Let your heart be your guide
Pre-order goods for AMONG THE WILDFLOWERS
We’re a little under a month away from the release of Among the Wildflowers, which means I’m getting all the technical stuff ready—perfecting the physical design of a paperback when you’re the only one working on it is a painstaking process!—but also feeling kind of weirdly distant from the book itself.
Another one of those administrative things is pre-order stuff, and I was hoping to have it all physically available for photos before I posted about it. But the postcards likely won’t be delivered for another week and I want to tell you about it NOW, to help me get back to caring about the book itself again. So here we go!
If you pre-order a physical copy, these goodies will come with your copy automatically. I will also have them available at my in-person launch for the book at Grand Gesture Books with Alison Cochrun on June 10th. (Click this link to RSVP and/or order a copy through them!) If you’ve pre-ordered an ebook, or requested purchase from your local library, or really anything else (I won’t be requiring evidence for any of this) and want the swag, fill out this form. This last option will be an until-I-run-out situation, but hopefully I’ll have stuff leftover and can send to as many folks as possible.
First up: a Short King Farms sticker!
The logo is designed by bestie & graphic designer Manda Bednarik, and the stickers are printed by local Portland sticker kings, Sticker Ninja. I always love being able to support other local businesses when I do these things, and Sticker Ninja’s quality and customer service is the best. They always send a few little extra treats with their shipments, one of which this time was a sparkly sticker proclaiming queer joy is a revolution, a central tenet of Heartwaves (and I mean, all my work?) so it felt especially Right!
Next: postcard with a map of Short King Farms!
I had a really clear vision in my head while writing this book of what Short King Farms looked like, and since almost the entirety of this book takes place on the farm, by the end of drafting I knew I should probably include a map for readers to refer to.
Of course, it doesn’t actually matter if how I picture the farm matches how readers picture it—it’s beautiful, in my opinion, when these things differ—but also, I have always really wanted a map. A grayscale version of it will be included in the final version of the book, but this full-color one will only be available via the pre-order postcard.
Not everything is perfectly to scale in this map—I picture the walk from Sally’s Barn to the wildflower field, for instance, taking a good ten-to-fifteen minutes at least, with a lot more forest between the two. But we wouldn’t have been able to express that without squeezing the actual farming beds—which again, take up more space in my head than is expressed here. Just as I picture the animals’ pastures also being quite large, but there wasn’t room for that on the map while still including the hill to the orchard. Anyway, you get it, BUT—for what we are able to fit in a postcard/single picture, this is approximately where everything is located! And it was so, so fun seeing it all drawn out by Nina Tysovska, who was so kind and accommodating with all my tiny tweaks and requests.
I was also proud of myself for including the name of the actual book on the back of the postcard, something I failed to do for the Greyfin Bay postcard I made for Heartwaves. Which in my head made sense at the time—I wanted it to look like a real postcard someone would send to a loved one, not just some marketing gimmick—but have since had several signing events with this postcard out on my table. And when I’ve watched strangers who know nothing about me or my books pick this postcard up and stare at it blankly, it has occurred to me that I am not that good at marketing. (But I’m learning! Maybe!)
Something else I’m proud of accomplishing: I now have an order form for (US) indie bookstores who want to order my indie books directly from me. (So Among the Wildflowers, Heartwaves, and any of Moonlighters.)
If you’re a local Portland, Oregon-area store (which includes pretty much any suburb), I’m happy to drop off any orders in person. For any other store in the US, I’ll ship using USPS media mail (the cheapest way possible). All books will be signed (if you want!) and checked for print quality.
Indie bookstores are one of the few things in our current world that bring me genuine joy and optimism for the future. Thank you for all you do!
While I’m here, here are five things I’ve enjoyed recently:
This is a Gardening Show with Zach Galifianakis, on Netflix: Obviously, y’all know this show was made for me simply from the title, but it truly is super charming and pure, and in a dark world, I’ll take all the charming and pure I can get. Each episode is short, about 15 minutes, covering topics from growing tomatoes to foraging. He also interviews kids about whatever the topic of the day is, who are always, of course, super cute, and as an extra bonus for me, I turned it on yesterday afternoon after work when my kid was grounded and super grumpy about being grounded. [He can’t watch his own shows whilst being grounded but is free to watch anything we happen to turn on.] He was, accordingly, grumpy at first about watching a dumb gardening show with his dumb mom (during an argument a few days prior he had declared that all adults are boring because all they do is garden, a point spat angrily in front of three adults when that statement was only true about one of them [me] lol). But soon enough he was laughing at all the kid interviews and—against his will!!!—was super engaged!! I almost floated right off the couch!
