to the public, it significantly increases the ratio of readers to writers in the aisles, and so changes the tenor of the conversations one has with strangers. It would be knee-jerk to say it improves them, and I almost said it did, before I thought further. With a hour or so to go before booth tear-down (AWP is prickly about tear-down not starting too early in the day) the press has sold out of all of the copies of A Northern Spring that it brought to Seattle. Dedicated sellers? A blip the result of a beautiful cover? Time will tell. It always does.

PHOTOS: Upper left: busy vendor booths along the Seine in Paris. Upper right: Bird's-eye view of vendor rows at AWP. Lower right: Busy, open-air market street in London, seen from the top deck of a double-decker bus, as near to the front as one could get without kicking the couple seen here from behind out of the best available seats. 

Great stage, lighting, sound, space, crowd, staff, and tap offerings at Underbelly. It was the kind of bar reading where one gets the sense that either readings have been held here before or else the crowd is a moveable feast that knows what to do when a writer steps up the mic.

My colleague and friend Lynette Reini-Grandell's new memoir, Wild Things, is out. Her spouse and co-star of the memoir, Venus De Mars, asked her to read something that would make her cry, and Lynette obliged. I have read before with and know David Groff and Lee Ann Roripaugh, and have read and am acquainted with Jan Beatty. Jen Manthey lives in the Twin Cities and so I know of her and travel in orbits with many who also travel in hers, but this is the first time I have met her. Laura Bandy and her book are both new to me.

The best laid plans gang aft agley, right? I'm not sure if those listened heard my reading as I did, but via my ears as the words came out of my mouth, I heard something altogether different from the perfect plan I'd hatched over pizza and beer. After I'd read some of the opening prose and talked a bit, contextualizing things,  I realized I'd used up a little more than half of my allotted time. I had to rush and cut on the fly. I read a couple of poems and skipped, didn't say what I'd hope top say about them, cut the additional contextualizing I'd plan to do, and got to the last prose section. I tried to skip anything skippable, editing out sentences/phrases/words as I was reading. What my ears heard bore little coherence to the scope and ends of my plan, and I'd gone a minute or two longer than I was supposed to. It felt like a complete and forgettable disaster. To top it off, I'd tried to play good citizen before it was my turn to read. Each of the readers' books had been stacked and spread along the right side of the stage, like a fanned out deck of oversized cards, which is the side people needed to step up on the dais from—it's where the step was located. The first couple readers had to step over the fanned out books and in doing so were balanced precariously on one leg before skip-hopping to the other. I didn't want anyone to fall, so in between two readers I stepped up and rearranged the books so that readers ascending the dais had a clear path. Backing into my seat stage right, I backed into the small, round two top atop which sat my beer, which tipped and spilled onto Jen and a bunch of stuff we had on the bench seat between us. This is also the story of why my reading copy of A Northern Spring is much more warped and timeworn than a brand book would otherwise be.

PHOTOS, CLOCKWISE FROM UPPER LEFT: Lynette Reini-Grandell, Issam Zineh (author of Unceded Land), David Groff (author of Live in Suspense, Clay, and more), Jan Beatty (author of American Bastard, The Body Wars, and more), Lee Ann Roripaugh (author of #stringofbeads, Dandarians, and more), Laura Bandy (author of Monster Movie), Jennifer Manthey (author of The Fight).

Over really good happy-hour-priced wood-fired pizza and a local pilsner, I've decided to try to capture the arc of the A Northern Spring as well as I can by reading a bit from the beginning, a bit from the middle, and a bit from the end. I'll start with prose that sets the scene—us in Derry, in the North of Ireland, when the travel ban is announced. After that, I'll talk a bit from notes to contextualize the book as a whole, how the prose is set in four preludes plus a coda with the poems intervening, and maybe a bit about why it's structured that way. Then I'll read a couple of my shorter, most reading-friendly poems, will say a bit more from notes—how the book coming to be was a matter of a confluence of events I'll likely never experience again—putting the arc I'm trying to capture inside a frame, and then I'll close with some prose from the coda. Boom.

PHOTO, LEFT: The handbill for the AWP offsite reading that Trio House Press is co-sponsoring, along with the South Dakota Review, Gold Wake Press, and the Minnesota Historical Society Press. The readers representing the various presses are discernible by the color-coding, the press names being the same color as the stars in which the names of their readers appear. The reading theme—"WE'RE THE FLOWNOVER"—is a tongue-in-cheekish (or not so tongue-in-cheekish) reference to the denotation of "flyover":

flyover—as modifier—US informal, derogatory denoting central regions of the US regarded as less significant than the East or West coasts: his appeal extends way beyond the Bible Belt and the flyover states.

