Summer Starter Kit, Inspiration Diary + New PO Box!
Before I forget: A funny thing happened this year—one of my favorite local bookstores (Riverstone Books) randomly started getting mail addressed to me.
There’s something so sweet about kids wanting to send me a note and—knowing that I live in Pittsburgh—mailing a letter to one of my local bookstores with the faith that it’s probably going to end up reaching me.
And all the letters have been reaching me!
At least, I think they have…
So even though I love visiting Riverstone Books, I decided to open a post office box to cut out the guesswork. If you or the young readers in your life want to get in touch, you can always use the contact form on my site… but you can also send letters to this P.O. Box address (be sure to include a return address if you’d like a response!):
Nick Courage
PO Box 96039
Pittsburgh, PA
15226
Summer 2024 Starter Kit + Self-Reflection!
As more and more readers find this newsletter, I’ve started to wonder (a little self-consciously) what it is I’m actually doing here. Sometimes I write about craft and sometimes I write about teaching or the publishing industry—and I’m always interested in navigating a creative life, with all of its highs and lows… but there are a ton of resources and newsletters out there that cover that kind of stuff, and my most forwarded email by far was about how to find a four-leaf clover.
Last week, the Authors Guild invited me to talk to a bunch of Middle Grade and Young Adult authors about book marketing—and I could happily give writing tips and publishing advice for hours and hours and hours… so after that conversation (with an in-house book marketer at Bloomsbury), I wondered if that’s what I should be writing about here instead of doing these deep dives into the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 and historical conceptions of the sublime.
Or plein air landscape painting and anti-perfectionism.
And who could forget Russia’s bootleg Mary Poppins!
Rachel always laughs at how esoteric these emails can get. I’m writing for kids, right? But the funny thing about writing for kids is that outside of the books themselves and the occasional school visit, you’re never really talking directly to your fans (speaking of school visits: I’m currently booking these—in-person and virtually—for 2024/25!).
Which meant that—for a long time—I actually knew most of the people who were getting these emails. They were writer and publishing friends, and teachers and librarians I’d met through events, and the kind of friends that text me pictures of my books in a library. There are only so many times you can (politely and reasonably) tell a friend about a book they already know about, so instead of turning this into an extended ad or a LinkedIn post about publishing… I started writing through all the stuff I’d want to talk about on a long and rambling walk with a friend.
And even though there are more people on the walk these days—people who I’ve started to worry might be looking for some kind of insight or a value proposition?—I don’t think I’m ready for that walk to pivot into a book conference.
Looking back at the archives, this is more of an inspiration diary.
A concept I loved the second it occurred to me!
But in acknowledgment of a growing readership—thank you to all my new subscribers!—I’ll try presenting my rambles in a more reader-friendly format, starting with a listicle of my Summer 2024 Starter Kit (pictured above).
1. A stack of surf magazines from Cornwall, England
I recently got back into skateboarding—not actually skateboarding, because I can finally walk without my ankles hurting, but watching skate videos (on YouTube, while Rachel was out of town at a writer’s conference). It’s been almost ten years since I wrote about “getting back on the skateboard” for the Paris Review Daily and I stopped keeping up with the scene pretty soon after that….
But clicking through a couple of hours of skate videos, I was struck by how much they’ve changed in the last ten years. The best ones—if you filter out all the tough guy stuff—are like art films and tone poems, and I’d forgotten about how most videos will show a series of hard bails and failures before someone lands a trick.
And then: all the high-fives and hugs when they finally make it.
I was reading the Cometbus zine that’s in my Summer Starter Kit this morning (more on that below) and the author just happened to be writing about a visit he made to Thrasher Magazine’s headquarters in San Francisco: “When I mentioned the positive attitude both in [Thrasher Magazine] and the office, [the art director] said, ‘that’s a big part of the climate in skateboarding. Too many hugs.’”
“[Skateboarding] is a practice of both faith and finite, hard reality, and its rightful place is among the humanities. In saying this, I mean that to know skateboarding is to know more completely the rigors, rewards, and negotiations of being human.”—Kyle Beachy (The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches from a Skateboard Life)
I used to subscribe to a handful of skateboarding and surf magazines—Surfer, Surfing, Transworld Surf—and then, one by one, all of the surf magazines just kind of… stopped coming. I tried to re-subscribe to a few of them earlier this month, after I realized what I’d been missing, but they’re all out of print. So I did a deep dive looking for physical surf mags and found Carve magazine based out of the United Kingdom.
Because they’re a little more contemplative than most skate videos, I also started putting surf videos on in the background while I do other things: at first just short clips on YouTube, then documentaries like 100 Foot Wave and Make or Break… and finally full, day-long World Surf League contests. Only about 4% of any WSL heat is action, so you only really see about five minutes of surfing in any two hour session. The rest is just hours of heads bobbing in the waves.
