Had a good time at the very, very hot (I mean literally — 90+ degrees in Oakland yesterday) East Bay on the Brain reading last night with my buddy Sam Hurwitt and a host of other readers. Kudos to Lauren for getting a successful reading series together. I ran one for a while, and it’s a pain in the ass but worth the effort. The night before, I did my first talk of the season at Cal Shakes, which meant two public speaking gigs back-to-back, and this after a different and pretty major public speaking gig a couple of weeks back. I was just leaving for a book tour around this time last year, which means that K.O. inc. has developed a habit of talking a lot in front of people in the summer. Which is one of many reasons why I am going on an eight day silent meditation retreat in July. I did a three day warmup retreat in January, and it was a revelation; not only is it a total relief not to speak, but being among a whole mess of people who are also not speaking, and thus being relieved of the burden of small talk, you are actually able to think.

As a person of Irish origin, my extreme verbosity is probably a given (my late father would be nodding at this idea, while talking — and cursing — a lot), but because I teach, and therefore talk to people for a living, and seem to have inadvertently developed a secondary career also involving talking, I get pretty sick of my own voice. Thus the idea that one can go days, weeks, even in some cases months and years in a nonverbal setting becomes rather appealing. Of course, the flip side to not talking is the need to express oneself otherwise, which in my case means writing, which means… more words. That’s the catch-22, I suppose. Without words, more words. And more and more and more.

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.