It's Time...

Yep, it's a newsletter.

We’re gonna do this thing.

In the past few years I’ve found so many communities I love (readers, students, fellow writers, fellow weirdos), and social media seems an increasingly fragile way to reach you all. Plus, I have some longer stories to tell.

So here we go.

Read on for a ghost story! (Well… a “ghost story.”)

I was advised that the first photo in my first post should be of me, which seems a bit much, but probably important. So: This is me, talking with my hands. You will not get the benefit of hand gestures with this newsletter, but that’s probably for the best; fewer spilled drinks this way.

How Does This Work?

You have four choices.

1)    Unsubscribe, block me, melt your computer, etc.

2)    Keep enjoying this newsletter, most of which will be free. We’ll talk writing, fiction, books in translation, weird Zillow listings, unsolved murders, strange etymologies, historical rabbit holes, and ambitious cooking endeavors… It’ll show up in your inbox a couple of times a week.

3)    Humor me with a paid subscription, which will mean you get ALL the content, including some exclusive stuff, and when I do writing advice columns you can submit your questions or your work. And you can join the book club conversations in the comments! You can pay $5 a month, or $50 a year.

4)    Be a hero and become a founding subscriber for $100. I’ll love you forever, and I’ll email you a deleted scene from The Great Believers. (Use the same button above.)

Read all about it! (And… do shots? What’s up with that kid on the right?)

Long, Clunky Exposition: My Relevant Backstory, Involving Ghosts

I need to tell you about my first newsletter. I was six, and it was a small, Xeroxed rag about our classroom ghost.

Here I am. It was Montessori, and there was grammatical labeling of farm animals going on.

I wanted very badly for our school to be haunted, so I convinced myself, and lots of other kids, that strange things were happening in the hallway and bathroom. I helped the ghost a little, by drawing small, ghostly doors on the walls with a smuggled glue stick. You couldn’t see them from most angles, but when you bent down and the light hit them just right: A door! To a ghost world!

I’m not sure if the ghost newsletter was propaganda (I needed more believers) or just an effort to fill everyone in without getting in trouble for talking about it in class. In any case, the teacher, who let us write pretty much anything as long as we used our cursive, allowed me to spend class time making this tiny leaflet—a couple pieces of paper folded in quarters, with illustrations. I tasked various helpers with illustrations and research.

My parents ran a small academic press out of our house, so we had a full-on dumpster-sized Xerox machine in our upstairs hall. I invited my friend Clive* over to help me copy and staple enough newsletters for the whole class. Just to make sure he still believed, I added three glue stick ghost doors to my own hallway. I couldn’t have my staff start doubting me.

Our machine was not QUITE as big as the one in this classic Xerox ad, but almost. And this was not a large hallway.

The next morning, we stuck the newsletters in every other kid’s little work drawer and enjoyed our fame.

Like so many student journalism initiatives, it proved a one-issue endeavor. You know what lasted, though? No, not my love of journalism. The rectangles of glue on my family’s walls. Within the year, they had yellowed and were visible in all light. By third grade, the paint was peeling in exactly those spots. My family was busy falling apart by that point, and no one noticed anything like the hallway paint, which was already old and peeling elsewhere. But I was wracked with guilt.

(Guess if my mom has ever repainted her upstairs hallway. Hint: She has not!)

Here’s where it gets weird: When she was six, my daughter, without ever having heard that story, decided to make herself a little booklet of all the ghosts she’d seen. I can only assume my family is very haunted. Here are two of hers.

Since that first endeavor, I wrote newspaper columns in high school and college, I helmed a college humor and politics magazine, I’ve enjoyed the hell out of social media, I’ve written five books (and one of them even has ghosts), but I’ve never had an actual newsletter again.

Until now!

So… Here we go.

*name changed mostly in case this person ever finds this post and goes Ummm, I don’t remember this at all, please stop writing about me, you absolute maniac.

What’s Next?

I’m reading 84 books in translation, and am just now finishing up Albanian writer Ismail Kadare’s The File on H., a comic novel translated by David Belos. When I’m done, I’ll post about it here.

I hope you’ll join me in this adventure, and some others.