Digressive Book Launch Scene Report

My experience of the night of Friday, November 26 2024 mini-marathon double book launch at Powerhouse Books

Took the Amtrak with Megan from Baltimore to NYC from 2:10 pm til 5:30. We weren’t able to sit together for the first half of the trip due to a completely full set and ended up at opposite ends of the train. I spent most of the ride reading Running Wild and finished just before the woman sitting next to me got off in Philly, then Megan came to join. She was reading a pdf of Void Corporation, going over the parts for the event that evening, sometimes asking questions or offering interpretations about the book in a way I appreciated even if I found I wasn’t always sure how to respond.

Throughout the night I would realizing more and more how far I feel now from the version of me who wrote the novel throughout roughly half of the 2010s, living a different life in another city that by now both feel almost like moonscape to me. That’s usually the case with a book by the time it’s published, but radically so in this case for obvious reasons. In some ways I felt glad that I didn’t remember or connect so much with who I was then, that I’d moved on into another life, another world; in other ways, I felt insane, even maybe distressed, to realize I was traveling to celebrate its rerelease under a different name than when it was originally published by Riverhead in 2020 as Alice Knott. I don’t usually get jitters about events, but suddenly I felt anxious in a different way than I would have expected, like I was being forced to go back into a shed in my old backyard and see what was there now. My mind raced a bit tracing old memories from the past to the present. I think I said I few times I wished we could go home without any intention of going home, and Megan understood and agreed.

When we arrived it was raining and dark, as it had been where we left. I made a joke about how the one time I leave the house to go somewhere in months it’s suddenly the first day it snows in Baltimore for the season. We had plans to meet Claire and Nik and Austyn, who were also reading at the event, at a bar right next to Powerhouse, so we could catch up a bit before the event. We’d arrived later than expected, due to the weather delays, and there was a bit of texting about travel times and whether we should just go on to the store. I found myself insisting aloud to Megan that I definitely wanted to go to the bar; that I wanted to have a drink, though I rarely drink anymore and certainly not as a priority when in a rush.

For most of my life doing readings I usually got super tanked before. I thought I liked the way it made me rowdy and impulsive, which could break any anxiety as well as the monotony I assumed would come out of just standing there saying words. I still drink occasionally, usually at dinners or parties, but I’d made a point doing the events for Molly to stay sober, to face it head-on. This was a novel, though, and one that now felt different than I last remembered it, so I wanted a drink.

Alice Knott had originally launched July 7, 2020; in other words, 121 days after Molly passed. The early days of lockdown, and the beginning of another life. I’d done a Zoom event (through Powerhouse, which publishes Archway Editions, who would later pick up the paperback rights), and I remember feeling insane reading the except into my laptop camera on the porch of a rented cabin in North Georgia, hanging on for Chelsea Hodson to help me through the Q/A. I felt relieved my friends were going to be there with me for this one, and that I didn’t have to read the book, but would get to listen, and see how that felt.

At the bar, I ordered a gin and soda, what I used to drink when I wanted to go in. It doesn’t taste very good if you aren’t drinking them all the time. Now when I try to drink I just feel like I have a headache mostly, though it’s nostalgic to fumble with one’s words and run into walls too. The others got what they wanted and we caught up a bit while dodging pool cues in the corner before it was time to cross the street and go to the reading.

Powerhouse is a really nice store. It’s rare for me these to get to spend time in well-stocked bookstores very long, and this evening wouldn’t change that, as the time was filled wall to wall with faces and friends. I caught up with Robert Lopez and John Dermot Woods, two old friends I don’t get to see often enough, laughing about old times. Robert is such a reliable presence, easy to relate to and quick on understanding. I reminded him of the time we’d stopped to stay with his mom in Jersey on a reading tour we did together with Sam Ligon around 2010. The strange vibes I’d felt about returning to the city on the fumes of the past few times began to dissipate the longer I settled in.

Chris and Naomi from Archway seemed in good spirits. They showed me the shirts they’d hand tie-dyed earlier that day, emblazoned with a logo by Steak Mtn. that also had been printed onto boxes of matches.

