My third book, Small Rain, comes out on September 3. Please pre-order by asking for it at your local bookstore, or through any of these links: Bookshop, Powells, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Amazon. There are even more links at the Macmillan page.
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A quick newsletter this week, and an apology that—barring 1) a stroke of inspiration, and 2) a burst of currently unimaginable energy—there won’t be another, proper post for June. I’m writing this on Wednesday evening; by tomorrow afternoon, if all goes well, the cats and I will be on the road, headed back to Iowa City. Naturally my move coincides with the first heat dome of the summer. Wish us luck.
I moved to NYC two years ago to start a teaching job at Princeton, where I had a great time for a year; then I got an offer to take up a Writer in Residence position at NYU, where my classes have basically been heaven. Heaven for me, I mean. A few years ago I came very close to deciding I didn’t want to teach in a university setting again; I was amazed to find teaching become joyful again this past year. What a pleasure, what a profound relief, to look forward to class each week. But being separated from my partner Luis has been terrible, and it became clear last summer that spending the whole academic year apart is not sustainable.
That said, I’m not really leaving, or not altogether. NYU, bless them, has invited me back next year, and is letting me shift to a one-semester schedule. So I’ll teach two classes in the fall (a workshop and a seminar on Henry James, which I’m very excited about), and I’ll spend the semester living in NYU faculty housing down in the Village. It’s going to be a busy few months. I’ll be on tour for the new novel, which as maybe I’ve mentioned is coming out in September. (The same day classes start, in fact.) There will be more info on those events coming soon, but I’ll be making stops along the East and West Coasts, as well as in Chicago, St. Louis, and Iowa City. I’ll also be spending a week in the UK, itinerary still TBA but I’m pretty sure it will include London and Edinburgh, a city I love. Again, more info to come. And September will also include a week in Richmond for the premiere of David T. Little’s operatic adaptation of my first novel, What Belongs to You, staged by Mark Morris. Tickets for that will be on sale next month. I hope you’ll come if you can.
Beyond this fall, I’m not sure how much time I’ll be spending in NYC. (If NYU invites me back for a third year, and if it feels sustainable for Luis and me, I would be very happy to keep teaching a semester a year in the program—but we’ll see how things go.) As I wrote in one of my first newsletters, I am not, and have never been, a New York boy. But there have been pleasures in living here. The UES gets a bad rap, but I’ve loved walking around the reservoir in the early mornings, and cutting across Central Park to Lincoln Center, and exploring the kind of wildly wonderful Carl Schurz Park on the eastern rim of the island. I chose this neighborhood because I wanted to live within walking distance of the Met, which really has been wonderful, as well as the Guggenheim, the Neue Galerie, the Jewish Museum, and Acquavella and Skarstedt on 79th. I’ll miss going to the opera with my friend Mark, who after two seasons is now a confirmed lover of the art. (We’re recording a podcast on artistic friendship this summer, where we’ll talk about opera and much else; stay tuned.) I’ll miss the bagel shop on the ground floor of my building, and the Corner Bookstore at Madison and 93rd. Not to mention Albertine, which along with Prairie Lights is the bookstore of my heart.
But I won’t miss the ambient conflict of New York, I won’t miss the blight of big box stores at 86th Street, I won’t miss the four flights of stairs to my fifth-floor walk-up. (In two years of climbing them they haven’t gotten any easier.) I won’t miss the utterly grinding impossible expense of pretty much every aspect of life here. I won’t miss the subway, where people these days always seem to be fighting or about to fight, manifesting the increasingly unbearable tension of the culture at large. There’s no escaping that tension, I know, not really, but things on the 4/5/6 line really have been especially fraught.
I started this Substack because of New York—because of the exhilaration I felt diving into the cultural richness the city offers. In my early posts I wrote a lot about musical performances, especially at the Metropolitan Opera and the NY Phil; but I found myself enjoying those posts less, in part because I mistrust the music-school impulse toward snarkiness they brought out in me. (I really did hate The Hours, but I’m not sure I needed to have so much fun articulating why). A robust cultural discourse includes space for negative responses, and snarky reviews are fine; but I’m not sure it’s how I want to spend my one wild and precious life. (Wild-ish.) (Precious-ish.)
More importantly, what I really enjoy is not evaluating an ephemeral performance—not evaluating at all—but instead meditating on things that I think are durably great. (I am not demoting performance as an aesthetic endeavor, or concert-going as an aesthetic experience; I’m just talking about how I want to spend my energies as a writer.) I do love writing about singers, and I suspect I’ll keep doing that, maybe turning more to recordings than live performances; but the posts that have felt most meaningful to me have been about poems, novels, and visual art. The biggest surprise so far has been how much I’ve loved writing about movies, something I hadn’t done before.
So I don’t know how much not living in NYC full time will change this newsletter; maybe it won’t change it at all. This summer I’m hoping to write about the Peter Hujar exhibit up at the Ukrainian Museum, which I was able to see several times over the past few weeks; I’d like to use it to think a little bit about queer visions of death. I hope to write more about Miranda July’s terrific All Fours, which I’m still thinking about weeks after reading it, and which has become something of a cultural phenomenon. I wrote in my last dispatch about one extraordinary sex scene in that book; there’s another I’d like to spend some time with. I’ll be sure to keep you posted on the neurotic anxieties of novel publication, and then this fall I’ll do my best to send thoughts from the road; maybe I’ll be able to share here some of the conversations I’ll be having in various places about Small Rain. Once things quiet down in October and November, I’ll go back to taking in as much of the city’s cultural offerings as I can.
Beyond that, who knows? There’s a great indie cinema in Iowa City, so I’ll still be able to see new and out of the way movies—even if I’ll miss the amazing programming at Film Forum, Metrograph, and IFC. For the ten years I lived in Iowa City, before moving to Manhattan, the University of Iowa was without a museum, the old one unusable after a flood; the very beautiful new museum building opened just after I left, and I’m looking forward to exploring the university’s collections. I’ll keep thinking about novels and poems, and I’ll keep sharing the occasional thoughts about writing and the writing life.
But for now, I’m so eager to be home again, in our beautiful house; and most of all I’m looking forward to being with Luis. It has been awful to miss him so much.
Maybe this is a good time to thank all of you for following along with these dispatches over the past year and a half. And a special thanks to those of you who have taken paid subscriptions; you’ve made it possible for me to spend more time with this newsletter than I had originally imagined. I’m immensely grateful for your support.
As always, thank you for reading—
G.
I wish you a safe passage. May your heart be enriched by the wonders that linger beyond the threshold. . .
I left Iowa City 43 years ago, just before Prairie Lights. I return from time to time, always spending time in that bookstore, but I still miss living there.