Welcome to Yes, And...
There's no script to fall back on anymore. It's all improv now.
As a former theater kid, I’ve never forgotten the fundamental principle of “Yes, and…” when you’re improvising. If your partner creates a scenario, no matter how far-fetched (“We’re in an inflatable kiddie pool on the surface of the moon making popcorn in a fedora”) you go with it. If you want to consider a pivot, you don’t reject what’s already been offered. Instead, you accept the challenge and respond with a Yes, And. (“Yes, and the popcorn takes the shape of a tandem bicycle, which we ride back to earth in time for the premiere of the first episode of White Lotus Season Four.”) The result is something new to both of you, creative and surprising, that allows you to take risks you might not take alone.
On September 1, 2025, Please Don’t Lie, coauthored with my longtime friend, the brilliant novelist Christina Baker Kline, will be available to purchase or order from wherever you buy books. Please Don’t Lie is a Yes, And… creation from beginning to end. (“What if we co-author a psychological thriller?” “Yes, and what if we create an imaginary town and set a series of thrillers there?”)
While Christina and I have played in creative sandboxes together for 25 years (editing a collection of essays, writing a pitch for a tv show, hanging out in actual sandboxes with our children when they were young) we’ve really hit on something exciting and generative with this, the first of two books set in the fictional Adirondack Mountain town of Crystal River, New York. To honor the publication of Please Don’t Lie, I’m here on Substack, creating what I hope will be an intriguing assortment of bits and bobs about Books, Life, Ephemera, and Diversions. A breather from the dark, pained world — ironic, since writing imaginary dark, pained worlds is what seems to keep me going these days. Imagining this one together with Christina — and populating it with commentary from our decades-long conversation about shared fears and outrages and ideas — has grown into a deeply satisfying collaboration.
In case you can’t tell from this photo, Christina and I have way too much fun Yes Anding our way through our Crystal River books.
One of the four main characters in Please Don’t Lie, Megan Sinclair, arrives at the start of the novel with ambitions for her nascent Substack, called “Woods and Wellness.” She has about six subscribers. In a tribute to Megan, I started drafting this newsletter with three. I hope that makes her feel better about her prospects! Thanks to generous friends willing to come along for the ride, I’m launching with a few more. Today’s installment is an introduction, a thank you for your time, a pledge not to take up much of it, and, yes/yes, and, a space for improvisation. I’m excited to play around here, to write more in the coming weeks. To get out from under my own perfectionism and post about the aforementioned Ephemera and Diversions, for your diversion too.
That’s it for Books today. Here’s a big moment from Life: my 25-year-old daughter, Tessa, just returned to New York after working as a deckhand on a 134-foot steel brigantine research vessel (a really really big sailboat) for an organization called Sea Education Association. Along with ocean scientists and 15 undergraduate students, her crew sailed the open waters of the Pacific Ocean, from Tahiti to Oahu, in a five-week-long transit. She’s taking a breather in the city with me before heading out to her next assignment. Tessa is brave and intrepid and inspires me to imagine new possibilities for myself too. Yes, it’s intimidating to cross the Pacific Ocean in a sailboat…And she did it anyhow.
The sunset over Tahiti is gorgeous, but Tessa’s glow is definitely coming from the inside.
Does Past Life count as Life? I’m saying it does, and I’m about to break my own rule about escaping the dark, pained world here, just for a moment. Since the true overarching principle of this Substack is “Yes, and,” I’ll allow it. Allow myself.
In 1994, the year I started in the graduate creative writing program at NYU, I took a job coordinating something called The Literary Network: a national coalition of literary organizations, publishers, booksellers, libraries, and magazines looking to connect the field of nonprofit literature. The National Endowment for the Arts’ literature program played a big role in LitNet’s work. Then, in November, the midterm elections brought us Newt Gingrich as the new Speaker of the House and an agenda calling for the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts’ individual artist fellowships.
LitNet immediately pivoted from a field-building association to a political grassroots movement. Saving the NEA writer fellowships from Congressional elimination became our mission. I dropped out of grad school for a semester so I could track appropriations bills through Congress: calling, writing, and sending endless curly faxes to constituents in key voting districts, encouraging them to let their senators and representatives know that support for artists mattered. These fellowships could change lives, as minuscule as they might seem to others — not just the lives of writers receiving them but the lives of readers. And even, I believe to this day, affect the heartbeat of our culture.
We won that fight thirty years ago. Our little coalition, laser-focused on a single goal, helped preserve creative writing fellowships, despite the elimination by Congress of individual grants in all other arts disciplines.
Last week, with nothing more than a backspace button, or a secret hand signal, or, I don’t know, a blowtorch, the Administration killed the NEA creative writing fellowships. No process. Just an inbox notice to thousands of applicants that it was all gone.
Yes, along with most people who probably read this newsletter, I’m fully terrified about the current dismantling of US democracy, the suffering of vulnerable humans stripped of their rights and resources, the disastrous impact on the environment, and on and on. The macro is devastating.
And this particular micro is also a personal loss.
For thirty years, I would read the annual announcement from the NEA about new grant recipients — poets and memoirists and short story writers and novelists and playwrights — with a private ping of satisfaction. I helped each one in a tiny way because of a semester I took off from graduate school when I was 28 years old. None of them needed to know. But I needed to remember. My own small, good thing.
The literary organization leaders I worked with then were fierce, devoted, passionate advocates. I learned more from them than I can describe about fighting uphill battles.
The Community of Literary Magazines & Presses and Poets & Writers support independent literary publishers and creative writers. These orgs hosted and led LitNet when I worked there.
I’m going to leave ephemera and diversions for next time. Both will probably dominate this space in editions to come. I hope to spark conversations with all three (seven? maybe more?) of you, so I’ll end this brief introduction with a question. What ocean would you cross in your dreams? Is there a No, Because… you’d like to evolve into a Yes, And…?
Thanks for reading! Talk to you soon.