Upstairs, they were serving free Parch drinks with tequila, and Claire and I chatted with Mia and Sydney who were working the bar. My left ear is losing hearing and I had to ask Sydney (I think that’s the right name) multiple times what her name was, unable to hear over the music (Tim Hecker, Ravedeath 1972, which much of the novel was written to) besides that her name was also a city. Other people were crowded around the bar or in the lounge-style seating area where they host the events; some faces I recognized but didn’t know personally, and others I’d never met.

While the six other readers were trying to organize what order they’d go in, reading consecutively from the first 30 pages of the novel after I read scenes from UXA.GOV, Robert approached me and said he’d forgotten his glasses, and did he have time to go get some readers from the store nearby? I like how Robert talks like he already knows the plan he has in his head but is willing to hear out others and go with the flow if need be. Chris suggested he maybe use a magnifying lens shaped like a crystal ball cut in half, dragging it across a page to show how it made the text huge, and we laughed at imagining him trying to get through 4 pages that way.

By the time the reading began, I was ready to get rolling. Chris read a friendly and thoughtful introduction about the way we met and how things had gone since. I felt glad to be in the company of people who wanted to be there, who thought it was worthwhile, and thankful that Chris saw something in Alice Knott that made him want to continue to pour energy into its rerelease. With the way publishing goes by so quickly, asking much of the author willing to show up and put a face to the text, often the event of the launch itself can feel like a slog, trying to catch up on your knees to where you’re supposed to be in the present, hitting marks even if nobody hears.

On the mic myself, I mumbled something about feeling less insane than I had the last time I was standing in the same place, a night I think I described as “terrible, but only emotionally” to the audience, trying to get myself on task taking the mic out of the stand so I could hold it. I read sections 116 113 65 94 93 from UXA.GOV, an order devised by Megan after I’d read her a variety of different excerpts the night before; she said she liked the way her sequencing created a flow, and I liked thinking about all the different ways the 254 sections of the novel could be rearranged to different effects.

The only other time I’d read from it, I’d taken numbers from the audience and read at random, which was fun but left the control of what the book would feel like to chance, and it seemed more pleasurable this way, to know which notes I’d hit and how. I like reading aloud once it’s actually happening; fun how much the sentences can change depending on how you say them and where the emphasis lies. UXA in particular is full of bizarre imagery and ploys that depends on particular attention to the gymnastics and buried logic, and I usually prefer reading stuff that fucks with the audience a bit instead of aiming to please.

Once I’d wrapped it up, they moved on into the marathon part of the night, beginning with Austyn Wohlers. Austyn is a Baltimore friend who recently moved to the city, and an incredible musician and writer herself (her debut novel, Hothouse Bloom, is coming out next year from Hub City, and is fantastic). I appreciated the calm, clear cadence of Austyn’s delivery and how well it set the mood for the description of the artwork being burned. It felt nice to not have to be reading it myself, to be able to appreciate the structure of the storytelling as if it were written by someone else. I tried to imagine what I would think of the words if I hadn’t written them and sort of gathered that I sort of hadn’t. Actually, I’d written it many, many times, over and over, in drafting and revision, trying to get it right, only for these to be the last of them. What a relief, actually.

Nik Slackman went second, taking on the part that introduces Alice as the protagonist and revealing how her mind works versus how she appears on the outside. As his reading went on, I felt myself becoming aware of gritting my teeth tight and wrapping my arms around my legs, oddly tense from paying attention to my sentences and how bizarre it felt to hear them hit so close to home in ways I hadn’t so well realized before. If you’d ask me when I wrote it, I would have set that the novel is fiction, and has nothing to do with me or my life besides the ways I have allowed it to; in fact, when I read the recent review in the Village Voice that drew lines between my personal life from Molly and the novel, I felt surprised, and even maybe a little irked to have to look at it in context as if the book weren’t under my control. Clearly, though, that wasn’t the case, as I felt the shit-talker in my brain coming online, trying both to analyze what it now perceived as habits or mistakes while also pushing harder on the parts of me that had hurt so long in order to be able to write it, and to be in the room with it again now. I started feeling like I wanted to escape, forcing myself instead to pay as close attention as possible to Nik’s diction and appreciate the way he moved his mouth, his tics and pauses, how it filled the room.

