Boosters and books
Boosters and books
It is my pleasure to write this newsletter, but today (Tuesday) as I write, I am absolutely blotto from having had my second Covid booster yesterday. I am grateful to have gotten the booster, I am grateful that the pandemic seems to be easing, and I am also grateful that I’m feeling blotto, because it suggests a robust immune reaction.
It’s a good time to acknowledge the massive loss that we as a nation and as a world have experienced and continue to experience, the many millions who have lost loved ones, the anxious uncertainty of this vast unknown, and the political tensions around masking and vaccinations that remain obtuse and senseless to me.
Covid and I had a lot to do with each other during the first year of the pandemic. Here’s a piece a wrote a while back about my first bout, anthologized in Alone Together: Love Grief and Comfort in the Time of Covid-19. By the time I got my second long bout of Covid, I decided I’d said enough. I am incredibly grateful for the care of loving family, community, and medical professionals who helped me get back on my feet.
Next week, I am excited to interview two authors at Politics & Prose. The first is Melissa Chadburn, whose terrific debut novel, A TINY UPWARD SHOVE, is inspired by her “Filipino heritage and its folklore, as it traces the too-short life of a young, cast-off woman transformed by death into an agent of justice—or mercy.” The event is at 8 PM on April 11, and is virtual. You can register here.
For Washingtonians, the second event is at the Union Market Politics & Prose at 7 PM on April 13, details are here. I’ll be interviewing Andrea Yaryura Clark about her moving debut novel, ON A NIGHT OF A THOUSAND STARS. In an “emotional narrative of love and resilience, a young couple confronts the start of Argentina's Dirty War in the 1970s, and a daughter searches for truth twenty years later.”
Wishing you a healthy and wonderful spring.
Love, Martha