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 event at First Baptist Church of Austin, 6PM. Ticketed event. Purchase 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.

Preorder your copy of Don’t Call It Art and complete this form to download a PDF that includes:

• A personal note from me
• 5 mini posters
• 5 zines with bonus material and extra book chapters
• 1 playlist of all the musicians mentioned in the book, plus a J-card if you’re feeling inspired to make your own cassette tape!

If you’ve already preordered, no problem! Just fill out this form and you’ll have access to the bonus material.

Today’s newsletter is about the other kind of easter eggs:

It turns out our tweens aren’t too old for an egg hunt, so we got out the plastic easter eggs for at least one more year and hid them around the yard.

I can’t pull out Easter eggs without thinking about the other kind of Easter egg — the hidden feature or message. I don’t think everybody knows this, but I hide two Easter eggs in almost every one of my Friday newsletters…

Read the rest here.

I had a musical Easter weekend. We watched Wayne’s World for pizza night on Friday, my band practiced for 4 hours on Saturday, and I spent most of Sunday afternoon making a new mixtape:

April is often a melancholy month for me. Last April I made an “April Showers” mix that I described as a “sad dad bad had” mix for spring with a bunch of country weepers and other stuff I like. This month, I got to thinking about Prince’s “Sometimes It Snows In April” and wondered if I could do a frozen version of “April Showers” with a bunch of wintry-ish music that might still sound good in spring. (If you’d rather listen to something more upbeat, check out last month’s mixtape.)

A new challenge: a reader sent me a big box full of sealed, blank C90 cassettes, so now I’m faced with filling 90+ minutes of tape. (As I mentioned last month, many 90-minute cassettes are actually more like 94-minute cassettes, because the manufacturers added a few extra minutes of tape to each side.) So this mix is something like 1 hour and 34 minutes long, with a few long tracks on side two:

The Sufjan Stevens track started off a mix of music we played at our wedding almost 20 years ago. I was going to follow it with another song from the wedding mix, Arthur Russell’s “A Little Lost,” but NASA’s Artemis II mission influenced me, and I chose “This is How We Walk on the Moon” instead. (I thought “Ashes To Ashes” would sound good after it, somehow forgetting that Bowie calls back to “Major Tom” in that song!) The things that look like moons on the cover are actually coins from a headdress in National Geographic:

You can listen to “Snow in April” on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.

Filed under: mixtapes

From my letter, “Desert not-so-solitaire”:

I don’t know how or when it happened, but I’ve somehow become a person who likes being in the desert? It started a few years ago driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, then developed on trips to Joshua Tree and New Mexico. Last week for spring break we took a little 3-night trip to Arizoña (I pronounce it like Matt Berry), hiked in a canyon outside of Sedona, stargazed under dark skies, looked at the sun through a solar telescope at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, and caught a Cleveland Guardians spring training game at Goodyear Ballpark in Phoenix. (The most fun I’ve ever had at a baseball game. Highly recommended.)

I’m already planning a trip to another canyon.