The One Year Anniversary of Heading North: A Giveaway, A Character Exercise, & Other Things

This week contains the one-year anniversary of Heading North coming into the world—November 7—and I want to celebrate that with a little giveaway! Details at the end of the newsletter. If you’re in the Pittsburgh area, I have an event at the Carrick branch of the Carnegie Library on January 18—see you there?

I knew I was going to have to send this post this week—this week of all weeks—and I wrote everything below before Election Day. It’s hard to feel like celebrating in the wake of all this. But making our scraps of happiness even smaller, diminishing and downplaying whatever is good, does nothing helpful, either. I wrote Heading North for many reasons, and a central one among them was to bring forward a version of the world that I think is possible, a better version than the one we’ve got. That’s why I write: toward possibilities, even in the dark times (especially in the dark times). In the years I was writing this book and in the year since it was published, I met extraordinary people who cared about this novel and this world, about queer kids trying to survive in it, about making sports a locus for joy, about the act of making art, and for all those things together. I owe so many people a debt of gratitude for their time, for their care in helping this book enter the world—from drafting to design to copy-editing to publicity—for their efforts in making space for me in residencies and workshops, giving me feedback, reviewing the novel, interviewing me, sitting in conversation with me at events, inviting me to speak with their students and book groups and communities and read in their series, and sharing this novel with the people in their own lives who might like it. Now is not the time to not share that gratitude. So. Onward.

Earlier this autumn, my long-time driving companion, my iPod Nano, gave up the ghost. On my way to campus, it played as it was wont to do, gamely randomizing 2,000 songs representing my musical tastes over the last twenty-odd years. When I got into my car to return home, its much-taxed memory reported whole-scale failure: 0 songs. 0 Tiny Desk Concerts. 0 playlists. No number of full restarts or full charging or passionate imprecations to come back would restore it.

I’m not someone who can listen to music while writing, but nonetheless, this little device was instrumental to the process of writing Heading North. It supported my first big trip with the novel and a huge turning point for the way I thought about myself as a writer: in 2013, when I was undertaking the first big revision of the manuscript, I was also driving to Scottsdale, Arizona, where I would watch a week’s worth of Cactus League action and write my first piece for The Classical. The pitch had already been accepted. I was fully committed, and I had a plan: revise all morning in my Motel 6 room (subsisting mostly on Clif bars and tea I made in the microwave in the disposable plastic cups from beside the room’s ice bucket that should not have been microwaved¹ ) and then go to baseball games in the afternoons and evenings—sometimes two in a day—across the greater Phoenix area. I was living in Wyoming then, and I drove to Scottsdale and back solo over Spring Break, with my little iPod Nano and a specially designed playlist for company. (On the trip home, a massive blizzard blocked the 15-hour, two-day version of the drive home through Utah and turned into the most ill-advised road-trip I’ve ever done, including driving three hours northwest into that blizzard before turning tail and fleeing east, totaling 20 hours in one shot, fueled mostly by those tunes and a sense that if I didn’t get home that day, I’d be stuck in Colorado for a week. I should have just gotten a hotel room in Colorado; that would have been more time to work on my book, and my students wouldn’t have minded.) In all that time in the car, certain songs became talismanic for the novel—how could they not?—and that connection to certain songs only increased as the years of work on the manuscript elapsed.

A Heading North Playlist

Over the following years, that little Nano also came with me to the gym, where I worked out and worked out problems with the book. The voice of Viktor Myrnikov was never as active in my brain as it was in the squat rack or on the treadmill. So in the little notebook where I kept track of my sets and the weights for each exercise, there are also frantic little scribbles of scenes and insights and dialogue and revelations. Heading North has stitched together so many facets of my life, has tinted the memories and habits of a decade and change with its presence, because while I was doing everything else for those eleven years, I was also writing (and rewriting) that book.

A Character Exercise

In that time, with a lot of imaginary people in my head, it seemed like everything was a character development exercise. I offer this to you and your writing practice: make space beside all of your daily practices to consider how your characters would do them. At a restaurant, know what all of those characters would order, even the ones without the cultural context for the restaurant you’re in. Those Bronze Age Irish shepherds you’re writing about did not have access to Thai restaurants, no, but you know these characters. What textures or flavors would appeal to each of them? Which would “spend” a meal exploring novelty? Which would seek out whatever seemed closest to home? Here in November, when your mailbox is drowning in catalogs you absolutely did not want to receive, flip through: which LL Bean flannel does your antagonist prefer (even if your antagonist would not be caught dead in flannel)? What pairing of ink and fountain pen would your protagonist gravitate to? What sports teams would they root for, even if they don’t care about sports?

