My latest mixtape captures my attempt to get over the depression and anxiety that can accompany “The Gulp” in between when you finish something and finally push it out into the world. (Don’t worry, it has plenty of bops!)

It’s also the first time I’ve ever given a mixtape an epigraph. (From James Hollis’s Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life.)

You can listen to the mix on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.

The latest typewriter interview is with Brad Neely. Several people told me this is the best one yet.

From my letter, “Fledging season”:

I spent an afternoon scanning diaries from 2023 for a speaking gig and I came across all the spring entries from when we had owlets in our backyard owl box. I was obsessed with those owlets and I couldn’t help comparing them to the two young humans we had in our house, except the owlets developed at super speed: They hatched in April, and by this time of May they had already fledged. (To fledge is to leave the nest after you get your feathers.) Our youngest is fledging from elementary school later this month. Counting down the drop-offs we have left. Fledging season.

I can’t stop making zines! Issues #6 and #7 of my Deleted Zines from Don’t Call It Art are available for free in today’s newsletter.

I’m doing a very limited number of events to promote the release of my new book Don’t Call It Art.

Monday, June 1 in Austin, Texas: BookPeople, 6PM. Details here.

Wednesday, June 3 in Nashville, Tennessee: Parnassus Books, 6:30PM. Free event, but registration required. RSVP here.

Monday, June 8 in Cleveland, Ohio: Cuyahoga County Public Library, Parma-Snow Branch, 7PM. Free event, VIP tickets available. Details here.

If you have questions about any of the events, please contact the hosts through the events page.

Author David Epstein makes his public drawing debut in the latest typewriter interview!

The snails have returned! And I shared some recent snail mail in the newsletter.

I have been struggling with what Jonathan Lethem calls “The Gulp” in The Ecstasy of Influence:

“For me, there’s a weird, unfathomable gulf—I almost wrote gulp—between the completion of a novel and its publication. Some days this duration feels interminable, as though the book has voyaged out like some spacecraft on a research mission, populated by forgotten losers like the ones in John Carpenter’s Dark Star, a craft cut loose by those who launched the thing and now grown irretrievable, bent by space and time into something distorted and not worth guiding home. Then there are other days, where the book might be a pitch that’s left your hand too soon, now burning toward home plate, whether to be met by a catcher’s mitt or the sweet part of the bat you can’t possibly know. Hopeless to regret it once you feel it slipping past your fingertips. Just watch. (That’s the gulp.) The weirdness is in that interlude where the book has quit belonging to you but doesn’t belong to anyone else yet, hasn’t been inscribed in all its rightness and wrongness by the scattershot embrace and disdain of the world. It’s a version of Schrödinger’s cat, unchangeably neither dead nor alive in its box.”

I’ve been relying heavily on my old method of Living For Dinnertime.

I’ve also been keeping Bertrand Russell in mind:

The kids in the forthcoming book are little kids — like, ages 3-7 — but those kids are now teen and tween. Still, they keep serving me up one-liners and inspiration, like my 11-year-old’s take on crazy sock day.

Profound wisdom there. (“Out of the mouths of babes” would’ve been a good secret sentence for this book…)

I asked the great Tim Kreider ten questions about writing, not writing, great writers who are funny, and more. Here are his replies.