In a window-wrapped warehouse gym up on U Street a month ago I was at boxing class, partnered with a ferocious tomboy of a woman, doing patty cake on steroids in the dusty halflight, when a spasm jerked into my back.

"You okay?" my partner asked.

"Small cramp," I groaned.

I'd been stressed out. My semester at GW ended with Sweeps Week-style glittery special moments--I had a nice big reading in GW's Continental Ballroom, a class visit from one of my favorite writers, one of my fiction classes came over to my place for a wine-soaked dinner party.

But then it all ended. I was majorly burnt out from teaching and promoting the book at the same time, and for a variety of reasons unrelated to life in the classroom--which for me has been a bottomless source of existential meaning (more on that some other time)--I decided not to return to GW in the fall.

So scratch that away: I'm not a teacher anymore. In the Land of Believers is out there, mostly wheeling around on its own velocity. I pulled back from True/Slant on the eve of its sale to Forbes. I decided to move to California.

I was feeling pretty scarily detached, in all senses but one: my second book.

For the last year and a half I've been working on a book proposal and sample chapter based on letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother during World War II. I've tried to talk about it just like that, in the blandest, most distant way, remembering how a mentor of mine once responded to my fears about burning out all my interesting ItLoB ideas in conversation: "Maybe you should just stop talking about it."

I hear that, I do, but I've been thinking a lot about what it feels like to be at the beginning of a project, so I'm going to talk about it a teeny bit now.

I'd been researching and writing a proposal--for those outside the book world, it's essentially a business plan for a book--for about a year. Now, before I went to shop the book (I was calling it The Idealists), it was time to write a sample chapter.

My sample chapter was supposed to be a fictionalized reconstruction of a moment in my grandmother's story, one that I'd partner in conversation with one of my grandfather's letters. I was excited about it! I'd effectively summarized a whole novel's worth of content for my grandmother in the proposal, so I had lots to work with.

But when I sat down to write my sample chapter, I had the darnedest time finding the voice. If you've read me you may know I write basically how I speak--I make up verbs and say "like" a lot. And now I was trying to pull off the free indirect, close third person narrative style that would twin with my grandmother's 1940s perspective. What I was doing felt musty and floral and humorless. Also, it was kind of twisted trying to inhabit my grandmother's deep, physical yearning for my grandfather. You know? I had to summon up his face and try to imagine wanting to kiss it. Was that...healthy?

Not to mention, the chapter was in this weird zone between fact and invention. How much stuff could I make up? I invented this other character for my grandmother to interact with, a woman named Aletta who lived upstairs from her in a boarding house. Aletta cried herself to sleep at night, made war cakes, was sanctimonious about public expression of morale. I spent about three weeks getting very interested in pumping Aletta full of blood and history. Until one day, I read over my chapter and got chopped down by this scary, grim realization: Aletta was the black mold that had spread over the whole chapter. There was hardly any of my grandmother there. I'd strayed very far off course.

Worse: the voice was phony as hell. I realized this tearing through Junot Diaz's Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. (Sidenote, I'm of two minds about whether it helps to read capital-G Great books at the start of a project. In some sense, they feed your work, punch out new tributaries of thought. But in another, the zygote you start with is so vulnerable and unimpressive it's very easy to get tossed into despair comparing your work to something seriously good.)

But so Diaz's narrator in that book talks in this vernacular that's sort of genius-from-the block, funny and casually wise, and reading him I felt the freezer burned quality of the voice I was using. I got hung up on one phrase I'd written: "...as if she hadn't any provisions of her own." Whose fucking voice was that?

One day I marched myself down to the coffee shop to get serious. Finish it! Just finish the stupid thing and see what happens, I was in the habit of saying to myself. I booted up, settled down, dribbled a little bit of coffee on my computer, and the screen went black.

And the weird thing? I felt relieved. Even when the dubious "geniuses" at the Apple Store told me my hard drive couldn't be recovered--I felt a little relieved.

I thought, Maybe this is a sign that I need to start over. And then, because I don't believe in signs, I realized that the mere act of looking for a sign was a pretty rock solid indication I needed to change it up.

So even when I did recover my hard drive--by miracle and hefty bill--I decided to start over.