Claire went third, and I thought about how her and Nik had been there with me so many nights over the past year and a half working on book stuff and in the world. Claire is a stabilizing force, and I really liked the way she gave voice to Alice’s voice in monologues, despite still steeling myself against madness in comparing how I’d felt about how the scene went on the page when I still lived back in my old house in Atlanta, and how it felt to see it exposed in the present know that other people know how it was then and what happened. Claire’s funny charm and no bs wit was a perfect fit, though, to bring the sentences to life in a way I no longer should desire to revise. Still, I couldn’t help thinking of my mother, and how she’d lost her mind, and what that had been like to witness, and how it must have felt for her inside; all of which I’d strained into a scene about this woman on her porch shouting at press. Fiction is insane, I realized in a way I hadn’t realized ever; how it pretends to be fiction, and yet is full of life in a way that ‘nonfiction’ fails to ever by needing to own itself so much as truth, when in fact the truth is very far from anything literal, except perhaps for how it feels. It made perfect sense, then, that I was sitting on my ass in the floor in a bookstore hiding behind the couch arm a bit so I could experience it privately in public.

Megan went fifth, and of course it hit me to hear her speak those words aloud in her own way, too. I knew I wouldn’t be sitting in that room without her having showed up in my life right in the nick of time, and for once I didn’t wonder where I’d be instead. I listened to her read with an earnest lilt that made me feel warm inside, knowing how much she understood what those words meant despite their disguises and flourishes. I knew from our having talked about it, how she related to the child in the story and how the parents treat her, and that could be felt in her voice in a way that simply hearing it from her on our own would. An audience is a room of witnesses, ideally. I wanted to hug Megan then and there and instead focused on the joy hearing her voice made, and though the section she read reminded me of suffering and of loss, it didn’t have to mean the end of the world.

I couldn’t help but think of Molly, too, and how her struggle had ended in the worst possible way; how this novel and its ending were one of the last things we ever talked about. How parts of her and me both from our years together were right there in the book being examined by a part of my brain that hadn’t put together 2 and 2 in actuality, but had still felt and received something during that time. I understood much different what she’d said about finding the novel hard to read due to being able to see how much I suffered behind the language; a statement that while I literally understood, I hadn’t taken to heart so well without the rug being ripped out from under me and being forced to look again; to hear it aloud without all the other noise in my ears; to sit and take it.

Sasha Fletcher read last, another old friend who’s been a blessing to have in my ear for so long; and especially in a moment like this, where his passion and excitement and love for literature shined through in just the right way. He took the mic and walked around the room with it, enunciating italicized bits differently than the rest of the text, shouting and then hollering, really going off on it. Quickly all the anxiety I’d felt, and all the feelings, flushed out my ass and fell through the floor and I sat up happy watching Sasha cause the good kind of a scene, lifting up the whole room from 40 minutes of complex sentences delivering liminal madness. It felt like exactly the right ending to an experience I was equally glad to have over, and sad to see gone. In comparison to reading my own shit, and then answering questions, this was no doubt the way to go to have some people you really love help you get there.

Despite the isolating and antisocial dispositions that tend to emerge from the actual work of the writing itself, it’s overrated to think like a leper and spend all your time jumping from one stump to the other; as if we weren’t aware of how fast it passes, and how much goes missing when you don’t look. That said, I don’t think I’ll be doing any other readings for a while as soon as possible.

At the end of the reading, they had us line up for a picture, and the audience stood watching as we mugged and posed. Megan said something about how this wasn’t part of the show, that they could look away, and some people laughed.

I like how I look sort of pissed in this picture, like my friends are the ones holding me up, but I’m also smirking, in my head. That’s how it happened.

