Novel
Baltimore, Maryland; Tabernacle, New Jersey
[First things:
NRDC]
I didn’t have time to go to Baltimore. So I went to Baltimore.
(A thing I’ve learned: the lack of time to do something—take a walk, call a friend—is a sure sign to do that thing.)
The last time I attended AWP I was in limbo, caught between continuing to write and giving the whole thing up. Upon arriving, I told Luke this; I told Trumaine this. They replied: “You’re always in limbo, dude.”
On the one hand: yes. On the other: as I entered Baltimore’s convention center with Trumaine I asked him, “Where are the good books? Just show me where the good ones are? Please?” I was being an asshole; I was making a joke. Mostly, though, I was protecting myself; these people had books to sell, while I had a backpack and a protein bar and a half-charged laptop.
I wrote a Substack piece, two years ago, called “This World Might Be Your Home.” AWP 2026 confirmed for me that it is not. I must exist on the periphery, regard it all at a safe and often skeptical distance. I cannot depend on writing. Not to eat. And having accepted this I am loving writing again.
The novel is called what it’s called because, in the 16th century, when the form was being popularized, it was new. It was fresh. Hence the Latin novellus. But the novel is no longer fresh. It’s worth preserving, no doubt about that, but my primary memory of Baltimore is of the smoke that rose from the manhole covers. The sky was gray and the buildings were gray and every block, it seemed, I walked through a plume of gray, burnt-smelling steam.
What was I doing here, I wondered? Poe wrote a lot, too, and here he nevertheless died—destitute, diseased, deranged. And in the end he only published one novel, and not even a very good one at that.
So what is new, then? What is novel? Nothing, yes, but also this: I marveled at Baltimore’s manhole covers. I wondered at all the interactions and manipulations of gravity and heat and water going on below my aching feet. And before I drove home I parked in Patapsco Valley State Park and ran to Cascade Falls. The trail was short, the promised waterfall squat, and as dusk came on the sun slatted through the sparse underbrush, and I felt a brief peace. I did not worry that I had not yet done (still) what I had long ago set out to do. I forgot about words, forgot about lofty concepts like fulfillment, like a life well-lived. I just teetered across a rotted log, thanked whatever Being was out there, up there, for not allowing me to fall into the cold, shallow creek. I took a snapshot—click—in my mind, my heart, said: save this. For later. And I did.
*
Other novel things:
Two weekends ago, for the first robotics competition of the year, I took a school bus home. Home is a small town on the northern edge of the Pine Barrens. Seneca, the high school hosting the competition, is a well-kept, vaguely eagle-shaped building I wish my younger self appreciated more than he did. On the first day of the competition, our drivetrain broke, and our intake jammed. On the second day, our drivetrain jammed, and our intake broke. We spent most of our time getting stuck and unstuck in various ways and finished twenty-first out of thirty-two teams and went home early. I called it, and call it still, a success.
You learn things when you enter yourself, or are entered by circumstances, into a situation where you don’t know things. I told my kids this on the bus ride home—told them about CAD and coding and sketching and watercoloring and all the other things I’m a novice at. You marvel at a thing beyond your reach and take the wandering, stumbling steps to reach it. You listen to the slick click of another robot’s rotating turret, watch it swivel and launch ball after ball with otherworldly precision while your WALL-E-wannabe clunks wretchedly along and say: one day. You admire the fading of the light on Atsion Lake and realize the only way to capture it is to paint the shadows along its edge. You realize that reality is created by letting go of control, letting failure and gravity take you where they will: starting again, again.
(I said a version of this. Then we went to Chick-fil-A.)