At the Natural History Museum, casting around new brain channels, I looked at this great exhibit on bones. Marveled at this little guy for a while:



...and in a sequence of thoughts based on this skeleton that may not make sense to anyone else, I had an idea about how to fix the project. I was going to add a third narrative thread: my own.

So I rewrote the sample chapter. It was very confessional. I had stuff in there about a destructive affair I'd gotten myself into concurrent to my initial research for the proposal. I hoped that the pathetic picture of that romance--about hearing violins swell when he bumped past me on the way to the ice machine at the restaurant we both worked at--would contrast well with the portrait of my grandparents' Great Love.

I emailed it to my mother and my sister. On the day I had that cramp at boxing, I'd received an email from my sister that she'd read the chapter.


All the while I was receiving a stream of emails from Christians telling me I've been on their daily prayer sheets. Are they praying for life to get so heinous I'll long for Jesus to swoop in and fix my book? I wondered.

Here's the thing I eventually realized: it just sucks being at the beginning of a project. Lots of things you spend time developing don't end up making the cut. It's an embarrassing mess. You're a well-oiled factory of bad ideas and overwrought sentences. Sometimes your internet addiction flares up and you don't even get that far. And none of it is something you can legitimately complain about, because it's all self-inflicted and small potatoes, in the scheme of world suffering.

Later in the process, when the sloppy document starts to take on the respectable posture of a manuscript, book people get invested in it and it's easier to keep working on it without it vanishing in your grabbing hands. But at the beginning, it's this tenuous thing that lives or dies because of you. You're the beating heart. No one can fix it or finish it for you, and it mostly seems doomed. You don't get days off from worrying about it, and it demands so much that you start to feel very miserly with your energy. Blogging seems Sisyphean. Oral hygiene--who needs it! When a former student emailed to ask for my help on her law school personal statement, I felt pinched and annoyed. But I met with her and was reminded of how important it is to do shit like that, especially in this stage--to get outside of yourself.

But okay guys: I finished another set of drafts, and I'm in an optimistic frame of mind about the future of the project. Hope this means I'll get back to blogging, because I miss it!

Here are a couple of things that came up in the interim since I last blogged.

Skepticality Podcast

And an interview with Bethanne Patrick on The Book Studio:



This Sunday I'll be on the radio on NPR's Interfaith Voices. You can check to see when it'll be broadcast in your area here, or if you want to just listen to it now you can do that here. The show taped the same day I'd spilled coffee on my computer, so see if you can hear that trembling relief in my voice.

Begin transmission: Chipping escape route from mile-deep igneous prison of bills and emails. STOP. Dress I picked up from unswept floor to wear this morning trailed furry chain of dust bunnies. STOP. Now that I am no longer a teacher (*sniff*) I am determined to return to READING FOR PLEASURE. I solicit your recommendations. STOP. This morning I decided I am officially too old to wear a sundress with cowboy boots. STOP.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, May 4 I read in Charlottesville, at Writerhouse on 508 Dale Avenue. 7PM. Please come! I will give you a five-second neck massage and recite for you the only poem I know by heart.

I'm excited to read at Writerhouse because I taught one of their inaugural classes just before moving to DC in 2008. There's even a picture of my class in the slideshow on their home page (www.writerhouse.org), where I'm wearing a heart rate monitor for a watch and gesticulating intensely to a dedicated, miniscule class. The cool thing about teaching at Writerhouse was that the students were all old enough to come to workshop with a decided commitment--they were there only because they wanted to be.

And my Writerhouse class yielded my favorite hilariously vague response to the icebreaker game I always play with new students, Two Truths and a Lie. One of my students presented these details about himself: "I go to a church; I announce at sports games; I like to sell things." The lie? Devilish smile--"I don't like to sell things."

Now that I'm preparing to leave DC for California (*sniff*), there's a symmetrical pleasure in returning to Writerhouse to talk about the book I was working on when I taught there. I really can't wait.

And on my way, I have the intimidating privilege of stopping by the Book Studio in Arlington to speak with Bethanne Patrick.

Big day. I'm going to go do some breathing exercises.

Virtual, I said. I've still got like one or two more of these posts before you get absolutely disgusted with me, right? Constraints on my time should ease this summer, when it looks like I might not have a job (related: hiring?), which will at least allow me to return to freestyle rambles about stuff you can sort of obliquely relate to, if you're in a generous humor.




