The Tour-ies!

the best and worst of this leg of the tour

This leg of book tour is 18 days (one carryon bag, one backpack!) and I finally get to head home tomorrow. I figured I might as well give out some fake awards for the best and worst of this trek.

Best fountain:

Guess what I immediately wanted to do.

Oh wait, the other best fountain:

The amazing Ben Fountain interviewed me onstage in Dallas, and he is WONDERFUL. The kindest, best interviewer. I can’t find a picture of it, so here’s us a few years ago, with Luis Alberto Urrea and Lorrie Moore and some banjo records (long story).

Worst airport:

I’m sorry, Denver. I love you, and I LOVED reading at Tattered Cover and teaching at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, but you have a bad airport.

Here’s my case: It might be haunted; it’s a hugely long drive from the city with no trees to block the sunlight blaring in the car window, so I always arrive with the start of a migraine; security feels like the scene from a post-apocalyptic movie where everyone is gathered in one giant tent to be microchipped; sections are carpeted*; and I always associate it with the one time I was there years ago and was sent a link to an article about me that contained the worst photo I’ve ever seen of myself.**

*Why would you carpet an airport? Why why why why why? In this age of roller bags, why would you lay down yard after yard of friction? It’s germy, it’s gross, and I go from rolling my bag along effortlessly to angrily pulling it behind. Looking at you, too, PDX.

** It’s amazing how this works: A photographer has you sit for half an hour for some article (yay!) when you’re in the middle of a tour and exhausted and your hair is gross (oh) and then chooses, out of all those shots, the most unflattering one possible, just because he likes the lighting. Then that shot goes up online, looking official, like something you chose. For years, when people do an image search on you, the photo pops up. People copy and paste it without asking (hey, folks, please pay photographers, and/or use the photo an author has already paid for license to use)… and the photo ends up, without your permission, on event promo graphics. You go to read at some lovely university, you go to the bathroom, you close the stall door, and there, on a paper flier, is the worst photo you’ve ever seen of yourself.

Best binge watch, on my phone, in airport gates:

YOU, with Penn Badgley.

It’s highly melodramatic, which is exactly what I need right now as a distraction. Bonus: In season three, there’s a conversation about Jericho Brown.  

Best event:

I loved this mostly because I didn’t have to talk about my book. At AWP (just a giant writing conference with 12,000 writers) I got the writers Matt Bell, Beth Nguyen, Matthew Salesses, Gayle Brandeis, and Robin Black to play a silly trivia game for StoryStudio’s offsite party. It was a blast, Gayle won (prize = glory), and it’ll likely become an annual tradition.

Worst wi-fi:

United Airlines, I mostly actually like you, but your in-flight wi-fi has worked ONCE this entire tour.

Best bathtub plant Zillow find:

For when you want a bath, but you also want to look at a plant.

Worst moment of realization:

I had not noticed that I hadn’t received any email through my website in… months? A year? Until I suddenly did. Based on what’s coming through now, I was probably missing an email a day. If you were one of the people who used my website message form, I’m SO sorry, and please try me again.

Best Podcast:

If Books Could Kill has Michael Hobbes (of You’re Wrong About and Maintenance Phase) and Peter Shamshiri (of something else, idk, but he’s great) taking down influential airport books like Outliers, and it’s fabulous.

Worst person:

This lady cornered me at an outdoor cocktail party (yes, you can corner someone outdoors if you try hard enough) to tell me, at length, how much she hated The Great Believers. That was special.

Best furry bar we ended up in after my Seattle reading when nothing else was open:

It was fox themed.

Best thing that has ever happened: