The Fourth Book

a chronicle of the generative seed

I am waiting for a friend to send me feedback on the most recent draft of my third book. After publishing The Collected Schizophrenias in 2019, I signed a two-book deal with Riverhead (an imprint of Penguin Random House); despite everything I’d said during that year’s tour about never wanting to write another nonfiction book again. The two-book deal was for a novel (my second, after The Border of Paradise) and an essay collection (my second, after The Collected Schizophrenias). While waiting for critique, I assembled a bulletin board corner with twelve index cards. I see this as the beginning of the next book.

My technique of using index cards to research, write, and revise nonfiction books is a cobbled-together system that works well for me whenever I need to write nonfiction of any sort.* These index cards are in an order that feels like the bones of what might be Book #4.