Cities We Can't Get Out of Our System

When the place informs your work.

Hi friends.

A reminder that I’m in the middle of a 5-year-anniverary special, where I’m lowering the annual subscription rate to $45 for the year. (It’s usually $60.) This gets you access to every letter I send out plus the archives too, the ability to comment and chit-chat with all the other nice paid subscribers, and regular ask-me-anything chats with me. Thank you for helping to keep the lights on around here!

I’ve mentioned I went to Chicago last week with Jason in support of his novel Kaplan’s Plot. Here we are, two Jews in a bookstore:

We’re not related, but we’re not not related.

Anyway, listening to Jason talk about why Chicago is important to him at the reading, I understood his feelings entirely. I don’t know if I’ll ever get Chicago out of my system. It has shown up in many of my books either entirely as a setting or as a place a character drops in or moves. There is a comfort and an ease to being there and in the surrounding area. There are places that are always going to make their way under our skin and show up as a backdrop in our work in one way or another.

Jason wrote beautifully about what it meant to be about a writer from Chicago here, but I think we can glean from it what it means to be a writer from anywhere. We just have to try and understand what we love about a place—even if there’s plenty we don’t like about it.