Lest this blog go rusty and unused now that book promotion for S&E has mostly ground to a halt, I thought I’d start using this space to fill you in on some of the stuff I’m doing as I marinate and research the next book project that I’ll hopefully be heading into this year. I started the new year by getting away to read and work on the book proposal — with the spouse and a huge pile of books up the Northern California coast to Gualala, a spot I’ve visited two or three times a year for nearly a decade and hold dear when I need a shot of no email, no phone, and nobody who knows me. Then home again, then off to a three day silent retreat. The only real weirdness about keeping the silence comes during mealtimes. It’s odd, to say the least, to be among 30 odd women eating and not talking, pretty much the opposite of mealtimes in my family with three vocal sisters. I don’t want to reveal exactly where I was, but suffice to say they do treat you very well while you’re meditating, reflecting, and stewing in your thoughts. I’ve become increasingly interested in monasticism over the last couple of years, and this was just a tiny taste of what it’s like to live that way full time. Thomas Merton called living in silence being “in the grip of the present”, and this turns out to be true. When you’re not speaking, you have to turn what would be chatter or the banal commentary we fill our days with into something else, and after the initial frantic feeling that something is wrong, that nobody will hear you, you begin to realize that the chatter in your mind is actually, finally, slowing down, and you’re forced to pay closer attention to what’s going on in the moment. By the time the final day rolled around, my voice came back painfully, like some small creature had been nesting in my throat, and I immediately burst into a rolling monologue of f bombs and s bombs, like I’d been saving them up all along. That’s just how it comes out, sometimes.

Today was the last teaching day of the semester, as Berkeley enters its first “Reading, Review, Recitation” period, which other schools call “Dead Week”. Normally, we’d have another week of classes ahead of us and wind things up around December 10th, but the RRR period was announced right around the same time the University started furloughing folks, so RRR may really be about the fact that there aren’t enough custodians still employed by UC to keep the classrooms clean. Anyway, my R4B students — the ones in the underground music class — asked me whether I was working on a new book, and I told them something I haven’t told you, dear reader. I am. I’m at the very beginning, just getting my feet wet, not really ready to tell you much about it stage of things. The proposal is mostly done, I’m hoping to knock down another three chapters or so in the bleak midwinter, and I’ll just let you in on a few things:

It’s a genre I swore I’d never mess with.

The people who wrote crappy reviews of Slanted and Enchanted will probably like it.

The people who wrote good reviews of Slanted and Enchanted will probably hate it (one of my students astutely observed that this means I am now following Bob Dylan’s career pattern).

It’s nonfiction, will be written in first person, will also involve field research and a lot of mucking about in rarely visited parts of the library, and will bear a closer relationship to much of the writing I did for Kitchen Sink than S&E did.

It will probably offend a lot of people.

More to come…