Stuff From Last Week #05

Gratitude, Translation, Stevie Nicks, etc.

On Sunday, we took our kids to the beach. I seem to have crossed a hurdle, where doing stuff with our toddler and baby is half fun and half exhausting, where the breakdown was thirty-percent fun and seventy-percent exhausting. We’re almost over the hump. Soon enough all family excursions will be one-hundred-percent fun all the time, right?

AWARDS

Two days ago, the Chicago Public Library Foundation announced me as this year’s 21st Century Award winner. Previous winners include Nate Marshall, Eve L. Ewing, José Olivarez, Rebecca Makai, Natalie Y. Moore, and a long list of cool folks. Here’s a link to the announcement video. Each year, the foundation gives the 21st Century prize alongside the Carl Sandburg Prize, which goes to a superstar deep into their career, like previous winners Percival Everett and Ann Patchett. This year, perfectly for me, the winner is Mo Willems. I’ll see him at the award ceremony in October and make him sign books for my kids. I said this in an interview recently. I’ll say it again here: In a world where so much isn’t working, is selfish, is cynical and close-minded, public libraries serve as examples of how society can work. They are spaces meant for everyone. Free knowledge, services, cornerstones of communities. One of the first things our toddler did in our new town was attend free story time at the public library near our house. More libraries, less data centers, you know?

I am incredibly grateful for this honor, the Foundation, all public libraries, Chicago, and, well, I already can’t wait to come home. I haven’t lived in Chicago since leaving for graduate school when I was twenty-three. I rarely left before then. I still feel like a Chicago writer. My books are still often anchored in Chicago, somehow, whether by character or setting or history. I hope that never changes.

Awards and recognition don’t define us. They’re nice. They give a good non-phone-related dopamine hit. With each book, I hope for, at least, one cool thing to happen. I have been fortunate enough to have had a few cools things happen with each book. I am grateful to be read and to have people out there who enjoy my work. It makes it easier for me to keep writing novels, to keep messing around in dreamworlds. I would do it without the recognition, but, still, thank you.

TRANSLATION

A few days ago, I finished translating a chapter from João Pedro Vala’s incredible first novel Grande Turismo. It’s a novel that can be broken into standalone short stories, if needed. He translated the first chapter himself, published it in The Common and won an O. Henry Prize this year, the first Portuguese writer to do so. Here is the story: “Iñes”. I met João last summer in Lisbon during Disquiet. He’s breaking into the American publishing nightmare and he’s kindly allowed me to mess around with his work, try my hand at translation, although his translations are perfect. I respected translators and non-American literature before, but, working through a chapter, in a language I can’t speak fluently, was one of the most challenging and rewarding creative tasks I’ve ever undertaken. After a month or two of moving really slow, reading some grammar books, keeping a dictionary nearby, something strange happened: I could look at the Portuguese on the page and translate in real time. Not perfectly, João caught plenty of errors, but, still, I understood it, the feeling. I can’t recommend it enough, reading a second language, making friends with genius writers in other languages, expanding your community and canon. And, strangely, finding echoes of your own work in the a different language. We both write about lost young men trying to understand themselves. We both use humor to alleviate anxiety. I can’t wait for you all to read more of João’s work.

Spending time in another language was been

STEVIE NICKS

It took me an embarrassingly long time to see this performance for the first time. When I finally saw it last week, I watched it ten times in a row. Man, she hates him.

Then, thankfully, Matthew Wright sent me this.

It’s been a long week of Stevie Nicks in this house, a good week.

PROGRESS

I sent the first one-hundred-or-so pages from my next novel to my agent. She’ll read it, tell me what’s wrong, what’s right, see if it’s ready to show my editor. Over the past two years, we’ve done this dance maybe four times and the project hasn’t been right and we’ve put it away, went back to the drawing board. Writing is sitting down and getting the words down. It’s also about knowing when to pause, shift things around, take a look at where you’re going, see if you can switch it up to make it better. I am lucky to have spent my entire career working with Alexa and Kathy on books. Plenty of random factors go into making art. Your mood, your ability to access the right sentence rhythm, find the right character. Having a supportive agent and editor directing your work is, in my experience, the most helpful thing you can have. So, if the pages aren’t ready. Time to get back to work. That’s the job.

WHITE SOX ROUNDUP

Murakami is injured. BUT, we still don’t suck and are in contention for the division. We don’t suck!

PROUST UPDATE

Not much Proust this week. I was reading a lot of Pessoa and translating and writing my own stuff. Back to it now! It’s funny how, as a writer and professor, we do all this writing and reading so we have more free time to read and write. Wouldn’t have it any other way.