With Lucky Me  no longer in my hands and the launch just days away, I took a trip to South America with my wife, traveling through Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. During the first few days, I still found myself thinking about the novel, even working on its translations into Portuguese and Polish. But by the time we reached Patagonia, I finally began to relax. I needed to. And I totally enjoyed it. Climbing the peaks of Torres del Paine, horseback riding with gauchos, tasting vi

Well, not six feet under yet, just dead nervous. The book is out, no longer mine to adjust, protect, or explain. For years, I’ve lived with these pages, rewriting them, defending them from myself, trying to make every sentence sound like something only I could write. Now they belong to others: readers, reviewers, perhaps even a few algorithms. It’s a strange feeling. Friends’ comments never carried this kind of weight. Fellow writers critique, suggest, nod, empathize. Reviewe

After my mother died, I went through her belongings. In an ornamental, wooden box, tucked among her precious cooking recipes and what I took to be my father’s love letters (he was not a man of great sentiment), I found a small, green-covered notebook, a zeszycik do słówek , as we called it in school, the kind used for vocabulary drills. Its pages were filled with handwritten poems. My poems. I remembered writing them, vaguely: the lined pages, the fading blue ink, the care wi

“Sunset.” This is how my friends reacted to my first post, or to the stock picture I attached to it. No question mark, but I could hear the doubt behind the words. Is that how you see your new beginning?  they seemed to be asking, smirking as they said the word. I thought about it for a while. “A matter of perspective,” I said. “The sun also rises. It’s always rising somewhere, even if what we call a sunset looks like an ending.” Hemingway meant something different when he wr

After decades of writing for the drawer, I decided it was time to share some of my stories with people other than a few loyal friends. I gathered a small collection, polished it as best I could, and sent it out to agents and publishers. To my surprise, one respected agent—just one, out of dozens—wanted to see more. In this business, that counts as success. Most of the replies were the standard “not for my list,” which is publishing shorthand for “good luck elsewhere.” I sent