The Between-the-Tour Diary (i.e. HOME)

Chris and I madly scrub the house in anticipation of his dad's arrival for a visit on Saturday night. We pillage the garden and cook beets and beet greens, pick all the snap peas, cut lettuce by the bushel. My basil is bountiful already and tomatoes will not be too long in coming. There is more chard than you can imagine. Why I have planted acres of chard is now a mystery to me. Anyone with a good chard recipe, please send it asap.

This weekend is Jazz Fest in Iowa City; the downtown streets all closed off, bands every day from noon till dark, food vendors and everyone out in their lawn chairs. It's glorious to be home. We run into our friends from Kelly Pardekooper and the Devil's House Band and find out that they are going to go on tour in July and August with Teddy Morgan. So everyone should go to teddymorgan.com and find out where he's going to be so you can go see Matt and Atom and Kelly play with him this summer. Teddy Morgan is tremendous and these guys are absolutely the shit, and I swear it'll be an incredible show. Go see them!

Iowa fortifies me by the minute, though the emotional swings of all this are still coming and going, washing me over with seemingly undefeatable self doubt, then ebbing and letting me live a little again. An email from Jim Behrle from Brookline Booksmith makes my day. Text to follow:

I had this freaky dream. You came back a few weeks later to Booksmith to do an event, and we had you over at the Coolidge Corner Theatre across the street from us, which fits 600 people. There was some disconnect on the Theatre side, and they didn't have us booked there. What will we do? Thousands are descending upon Coolidge Corner. The phones are ringing off the hook. I'm freaking out because I'm going to get fired. They are actually chanting your name in the streets. And you say, why don't we just do it over there, and there is suddenly a huge beautiful field next to a lake, and people are picnicking while you do this tremendous Sermon-on-the-Mount/Lollapalooza-like reading. Then you are carried off on the shoulders of the multitude. There is this subplot that features me and Halle Berry, but I won't bore you with that.

There are good people in the world. I am ready to try and plan the course that I start teaching next week for the Iowa Young Writers' Studio (teenagers from all over the country in Iowa for two weeks of intense writing classes. It's a great program. Young writers out there should come join us next summer! Shameless plug, I apologize.) Things to do: send Knopf all my receipts, make dentist appointment, get haircut, get computer fixed (or get new computer?), send thank-you-for-letting-us-stay-with-you present to Lisa and Christopher, prepare lecture on "writing dialogue" for Iowa Summer Writing Festival, do interview with ELLE Holland, do motorpool training (i.e. learn to drive a van full of kids), WEED THE GARDEN, clean office (i.e. excavate desk), read Justin's novel, read Breanne's story, drink water, pay bills, buy groceries, breathe...