24 Hours till Pub Day
The Healing Circle is just around the corner.
I can’t believe it’s happening but on Tuesday August 16, my novel, The Healing Circle (Red Hen Press) will officially be in the world. A friend asked how I felt about it and I realized that had and have no idea. I’m thrilled and also blank and also terrified and also just like, here we go. I've been working on the book for about ten years. I’m not sure I know what being finished will mean—when working on a long term creative project, I feel like it inhabits my mind like a roommate, someone I talk to constantly with varying intensity. The book coming into print means its moving out of my head. I expect I’ll miss the room it occupied while also feeling relieved and happy to let it go.
I am most excited about my book launch for The Healing Circle in Chicago on August 23 6:30-9pm at the Comfort Station, co-hosted with City Lit. After living in Chicago for seventeen years, I haven’t been back since before the pandemic. The event came together organically. Todd Mattei will kick things off with a meditative musical performance, then a panel discussion led by Suzanne Scanlon between myself, AM Whitehead, and Tricia Park. Followed by a plant-inspired performance by Doa Nguyen. City Lit will have the book available for sale. I’m excited to hear traffic on the Logan Square boulevards, hear some cicadas, see old friends—all of us likely aged in curiously unanticipated ways.
In anticipation of the book launch, I made a comic for Red Hen Press’s Chicken Scratch blog, “The Bureaucracy of Care,” (I highly recommend drawing crystals-as-meditation). I also wrote an article for The Democracy Chain, “Should Air have Rights?,” with some tangential resonance.
But honestly, I’ve been scattered over the last couple of months. I can never remember where I put anything. My family and I have been in transition since May. We left Santa Fe in May with a summer-long layover visiting family on the East Coast. We are currently waiting on visas to move to Oxford, UK for a graduate program. I know life is about to change in big ways, but I don’t know how yet. Maybe for that reason, it has been hard to write. Also for that reason, it feels especially sweet to have a chance to go back to Chicago one last time before leaving the country, kids and cats in tow.
I rely on routines and routine spaces for writing. In the thick of the first wave of the pandemic my instinctive place to write was the bathroom and the middle of the night—two places where I was unaccountable to anyone else. Obviously it’s good to be moving into new alternative spaces, routines, and improved sleep habits, but I fret in the shuffle, struggling to keep an emotional and creative balance while also trying to be a present parent and partner, a good house guest. I wish I had better suggestions for how to manage or how I’ve been managing. I think I just held my breath, lost my mind a little bit, and now with a lease and a deposit on a rental property for our family, plus tickets purchased to leave the country, I see an end. It seems fitting that so many threads converge at this moment—the book, a new grad program, my youngest sleeping through the night. Going back to Chicago for the launch event of my novel, a novel that was seeded by the death of my own mother during my first year living in Chicago—there are a lot of circular themes in The Healing Circle and this physical return feels like an external manifestation of another cycle.
I like remembering to enjoy this space of flux—it can be so generative and one that I’ve missed for years.
On that note, just hours before the arrival of my book and one week before a trip to Chicago, here is an excerpt from The Healing Circle:
The handlers tell everyone not to touch the Holy One. “It’s like strippers,” Lena jokes. “You can be touched but not touch.” Mother and the rest of the Healing Circle stand in line with a few hundred others in a long since closed Ross Dress for Less. Everyone shuffles forward to see the guru and there she is—a stout woman sitting cross-legged on several silk-tasseled pillows like a voluptuous chicken. The Holy One pulls Mother’s head to her breast automatically, and already Mother is crying like a lamb with hiccups, pressing into Her Holiness’s chest. “Ma Ma Ma Ma,” the guru says, mechanically, “Ma Ma Ma,” bleating with a fuller voice. Everything is warm, a little too much. Mother stares at the fleshy linoleum tile and notices the faded silhouettes of former shopping aisles. She used to come here to find shoes. “Ma Ma Ma.” Surrounding members of the crowd shift and sway. Mother feels the pressure of the Holy One’s arms, the pliancy of her skin. The guru smells like sweat, sugar, a hint of Tiger Balm, and incense. Mother sobs. “How can I live? How can I survive? What am I surviving? My mother never loved me,” Mother says. She is just about to let go of everything—all the tension,sorrow, resentment—to find redemption or solace, or whatever—to have one of those moments where she might experience her unburdened, light-soaked, profound true self—and be healed!—when a handler abruptly picks up Mother by the shoulders and moves her to the side, setting her against Nancy’s back, where Mother slumps into weeping.
It is Lena’s turn to be touched, Mother turns to see. “Ma Ma Ma Ma . . .”
Andrea is behind Lena, glowing with expectation.
Mother turns. Devotees whisper beside her. “The Holy One was beaten as a child, did you know? It’s on her website. Nobody understood her gifts.”
“Women always pay the price,” someone else agrees.
Mother might go back to the beginning of the line and do it all over again.