Coming Up!

A few more events on the calendar:

Wednesday, Sept 29 - 7:30pm
Bar on A, 170 Avenue A
part of Guerrilla Lit Series

Saturday, Oct 2 - 9:00pm
Brooklyn Museum of Art
part of First Saturdays

Tuesday, Oct 5 - 6:00pm
Dixon Place Lounge, 161A Chrystie Street
with Sam J. Miller and Alexander Chee

Wednesday, Oct 27 - 8:00pm
Nowhere Bar, 322 East 14th Street
part of PANIC!

This is a Test

The day after the 9th anniversary of September 11th,
we stood at the edge of the great hole in the ground,
where the great buildings once stood,
and watched thousands of birds caught
in the two great columns of light,
which are lit each year to mark the memory of the day,
of the lives that were lost,
and the thing that happened.

We do not reach desperately into the cold dark.
We do not grope for meaning in the great black sky.
Rather, we are blinded by the brightness of our grief.
We spend hours wandering the density of it.
We are unguided, made tired hungry zombies
by the rich colors of our memories,
and the instinct to find safer climates,
where winters
and sadness
can not find us.

The sign above the roadway of the Williamsburg Bridge,
as we drove from Manhattan to Brooklyn,
which is designed to warn drivers about traffic
and construction issues ahead,
blinked over and over: THIS IS A TEST.

Yield at Your Local Library

You can find Yield at the following local libraries. God bless them, every one.

-Birmingham-Jefferson Public Library, AL

-Mill Valley Public Library, CA
-Santa Monica Public Library, CA
-Torrance Public Library, CA

-Denver Public Library, CO
-Douglas County Library, CO
-Pikes Peak Library District, CO

-Ferguson Library, CT
-New Haven Free Public Library, CT
-Pequot Library, CT

-Alachua County Library District, FL
-Orange County Library System, FL
-Sarasota County Library System, FL

-Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System, GA

-Ames Public Library, IA
-West Des Moines Public Library, IA

-Bloomington Public Library, IL
-Champaign Public Library and Information Center, IL
-Highland Park Public Library, IL
-Shaumburg Township District Library, IL

-Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library, IN
-Monroe County Public Library, IN
-St. Joseph County Public Library, IN
-Tippecanoe County Public Library, IN

-Johnson County Library, KS
-Wichita Public Library, KS

-Lexingon Public Library, KY
-Louisville Free Public Library, KY

-Merrimack Valley Library Consortium, MA

-Anne Arundel County Public Library, MD
-Caroline County Public Library, MD
-Cecil County Public Library, MD
-Prince George's County Memorial Library System, MD

-The Library Network, MI
-Superiorland Library Coop, MI

-Ramsey County Public Library, MN

-Mid-Continent Public Library, MO

-Cumberland County Public Library, NC
-Durham County Library, NC
-Greensboro Public Library, NC

-Bismark Veteran's Memorial Public Library, ND
-Fargo Public Library, ND

-Ocean County Library, NJ

-Brooklyn Public Library, NY
-Finger Lakes Library System, NY
-Onondaga County Public Library, NY
-Suffolk Cooperative Library System, NY
-Westchester Library System, NY

-Cleveland Public Library, OH
-Columbus Metropolitan Library, OH
-Cuyahoga County Public Library, OH
-Dayton Metropolitan Library, OH
-Marion Public Library, OH
-Public Library of Cincinnati / Hamilton County, OH
-Worthington Public Library, OH

-Tulsa City-County Library, OK

-Washington County Cooperative Library, OR

-Reading Public Library, PA

-Ocean State Libraries, RI

-Salt Lake City Public Library, UT

-Norfolk Public Library, VA
-Virginia Beach Public Library System, VA
-Williamsburg Library, VA

-King County Library System, WA
-Seattle Public Library, WA

-Beloit Public Library, WI
-Northeast Wisconsin Public Library, WI
-Lakeshores Library System, WI
-South Center Library System, WI
-Milwaukee County Federated Library System, WI

-Eastern Panhandle Library Network, WV

Oh, and in the U.K.: The British Library.

An Elaboration

The Q&A part of a reading can be difficult for the writer. You're trying to understand the question which is sometimes asked from the back of the room with a mushy mouth. You're thinking of what you want to say to answer the question, and you're wondering if you are making any sense, and wondering whether you are going on too long, or not long enough. And so, I wanted to take a minute to elaborate on one of the questions that I was asked at last night's Barnes & Noble event, in hopes that if I didn't completely get the right answer out, I'm taking a second chance here.