The point is not to introduce anachronisms into a historical character or to push a character out of their character by giving them any particular traits or preferences, but rather for the writer to know that character—their motivations, their inclinations—well enough to see them anywhere. Well enough to recognize them in any circumstance and to know what they’d do, even in situations they’d never find themselves in.

It’s also a way to keep touching your work even while you’re not touching your work, which feels especially important in times of tumult, stress, and over-extension, which seems like it describes all the time now.

Making

I’ve been back to the wheel, recently. I’m spinning some Tour de Fleece fiber from Fossil Fibers, and I chose this particular braid because it’s the most autumnal fluff I have in my stash. The colors are so strikingly bright and leaf-perfect; there are two braids, one fading from a robust orange-red to yellow to evergreen and back and one fading from the orange-red to the deepest Malbec-purple. Autumn breaks my heart. I’m doing this spin because it makes me feel a little more kindly to the season.

Reading

To be honest, the majority of my reading at this exact moment is student work and class prep. I’m working on a batch of stories and chapters from Fiction Workshop and there are two sections of First-Year Writing essays waiting for me, after which I will read setting treatments for Twelfth Night from the English Lit I folks. It’s just going to be like this until December 20 or so.

But I’m notoriously bad at self-control in bookstores, and I just picked up a copy of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (yes, I’m usually the last person to get there with all the Big Books) and am treating myself to a few pages here and there. Since it’s a thousand pages long, I feel like I can afford to go slowly.

AND I devoured Libby Cudmore’s Negative Girl over one evening and one morning after idly flipping the novel open so I could get it on Bill’s to-read list, too. I couldn’t stop reading. Negative Girl is the most stylishly designed novel—absolutely no surprise if you know Libby—and assistant private detective Valerie Jacks gives us this tantalizing, wry moment on page one: “I’d come back to Perrine two years ago under what my brother Deacon called ‘mysterious circumstances,’ arrived in Upstate New York after a three-day bus ride, wearing my pajamas and jacket and Doc Martens, without even a phone charger.” It is absolutely a “get on the couch with this book and don’t get up until you’ve read it all” experience that’s rich in plot (as a neo-noir is wont to be) and intimately layered with music. The mystery leads are provocative and thoughtfully drawn, and what I loved best about it, as someone who doesn’t actually read extensively in this genre, is the depth of heart in it. Pick up a copy and get one for the noir fan in your life.

Happy book birthday this week to Avitus B. Carle’s These Worn Bodies, a flash collection I (and so many others) have been looking forward to!

A Giveaway

Throughout the month of November, if you post a photo of your copy of Heading North (in print or on your e-reader, and even better if it’s with your pet!) and tag me on it (on Instagram, Threads, or BlueSky), I’ll put your name into a drawing for a Heading North mug! These are dishwasher safe 16oz ceramic mugs, and I will mail out three on December 3 (US addresses only, please). And for those of you who want to read Heading North but don’t have a copy, re-post my Heading North anniversary post or this newsletter (on Instagram, Threads, or BlueSky) with a comment that says why you’re excited about the book, and I’ll draw three names from among those posts to receive a copy of the novel! One entry per person, please.

*Note: I’ll do the drawing early in the day on Sunday, December 1, then I’ll contact winners via the social media platform they entered. I’ll need to hear back from you by the end of Monday, December 2 with a mailing address so I can get items in the mail.

And, of course, if you’d like to purchase a signed/personalized copy of Heading North, please reach out via e-mail or my website contact form!

As always, as I share bits of my own writing life and love for other books I admire, I hope you’ll do the same and tell others about the artists and works that move you. Leave reviews, share posts, add books to your GoodReads or StoryGraph or Library Thing to-read lists, request that your local library add a book to their collection, tell your local bookstore or reading series how much you’d like to attend an event featuring A or B. These are among the best ways you can help the writers and artists in your lives.

1  I have learned better now. For any trip like this, I travel with an electric kettle and a real mug and if packing space allows, an actual teapot.