Waiting for something to happen.
2. Brick
This isn’t an ad or sponsored content, but that little gray cube in my Summer Starter Kit is called a “brick” and it was my big solution when both Rachel and I were so sick of our cell phones that we were ready to go back to beepers.
You just tap your phone to this little thing and it gets locks all the apps you don’t want to waste time on (until you tap your phone against it again)… that way you can go on an adventure with GPS and text messaging, but leave Instagram and all the other social apps at home.
3. VHS from Advance Creative Writing Camp 1996
Most of my Summer Starter Kit is stuff I recently got in the mail, but this is more on the outgoing side of things.
In the summer between 8th and 9th grade, I went to a creative writing sleep-away camp at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. That was also the year the FBI caught Ted Kaczynski, and the coverage must have really captured our imagination (or, at least, the imaginations of the edgier 10th and 11th graders in my session) because that summer we produced a movie called Unabomber: The Musical.
I don’t remember much about it…
Except: my cool creative writing camp uniform was a pair of blue-striped postal pants that I got at Thrift City in New Orleans, so I played the unsuspecting mailman in our movie (modeled after Mr. McFeely from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood—who I later ended up meeting at a cocktail party at an astronaut’s house! I’d completely forgotten about that until just now and to be honest, I can hardly believe it myself).
Also, there was a long sequence over the credits where we jumped around singing R.E.M.’s “End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”.
Anyway, I’m getting a bunch of old VHS tapes digitized this month and am looking forward to (slash: terrified of) watching this, plus a bunch of Rachel’s old musicals. No summer starter kit is complete without an 8th grade production of Pirates of Penzance!
4. Courage Literary Business Cards
It’s been a big year for Courage Literary… and this isn’t the Courage Literary newsletter, so I don’t want to get too far off topic—but ICYMI, I’ve been doing a lot of developmental editing for the agency this spring (with more planned for the summer) and am super-excited for all the amazing books and authors on our roster.
For more about Courage Literary, check out our website!
5. Wicked Marigold by Caroline Carlson
My friend Caroline Carlson (who’s been writing a monthly children’s book review column for Literary Hub) has a new Middle Grade novel coming out in July and I’m going to be helping her launch it with a virtual event for her fans all over the world!
“In a funny and charming fantastical romp, overlooked Princess Marigold is nothing like her perfect, just-returned sister—so she runs away to an evil wizard’s tower to prove her wickedness.”
Caroline’s one of my favorite kid lit authors and she was the author who helped me virtually launch Snow Struck—with Penguin Bookshop—back in 2022!
And you can get more updates from her here:
Speaking of some of my favorite authors with newsletters, Jeff Garvin (author of Symptoms of Being Human and The Lightness of Hands) just started his own:
6. Cometbus by Aaron Cometbus (from Microcosm Publishing)
When I lived in New York, I’d sometimes see Aaron Cometbus selling used books at a table on the sidewalk and every time I saw him, I’d whisper: “That’s Aaron Cometbus.”
This was before he opened up Book Thug Nation, the very-cool secondhand bookstore around the corner from my old apartment, but I knew about Aaron from music way before I knew about his zines or his life in bookselling.
He was in a couple of punk bands I loved in high school, like Crimpshrine and Pinhead Gunpowder. They have a bunch of cussing in their songs, so I’m not sharing them here—but he was Green Day’s drummer for about 20 minutes…. and even more importantly, he’s become a writer I really look forward to reading.
Some of my favorites issues are: Cometbus #56, A Bestiary of Booksellers (his “loving ethnography of New York City's wild, weird, and bearded used book trade”) and Cometbus #51, The Loneliness of the Electric Menorah (a “history of the East Bay through the lens of independent bookstores and their mercurial management”).
I accidentally ordered a second copy of Cometbus #59 (Post-Mortem) last month and gave it to a friend who I was sure would have known about him… and he didn’t! So I’m sharing Cometbus here as a public service announcement to anyone who might want to track down his novella-length zines about bookselling for summer beach-reading.
7. Rádio Viva o Samba from Rio de Janeiro
This isn’t in my Summer Starter Kit flat-lay (and I’m running out of room to cover everything in that picture), but it’s definitely the vibe of my Summer Starter Kit. As previously reported, I’m still listening mainly to live radio from around the world on the super-cool Radio Garden app… and these days and I’m mostly listening to this excellent samba radio station from Brazil.
But in the car, it’s another story.
I recently (and randomly) stumbled upon a sub-channel of a radio station that mostly plays TV theme songs from the 50s to the 90s, and let me tell you: there’s absolutely nothing like driving around with the windows down, blasting the themes to the original Hawaii Five-O and Star Trek: The Next Generation. That’s summer in a bottle, right there. And speaking of Star Trek, it looks like I’m running out of space…
Until next time,
Your friend,