Wreck, Catherine Newman: I loved Catherine Newman’s Sandwich last year, so much, and I recently finished this follow-up. Her writing is so sharp and funny and observant and voice-y, the tone and content super slice-of-life-y, like literally all of my favorite things. But serious topics are always hidden underneath all the laughs, keeping things almost cleverly propulsive. & I feel like Newman had a much taller order with this one: Sandwich took place during an annual summer vacation to the Cape, while Wreck deals with the family back at home in Western Mass. And well, vacation is always more fun and entertaining than real life back home. In particular in this one, there’s a storyline with Rocky’s son that I find myself still thinking about, weeks after finishing it. In a world where there are such clear sides these days, it tackles what happens when someone you love deeply engages in work/something/ethics you deeply disagree with, and idk—it just made me uncomfortable in this way that I think it was meant to, in a way I can’t clearly articulate just yet, but it’s really lingered with me.
Noah Kahan: Out of Body, also on Netflix: Obviously I am (slowly) absorbing Kahan’s newest album, even if the fact that he is now so popular and just Everywhere in all my feeds has made me hesitant to talk about it out loud. Which is weird, and frustrating to myself, because I’ve always hated the “I won’t vocally support a thing because it’s popular” stance, which should be obvious from my love of romance novels. Still, I think it has to do with how personal Kahan’s music has always felt for me, and it’s weird seeing it hyper-consumed because I want to get back to it being Just For Me. Which sounds selfish but I think is actually really important in terms of how we consume art—I am constantly trying to get back to the Just For Me mindset with books, too. But anyway—
Before the release of the album, we watched the documentary on Netflix that was made in the period of time post-Stick Season blowing up, when he was playing Fenway Park and trying to work on this new album. It was really fascinating to me how vulnerable and personal this documentary was, how we got to meet his whole family basically; I also appreciated how open he was about his body dysmorphia. But really, this is a documentary about burnout, and there were so many things I related to. In particular, there’s a moment where he talks about how thoroughly disconnected he feels from music, and another moment when he’s talking about Nashville, how he wants to get away from a place where everyone’s always asking about his streaming numbers. Different, obviously, but that’s how I feel any time I even venture onto Threads lol. I don’t want to know your book sale numbers; I want to know about your dog. How your folks are doing, how your garden’s looking this year. I constantly feel disconnected from writing at the same time that I constantly fear it’s the only thing I’m actually qualified to do.
I also loved how, like his music, this documentary was so firmly centered around place: I really felt like I was in Strafford, Vermont. My life, like everyone’s, also feels so firmly centered in place—I wouldn’t be who I am without Pennsylvania, Boston, or Portland; I think about all three of these places all the time—so setting has always been really important to me in my work, too. It’s made me think about how connected I feel to other work that’s firmly centered in a specific place, something that isn’t always central to music as an art form but when it is, it really pulls me in/matters to me in the same way it does in books. This is likely the topic of another essay entirely so I’ll stop here.
One of my favorite parts about watching the documentary, though, was that my wife watched it, too, who’s not as big of a Noah fan (she doesn’t dislike him, just hasn’t listened to his music as much as I have) and is generally more well-adjusted than the rest of us, and at the end she said, “I’m kind of concerned for him?” lolBooks that aren’t out yet: Some of my favorite books I’ve read this year are drafts of friends’ books that aren’t out until 2027. I think I already mentioned Alicia Thompson’s 2027 book, but since then I’ve also read Ari Baran’s next release, Unsportsmanlike Conduct, and Sarah T. Dubb’s 2027 release, and I loved them both so much. They are both so queer, and hot (while dealing with sex in really interesting ways), and feature characters I can’t get out of my head.
Go Away, Best Coast & Weezer: This is going to be one of my top jams of the summer; there’s something so beautifully simple and fun and almost throwback-y and just Weezer-ish about it. I love pop music!!!
I also totally forgot until recently that I made a resolution a year or so ago to finish each newsletter with a photo of the garden and a photo of one of the dogs. A resolution I clearly forgot after a few newsletters, but I’m bringing it back (until I inevitably forget about it again)!!
xo
anita
I'm obsessed with this preorder art!!!
I haven't watched the doc yet but I had been thinking of you as I absorbed Noah's album! The piece you wrote about Stick Season was my introduction to him, and then his music became so important to me that it was the only thing that would soothe my child to sleep when she was small (since I listened nonstop while pregnant I guess? wild!)