After the reading, some people started departing, while others hung around to chat. I spoke with Alexandra Tanner a while about the weird circus of doing press stuff when you’re trying to write, and what we’re working on. I spoke with the How to Win the Lottery podcast guys who’d come in from Jersey and were super chill. I said I liked Joey’s Trash Humpers shirt. Bobby and I talked about the Hawks and how Dyson Daniels is the shit. Those guys are currently doing a multiple part podcast about my books through December, which seems super kind and nuts. I talked with Naomi about her book coming out on Inside the Castle next year and we talked about how rad John Trefry is. I talked with Andie Blaine about books and how she’s working on a Marguerite Young biography. I probably spoke with several others people but I usually only remember the names of people I’ve met more than once because I am bad with names.

I signed some books and spoke to some nice people about friends in common, about Molly, about the Ditrapano residency. Chris and I exchanged notes about people in the literary scene, and I like the way Chris handles his business and keeps it real.

Meg and I had a 11:20 train back to Baltimore to catch and had agreed to leave by 10:20 at the latest. It was about 10:15, which meant the event had been going on for three hours including the socializing before and after. For the first time ever, attending or presenting, it seemed like the night had lasted way shorter than I’d imagined, there and gone in a flash. I thought of Megan saying on the train up how even though we were tired about going it would be over before we knew it, and that was true again.

We rushed out to an Uber, still talking to new friends as we got into the car and rushed to meet our train. When I say we rushed, I mean me primarily. I am a terrible traveler and always assume we’re going to be late no matter how early we leave. Megan is an experienced traveler and tends to much more realistically estimate the time it takes something to happen when we have a deadline involved. We talked about the night in the car until we got across town into traffic near Penn Station, and agreed to get out early and walk the last block rather than wait.

It was about 10:50, which meant theoretically we had 30 minutes; to me, that means it’s almost too late, even knowing the walk into the Amtrak station is about 10 minutes and they don’t let you on until just before departure. To Megan, that means we should have plenty of time to run across the street and get some pizza because we’re both starving, and it’s right there. Megan is sweet and patient with me around differences like this, especially on a night like this one had been. She let me figure out that it was at least worth the two-second walk across the intersection to estimate how long the line is.

The good pizza place was packed out the door. There was basically no one in line a few doors closer at Sbarro. We went into the Sbarro. I ordered 2 slices, then Megan ordered two slices. They put our slices in the oven. There was a weird vibe around the waiting area where it wasn’t clear if they wanted you to get your pizza first and then go pay, or if you could pay while you’re waiting for the oven stuff. Megan and I both looked at each other knowingly a few times, acknowledging that she knows I’m sweating the seconds and she’s got this. She moved down the line to the cashier, and waited beside two ladies who’d come in after us and wanted to pay first, menacingly lingering next to Megan as if they should have precedence over her. Megan clearly noticed this and then moved confidently to the cashier to pay for our pizza. Behind her the ladies made little faints but didn’t say shit. There were no laws here in pizza town.

I was watching the clock, certain that if we lose too many more minutes, we’ll miss our train, which leaves in 18-22 minutes if it’s on time. I knew the earlier train had been delayed due to the freezing weather, and could bet that our night train would be delayed too, lengthening the padding space of my impatience.

At some point Megan pulled up and whispered in my ear, “Tomorrow you’re going to laugh when you remember we went to the Sbarro from The Office.” Actually, I think she said it multiple times, and each time I refused to laugh but also knew she was right and yet I choose to continue to be me, and knew that she knew. Even though I was tapping my toe, we were going to end up wherever just fine.

The guys behind the counter were all out of order. They didn’t seem to know who was in charge of getting which person’s pizza choices from display to oven to customer and/or in what order. I think there were four of them but there might have been five or more. No one was at the register and Megan is standing there with the ladies sallying around behind her.

The guy gave me my pizza. It was the right pizza. Then he gave me Megan’s pizza. I knew it was not the right pizza. Megan did not want a slice of chicken buffalo pizza; I’d heard her order and knew this was not it.

I turned to Megan and said, “They gave you a chicken buffalo instead of the other one. But you should just take it.” I looked up at the clock, seeing a few more minutes gone, the second hand sliding fretlessly toward our deadline, carved in my memory like onto stone.