The stars are homage to the stars of First Avenue & 7th Street Entry, the two historic and iconic music venues (known by locals as "The Mainroom" and "The Entry") housed side by side in the same building with a passageway between them, in downtown Minneapolis, known to the world as as the club featured in the Prince film Purple Rain.

PHOTOS, RIGHT: Top, a close up of the some of the First Ave stars inside which are the names of bands/performers who have appeared at either The Mainroom or The Entry. Bottom, First Ave main entrance.

The official pub date for A Northern Spring is July 1, 2023. Trio House Press has advance copies for sale at the AWP booth. I've spent a lot of time in the Trio House booth telling the story of A Northern Spring and signing copies. I'm figuring out how to talk about the book. I'm revising this story of the book on the fly, figuring things out as I say them, say them again, say them differently, adding and subtracting—editing. 

As I do so, there's another me beneath the outward me trying to figure out how to read from A Northern Spring in the ten minutes allotted at the offsite reading on Friday night, doing the same sort of revising, the same sort of editing. A Northern Spring is a hybrid work, with both prose and poetry throughout, and what I'm realizing is that picking what to read from poetry-only books is a much simpler endeavor than this. Poems X, Y, and Z seem fitting for this crowd. I'll read those. If I've misread the mood of the crowd, I'll have poems A, B, and C tabbed, on standby. The more you read from a book of poetry, the more sets you have ready, the easier it is to shift to a new set midstream if the need arises, if your reading of the crowd dictates you change things up.

I have written thematic books—all of my books are thematic in the way that I understand "thematic"—but never have I written a book with a real-ass narrative arc. Until now. Until A Northern Spring and its prose. And that demands a different kind of reading. How do I capture enough of the arc? Do I read some from the start, some from the middle, and some from the end? Or do I not try to capture the arc at all? Do I instead read one single passage, as a novelist might read a gripping scene?

This is the gist of the inward conversation that nobody privy to the various iterations of the outward conversation know is even going on. I think I should ask a novelist or several how they do it, for advice. I think that there can't be a better place to do that than here.

PHOTO: The THP booth at AWP Seattle. From left to right: Issam Zineh, author of the poetry collection Unceded Land (Trio House), Natasha Kane, THP Acquisitions and Publicity Director, Patrick Werle, THP Editor. Some copies of A Northern Spring are stacked behind Issam, just to the right of the book with the green cover, of which you can make out "Lucky," the entire title of which is If You're Lucky Is a Theory of Mine—my second collection of poetry and the first of my books published by Trio House, ca. 2013—ten years ago.

I travel light when I fly, only ever with a backpack and perhaps a small carry on to cram under the seat on top of that, but usually only the backpack. I tend to wear the same clothes over and over—a couple different outfits—and can always wash anything that needs it the sink or bathtub where I'm staying. Knowing that I never have to wait at the baggage carousel feels like I've figured something out that others haven't (which I know isn't true).

Headed to the AWP Annual Conference in Seattle, I had a couple pairs of pants, a couple shirts, toiletries, socks, underwear, laptop, headphones for in-flight movies, and fifteen of the twenty author copies of A Northern Spring that Trio House sent me (the other five had been given away already to some of the book's principles). I plan to carry a few with me in a smaller bag with a shoulder strap (packed flat into my backpack) in case I encounter a situation where it's handy to have a copy to give away, swap, or sell. Fifteen is probably way too many for that purpose, but I have the space and the backpack—I've tested it—isn't too heavy on the shoulders with the books in it.

Fifteen copies is, though, enough to trigger a warning with the TSA. Via the security scanner, they must look like a big brick full of the intention to obscure. Three TSA officials—a woman and two men—waved me over to a table at the end of the baggage conveyor. The woman did all of the talking, asking me the standard questions—where I'm going, etcetera—as their six hands in matching rubber gloves unzipped and probed my bag's various outer pockets . . . and then they got to the books in the main compartment. I told them that they're advanced copies of my new book. The woman—still speaking for the three of them—was nice enough but didn't ask me what the book is about, what I write—not anything like that. They split up the work, hands grabbing copies and ruffling through the pages like their flipbooks, as if each copy had a different set of animation, a different show. It took awhile to get through all fifteen, and I used the time to put my shoes, belt, etcetera back on. They handed me my backpack, all unzipped and opened, the TSA version of graffiti that says WE WERE HERE. I put everything in place again on one of the get-yourself-back-together benches, and still had time for a pre-flight Bloody Mary near my gate.

PHOTO: My trusty, emerald green backpack, which I don't think you can get in this color anymore. It has been to numerous ports foreign and domestic, but never once has ridden in a cargo hold.