Got a really, really generous review in BUST, too, a magazine I've long loved, and pitched, and been resolutely ignored by. Plus, I'm in the Tracy Morgan issue, which just feels right. I rub my belly in gratitude, guys.

Did I tell you I'm afraid of flying? Turbulence, specifically. I know, it's not turbulence that's dangerous, it's the cold, canned air. Don't bother linking me to statistics about how it's safer to fly than to eat a Caesar salad or whatever. They don't alleviate the terror clawing at my heart when a plane starts rattling around. If I may plagiarize myself, I've said before that I fear flying in the brainless way a dog feels thunder. That's just how it is.

But so, Saturday I agreed to go up in a four-seat prop plane. Friends arranged it. "If I have to die," I wrote them, "might as well die in the company of people I like."

One of them is a pilot, and he sent a breezy email to let us know that the good thing was, no one was going to die. The bad thing? "That is not to guarantee that we will always be landing on an official paved runway--so long as you guys bring sturdy shoes in the event of a forced landing, all will be well."

My mother tried to convince me not to go. "Do you know how many of those little planes crash?" she asked.

"I know," I told her, "but [pilot friend] says this plane is as safe as they come."

She sighed. "I don't know why you care so much what people think of you."

Truth, I was tempted by the otherworldly idea of jaunting somewhere with funny friends on a spring afternoon to crack crabs and get a light sunburn. Whose life is that? Mine, for a day! So I went. Look at this thing:

Look at me looking at this thing:


That, friends, is the face of primitive doubt. How something so heavy go up so high?

"Do you want to know how flight works?"[pilot friend] asked me.

"We all have to believe at once?" I said.

We strapped in and put on our little headsets which weren't working (buttressing my fears about plane malfunction) and [pilot friend] showed us the tiny hatch through which we'd escape in the event we landed "upside down."

"I know we'll be safe," my other friend said, "because I know how much [pilot friend] values his own life."

So up we went, over to Maryland, where we landed and borrowed a truck from a stranger to ride into town for crabs and beers. I did okay! I only cried on the inside! On the way back we hit serious turbulence. [Pilot friend] asked us to look for bogeys. Bogeys, you guys. Pew-pew laser sounds filled the cabin, and I clutched my friend's arm, making peace with my impending fiery death.

We landed safely at Leesburg Executive Airport, and [Pilot friend] was right: nobody died. But nothing wears you out like long spells of sheer terror, which did kill my plan to work on my next book proposal that night. I spent the evening wishing someone could just surf the net for me, so tired was I.

Maybe you did something scary and exhausting today and you just want to mellow out with some links, pictures, and video. Here, put your feet up and let me lead you through some programming.

In the Land of Believers got Briefly Noted in The New Yorker, which almost would have made me okay with dying in that tiny plane. My friend said it perfectly: "You got to see your name in that specific New Yorker font!" I feel so lucky.

And then I did this Interview with TIME Magazine with the most thoughtful, incisive interviewer.

Here are some other fun profiles, interviews, and reviews:

The Bogus Born-Again - East Bay Express

Credo - Gina Welch - The Washington Examiner

Interview with GW Today

Review in Sliced and Diced

Review by Denny Burk


And here go some pictures of readings I did a couple of weeks back:

Politics and Prose - Washington, DC

Strange things happen when you publish a book.

Readings become wonderful forums for This Is Your Life-style reunions with people who bring you pictures of yourself as a child, strangling a poor white cat. Strangers thank you, and ask to take pictures with you for their "semi-private website." Reviews appear online written by people who haven't read your book yet.

People ask you funny questions. Maybe they'll approach you at after a reading in California to ask, "Are you going to do a book tour?" Or they'll refill your wine glass at a party and say, "So when will you know whether or not your book is a success?" Or maybe they'll drop an email to inquire, "Have you ever considered that maybe God is real?"

The stubborn belief that your book only exists in the consciousness of people who know you personally finds a challenge in the stranger strolling 4th Street in Berkeley, your distinctive blue book jacket peeking out from under his arm.