Megan said, “No, I want what I ordered.” Her patience was doing an admirable job with not only me, but the ladies, and the men, and then the cashier, once someone volunteered to take our money. I told the guy she didn’t have the buffalo one, and I repeated the proper order. They had two other slices out that belonged to two other guys who’d come in after us. There were like five of us doing the Reservoir Dogs everybody-shooting-at-each-other scene trying to figure out how to sort out these two separate transactions. I got Megan’s and came to stand beside her at the cashier.

The cashier asked what kind of pizza was the cheese slice? He pointed at the cheese slice in the popped open box Megan was holding to show him the cheese slice. She said, “It’s a cheese slice,” calmly and firmly. He said, “They’re all cheese slices,” pointing at the other slices that had already been rung up according to their toppings. Eventually they worked it out and Megan paid for our pizza and her Coke Zero.

We rushed for the train. I was walking fast and Megan was keeping up with me though we both kind of new we had more time than we needed to get there. Except I didn’t quite trust that the signs were actually taking us where we were supposed to go, and so still wanted to hurry, to be there early as possible, so we don’t miss anything. Megan asked if we could stop so she could stop her underpants from falling down because of us rushing and both holding our orders while I ate mine.

I kept laughing and admitting how insane I was and trying to measure the right pace to be comfortable as possible while also arriving at our destination on time by saying here we are early once again, and Megan smiled knowingly while plunking down relieved to have a place to sit and eat her pizza finally. We’d made it, no big deal, despite all my worry, if not also because of my worry, without which I know I wouldn’t be here.

Megan liked her pieces, said they were good. I said mine truly tasted not very good, like Sbarro. But here we were.

The train was 18 minutes late, then 22 minutes late. Then the train arrived.

We easily found seats together this time. The train was less crowded, and of a lower energy feel now that it was dark outside. Megan continued reading my novel where she’d left off, and I laughed that she still had the stamina for more. “I want to find our what happens,” she said, which is something no one hears enough. I closed my eyes and thought about the book for a while, trying to imagine what she is reading, before zoning out and then taking an edible.

Then I noticed our tickets said we weren’t arriving in Baltimore until 5:30 am, two hours later than we’d thought. Megan realized there was a layover in Philly, where we’d be stuck for a couple hours in the middle of the night. She noted she was surprised I wasn’t reacting as much as she was to the delay, opposite of how we normally are. It would be okay, though, because she could sleep. Megan can sleep anywhere and through anything. I knew I would be up all night, but I didn’t mind. I like being up all night.

At the Philly stop everyone was basically asleep. I tried to lie down in a variety of different aisles to try to maybe find the right feel I could nod off in, but none worked. I’d run out of water and refilled our bottle in the bathroom, which taking swigs off made me sick thinking of toilet water. They’d said there’d be refreshments in the Philly station, and around 4 am I decided to get up and go see. Down a dark wall, up a concrete staircase, over a DO NOT CROSS line, and as I emerged I saw the Dunkin’ Donuts.

Holy shit, I said, keeping in stride.

I went over to Dunkin’ Donuts and they were freshly stocked. I ordered what I wanted on a touch display screen without being acknowledged by the two attendants who were busy stocking. I got two crullers, one for Megan when she woke up, and 25 munchkins. The attendants eyed me wearily as I waited for them to process the order the computer had given them on my behalf. I was one of maybe 8 people in the massive room. They gave me like 70% chocolate munchkins and the rest assorted.

I walked around the station like it was a museum, gnawing the cruller. I used the men’s room and washed my hands, repeating the number 6, which is the hall where our train was, afraid I would forget since they all looked the same. I walked back over to the DO NOT CROSS line marking the 6 staircase and wondering if the security officer lingering across the room behind me would say anything, and they didn’t.

I ate about 20 of the munchkins, on and off. Megan didn’t want any when she woke up. She ate half her cruller and handed me the rest, all dreamy, smiling. When we arrived, I left the last five in the back of the seat in front of me.

I did laugh when I remembered the next day that we went to The Office Sbarro.