Preparing for "Face Your Fears" Spring
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Preparing for "Face Your Fears" Spring
On approaching all live events as practice.
Over the sunny weekend, daffodils and magnolia blossoms opened across the D.C. area. Now that the landscape is blooming, the cat is shedding massive amounts of hair, and I’m feeling absolutely hop-out-of-my-own-skin amped: it’s probably the prednisone for my allergies, but it could be the tide of in-person book events appearing in my GCal.
Dear reader, I have a one-on-one kind of personality, but there comes a time to face fears and learn something new. If that sounds inspiring, read on. If not, and you just want to know about the current roster, here it is:
March 8–11: AWP Conference, Seattle. This is where tens of thousands of writers gather our annual harvest of canvas tote bags. Virtually and in person, I’ll be on a panel with other editors Saturday, 9–10:15 a.m. PT. Register for the conference here. If this is your first time, Becky Turch has a great Substack post on AWP survival.
March 24: Charlottesville, VA. Hybrid virtual/in-person moderator for Lucinda Roy’s salon on her Afrofuturist novel Flying the Coop at the Virginia Festival of the Book. Register here.
April 25 at 7 p.m. ET: Washington, D.C., hybrid in-person/virtual book launch for THE SKIN AND ITS GIRL with book influencer Lupita Aquino: RSVP here.
April 27 at 7 p.m. ET: Virtual Arab American Heritage Panel hosted by Penguin Random House. Sign-up link here.
April 27–29: Virtual Epigraph Literary Festival. Registration is open.
May 3: Brooklyn, NY, The Center for Fiction reading + convo with Zaina Arafat.
May 4 at 7 p.m.: Virtual craft chat, hosted by The Writers Center in D.C. in convo with Zach Powers. Register here.
May 5: Pittsburgh, PA, White Whale Bookstore in-person reading + convo with Sarah Cetra.
October 25: New Hope, PA, River House at Odette’s in-person reading and author event.
I’ll also be on some podcasts! Check back soon for air dates with Debutiful, Pop Fiction Women, Chills at Will, and Queer Everything.
I’m also presenting at a career day for local high school students. Suffice it to say, teenagers weren’t my fan base when I was one, but now I’m oddly excited about the chance to talk to young writers about imagining literary futures.
Public Appearances: A Writerly Coming-Out
Showing up to read and talk to readers is part of publishing a book. So naturally, I joked to a friend about needing to start a talent agency for author lookalikes. Our body-double business would hire actors who can give well-modulated readings and soundbites about the writing life, signaling ease and intelligence in front of audiences. What a boon it would be for writers who don’t already teach! Ones who might have spent their entire career at home, writers like, ahem, you know… a lot of us.
It’s good that this service doesn’t exist. Appearing in front of groups regularly means getting comfortable talking without oodles of rehearsal. And after all, isn’t my book a topic I already know something about? The publicity team has been working hard pitching appearances to book fairs, bookstores, podcasts, and more, which means saying yes to dream invitations and also hearing some rejections. It makes for a lot of ups and downs, but because it is the nature of work I want to do for many years, I’ve been in search of a more fluid state of mind.
A phenomenon: After saying yes to any task, it always feels bigger than it actually is. Maybe it’s running through my author intro or revising a guest essay. The task might only take two or three hours to do, but no matter what it is, nearly a week goes by where I do very little but scrabble against the mental rift of imposter syndrome. I don’t come from a family where anyone has made a career in the arts; it is the exception, not the norm, to have a college degree. Sort of like a laptop fan that never turns off, I sometimes wonder whether living a life far from the place where you started creates a certain strain, arising from a constant expenditure of energy to do things that come naturally to peers who didn’t take so long finding their way in. But does it really matter? I care about books and writing as much as anyone here, and even if there’s a hot little fan whirring somewhere in my chest whenever I’m asked to do something in public, it’s no reason to say no.
So, in my house, the next few months have earned the moniker Face Your Fears Spring. When I hear no to a pitch, all I hear is, “Not yet.” When I say yes to an invitation, I’m telling myself, “Go for it, it’s good practice.” The thought of any event gives me the jitters, but it helps to think of each one as on-the-job training. This shifts it from being something to fear toward being a task that requires preparation and will yield a muscle memory for future events.
In the larger scheme of things, even writing a novel is practice for the next one. You can only do your best, and it teaches you to be better. It’s not a restful strategy, granted. It puts a lot of focus on the future and commits to a churning effort. But it beats alternatives like freaking out, imposter syndrome, disappointment at rejection, flights of unsupported confidence—that whole starter pack of writerly emotion. And maybe it’ll turn out that everyone is just faking it together, because we’re writers, and of course it’s more comfortable to be at home writing.
In the meantime, it can be rewarding to meet one another and talk about storytelling and language, because there is something extraordinary about publishing a first book. Also, despite the knives-out reputation, the literary community is mostly a sympathetic and generous one. You find what you’re looking for. And that’s what I’ll be looking for this week at AWP, as well as a new canvas tote.
