Paul Lisicky

@paullisicky.bsky.social

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My books include LATER and THE NARROW DOOR. SONG SO WILD AND BLUE: A LIFE WITH THE MUSIC OF JONI MITCHELL is coming from HarperOne on 2/25/2025🏳️‍🌈🦌🐊🦀

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I’ve been dying to show you my cover for weeks. Cannot think of a better face for this book! electricliterature.com/exclusive-co...

Exclusive Cover Reveal: “Song So Wild and Blue” by Paul Lisicky - Electric Literatureelectricliterature.com What are the costs of living with a drive you can’t say ‘no’ to?

We’re in Provincetown where I’m teaching a workshop all week & giving a reading with Matthew Olzmann on Wednesday 5PM at the Fine Arts Work Center after which the two of us will be in conversation. We’d be thrilled to see you and say hi.

Two first books by two former Rutgers students, so good and absorbing I’d forgotten I’d ever seen and commented on early drafts, forgotten I’d ever had any connections to the writers. I read Michael Deagler’s EARLY SOBRIETIES and Nina St. Pierre’s LOVE IS A BURNING THING in joy 1/

Dreamed that AWP was in Ocean City, NJ. All transactions had to happen by cash and no one knew how to use ATMs anymore, including me. But that stopped mattering when I found out Donna Summer was a panelist. I saw her heading up the escalator—I saw her!—just as I woke up.

This is magnificent. That is all.

Rosy maple moth!

So lucky to be working with a copyeditor who feels like they're entirely on the side of this book. When a phrase feels off, they offer a suggestion, which always manages to be in tune with how I think. The book will be better for their care & attention & my thanks to them are endless.

A new author face for a while. Jude took this yesterday.

It’s one of those days when I’ll be teaching a piece by a former student, and I’ll have to restrain myself from saying, every five minutes, with beaming face, this was my former student!

Before the plows, the feet mashing the sidewalks, the melting, the salt, the sun. 4:30AM, city as quiet as the country.

Need to find my figurative dulcimer and play it today.

Goldberg Variations last night.

💙💙💙💙💙

Sometimes the title that guided your book into being shakes itself off, lifts up, and the real title that’s always been off to the side waits for you to see it, hear it. The book formerly known as THE SKY IN IT is now SONG SO WILD AND BLUE: A LIFE WITH JONI MITCHELL. 1/2

Just walked past a Daniel Day Lewis zaddy of a dog, a style icon with white sprinkled around his eyes and muzzle and a form-fitting camouflage coat.

Have just spent twenty shaking and smoothing minutes cursing the popularizer of the duvet (and its associated cover), one Paul Rycaut, who brought the idea from Germany to the UK, where, according to records, he “failed to create a demand for the product and eventually gave up.” There.

One of the favorite places of my childhood, the (former) township library, which makes a brief appearance in the Joni book.

I pulled out a T-shirt that I’d packed for Key West but didn’t wear in Key West. It still smelled of Key West—beachy, leafy, and very damp—even though it had been in a drawer back home for two weeks.

New York Harbor thinks it’s San Francisco sometimes.

iPhone says “ ice plant” and “pygmyweed.” I don’t think so, but I do see sprouts.

You think you’re sitting in the dark. You look up, and the sky’s already doing this.

Sometimes I imagine my 7-year old self coming up to my apartment and saying to me, wow, you have a view of a traffic light! And we stand at the window watching the light go from green to red to green again.

Jean Valentine: “but you didn’t go away, / twice-born, three times, coming around, / rough cello.”

Finished second round edits over the weekend. ✅ Joni book is coming, baby!

“…his thoughts moving in an orderly fashion, like children in a snaking line, holding hands and following their tracher out of a building where some dangerous event was commencing—“ www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Poem for the middle of winter: “We know the horses are there in the dark / meadow because we can smell them, / can hear them breathing.” —Jack Gilbert

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