Your inbox fills up with thoughtful, warm emails from strangers, and the odd stink bomb of hate mail, calling you a "horrendous pagan," or a "trainwreck," or one from someone calling herself "Peacemama" who dubs you a "southern California bimbo who should be writing about tans and plastic surgery." You have to sit on your hands to keep yourself from replying, "northern California, jerk."

Here's a sort of highlight reel of the little book tour from which I just returned.

-My Politics & Prose reading was an unbelievable delight, in spite of a terrifying moment of doubt precipitated by someone at the bookstore asking, "Is anyone coming for you today?" My sister came down from New York, and the full house crowd included my old boss from a Charlottesville restaurant, friends from graduate school, college, and high school, and lots of smart strangers with difficult questions.

The next day my sister and I walked around the National Mall, marveling at morose Lincoln, the underreported power of the Korean War memorial, and the failure of the World War II memorial to transmit a sense of loss.

-I pulled some diva shit one night at the Omni in Charlottesville a few days later. A party in the hotel room next to mine had been bumping for a few hours, unaffected by my periodic flurries of banging on the wall with both fists. I called the front desk at 3AM in a fury. "I am here for the Virginia Festival of the Book," I announced, "and I have to give a reading tomorrow!" The attendant may have stifled a laugh.

The next morning, the hotel gave me a free breakfast for my troubles. The man at the front desk apologized for my sleepless night. "It's hard to balance professionals who come here," he said, "with people who come to party."

-The next day I had fun guest DJing on my friend Dominic's program on WTJU. I sat up on a little stool and got to talk to Dominic about songs I love. We gave away a copy of my book donated by the UVA Bookstore and someone called to tell me I was participating in a culture of impersonation. Here's the playlist from the show.

-At the UVA Bookstore, I read with poets Mary Ann Samyn and Andrew Mulvania, and novelist Mary Beth Keane, who was a classmate of mine at the UVA MFA program. We sat in the front row of the reading as seats filled up behind us. In front of us, our books were arranged on a long conference table.

"Isn't it crazy how official this is?" Mary Beth whispered.
"Yeah," I said. "Like, somebody stacked those books."

Our reading was a wonderful sort of homecoming, with our professors in the audience and current and past MFAs there to root us on. The program threw us all a lovely reception in the good old MFA lounge, whose loveseat I used to kneel on to smoke cigarettes out the window during parties almost--golly--ten years ago.

-The next day I interviewed on Air America's State of Belief program and then gave a reading at Warren Hall at James Madison University, again with the wonderful Mary Beth Keane. She'd popped over to Warren during my interview. "They have it set up like Obama's going to be speaking," she told me.

It was a nice big event, for sure. Afterward, a student approached me at the signing table and told me he was majoring in Political Science. He glanced at my copy of In the Land of Believers. "So do you think it's worth it to read that?" he asked.

-Saturday, on my flight to California, I wrote something for Berkeleyside on the patchouli-scented stigma of being from Berkeley.

-At 8 Sunday morning, I was a guest on KRON 4's news program. I wish I had video! It looks wonderfully '80s, all grainy and dark, with me sitting on a grey-flecked couch across from my interlocuter, who had this great John Waters mustache. The guest after me was a 14-year-old boy--"the youngest author of a book about chess"--who made me feel a little long in the tooth, but also like I was living out the Platonic ideal of the local news experience.

-A few hours after the KRON thing, I settled in for a Skype chat with Richard Metzger of the LA Times for his interview series on Dangerous Minds. He said he could see me on a big screen in the studio, but for some reason I wouldn't be able to see him on my computer.

"OK," I said, "I'll just look into this little black hole and pretend it's your face."
"That works," he said, "because my face sort of looks like a black hole."

As you can see, he was being modest:


Gina Welch: In the Land of Believers from DANGEROUS MINDS on Vimeo.

Sorry my eyes were rolling all around like Howdy Doody's. My computer screen was very distracting.

-My mother threw me a big fat book party that night. My brothers were there, my college boyfriend flew up from LA, and the man who plucked my query out of the slush pile at my agent's office five years ago was there, too, giving the party a nice feeling of symmetry.

I didn't recognize the family dentist when he approached me to say hello. "Are you from my mother's gym?" I said. I realized who he was in a flash when he looked wounded. "Oh," I said, "I didn't recognize you without your Hawaiian shirt and paper mask!"

