Every book has friends.
Some of these friends are people who actually help the book get written. Maybe they read and offer advice. Maybe they’re agents or editors or people who spark ideas. Others are people who are friends of the book because they are friends of the writer in some way. And of course there are readers, the best friends any book has.
Man, this book sure has a lot of friends.
The list begins with my wife and friend, writer and poet Janine Harrison. Janine has been excited about Reincarnation Blues since I first mentioned it and has been a tireless cheerleader and adviser. She is also much more, of course.
My agent, Michelle Brower, dropped into my life by telephone one day some time ago, saying, “I like your style. Would you like to try and publish books together?” She changed my life, and I thank her with all my heart. It should not go without saying that this book was actually sort of dumb as a first draft, and Michelle guided me toward the light. Everything that’s good about Reincarnation Blues has her mental fingerprints on it. Her assistant, Annie Hwang, can also share in whatever credit is due.
Tricia Narwani, my editor at Del Rey, was wild about the book and is also fun to drink beer with. She, too, guided me through some changes. In the nicest way. You know how some writers will tell you that working with their editors and publishers was pure, raw hell and that the book they wound up with was hardly their book anymore? I have never experienced that. Tricia and Del Rey have been good and gentle friends.
A humble thank-you to Alice Walker for her pamphlet Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (Seven Stories Press, 2001). The story of the wise, loving people in chapters 9 and 27 is inspired and informed by Walker’s account of the Babemba tribe, appearing in this essay.
I have had valuable input and encouragement from many of the usual suspects. Josh Perz. Ted Kosmatka. Rachel Mork. Mary-Tina Vrehas. My dad, Don Poore, basically told me how he thought I should rewrite the first chapter, and he was right.
As always, Mom and Bill have been a source of encouragement and support. Plus it’s nice to go hang out at their house, which has a pond and a cool indoor-outdoor porch kind of thing, which is a perfect place to write and watch the ducks.
Sometimes a book’s friends are groups of people.
I’d like to thank Janine’s group of writerly students from Purdue, the First Friday Wordsmiths, especially Kevin Shelton and Kayla Greenwell. I started this book during a FFW retreat on a farm in southern Michigan, at a farmhouse table full of young people drinking coffee and tapping away on laptops. In the evening, there was a bonfire and stars and lightning bugs. What a fine setting for starting a book.
There’s a group of people in Muncie, Indiana, who have been so good to me I don’t even know where to start. Writer and professor Cathy Day and I exchanged books and became friends some time ago, and she got poet Sean Lovelace to invite me down to Ball State for a reading. That evening remains one of my favorite nights ever. Cathy, Sean, Silas Hanson, and several of the young writers I met that week—Brittany Means, Sarah Hollowell, Jackson Thors Elfin, Jeff Owens, and Jeremy Flick—have been with me in my head and heart ever since.
As always, the writers of the Highland Writers’ Group have been a trusty source of criticism and support.
And the Mean Group, the meanest and most snack-eating crit group ever. We’re back together and meaner and snack-eatinger than ever.
And thanks to those who have read and continue to read. I offer you a courtly bow.