This is a post offering a few of my personal highlights from the ten days I just spent teaching at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and I promise that eventually it will share insights and wisdom gleaned from some of America’s best writers. But first: Small Rain is out today in the U.S., which means that soon I can stop pestering you about it. But not yet. If you’re reading this in New York, please come to the book’s launch tonight (Tuesday 9/3) at the Center for Fiction, where I’ll be talking with Alexandra Schwartz. If you can’t make that but can steal some time Friday morning (9/6), I’ll be signing books and eating scones at Three Lives & Co, one of my favorite bookstores, from 10 to 11am. Come by and say hello! Boston/Cambridge, I’m also heading your way this week: Adam Dalva and I are chatting about the book tomorrow (Wednesday 9/4) at Harvard Bookstore at 7pm.
There has already been some nice coverage. Wildly, I’m on the cover of the new issue of Poets & Writers (text is print only, but you can see the cover at the link), with a profile by Brian Gresko and photos by Rebecca Ou. (The photos were taken in my NYC apartment; I’m happy to have these memories of it. Also, one of the interior photos features my cat Oppen and so is my favorite thing.) Brian and I are doing an online event hosted by the magazine on Thursday (9/5). This is the only exclusively virtual event of tour (though some of the others, like the Center for Fiction event, will be livestreamed). It’s free, but you do need to register for it here to get the Zoom link. Join us! Ask a question! There’s nothing worse, literally, than a Zoom room with nobody in it.
Several weeks ago I had a five-hour photoshoot with the photographer Bryan Schutmaat, who works with a 4x5 large format camera: think old-school technology, a guy under a hood. (Bryan used a t-shirt he hung around his neck.) Schutmaat, who drove up from Austin in his well-loved truck, is the real deal, making beautiful work out of the landscapes and people of the American southwest. (He won the Aperture Prize several years back, and it turns out we got Guggenheims the same year, 2020, when the reception was canceled and so we didn’t have a chance to meet each other at a fancy NYC shindig, which honestly I probably would have skipped anyway.) It was a painstaking process: Bryan would minutely pose me, then tell me to hold for what felt like an infinity of minutes (but was really probably like three) while he even more minutely adjusted his camera. This was a fascinating process to watch. Who knew a camera could have so many moving parts? We started in my house in Iowa City, and then moved out to locations Bryan had scouted, which were just ten minutes away but absolutely, breathtakingly gorgeous. I should leave my house more.
Anyway, the results are in the new issue of New York magazine, and I kind of love them, which is something I never feel about photos of myself. (Also, just quickly, Nicole Scherzinger and I both have our names on the cover, and I would like to ask when that last happened with two alums of the Youth Performing Arts School in Louisville, Kentucky.) (We were in choir together.) (If anyone reading this knows her please tell her I say hello.) The photos are epically Iowan; my farmer ancestors rose up. (Luis has some things to say, which he thinks are very funny, about Iowan farmers with blood on their hands and bodies in the barn. I think he means I look butch.) These are accompanied by a pretty wonderful profile by the novelist Sarah Thankam Matthews, who returned to Iowa City (where she had been teaching earlier in the year) to spend two days with Luis and me. Sarah and I had met once, glancingly, after an event in New York, but I didn’t know her at all; it was really lovely to spend time with her. I read all writing about myself with my eyes half-squinted, because being represented is always a kind of injury (this is one reason artists have no business striking righteous poses)—but Sarah wrote about Iowa City, Luis, and our house with real grace. She is a frighteningly observant person. How did I get that scar on my lip, she asked after we had been talking for several hours. Literally no one ever asks me about this, it’s barely visible: the result of a bad bike accident when I was maybe twelve.
Sarah also offers the most beautiful descriptions of Small Rain I’ve seen, and since I’m hoping you’ll buy a copy, if you haven’t already, I’m going to do the embarrassing thing of copying them out here. She calls it my best novel, which I hope it is, and says:
Throughout Small Rain, Greenwell’s massing, vascular prose, arranged in paragraphs that span many pages, deftly forces the reader to slow down and concentrate. His sentences are parataxic and branching, as organic and surprising as a network of veins .… This is Greenwell’s great gift: finding forms for the representation of thought, much as the Impressionist painters, more than a century ago, found new forms for the representation of light …. If the banquet of eroticism in Cleanness caused me to on occasion hold my breath, Small Rain’s single sex scene made me wipe my eyes. Its enclosed and high-stakes choice of settings and situations — the ER and ICU during the height of COVID, the hard-won house and loving life partner, the glancing brush with death — grant the novel a blazing universality and grace.
That bit I bolded is my new favorite sentence. Other reviews have come out in The Nation (where Hannah Gold calls the book a “great American novel”), the Brooklyn Rail (where Daniel Allen Cox says the novel is “a single breath of life that contains the world in all its beautiful and horrifying minutiae”), and a very beautiful, very thoughtful piece in The Boston Globe by Rhoda Feng (“A priest of perception, Greenwell implicitly makes a moral claim about dwelling with details”). You can read my favorite bits of all the reviews here.
I’ve often said that I aspire to be a writer who doesn’t read his reviews; you can see that I’m making great strides. But I feel very lucky that the book is being treated so seriously.
Finally, before getting to Bread Loaf: Please do pick up Small Rain, ideally at your local bookstore or, failing that, at any of these online resellers.
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