American Weather

Hello!

I last used this platform during shutdown, to teach. Good morning from a bunch of birds in the lawn-turned-meadow, and too much milky coffee, and I tried Morgan’s insomnia trick at 1:30 am, and I think it worked?

I am writing to announce a new book, American Weather, out last week and available for purchase from NewLights Press. Here’s my author’s note, which I wrote for the publisher, and which was picked up by The Rocky Mountain Reader:

I have written from dream, from image, from urgency, from sound, from a beat, from a question, from a conversation with the dead, from time keeping or a desire to keep time, from grief, from jokes, from scraps.

“American Weather” began in anger. I was angry that we could all so fail one of our number that that person could arm himself with long guns, walk down some blocks designed for humans to walk, shoot people, and kill them.

This happened on Halloween, in 2015, a few blocks from my home. There was a girl trick-or-treating as a jellyfish that year. She wore strings of lights and stood under a clear umbrella with iridescent streamers hanging from it. Who isn’t a lantern? But there she was, so visibly a lantern, moving up and down the block, and the beauty of that, on a holiday of such trust and vulnerability—strangers begging candy from strangers—it did me in. I thought about how much worse (a familiar and grotesque calculus) it would have been had our neighbor, the shooter, walked out in the evening instead of in the morning. I tried to make sure my children didn’t even know what had happened that morning, all they needed to know was what could be, what must be: a world where they never have to hide from a “shooter,” or become a shooter, and neither do you.

To write this essay-turned-book I joined the NRA, and learned how to shoot a gun; thought about public space (“front porch” vs. “back-yard culture”), and race; interviewed the neighbor who owned the Kwik-Mart and the one who owned Catch A Fade; interviewed my older sister after a mud-covered man shouting about a war broke into her home; read about District of Columbia v. Heller, and the history of the NRA; took my employer’s active-shooter training on a college campus that has since lost students to gun violence; and so forth.

Corie Cole made a series of monochrome underglaze paintings of guns getting chopped & melted to illustrate this book.

A shorter form of the essay was published by VQR. As part of their editorial process, I worked with a fact-checker so thorough that she ended up fact-checking The Atlantic in the process. Only primary sources stood.

Aaron Cohick, genius printer and founder of NewLights Press, noted some years later that this long-form essay remained sadly relevant, and suggested it be a book. That book became a collaboration with the artist Corie Cole, who made finely detailed monochrome underglaze paintings of guns being sawed, melted, forged, and smithed into garden tools by Mike Martin and the good people at RAWTools. I wrote the book’s afterword—another essay—after hanging around that shop, and its radiant people, and after attending a gun buyback.

American Weather is, first, an artist book. All of NewLights books are printed and bound “by hand.” Aaron, printer of the press, uses “a variety of techniques, ranging from the obsolete (letterpress) to the utilitarian (laser/Risograph) to the meditative (delamination).” It is art, in Corie’s illustrations, made with great precision, in a series of small marks, on ceramic tiles. And it is a book-length essay, by me, in refusal of gun violence as a kind of “American weather,” and one that points toward other ways that we might live and not die, through the heroism, that Halloween, of an unarmed veteran of war; my unarmed older sister, trained to treat violence as a public health problem; a man who enjoyed recreational shooting but gave up his arms after suffering the loss of his wife and son; good Fred Martin, who held that man when he wept, and Fred’s son and his co-workers, who chopped the guns.