Five Reflections as The Way Around Turns One

Plus a paperback reveal!

Reading at the book launch event, Missoula Public Library, July 8, 2025. Photo: Forest Woodward.

“Summits are never where we think they are.”

In The Way Around, I remember writing this sentence.

I remember being quite fond of it.

As my book celebrates its first birthday today, if I’ve learned anything at all, it’s that putting a book into the world isn’t what you think it is, either.

An early mentor, the great Janisse Ray, told me in 2014, and I’m paraphrasing: “Publishing an article or essay will change some of how you write; publishing a book will reorder your life.”

This is truth.

The world, my perceptions and relations and potential pathways of inquiry, opportunities and foreclosures, so much of the past several years have been quite literally shaped by saying yes to this project, yes to this curiosity. It’s been wild, euphoric, exhausting, and everything in between.

Marking its one year birthday this morning, I sat quietly at my desk with my copy of The Way Around to my right. I stared at it a long while, ran circles around the cover with my finger before mapping out some of the most potent moments along the way, and major takeaways, which you’ll find below.

But before I do: thank you. Thank you for supporting this vision in whatever way you have. Spoiler alert, but the biggest takeaway I keep coming back to is this: Books are never an enterprise of the sole individual, never grown in isolation, never some heroic and solitary endeavor completed on its own (though, sure, spending a fair amount of agonizing time alone is definitely part of the deal.)

Books are hand-stitched by relations. Each one on your shelf is a million arms reaching out for help, for guidance, a living attempt of intellectual grace hungry for the whole and packaged up in stacked pages that whisper: no one gets out of here alive without leaning on others.

It’s liberating to release the cultural and economic delusion of sole propriety, that all of this curiosity and expression comes from nowhere but the self. Perhaps this is obvious, but pausing to let that in a layer deeper—whether you’re a writer or not—can be wildly instructive.

Highlights from One Year of The Way Around

OK, there have been innumerable moments of revelation and awe along the path so far. Here are six:

• Kickoff Event with Robert Macfarlane. The first time I ever saw my book on the shelf, for sale, was next to Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane. I’ve gushed far too much about how formative his work has been for me over the past decade, but to have been asked to be in conversation with him in front of a sold-out live audience in Minneapolis, to celebrate his new stunning work and connect his dots with mine—which hadn’t even officially been published—was an evening of profound anxiety and eventual joy that I’ll never forget.
  
  

  

  Milkweed Editions Bookstore. Minneapolis, MN. June 9, 2025.

• Circuminterviewed for the LA Review of Books. The book’s been featured on the morning news, in People Magazine, Adventure Journal, Hippocampus, Trails Magazine, and others, but when Miyo McGinn reached out asking if I’d like to circumambulate Green Lake in Seattle and be interviewed, in motion, for the Los Angeles Review of Books, I was ecstatic. Miyo was a former colleague at Outside and an extraordinary mind, and our conversation was the best I’d had about the book. Plus, moving and talking and thinking with such a beautiful brain was just the best.

• Powell’s Books with Gregory Gourdet and Family. Gregory Gourdet is a Haitian-American chef, a three-time James Beard winner, ultrarunner, and dear friend. I’d known him for over a decade before asking if he’d join me on stage for my tour stop at Powell’s Book, in Portland, Oregon. (A day after an evening in Seattle with Ben Gibbard, a memory tied for first.) I assumed Gourdet would be busy, assumed he’d have a kitchen to run that night, that he was in Paris or New York City launching some new collab with Versace or something, but he texted me back in minutes: “Yes, I’d love to!” A wild confluence of things happened that evening: Several family members drove up to Portland from California. Seeing my name on the Powell’s marquee made me feel like I was on drugs. Following the reading, we sat in my cousin’s backyard in SE Portland, drinking tall boys in a circle under soft bulbs of light surrounded by my father, stepmom, aunts, cousins, and partner. I was in full bliss, only to be topped the following evening when I coordinated a meal with the publisher and marketing director of Milkweed Editions, and their wives, at Gourdet’s award-winning restaurant, Kann, to celebrate. Milkweed’s publisher, Daniel Slager, the man who acquired my manuscript in 2019, leaned over to me and said: “You order. We trust you,” to which I leaned over to the server and said: “We’ll take one of everything.”
  