Q: Do you get writer's block?

A: I don't. I've never had trouble getting words out of me, but I constantly have trouble getting the right words out. So far, at least, is has never dried up. I think non-writers ask this question because they think it's something that every writer feels every now and then. I think writer's ask this question because they are looking for ways out of it--they want to know if you have any practical strategies.

So, the only strategy I have is this: make your work less precious. Kill your babies, as they say. If you are having trouble writing, write something else. Write something you think is awful, something you'd never want anyone to see. You have to remember that you're a living, breathing artist, and the work you produce is going to be uneven. It's going to be fragile, and it's going to need time to mature and become something great. (This is why novels take a long, long time; we want you to feel the passing of time that happened during the making of it.)

This is not to say that I want you to make your work "less good." I don't, and you shouldn't either. It should be the most fantastic, the most political, the most beautiful, the most perfect version of the story you have inside you that is dying, unbearably, to get outside of you. But that kind of writing only comes with revision, and until you have a first draft, you can't revise. So write, write, write through the pain, through the blockage, just write.

And if you really, truly, impossibly, can not write....then do something else for a while. Pausing is not the same as stopping. While you're taking a break, make colored paper collages with cheap materials you buy from the 99 cent store. Make brioche. Listen. Listen deeply to what's close and . Keep the movement in your brain, and keep the movement in your fingers.

If you're working on a novel, at some point in the writing of it, it will want to be the only words. (I think Alexander Chee was the first person to tell me this would happen, and like most things he says, it was true.) You will be unable to read the newspaper, or other books. You will be unable to concentrate on anything but the narrative that your characters are living in. This is the opposite of writer's block, when the story and the paragraphs will be coming faster than you can get them down--like a storm on the prairie that you can see coming from far, far away. But until this happens, let yourself be distracted by the museum, by Bernadette Peters in A Little Night Music, by the brioche, by the long chatty conversation with your mother on a Friday night.

Well, now this post ended up being a bit rambling and not very sense-making either. This is a difficult question to elaborate on. Thank you to the guy who asked this last night--from the back of the room, in a clear voice.

More Events!

Three more readings coming up. You can find the entire list here.

Saturday, Sept 11
7pm
Von Bar, 3 Bleecker Street
with Rakesh Satyal and Frank Polito

Saturday, Oct 2
9pm
Brooklyn Museum of Art

Wednesday, Oct 27
8pm
Nowhere Bar
part of PANIC !

Buy the Book!!

Yield is finally in the world, on bookshelves (practically) everywhere, and in warehouses waiting to be shipped to your gleaming front doors.

I think the best way to buy the book is from an independent bookseller. But if you prefer, you can order from Amazon.com, where you can get the paperback or the Kindle edition. Barnes&Noble.com also has paperbacks and digital editions, and of course there is always one of the best indie bookstores in the (known) universe, Powell's.

If you live in New York City, you can get signed copies from the Barnes & Noble on 6th Avenue and 10th Street, or starting Sept 3rd, the Union Square B&N. You can also order signed copies directly from my website--and those books come with a cool free bonus gift!!

Also, some more reviews are in!

"Solid, unsentimental storytelling distinguishes Houck's first time out."

--Publisher's Weekly

"Five Stars."

--Echo Magazine

"Perfect emotional pitch...a brilliant, beyond-coming-out story."

--Book Marks

"Surprisingly thoughtful, emotional and erotic."

--Instinct Magazine

I am so thrilled to be able to share the book with everyone, finally.

Away in Vermont

I am sitting at a very old, very beautiful dining room table in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont half-listening to a story on NPR about butterflies. Someone has figured out a way to tag and track butterflies, the same way they tag eagles or sharks, but I didn’t hear all the details of the story—the how the do the tagging, and what the tag physically is—because I am working on some new writing projects which I came here to hopefully finish, and those are taking most of my attention. Some of the butterflies which were tagged in Vermont ended up at the Connecticut shore. Some of them ended up in Mexico, where they usually go for the winter months. To me this made the butterflies sound like retirees.

