Both books are collections of story-essays. The Driveway Diaries grew out of NPR commentaries and newspaper and magazine columns I wrote while living on Chapin Road in Essex and struggling to come to terms with being a new homeowner in semi-rural Vermont. The first edition was so popular (it was excerpted in Harper’s magazine and read on Martha Stewart Radio!) that it sold out immediately, but thanks to an eccentric New York literary publisher was never reprinted. Many of my neighbors who appear in the book turned up to the book’s launch, which took place almost exactly a decade ago at the Essex Free Library. I hope they come back for the launch of the second edition, which includes several more stories (including the classic battle between my driveway and my pond) that round out my time living on Chapin Road and see me returning to city life in Burlington.

The Ghosts of Good Intentions is a life in public radio essays. I’ll be reading from it and talking about the working life of an NPR essayist behind the scenes, including the experience of having the first censored commentary during the first Gulf War–and once again I’ll have the chance to hold the world premiere of one of my books of essays at the Essex Free Library. And the book itself was the product of a wonderful experiment in crowd-editing: I posted almost 100 of my NPR essays on this website and invited people to vote as to which should be included in the final collection. The result changed the entire book for the better, giving it a strong focus on the perennial Anglo-American culture debate and reversing the chronology so the stories go back in time, less of an autobiography and more of an inquiry: how did I get here?