Image description

So my first book got this too (click here for the full announcement and a chance to check out the other Finalists, including the great Rebecca Brown– I can die happy now, as I honestly can't imagine a more meaningful award than my work getting recognized alongside hers, as if my writing even comes close to her prowess. That and learning that EJ Koh read it!!). And because my first book was also a Finalist you might imagine that this time around, receiving this frankly incredible honor would be somehow less surprising, or less special, or something. 


Not for me.


The Lines That Make Us was always intended as an introduction. Tom Eykemans, the renowned graphic designer, teacher, and originator of the Seattle Art Book Fair, and I put it together with the assumption that no one would buy it. We thought we were making something just for friends, and that would’ve been fine. Lines would be an introduction to the world of the street and my perspective on it, a curation not of my best stories but, up til that point, my most personal.


The hope was that later down the road we would make the bigger, longer, deeper, harder book, the one that would move beyond introductions and wrestle with the unanswerable questions of life and loss and death and getting older, of somehow keeping your capacity for joy through all of it, using the pretext of bus and street stories as a vehicle for exploring what all my favorite art pieces explore: the boundary between the known and the unknown. We somehow hoped that this thoroughly uncommercial subject matter would find a way to land.


In retrospect both awards are equally shocking to me, for different reasons: Lines getting in floors me because debut authors almost never become Finalists. And small indie presses generally aren’t the ones throwing their weight around at these types of things, on top of the fact that non-fiction essay collections are not exactly bestseller material. I couldn’t believe our small handmade project had become the little book that could, bestselling for 2-plus years in Seattle, available nationally, taught as a textbook in both universities and transit agencies, and featured in other textbooks. 


Deciding as a Finalist and as a commercial and critical success generally (it has all the above plaudits plus more, with a larger launch and more press) confounds me because, frankly, the subject matter is so challenging. Who wants to read about Death? Grief, struggle, philosophy, reflection? On the surface it’s still a book of bus stories, albeit three times as large as its predecessor, but this time the stories are repurposed as a microcosm centered around a different narrative thread: the question of being human in a world where tremendous violence is done to the heart, individually and collectively, to us humans as we stumble through our lives in a perpetual cloud of unknowing, always blindly seeking a way forward. Seeking hope. How do we find the light? This is what’s been weighing on me, and I had to write about it. I did not expect it to resonate as easily with audiences as the first book, let alone become more popular. 


Deciding took about five years to write. The events in the book’s 84 stories range from 2003 to 2024, and drafts of many of the stories first saw light as blog posts, but were refreshed, rewritten, tied together. I couldn’t have known during those years that what was preoccupying me personally would become central questions of modern life in the West. We are all grieving something now, all processing; life has become more difficult, more intimate with failure and loss. How do we comfort those around us, when we ourselves don’t even have the answers? Where is the joy I know is still there, the heady fullness of empathy and lived connection, that we used to more easily touch?


These topics only seem timely. You know that people have always been asking such questions. But we ask them now as a society, with new urgency, and Deciding seeks solace in reminding us of the collective, of what we can achieve in public spaces, the unglamorous living Now. I wanted to move beyond Lines' central theme of compassion, and I wanted to show rather than tell. 


Often my favorite things about my favorite artworks (like this film, this book, and this painting) happen to be their most uncommercial aspects. Because these are usually the most creative elements. The creatively risky, uncommercial choice ironically often ends up being the big draw, because it’s authentic. And authenticity is one approach which will never go out of style.


I hope Deciding can reach you in something like this manner. It was not made for the market. It was made for you, the reader, the seeker who finds themselves asking the big questions. Maybe you’ve lost someone. Maybe life has turned out differently than you hoped. You can sense something edifying in the hardship, a shape you can almost touch, but words for it remain elusive. 


Or maybe you just want more bus stories, because who wouldn’t? People will never stop telling each other bus stories. I find such joy in writing them. This is not a sad book, despite the aforementioned focus. It's become an accidental specialty of mine to make art about melancholic themes using vibrant colors, light, humor, music and glowing energy. As Kundera writes about Therese at the end of The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “happiness was the form, and sadness was the content.” Light and dark. Known and unknown. Highbrow and lowbrow, all at once.


Deciding is my best attempt to capture the world of the street, my world of the late nights and streetlights and journeys and snatches of glowing humanity, and transpose it into the literary space. If you've already read it, I hope you tell your friends. If you haven't, I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.


Thank you.


---


Click here to read my thoughts when Lines was awarded Finalist status in 2019.

Interviews etc with me about the book here!


This is the October post, going up early. Next post Nov 1st.