  

  
  

• A Visit from Mom. I was with my mother in Palo Alto, California, the day her hardcover copies of the book (she’d bought several) arrived in the mail. First, I scolded her for buying them; if anyone didn’t need to spend money on this damn book it was this woman. (The book is dedicated to her.) Second, as I was preparing her coffee in the kitchen, I heard her rip through the packaging and everything turned silent for several minutes as she read the first pages. Nothing for minutes. Then, finally, this: “Nicky, I never knew you were this deep!”
  
  My mother died three months ago. In her flagging health last year, she still made it to San Francisco, for my reading at Green Apple Books alongside my bestie-to-be, Josh Jackson (VIDEO), a highlight of friendship because of the book. (See? All relations.) When I arrived at the venue for soundcheck, Mom was already there, front row, smiling with a scarf around her neck and her oddly discolored front tooth and her unending love. We went out for food afterward with my brother and niece and others, and it might have been the best night of my life.
  
  In her final minutes, ten months later, I’d whisper in her ear at the hospital:
  
  “Love you, Ma. You can let go now. You are the mountain.”
  

  

  Following the SF event, with family, in San Francisco, CA. June 23, 2025.

• Awards. I never expected any award for this book, never expected to receive glowing support for its contents and shape, never thought it’d feel so affirming to receive awards like the Reading the West and Library of Congress/Humanities MT Great Reads, Great Places Awards.
  
  More than affirming, these feel notable because it builds trust in my own curiosity, that it’s worth listening and following and being patient with creative and ambitious urges, that when an image or an idea jumps on your back and doesn’t let go, digs its claws into your neck, you better listen, better keep walking.
  
  Being shortlisted for Reading the West alongside Mark Sundeen (The Unsettlers, Delusions & Grandeur), and Philip Connors (Fire Season, The Mountain Knows the Mountain) was humbling. Their careers extend well beyond mine, and I’ve looked to them for guidance for years, so these accolades are nothing if not shared.

• Releasing the Paperback! After several rounds of updates and cover art conversations, I’m thrilled to announce that The Way Around will be available in paperback on October 6! Milkweed Editions was excited to brighten up the cover and update the subtitle to invite a more buoyant and broad appeal across audience and genre. It’s exciting to see it change in optical texture and see what that does for its reach.
  
  Pre-orders are available now, and we’re currently scheming a two-week tour in Montana, Oregon, California, Utah, and Colorado for the first two weeks of October.
  

Available: October 6, 2026.

Five Things I’ve Learned After a Year of The Way Around

1. The Surface Area of the Self Is Shifty. One thing that’s been fascinating is the ongoing, unfurling, unending stress-test of the ego when putting something like a book—or I’m guessing a record, an art show, anything expressive—into the public sphere. Crediting my therapist here in the lead-up to the publication, when she said that, by publishing a book you’re voluntarily expanding the surface area of the self that makes contact with the world, and that’ll bring with it all sorts of interesting and challenging encounters—more contact, more critique, more praise, more vulnerable side doors and Shanghai tunnels to trap and corner and boost you and, perhaps most interestingly, respond with . . . indifference.
   
   One year in, I’ve grown a kind of baleen, a filtration system around the self, where any praise or criticism or indifference meets a bouncer at the door who asks: Is this helpful? Are you feeling overly identified with the critic, the praise, the silence? How is this instructive and decentering, or how is it inviting more solipsism and narrowing? Tending with caution to what you let in and what you let go is not unlike an emotional blubber I’ve built this past year.
   

2. You Let the Book Lead. The Way Around has been knocking around in my imagination for ten years, several of those years in earnest as a book project. So much of that experience has felt solitary, a minefield of doubt and revelation, promise and defeat. I lit the manuscript on fire once. Maybe twice.
   
   One of the most amazing things, now that the book is a year old, is that the final expression has become itself a calling card, a point of departure to begin new conversations with people and with the world. My friend and fellow Milkweed author, Scott Chaskey, said to me on a podcast interview: “Now, it’s time for the book to lead.”
   
   And perhaps this book has been leading the whole time. Now that it’s in the world, gulping oxygen and reaching to surprising corners of the world (here’s an updated list of events, interviews, and podcasts), what comes back in these exchanges feels animate, alive, and not entirely my own. Summoning Percival Everett’s Mama Bear School of Art philosophy here—once he publishes a book, he thinks to himself: OK, little guy. Go find your way. Don’t come back to Momma. It’s your path now.
   
   

   

   First clear glimpses of Mount Kailash, Tibet. August 2014.

