Thank you to all that came to my readings in the Bay Area. I can’t tell you how happy it made me to look out at familiar faces while reading from my new book, Gone Feral. And I’ve gotten to meet some new friends, too, including a woman who dated my dad in the late 1970s. She told me she had been thinking about her old boyfriend George Carpenter and so she googled his name. My reading came up in her search. Of course she lives in Berkeley, right where I was having a reading. Priceless.
I’ve been learning about myself too. One woman at the SF reading at Omnivore Books told me she was so surprised at the difference between me reading from Farm City and me reading from Gone Feral. “You were so…strident last time I saw you read,” she said, “Now you seem so vulnerable, so soft.” It’s true, I was a little weepy that night. The two books are very different, I’m not so heroic in this latest one. It feels good to admit that I’ve had a tough life, that I’ve made mistakes and that I’m just human.
Now my sister and niece are coming to America to go on a great roadtrip/book tour. We’ll be camping in the redwoods, staying at Pholia Farm up in Ashland (Nigerian goat farm and cheese making paradise), before doing a few readings up in the PacNW. Like I said in my last post, I’ll be reading in Portland (Powell’s) June 30, Seattle (Town Hall) July 1, Olympia (Main public library) July 8, Moscow, ID (Bookpeople) July 10, and Eagle, ID (Public library) July 15. We are also going to go visit my dad and our birthplace of Orofino, ID. When my sister and I get together, strange magic tends to happen so I’m thinking this is going to be epic.
If you missed me in the Bay, there are future readings in the making for the months of September and October, so stay tuned. Until then, see you out in the wild.