So (drumroll) . . . I’ve finished a first draft of the book I’ve been working on for the past three years.

(small parade in my head vs polite applause vs scrolling quickly away)

If you’ve been reading this substack for a while (I know you’re reading it now…is that creepy?) then you know that this book is about the years I lived on boats and my friendship with an artist named Richard.

Here’s how I found this project—the boat project:

I’d published a book a couple years ago (Low, 2023), and I was then cast into a period I like, which is wandering in the unknown. I was simply alive, not in the middle of a book, which is what I imagine it’s like for most normal people. You know, not feeling compelled to transform everything you see into language. But when I teach I also write, alongside my students. I do this to see if what I am asking them to do is even possible. For the first few months of teaching I began working on a piece that involved my daughter’s ex-boyfriend—let’s call him Jude.