Brewery visits
I don't know where I expected to end up, but it wasn't here.
Not too long after I moved to Louisville, Great Flood Brewing Co. opened its doors about a ten minute drive from my house. It was a chill place with a cozy sort of décor more like a coffee shop than a bar, and my wife and I took to it immediately. We’re people of habit—well, I’m a person of habit, and Ashley is kind enough to embrace this—and, as such, we became regulars. We struck up friendships with the bartenders and owners, I started doing some freelance work writing for their blog, and they even sponsored my beer league hockey team. We formed the best kind of friendships there, the kinds you stumble into without realizing they’re coming. We don’t get to Great Flood as often anymore, but the people we met there are still some of our best friends.
For a couple years, I’d coop up at the bar every Thursday and write. Ashley was in graduate school, so she was studying, and I’d become close friends with the Thursday bartenders and the guy who hosted trivia. Thursdays at Great Flood weren’t what you’d think of as a prime writing environment. The tables were stuffed full of folks huddled over their trivia sheets, my buddy/hockey teammate/trivia host’s voice boomed over the speakers as he rattled off his curated list of questions, and the bar hummed with people filling and refilling and sometimes spilling their beers. I liked it, though. I knew it, and people were kind to me.
During that time, I wrote what I then called All You Wish For. Later on, I edited this and decided I Could Have Lied was a better title. A little less than a year ago, I renamed it once more and settled on The Jackals. And now, that little book I worked on at Great Flood just so I could be around my friends is available for preorder, almost ready to make its little debut in the world.
It’s weird think about how different things are going to be one day from what they are now. I think that’s why we like old friends, those folks we can not see for years but fall right back in line with. In many ways, the flip side is what this book’s trying sort out—how we can reconnect with those people we’ve drifted away from. If you would have told me all those years ago that I’d be holding a print version of what I was writing in Great Flood, that I was getting ready to see it come out, though, I don’t know what I would have said. It makes me think I should roll with the present a little more willingly, though.
Some recommendations:
Snail Mail’s “Valentine” recently showed up on a bunch of end-of-year lists. I’d never heard of her but decided to check her out. Her lyrics are the sort of heart-wrenching that makes it feel like you’re being twisted inside. It takes you back to being young and hurt and confused all over again. She was supposed to play in Louisville but had to cancel, but I’m hoping to catch the rescheduled show.
I picked Will Leitch’s novel How Lucky on a whim. It’s about a young man with spinal muscular atrophy who can’t speak or move his appendages but witnesses an abduction happen on his street. I’m still reading it and can’t speak to its ending, but there’s a wit, a uniqueness to the voice that’s just gripped me and won’t let go. If you’re looking for something to read this winter, do yourself a favor and check it out.
Oh, and if you haven’t already, don’t forget to preorder The Jackals wherever you buy books. It’s our January 11, 2022.