   
   

3. Grow Thick and Thin Skin. In my limited experience, publishing a book requires simultaneous callusing and porosity, and with that comes an intimate opportunity to better develop my relationship with the self: passing through gauntlets of aforementioned praise and also getting the shit kicked out of you. I told myself I wouldn’t read reviews of the book. I failed. I’ve read every one of them. Several times. I promised never to encourage readers to leave Amazon reviews because, well, Fuck Bezos and his rockets, but I’ve checked in on them regularly. Goodreads, too.
   
   It’s a strange and small thing, this longing for validation and acceptance. But I think a year on I’ve learned to hold it all lightly, to notice when the focus on receptivity carves into my focus and creative drive. Because confidence and durability is required to continue making lasting work, too. I suppose the invitation is this: What are the conditions and habits to nurture that’ll position us to continue making work, each day, continue the practice and stay inspired, enraged, in love, embodied, and radically generous? This is the only rubric that matters.
   

4. Publishing Is Polytemporal. To have taken the better half of a decade to publish this 180-page book feels, at times, embarrassing. It’s short. Only three parts. Not that hard, right? What I’ve shared along the way at readings is that the original manuscript was nearly double in length—not uncommon for many authors.
   
   What’s been wild is to work on something for so long that both yourself and your craft are constantly changing, upgrading, evolving, alongside the ever-unfolding world. And that makes for this polytemporal rubix cube moving target. It’s like shooting clay pigeons but you’re starting with a slingshot, then handed a pellet gun, then a pistol, and a rifle, all while the clay is being lobbed in every direction at once from shifting machines.
   
   A year on, I can still get behind most all of the writing and the ideas and shape of its narrative. That was a function of ruthless revision and cutting, asking myself: Would I be happy with this sentence in twenty years? Editing for the long game, for perennial bounty, not annual pyrotechnics, felt critical—albeit crazy-making. That’s not to say there aren’t things in there I wouldn’t change, or that I’d add, but the house was built to last.
   

5. Audiences Are On Their Own Timeline. When you publish your first book, or anything for that matter, you oddly expect people to either read the thing immediately or not at all—which is entirely a math problem, as you’d spent unreasonable hours, days, and years on the thing so the least people could do in respect would be to drop everything and read it, right? Wrong.
   
   That’s not how literature works. In fact, one of the most enjoyable parts about the process has been receiving notes from readers just now finding it and having their own experiences. Seems obvious, but what a gift to have something that crawls around and slithers into the minds and hearts of others on its own time, in perpetuity, that someone at a certain time in their life might decide: Hey, I’ll try this book out. I’ll see what it does for me.
   
   Here’s the sappy lesson: You never know how your expression, your actions, your generosity will affect another, how it’ll be metabolized and when. So you continue down the path, continue trusting the impulses. You listen. Poke stuff. Bathe in curiosity, tenderized by the generosity and risk-taking of others’ expressions and make it fuel for your own contribution.
   
   “You never let go of the thread.”

Final Thoughts . . .

I’m thrilled. It’s been a lot of ground to traverse. I’ve never felt equally more proud of what I’ve done and more insecure and sensitive than this past year.

Putting a book together is so much bigger than a book. It’s commitment on steroids. It’s an endurance event, a long dark night of the soul and squeezing out the other end caring for sentences more than anything else, though you’ve privately given up a million times. It’s daily conversations with yourself about priorities, about what matters, about what you’re here for.

Why you, why now?

By the end of last year’s 20-plus stop hardcover tour, I ended up in Murphys, California, where I grew up, a small town in the Sierra foothills in California, in front of family and friends—about fifty in attendance. My AP English teacher was there. My middle school teacher, too. My father stood next to a family friend who’d recently lost her own son in a head-on collision.

Here, I remember feeling more myself than ever in my life, speaking not from a place of expectation but fully owning the creative act, the idiosyncratic urges I placed here in this book. I spoke to its deepest longing without apology. Not for what my high school teacher knew me to be. Not for what my father expected to hear from his son after all these years. Not for what I thought this crowd could or couldn’t handle. I spoke with compassion for self and for the audience and for this impossibly complex world, guided by what I scribbled in the margins of my notes:

“Sincere Motivation.”
“Trust your voice.”
“Slow down.”

Thank you, everyone, for helping me walk into and around those three things, to be motivated by integrity, to trust one’s creative shape, and therefore the world—to be patient in the shaping.

To Deepen:

1. Preorder the paperback version: Milkweed, Bookshop.org, or your local indie.

2. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to The Jasmine Dialogues. (Helps me tremendously keep doing this thing.)

3. Support Milkweed Editions with a donation, or become a sustaining member.