Offerings

work in process//5.

Feb 03, 2024

It’s 10 o’clock on Thursday night as I sit down to write this. The girls and dogs are asleep, Steve’s away, and I’m listening to Lucinda Williams’s 1992 album “Sweet Old World, in its entirety, from “Six blocks Away” to the lovely lament, “Which Will.”

This is how I listened to the album in December 1995, start to finish, the cassette player in my gold Jetta flipping automatically when the tape got to the end. It was my first winter in Santa Fe, and on Saturday afternoons, I drove out to the dusty village of Cerrillos, where I worked part-time for a publicist, filling holiday gift baskets.

I’d left my full-time book publicity job in New York City to move to New Mexico for a magazine internship that paid minimum wage. I was 24 years old. The publicist, a friend of the magazine’s editor, must have known I needed extra cash, but why or for whom we were stuffing the baskets, I have no recollection. What I remember is driving home through the blue twilight and listening to Lucinda sing Sweet Old World, her voice as sublime and ragged as the high desert, and feeling free.

This winter, I’ve put on my publicist’s hat again for the launch of Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World, on April 16. Such is the reality of publishing in 2024. Gone are the elaborate, 30-city book tours we used to plan at Little, Brown: live segments on the noon news in Kansas City, Elaine the media escort in St. Louis, indie bookstores at every stop, boozy book launches. For most authors, publicity has become a DIY affair.

The weird thing is, it’s actually pretty satisfying.

My hodgepodge skillset is surprisingly well-suited to the task. I can still cobble together a press release (though please don’t make me). As a former fact-checker, I’m not afraid to email anyone and ask them almost anything. I have the demented endurance of an ultra runner who once walked 50 miles of a 100-mile race, and knows how to ask for—and receive—help. Give me a friendly stranger serving hot soup at an aid station and I will love them for life. Planning family wilderness trips has sharpened my logistical skills. And I still know how to make a mean gift bag.

But it’s our mindset that matters most of all. A few months ago I listened to a podcast about happiness. I was running down the mountain when Oprah said something that nearly stopped me in my tracks. She’d learned to see the work she does in the world—films, podcasts, books, philanthropy—as offerings. An offering is something given, if not freely, then generously, wholeheartedly, without expectation of receiving anything in return.

Book publicity has always been about the “get.” Did you get Oprah? NPR? Did you get a full-page review in the Times? There’s only so much to go around, conventional thinking goes, and the window for getting is short—a week, ten days tops—and then you’ve missed it. The world rolls on, and someone says, “It’s not working,” and the loneliness of those three words feels like being set adrift on an Antarctic ice floe without a sat phone.

What if we changed the model to giving?

This is how I’m approaching Brief Flashings. Certainly that’s how and why I wrote the book: as an offering. Not everyone will be able to receive it, but I gladly give it anyway, trusting that it will find its way to those who can.

A month or so ago, while out walking the dogs at dusk, I listened to another podcast, this time with a freelance book publicist. She’d stumbled into the business accidentally but has found unusual success. How? She only promotes books she believed in. She sends personal emails, not mass mailings. She has turned publicity from a competitive transaction into a human relationship.

I thought back to my two-year stint as Little, Brown. I remember feeling ill-equipped for the job. I dreaded cold-calling TV producers and I always got nervous at book signings, wondering if anyone would show up. But I loved talking to my authors about books and writing. I can still hear Ellen Gilchrist, in her caramel southern accent, telling stories about her scrappy, self-reliant female characters, who seemed a lot like her, in disguise. I wanted to be like them, too.

Isn’t this what writing—and life— is about? Sharing our stories so that we see ourselves, and others see themselves, more clearly?

Brief Flashings is about wilderness and love, moments of everyday awe, stamina in motion and marriage and midlife. The more I talk about it, the more it reveals itself to me, and at the same time, the more it seems to resist description. Annie Dillard asked herself of her Pulitzer-Prize winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, “what kind of book is this?” I like to think that she preferred not knowing. It reminds me of the classic Zen koan, What is this? Answering the question isn’t the point; asking it is.

Now when I get stuck on pitches or disappointed to see Brief Flashings left off a preview list, the writer in me knows what to do: I put on some music and let my mind wander with the lyrics. I pretend I’m just home from a reporting trip and I’m telling a friend all the best parts. I start there and keep going.

Who knows if it will “work?” Our collective attention span is so short and marketing so fickle—a mysterious convergence of luck and timing and word of mouth and current events. I sure hope it does. The fact of you reading this means that, in a way, it already has.

You can help. Tell your brother or your dentist or your best friend about Brief Flashings in the Phenonmenal World. Maybe they will tell three more people. Supposedly three is the magic number: Hear about a book from a trio of unrelated sources, goes the thinking, and invisible synapses will fire through the universe, and the book will take on a momentum of its own.

But don't just do this for Brief Flashings: Talk about and share the books you read and love or want to read. Support authors and local bookstores; ask your library to order a copy, post a review online. Spread the word. There’s more than enough to go around. Put your own good work into the world. Believe. Offer. Not every offering will be received. Make it anyway.

Not long after accompanying Ellen Gilchrist around New York, I left for Santa Fe. Deep down, I knew I was leaving to become the writer I’d always dreamed of being. Just now I googled Ellen’s name, as I have from time to time, thinking that I would like to write her a letter telling her this.

What uncanny timing. She died Tuesday, at 88.

Thank you, Ellen, wherever you are.

In the spirit of offerings, I promised I’d share my pre-orders and reading list for February: Instructions for Myself, by Heidi Julavits. Earth Keeper, N. Scott Momaday; Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti; Molly, Blake Butler; Tremor, Teju Cole; More, Molly Roden Winter; and This Impossible Brightness, by Jessica Bryant Klagman.