Moments ago, the 21 year-old son of the friends that I am staying with came into the kitchen to tell his father, my host whose dinner table I am sitting at, what kind of noises that his car is making. “Angry grinding noises,” he says, and then he makes the noise for all of us—a loud, angry grinding sound which makes all of us laugh. This is a perfect moment, and it rivals the joy of feeding the forty chickens in the backyard, which I did this morning. “I’m not good at laundry,” the kid says, when he is asked to help. “I am good at my own, but I always mess up if I have to do someone else’s.”

My novel will be released on Tuesday. So I am here for a few days of brain rest and rejuvenation before that experience begins. I have no idea what to expect, but I am expecting to feel a lot, to have a lot of reactions. And I want to be in the kind of mental place where I can take it all in. I was reading an article in Vanity Fair about Angelina Jolie by Rich Cohen who wrote: “I noticed everything…as you notice everything in a video game: because who knows what you’ll need, what will mean your advancement, what will be your demise.” I realize when I read this that this is why I have come to Vermont: to ready my brain like September is a video game. I’m doing a lot of events.

On the way up here, I stopped to get gas at the same exit where I was in March of 2009 when my agent called to tell me that someone was about to make an offer on the novel. I figured it was a lucky place, so I bought four scratch-off lottery tickets. The lady who sold them to me asked me which kind I wanted, and she pointed to the big acrylic case where all the rolls of tickets were held. “Red?” she asked. “These red ones are the most popular.” This is when I became suspicious of her motives, perhaps wrongly-so, because I went against her recommendation and bought the blue kind—Sparkling Diamonds—and ended up not winning. Four dollars, goodbye. Oh well. I still win: my novel comes out on Tuesday.

Garden Update!

I was relieved when my friend June said to me: "It's not really about anything other than growing." I was complaining that my shishito plant was only yielding one or two peppers every three weeks or so, which, to give you an idea, when I cook them for part of dinner, I usually start with a pound or so. June clarified that the act of gardening is often less about the physical reaping than the excitement of just watching something do what it does.

Thus, the morning glories have finally started blooming all over the railing. I like them, despite how they take over everything and at one point began shooting out into the cucumber and I had to intervene lest we have our whole garden taken over. It's true, they don't have much dignity, but they are beautiful.

The green peppers are finally growing--there are these two on the plant, and a few more starting. Actually, I think these will be red or yellow peppers once they are mature. That's the shishito behind it.

Finally there is the "Mideast Prolific Cucumber" plant, which spun itself all over the concrete and hung down the back of the railing into the yard, covered in flowers, but for many weeks made no attempt at a cucumber. Then I went to water and low-and-behold! There is a single huge cucumber hiding under a leaf. Look how it's just resting on the dirt! Who knows what mysteries the garden holds!

Death of the Poet

You said you'd done 200 push ups, and then
we looked at each other.
I said: "Your arms look like it."
You said: "Do they?"
Then we said nothing for a while.
I thought you were comfortable with silences.
Then I realized that you didn't have
anything to say.

If I have to write one more poem about the distance
between you and me
--the singular me and the royal you--
then I'm going to die a slow,
mournful, ugly, selfish death,
writhing in cowardly pitifulness,
like something out of a Paul Verhoeven
movie, but not the popular ones.
The ones they don't show anywhere at midnight.

A Happy Expectation

Things are good. I am finally starting to get excited about Yield being out in the world. That might sound crazy to those of you who are not me--and, um, I guess that's all of you. A box of finished books arrived the other day, and I stacked all of them up on the kitchen table. I looked at them, I held them in my hands. The transformation into a physical object is the real magic--I now know what a sculptor feels when the stone at last reveals itself to be a lady, or a beast, or a flower. I think what I mean by "finally getting excited" is "finally feeling content." There are a lot of fears that come with publishing--and I think I've somehow figured out how to work my way around those fears, how to process through them, and now I just have a kind of happy expectation.

My friend Andrew brought me a plum tree from the orchard where he works. Kip planted in the backyard, digging through the dirt there, which, we discovered is mostly clay and stones. It's beautiful, just standing there. It seems like it's waiting for something. Or perhaps I have projected this sense of anticipation on it...in any case, as a gesture of gratitude, I took Andrew a copy of the book. And right there in the market, he started reading it. I watched him pick it up every now and then, dipping into it between customers, like a person can do when you work the kind of retail that we do. That, I really loved.

In addition to all the events I previously mentioned, there are a few more in the works--one more New York City date, and some others that need some ironing out. Stay tuned. I can't wait to share all of it with all of you.