In which I deploy a questionable surfing metaphor

I’m a melodramatic soul, but I suspect myself of particularly flamboyant hyperbole when I find myself wondering if this is one of the most important seasons of my life, career-wise. (I’d put, for example, becoming a parent ahead of it on the Actual Major Life Change list). Lightning has struck before, for example through a couple of fellowships that gave me time AND academic street cred (what would be a better analogy than street cred for professors? a Professional Hall Pass, a magic spell encoded into your c.v.?). These were gifts that involved both luck and planning. You have to work hard, but forces beyond your control also have to align. And behind them all is the deeper luck that came with no labor on my part: being born to financially secure parents who wanted me, in a country where people who look like me and have a passport like mine get privileges. My parents were damaged and sometimes abusive but also invested in my success, and one of them genuinely loved me, so that I started life well-resourced enough to grab opportunities and fight past obstacles. It’s not lost on me, either, that I’m safe enough for the time being to think about career vagaries as the world burns.

Sorry to bring up that heart-rending mess I don’t have words for, but all kinds of fortune are on my mind, as I oscillate between the big bad and the small good. A fear that any celebratory noise will make suffering people feel even more invisible, and a simultaneous determination to enjoy this moment. Best American Poetry! Magazines reaching out to me! And placing Mycocosmic with a larger indie than I’ve yet been able to work with. Sure, I know it’s a good book and I laid as much groundwork as I could, but that’s a well-told tale. Why is the tide coming in for me now?

Please don’t think I’ve earned this surfing metaphor–I have zero athletic skill and my balance is particularly catastrophic, I’ve spent my whole life bruising and breaking my limbs in pratfalls–but I’m determined to ride the luck as long as I can because every wave crashes eventually, unless you’re in a Hokusai painting. One week till the book launch. The wave’s looking not ginormous but decent. Still balancing on the board.

One favorite moment of the last week was finding Jeannine Hall Gailey’s lovely praise for Mycocosmic in her blog: “It’s such a unique and moving book, whimsical and witty. It’s ecological in a way that makes you believe again in the superpowers of nature and feminist in a way that makes you examine your own behaviors and shames. It’s hard to explain, but you should get yourself a copy.” Read it and weep (if you’re me).

Here is my university’s press release on the book with a new picture I miraculously don’t hate, credit to university photographer Shelby Hamelman, who visited my office during a snowstorm. And I keep revising the event poster below, which has now spawned a sparse second page, as more serendipity strikes. One change: the guy who runs the Fergie’s series in Philadelphia offered to move me from a mid-week April spot (which meant another two classes to make up) to July, when they’re running a Tupelo-focused reading, and I thought, hmm, that would give me a better chance of keeping my footing. Lucky break–I’ll take it.