STILL POINTS NORTH

My friend Leigh Newman's first book, a memoir entitled STILL POINTS NORTH, comes out in three days--on March 19--from Dial Press. Here's the official description:

"Part adventure story, part love story, part homecoming, Still Points North is a page-turning memoir that explores the extremes of belonging and exile, and the difference between how to survive and knowing how to truly live.

Growing up in the wilds of Alaska, seven-year-old Leigh Newman spent her time landing silver salmon, hiking glaciers, and flying in a single-prop plane. But her life split in two when her parents unexpectedly divorced, requiring her to spend summers on the tundra with her “Great Alaskan” father and the school year in Baltimore with her more urbane mother.

Navigating the fraught terrain of her family’s unraveling, Newman did what any outdoorsman would do: She adapted. With her father she fished remote rivers, hunted caribou, and packed her own shotgun shells. With her mother she memorized the names of antique furniture, composed proper bread-and-butter notes, and studied Latin poetry at a private girl’s school. Charting her way through these two very different worlds, Newman learned to never get attached to people or places, and to leave others before they left her. As an adult, she explored the most distant reaches of the globe as a travel writer, yet had difficulty navigating the far more foreign landscape of love and marriage."

When I first knew Leigh--during the Latin poetry phase of her childhood--she wasn't much older (or taller) than she is on the book's cover. She was two years behind me in school, a condition that can sometimes render younger kids invisible. But she wasn't, even then. There was something charming about her. And I'm ridiculously excited to read this story.

Update, 3/26/2013: I read it, I loved it, and I interviewed Leigh for Baltimore Fishbowl.

Hardcover

The other day, my editor mailed me an advance copy of the final hardcover version of GENIE WISHES. Even at this late stage in the leadup to the book's release, surprises awaited me. What would the endpapers look like? What would you see when you slipped off the dust jacket? I was not disappointed; the final product is a great example of book art, just as you'd expect from the team at ABRAMS.

Now Playing: The Genie Wishes Book Trailer

I had almost as much fun making this GENIE WISHES trailer as I did writing the book. I put some of my line drawings from the book into Windows MovieMaker, wrote a voiceover script, recorded the voiceover, found low-cost background music, mixed the voiceover and the music, and fit the drawings to the sound. It has a sort of do-it-yourself feel, but then, in certain ways, so does the book. Let me know what you think, unless you hate it, in which case it's probably best that I not know.

Also, the advance hard copies are in at ABRAMS. Here's my wonderful editor, Maggie Lehrman, with the book. Doesn't she look a bit like a grown up Genie? There's just over a month left until the book is out.

Little Patuxent Review Reading, January 2013

A couple of weeks ago, I read at the launch party for the winter 2013 "Doubt" issue of the LITTLE PATUXENT REVIEW, in which I have two poems. Someone was kind enough to film and post a video of the reading. Here it is.

February in NYC

I'm just back from a lovely weekend in New York, where I stayed at my friends Michelle and Brian's empty Nolita apartment while they flew off to New Orleans to cheer on the Baltimore Ravens. I spent a lot of time holed up in the apartment with my computer, eating dark chocolate and drinking fizzy things and trying to write (not super productively, BTW) as the light came and went across the windows. For a writer and lover of solitude, this was all pretty dreamy.

But I also did some fun bookish things outside the apartment. On Saturday (a day after Grand Central Station celebrated its hundredth birthday), I hung out with some fellow 2013 book-debutantes in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt, where the SCBWI conference was taking place. On Sunday, I got to know the great McNally Jackson bookstore, which sits just down the street from the apartment I was tenanting. Monday I met my wonderful new agent, Alice Tasman, as well as the rest of the group at the Jean V. Naggar Agency, which renewed my energy about my works-in-progress. Then I returned to McNally Jackson to meet author Kate Milford, whom I loved getting to know. Finally, I stopped by ABRAMS for an exchange of Max Brenner chocolates (me to them) and excellent ARCs (them to me). I got to see my talented editor, Maggie Lehrman, again, and meet the publicist who's been so helpful already, Morgan Dubin. I also met Sara Corbett, who designed GENIE WISHES; creative director Chad Beckerman, who art-directed the book; and Jason Wells, marketing and publicity director. ABRAMS is warm and welcoming, the kind of place where you imagine that around every corner there's some new delight--a cool new book cover or box of ridiculously good cookies for the taking.

There was shopping and eating and endless walking and subway riding too. I ate really good falafel at Taim. I drank several glasses of a delicious pear cider. I walked starry-eyed around the MOMA Design Store. I marveled at an incredible selection of cookie cutters at a Sur La Table on the Upper East Side. And then I raced back to Penn Station to get my train home.