Ridgeline subscribers —

Howdy from the Things Become Other Things MegaTour, USA, where I’m on planes, trains, and self-driving automobiles as I make my way back and forth across this flawed and beautiful continent, talking, talking, signing, and stamping things. I’m doing a little walking; I walked around the Botanical gardens in SF, and walked on the Wharf, and took big walks up and down Manhattan but, honestly, I’ve been trying my best to listen to my body and my body has been saying: Be still when you can be still.

Amidst the chaos of travel and tour, I just announced another new book. (Always Be Making Books.) A book of photos called OTHER THING. We sold almost 400 copies in 24 hours since announcing it. It’s an edition of 1,200, all signed and numbered. A book of 57 photographs (55 of them are never before published; 2 are in TBOT) of the Kii Peninsula, 99% of which were taken over ten days in February of this year on my About a Nightingale tour. The stats:

• 1,200 signed copies
• cloth-bound, flexible hardcover (0.6 mm boards)
• debossed, tipped in photograph with foil stamping on cover
• fine-art archival matte Japanese body papers (Araveal White, 110g)
• 170 mm x 240 mm (~B5 size)
• 128 pages (same size as Kissa by Kissa)
• 1 new essay
• 57 photographs
• printed and hand-bound in Japan

I see this as a full-color companion to the Random House edition of Thing Become Other Things, a compendium of people and intimacies, sequenced with deliberation, and capped off with a new essay.

This also marks my first project in 23+ years shot almost entirely on film. (I bristle at talking about things like this (film, tools), as if it were mystical, but it’s probably worth mentioning.) So there’s that element to it, too. A mix of Mamiya 7II 6x7 medium format and Leica M6 35 mm (with two or three M11 shots strewn throughout).

Yearly SPECIAL PROJECTS members get a $25 coupon. You can join here. (Also, a recent unexpectedly nice new perk: members get access to The Good Place, my members-only Twitter-circa-2009-clone which has become one of my favorite, most joy-filled nooks on the web with just the right amount of activity and chatter.)

Someone asked at the SF event the other night: How do you do downtime? How do you take care of yourself? Which is a great question. I am maniacal about “regenerative” activities, mainly sleep. So, that’s the big one: Fighting for those eight hours a night, being pathological about that. And doing so by not drinking alcohol and not going out past 9 p.m., really, at all. (“Nothing good happens after 9 p.m.”) The opportunities to go out to yet another thing are essentially infinite, especially in Manhattan. (And everyone sees you as existing only in the moment, only on that day; the notion that you are running an ultra-marathon is lost on most people.) So mustering up some strong anti-FOMO powers and being like, No, I don’t need to go to Questlove’s party tonight (though I sort of wish I had), are (for me) critical to not losing my mind on a big trip like this.

Because: there is so much movement. It’s easy to underestimate the physical toll of travel. I finally — FINALLY — feel like I’m “inhabiting” American Time, and finally — FINALLY — felt, just two days ago, like I had the reserves to do a gym session. Which I did, and it felt great. (And my body is still aching in that good post-gym way.) But it took me nearly two weeks (!!) to feel that way. Each event requires an incredible amount of energy on my part (the performance, the “showing up,” all that), and I’m trying to be as kind as possible to myself, to allow myself a day or two of total stillness, to replenish those emotional and physical reserves, so I can show up fully for the next event, and then the one after that.

Thank you to everyone who has come out and bought copies of the book. If you are enjoying it, please spread the word. Buy copies for friends. Consider leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads or Storygraph. That all helps the book find a bigger audience (which is a foundational point of attempting to do a book at this scale — expanding its reach).

OK, I’m going to be VERY QUIET for the next five hours. And then tonight I’ll be on stage with the amazing Liz Danzico here in Seattle at Third Place in Ravenna. Hope to see you there (or LA next week or Chicago the week after or Brooklyn after that).

C