A book tour is the best excuse to see old friends. This past weekend I reunited with two: Western Massachusetts and Gabriel Bump, author of the novels Everywhere You Don’t Belong and The New Naturals.
I met Gabe in Buffalo in 2019. Our convenient location on the I-90 and rents that matched his first advance made Buffalo an attractive home, in between his roots in Chicago and Western Massachusetts, where he had recently completed his MFA. We went to the same poetry and art parties and traded thoughts on fiction and hip-hop, before he went south for a job teaching at the University of North Carolina and I went east to his old stomping grounds in the Valley. When I was putting together the tour for this book and learned that Gabe was headed back to UMass, I knew we had to meet up somewhere. I’m so grateful that he joined me for a reading and conversation at Unnameable Books in Turners Falls.
I opened the reading with a poem by Alice Notley, “One of the Longest Times,” which I felt marked an intersection between my project and some of Notley’s lifelong interests—communion with the dead, the making and remaking of personhood, the persistence of identities, experiences, and relationships across geological time. Then I read two sections from I Am Here You Are Not I Love You that I hadn’t spoken aloud since my final round of edits—never before an audience.
Gabe and I then had a wide-ranging conversation. I’m still still blown away by his sensitive reading and exciting questions—which I think you can hear in my voice on the recording. We talked about our relationship with Buffalo and ideas of “home,” success and celebrity, and how to persist as an artist, touching on the obvious examples of Andy and Cindy, our mutual friend Mickey Harmon, the extended Griselda universe, and our own experiences as writers. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
A tour is also a great excuse to make new friends. Rachelle and I recently met the photographer Nafis Azad at a wedding in Maine (thanks Meagan and Nigel), and he generously invited us to his studio in Whately near Turners Falls to see his studio and massive vintage Polaroid, a demo model that never went into commercial production. His portrait is below.
Sending my thanks out to Gabe, Nafis, Adam Tobin at Unnameable, and everyone who came to the reading.
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