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Blackout Tuesday
In the days after Charlie died, I learned something I had somehow never known before. It’s a tool, a trick, a way of being in the world when the world spins out of control:
Close your eyes.
Do it when the visible world around you feels charged with pain and you can’t bear to look. Do it when loss swells up in your throat. Do it when you’re talking and words feel insufficient and meaningless and hopelessly futile.
Close your eyes. Keep talking, keep thinking, keep feeling - just take a moment to be in darkness. Reduce the input. Breathe.
Our hearts break for George Floyd, whose breath was taken before our eyes. The brutality of the cops, the pleading of bystanders, the calls of Floyd for his mother - this was slow-motion murder, an unambiguous recapitulation and embodimet of centuries of state brutality against Black people. Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Delrawn Small - how many names, how many bodies do we need to see erased before we say: enough.
And oh yeah: we’re in the midst of a global pandemic and our president is a red hot pig without an ounce of empathy.
So here we are, the air swirling with smoke and aerosolized virus, deep in upheaval and upset and uprising. The past rears up to bark, the future bends and branches, events are charged with history. It is a terrifying and overwhelming time to be alive.
Working on “Good Trouble: Lessons from the Civil Rights Playbook” revealed knowhow that feels especially relevant right now - especially about the deep spiritual and tactical value of nonviolence and the redemptive power of suffering. But now is not the moment.
Now I’m not a reporter or a writer or a person with opinions about the world. I’m a grieving father and what I know about this moment is this: close your eyes.
I mean it in the same way that activists have called on people to mark Blackout Tuesday. We’re not closing our eyes to pain we normally ignore that we now cannot. We are right to shout and rage and take to the streets. By all means, open your eyes for that (and for godsakes, wear a fucking face mask).
We need clarity and courage to get through this. And that means taking moments to stop, go dark and find that small quiet voice. It has vastly more valuable things to say than anything we see around us.
Grief in COVIDtimes
When your child dies, people say: I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine.
That’s what the ER doctor in Salt Lake City said. I was like, fuck you doc. *I* can’t imagine. (Also, what are you sorry for? What did you do? Is there something you’re not telling me?)
A week or so later I was out in the world and I was like: fuck all y’all. People on the street, in cars, in shops, chatting and texting and sipping their beverages and going about their lives. The clouds in the sky and the birds in the trees and even the trees themselves - how could everything just go on?
Then coronavirus hit and everyone lost their minds. The world literally stopped. People said they’d never experienced anything like it - this mysterious, disassociated, uncomfortable feeling.
Turns out there’s a word for it. The word is grief.
Welcome, friends. Settle in. There’s no getting over this. Or as LA Mayor Eric Garcetti said the other day: “We are not moving past Covid-19; we are learning to live with it.”
As it is with covid, so it is with grief.
That’s the thing about dealing with a global health emergency during a period of soul-shaking grief: the crisis doesn’t seem so bad. As anxiety has escalated in the world at large, mine has stabilized. Suddenly I’ve got company. Beyond our family and all the people who knew and loved Charlie – suddenly everyone is beside themselves, raw and anxious and weirdly dislocated.
Really, it feels like I was just becoming aware of a terrifying truth about the world when suddenly everyone was forced to confront the same reality.
Mainly: we are mortal, fragile beings and everything we build our lives upon can go in a second. There’s no escaping it - things go sideways, the center will not hold, death and disorder are closer than we ever knew. The safety and security we take for granted to operate in the world is an illusion. Safety can really only be achieved in moments, and even then it is mostly a story we tell ourselves.
Reckoning with this truth makes us crazy. These are intense, insane, heightened, upsetting, unsettling,traumatizing, historic, spooky, sad times. We feel fundamentally unsafe. Everyone - literally everyone, even those who claim everyone else is overreacting - has been forced to respond to a mutating biological force that upsets the expected order of things, busts through barriers, and kills. Death is crashing over countries. It’s passing through our bodies in tiny spiked balls, attaching to airways, suffocating the ill and elderly and poor and plenty of others besides.
