School's (nearly) out, book's (nearly) finished!
School is beginning to wind down for my kids; it’s mostly Field Days, concerts, and Regents exams for the next three weeks. I also just went through a mini-end-of-school-final-exam of sorts: I reviewed the final page proofs for Ordinary Devotion. My publisher emailed me a pdf of the book in which the pages look exactly the same as they will in the final, physical book: page numbers, margins, chapter headings, all that good stuff.
I proofread books for a living, but it was an odd new experience to be proofing my own book. But proofreading isn’t really “reading”; it’s not taking in language to absorb plot, character, and setting. Instead, it involves looking at each word and line as a discrete unit, and focusing purely on finding misspellings and errors. So although it felt weird at first to be proofing my own book, my proofreader brain took over fairly quickly.
Anyway, in the spirit of not only talking about Ordinary Devotion, let me offer a few bookish and literary recommendations:
I just read Rebel Girl, a memoir by Kathleen Hanna. If, like me, you are a certain type of woman of a certain (middle) age, you were probably a fan of her band Bikini Kill in the 90s. I don’t read many memoirs, but I have an admittedly weird soft spot for celebrity memoirs. Hanna is a niche celeb for sure, but if you spent the 1990s wearing baggy flannel and listening to Nirvana, Kathleen is an excellent writer who evokes that era really well.
Over the weekend, I managed to visit two very lovely, and very different, local-ish bookstores. Bruised Apple Books in Peekskill, NY is the Platonic ideal of a classic secondhand bookstore: the floor-to-ceiling shelves are comfortably overstuffed with a dizzying array of books. Over in Kingston, Rough Draft Bar & Books is pretty much the opposite: housed in an eighteenth-century building, the interior is twenty-first-century sleek. I enjoyed one of their specials, a Jane Austen (espresso, Earl Grey tea, vanilla, condensed coconut, milk), while sitting at a big wooden table in front of the huge windows and flipping through new releases.
Finally, on Saturday June 15 at 8:00pm, I will be in conversation with Jason Koo, poet and executive director of Brooklyn Poets, at Stanza Books in Beacon. Jason will read from his excellent new book, No Rest, and I’ll chat with him about writing poems, how the heck to organize a book of poems, and making that good old transition from Brooklyn to Beacon. Join us!
Until next time, friends!
Kristen
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