Relocation, Relocation, Relocation

Above photo: I’ve been to many, many readings at BookPeople over the past eleven years of living in Austin. Sometimes they are funny, sometimes sad, sometimes riveting, sometimes boring. But no matter how many times I go, the feeling of being able to celebrate the beginning of a book’s life in the world is always immensely satisfying. That feeling is multiplied when it’s a friend, or a mentor, or someone whose work I’ve respected for a long time. Jennifer duBois is all three, so this event was just fantastic.

Friends,

As denizens of the digital age, I’m sure you’re all familiar with a new genre that’s emerged in our personal correspondence: the life update email. It’s a difficult one to write. You have a wide audience to consider. You want to give some details and answer some expected questions without overloading your reader. You want to inflect the proper emotion — usually excitement, but in various shades. Maybe you even consider how the messaging will be different for your email versus social media, etc. etc. I for one am a big, big fan of people who announce changes via a simple image/photo, whether it be for a birth or an engagement or a move or a new job or what have you. I envy the people who can envision that single image that can do a lot of storytelling work about their own lives.

I am not one of those people. I do not have a simple image. So here’s my life update: my spouse and I are moving to Taiwan in June. We’ve been in Austin (well, the Austin area, or “oh, north Austin” or South Dallas, depending on your thoughts on Round Rock) for eleven years, I’ve been at Texas State University for seven years, we’ve lived in the house I’m writing this from for almost exactly nine years.

It is a change. A big one.

Carolina and I have talked about living abroad for a long time. In the beginning it was something vague, something like a bucket list item, something we’d say we wanted to get to eventually but with no details and no real plan, no real conviction. Over the past few years, though, we began considering it more seriously. What might it actually look like? What kind of opportunity would it take to make it happen? Taiwan emerged as an possibility due to Carolina’s work, and the more we learned about it the more appealing it became.

And so an adventure. Packed my bags, zero hour nine a.m. Leavin’ on a jet plane and don’t know when I’ll be back.

In February I wrote to you about the KonMari method , and boy howdy does an international move make you really consider what sparks joy. Our worldly possessions are being divided into a complex system of categories including “coming with us,” “beg someone to store this in their attic,” “I bet someone wants this,” “oh God do I really have to deal with Craigslist?,” “it would be nice to get this back eventually, maybe,” “how much exactly can it cost to ship a KitchenAid stand mixer across the Pacific?,” “where on Earth did this come from?,” and “there is no way I’m doing a yard sale no absolutely not.”

I do not know if Carolina expected that saying wedding vows would lead her down a path that involved vacuum sealing a bag full of comic books but here we are.

When it comes to books, I’m only taking a very small handful, mostly considering what I’d want to have on hand for teaching. I’m keeping about 40% stashed in various places, awaiting our eventual return, but I am getting rid of about 60%. Of that 40%+60%=100%, 95% of my decision was really easy. There were books I was obviously going to keep and books I was obviously ready to get rid of. But the ones on the border, man, those caused a little agony. Here’s an example: I have copies of every book I’ve ever reviewed or interviewed the author for. At first this was a single shelf, but it grew and the total now is somewhere around 40. Many of those books were, frankly, bad. Most I’d never consider rereading. But, it was nice to point at an area of my bookshelves and feel like, “Wow, that shelf represents a lot of my work.” I ended up keeping them all after going back and forth a whole lot. Other sources of stress: unliked books that were gifts, books by people I took a single workshop with years ago, issues of lit journals with short stories by friends. Tough decisions, one and all. I wouldn’t call myself a hoarder in that I don’t accumulate new things very easily, but goodness gracious do I have a hard time getting rid of things.

Biggest source of cringe on my bookshelves: when I was very first getting really into books and wanted to get some signed, I was a broke/cheap undergrad college student, and so I bought very obviously second-hand books to take to author readings. In most cases I could pass them off as being my own copy, except in the case of Dave Eggers. At the time, Dave Eggers was one of my absolute favorite writers, and all I had was a ratty paperback of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius . I went online and was determined to buy a hardback to get him to sign, because I knew this was a book I wanted to treasure. What I did not understand at the time was that the book had never been published as a hardback. Not only did I get a secondhand copy, but I handed Dave Eggers a bootleg hardcover of his book (which I’m sure he was very aware had never been published as a hardcover). He said nothing about it, and I didn’t even realize what I’d done until months later.

Maybe my signed bootleg Eggers is worth a fortune. We shall see.

So, Taiwan. I’ll be shifting this newsletter to focus on the move. Books and teaching writing will, of course, continue to be central to my life, but I figure the process of moving to and creating a life in Taiwan is a little more interesting subject than my voice being among the chorus of existing, excellent voices talking just about books and writing writ large. I hope that works for you.

Further reading:

• Your depressing read this month is The Atlantic ’s/Adam Harris’s heartbreaking profile of Thea Hunter, “ The Death of an Adjunct .”
• Hopefully someone has already sent you NBA player Kyle Korver’s essay, “ Privileged ,” but if not here it is.
• What’s the best $20,000 you’ve ever spent? For Mae Rice, it was spent on Starbucks .
• Claire from Bon Appétit has started a cake baking “class” and the first lesson is available. It’s awesome as is everything she does.
• 4/8 was Rex Manning Day, so you should watch Empire Records and bask in that delicious ’90s nostalgia.
• Several good radio things lately, but Kiese Laymon on Longform was just so Heavy — see what I did there?
• And, finally, a few book recommendations. Shirley Jackson should be known for more than “The Lottery” and her spooky books; her collection Come Along with Me is the best book I’ve recently read. Want to dip your toes into Taiwanese literature? My favorites so far are Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre and Pai Hsien-yung’s Taipei People .

Send me what you’re curious about with the move and I’ll do my best to answer. Soon I’ll regale you with the story of why I’m now a certified substitute teacher in the state of Arizona, and how there is an order of magnitude more copies of my fingerprints out in the world now. Bureaucracy, am I right?

I hope March went out like a lamb for you, and that April finds you no fool.

-g