My mother gave me a lovely introduction for a reading in her living room, in which she said something to the effect of, You never know what Gina's going to say about something, which was just about the highest compliment I could hope to receive. There was a lively Q&A, where we talked about being regarded as curiosities as Jews and where I had to talk someone down from comparing evangelical Christians to neo-Nazis. During the signing afterwards, a woman I hadn't met before approached me with an intense look in her eye. "I just wanted to tell you I got a terrible review from the LA Times, too," she said.

-Books, Inc. was a great time. They had to pull out extra chairs, and all told the reading, Q&A, and signing lasted two hours. Someone live-tweeted it!

Here's what I looked like reading there:



Yes, there's a showtunes portion of my reading presentation. I bring those sock monkeys along for harmony. You can't see it, but I had great rivers of sweat rolling down my neck. It was hot up there.

A history teacher from my high school came, and two BHS classmates, and the entire family of an old friend, and a beloved ex-girlfriend of my father. And here's a picture with my uncle, who came unexpectedly with his son.


It was a great night.

-My reading at Book Passage the next day had a more modest crowd, but the staff there was so incredibly warm and generous. They gave me ginger tea, and told me about Ozzy Osbourne's recent reading, and made me these notecards, delivered in a wrapped box with a handwritten message!




 Fora.tv filmed the event, and it should be up for consumption pretty soon.

The next day, I flew home.

More reviews have come out since last we saw one another:

The Salt Lake City Tribune

Time Out Chicago

I realize that announcing my bits of news in the blog like this makes it hard to cold gorge yourself on articles and interviews about my book in one sitting. I'm working on creating a Media page so you can sit down and find everything in one place, the better to catch me in a contradiction/see how often I repeat myself.

This is my Spring Break, and so far I haven't been offered a single body shot. With the lost hour I feel more like springing back to find someplace to hide. But there are places to go, people to bore, so spring forward I must.

Later today I should have some pictures and stories from my Saturday reading at Politics and Prose, which had a great crowd, killer questions, and a tense moment where I considered bending over in front of everyone to retrieve a fallen pencil.

I guest blogged at the witty/wise Book Lady's Blog today: There's More on Craigslist Than Ikea Furniture

The podcast from my visit to Paul Edwards' Christian talk program "God and Culture" is now online. In an interview in which Paul and I disagree agreeably about who wrote the Bible, he begins by asking, "What's a nice girl like you doing at Thomas Road Baptist Church?" I very nearly asked in response, "Who ever said I'm a nice girl?"

This week I head west to unleash my reign of UMs on Charlottesville and Harrisonburg, VA. Come get me!

Wednesday, March 17 I'm spinning a track or two on my friend Dominic's radio show on WTJU 91.1 at 2PM. You can listen online.

At 4PM I'll be reading at the UVA Bookstore with several other graduates of the UVA MFA program--Mary Beth Keane, Andrew Mulvania, and Mary Ann Samyn.

Thursday, March 18 Mary Beth and I will read at James Madison University's Warren Hall at 2PM.

Saturday--California, and upcoming stops at Book Passage in Corte Madera and Books, Inc. in Berkeley.

If you aren't sick of me yet, or if you are, but are also bored or kind of a masochist:

I made an On Faith Guestblog at the Washington Post about what secular progressives ought to know about evangelical Christians.

Interviewed with Roxana Hadadi at Washington Post Express Night Out.

I went on an evangelical radio show based in Michigan yesterday, God and Culture, hosted by Pastor Paul Edwards. We had a good, civilized chat, I thought. We disagreed about some stuff. I said I didn't believe in God but was moved by Jesus' works in the Bible, and Edwards told me I was missing the point if I didn't accept Jesus as the Son of God. And I said I believed in the Bible as a work by men, so I didn't take from it any theological imperatives. And then we sort of moved on. I think you'll like it. I've been working on my suppressing my Um's, so hopefully listening to it won't make you clutch your heads in aural agony. I'll repost when the podcast is up.

And tomorrow! Is the Politics and Prose reading! One PM! Less than 24 hours! So now! I've got to figure out what I'll read! Anyone who's perused the book is welcome, encouraged, begged to weigh in.