PDT

We made it to San Diego.

Greetings from America’s Finest City! Since releasing my debut book in January and going on a two-week promotion blitz across the Southwest clearly wasn’t exciting enough, my wife and I decided it made perfect sense to also move to the opposite end of the continental United States. Well, here we are a month later: living in San Diego, where we’re taking care of my grandfather and sorting out what to make of this new life of sunshine and slow mornings. For folks back in New England, we’ll be on this coast until at least the fall, then coming up with more of a long term plan for this next act of our lives.

In the meantime, I’m finding some unexpected pleasure in being three hours behind all my editors, publishing contacts, and sources across the Eastern Seaboard. While my enduring devotion to Mountain Time is a matter of public record, Pacific Time has its own perks. As soon as I open my email in the morning I’ve got a pretty good sense of how many messages I’ll need to respond to on any given day; likewise, by the early afternoon I can be assured of a few quiet hours to catch up on writing, reading, and, well, thinking.

The same goes for following the news. There’s more to catch up on when I first get up, sure, but also less to attend to in the evening. I don’t know that my work and media consumption schedule out here is better, but it’s certainly different enough to provoke a shift in my mental baseline. I suppose I feel more detachment from the maelstrom in Washington and the milieu of New York, and that sort of detachment is nothing new for folks who have lived on the West Coast their entire life. Still, it’s refreshing to feel myself shift into that mode.

Chaz Bear, the musician who mostly records under the moniker Toro y Moi, underwent his own such transition back in 2012, when he decamped for the Bay Area. A decade later, he captured the vibe in a song called “The Loop,” off an album whose art features him posing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge in a psychedelic Jeepney.

“East Coast friends fill me in, I know you get the early scoop,” Bear sings. “Online trends that border cringe start to feel overused.” The song is soft, so washed out that even the guitar solo feels sub rosa. Though Bear repeats, “Stayin’ in the loop, gotta stay up in the loop” in the song’s first verse, it eventually descends into a chill soundtrack to a lazy afternoon in the sun —the intent to remain in the loop blissfully forgotten.

Perhaps my own disinterest with staying in the loop has more to do to my new responsibilities as a caregiver than a change of geography. Either way, though, Bear’s song feels just right for this interstitial moment. I’ll check in as much as is necessary, keep abreast of everything I need to in order to keep working as a journalist. But otherwise? I live across the street from Balboa Park now, where there’s canyons and tennis courts, daily picnics and dog parades. There’s a tree on the patio that grows four kinds of citrus and a neighbor down the way with more quince than they know what to do with. So that email? Yeah, I’ll get to it in a minute.

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…None of which is to say that April won’t be busy. In fact, the next few weeks are shaping up to be a nice little second phase of the American Oasis book tour! First on my docket is the San Antonio Book Festival on Saturday, April 12th, where I’ll be speaking with Texas Public Radio’s David Martin Davies for a session titled “The Future of the Southwest,” which is scheduled for 10:30am CT at the Hawn Holt Family Auditorium. That event will be filmed by C-SPAN 2’s Book TV, though I’m unsure if they’ll carry it live or rebroadcast the conversation later in the month.

I’ll be at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Tempe two weeks later, namely to co-lead a day-long tour of the city with NPR’s Sadie Babbitts. “Phoenix From the Inside Out: Heat Stress and Housing Discrimination in the Valley of the Sun,” will be a showcase of the neighborhoods I discuss in the American Oasis chapter about Phoenix’s history of redlining and the region’s current housing crisis, as well as a chance to imagine some more equitable and sustainable alternatives for the Valley to pursue from here on out. If you’re going to SEJ, you can register for the tour here, but please also feel free to respond to this email with any questions about what Sadie and I have planned!

Next, I’ll be bolting straight back to Southern California for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Catch me at noon on Saturday, April 26th, in USC’s Newman Recital Hall for “Alternatives to Apocalypse: A More Hopeful Climate Future.” Really excited about that session, as I’ll be talking with three brilliant writers and scientists about how to pull ourselves out of the current tailspin of climate chaos: Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (What if We Get it Right?), Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow (Atomic Dreams: The New Nuclear Evangelists and the Fight for the Future of Energy), and Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred).

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I’ve been staying busy with publicity for American Oasis, recording an interview for Time to Say Goodbye with Jay Caspian Kang, as well as with Julie Wu for Lumpen Radio in Chicago. In recent weeks I’ve also appeared on Marfa Public Radio, StreestsBlog’s Talking Headways podcast, and the Desert Advocacy Media Network’s 90 Miles from Needles.

Over in print world, I talked to Craig Thompson from EcoWatch and got a nice write up in the spring issue of Sierra magazine from Sara Hashemi. For cable-watchers, I also recorded an interview with Book TV at the Tucson Festival of Books which is slated for broadcast on C-SPAN 2 on Sunday, April 7th at 6pm ET, on Monday, April 8th at 7am ET, and the following weekend on C-SPAN 3.

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That’s all for now! Thanks, as always, for reading and subscribing. You can find me at my website, or saddling up for the quick bike ride to the North Park Farmers Market to spend more money than I’d care to discuss on the amazing onion bread from Jamul.

Your pal,

Kyle