The question for all of us is clear: what do we do with this awful truth? How do we keep moving forward knowing the ground beneath our feet is so shaky, that every step forward moves us deeper into the abyss?
A lot of us don’t do so well. Many spin out in anxiety and worry, holing up in hidey holes of isolation and inaction. Others are in full denial, pretending nothing has actually changed and if we just plow forward everything will return to “normal.”
But all around us, you can see others discover deep reserves of resiliency. They’ve found ways to help, to make use of what they have, to appreciate their loved ones. They’ve awoken to disparities previously treated as rhetorical social “issues.” They’ve at last embraced mutual aid, paid leave, essential work.
Right after Charlie died I felt a strong resistance toward anything that felt even a little bit like a silver lining. I refused to entertain any suggestion of a “growth opportunity” or “life lesson.” His death was a tragedy and it made no sense and nothing good would come from it. Anything beyond that felt like a betrayal.
But as the months and weeks have gone on - today is day 145 AC - I am sensing the arrival of another, equally foundational but less terrifying set of truths. I felt it in the first days of grief, learning that on the other side of the world, 172 people had died in a Syrian airliner crash - I was struck by how awful it must be for all those families, how hard it is to lose someone with such uncertainty. And then I felt it with the helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant and eight others, how agonizing it would be to lose someone with so much attention from strangers. And again with the news of the first coronavirus fatalities, isolated in crowded ICUs, separated from their loved ones, suffocating and terrified.
And there it was, an unintended result of unimaginable loss: an expansion of empathy, some small growth in my capacity for compassion.
I now look at these losses and can say, really for the first time: I am so sorry; I can imagine.
100 AC
One hundred days after Charlie.
There’s so much you should know about this kid - he was such a brilliant, kind, curious soul, and one of the big things I’ve learned this year is that while it’s important to talk about his death, it’s better to talk about his life.*
But today is 100 AC. And so today I want to talk about that number.
Lately I’ve noticed people use “AC” to mark the before and after of Coronavirus. I get it: the world feels different now. We’re all looking for a way to wrap our heads around it. But I felt a pang when I first heard AC in a post by someone who was forced to stay home and miss spring break and how it was “the worst thing ever.”
No, sorry: it really isn’t.
Then today I learned a crazy fact. The New York Times timeline of the pandemic begins with the government in Wuhan China confirming cases of coronovirus on… Dec 31 2019.
The same day Charlie died.
Which means we’re ALL at 100 AC.
This is spooky and strange and does nothing to relieve the temptation I feel to conflate Charlie’s death with all this craziness. It’s hard not to feel like whatever caused his accident is also responsible for all the current chaos, misfortune, and unease. It feels like something’s been knocked out of place in the foundation of things and the whole Jenga tower is teetering.
Of course the two things have nothing to do with one another. Charlie’s death was sudden, definitive, senseless. It came out of nowhere. It was singular. It was like the crack of a tree branch on a windless day.
This is different. The pandemic is ominous, looming, amorphous. We can see it coming. It’s happening to all of us, all over the world. And for most of us, it’s preventable. We stay in our homes and hunker down inside our tight protective pods. We tell ourselves: we’ll get through this. A lot of us are itching to get back to “normal.”
But it’s feeling more and more like there’s no normal to get back to. There’s no erasing or recovering from a shift this big - there’s only learning to live with it.
And learning to feel it.
The author and grief expert David Kessler was interviewed this week about this moment. Our days feel unreal and scary. Something horrible happened and everything is the same and eerily different. Death feels close.
In moments like this, Kessler says it’s crucial to name the feelings and let them come:
“So many have told me in the past week, ‘I’m telling my coworkers I’m having a hard time,’ or ‘I cried last night.’ When you name it, you feel it and it moves through you. Emotions need motion. It’s important we acknowledge what we go through. One unfortunate byproduct of the self-help movement is we’re the first generation to have feelings about our feelings. We tell ourselves things like, I feel sad, but I shouldn’t feel that; other people have it worse. We can — we should — stop at the first feeling. I feel sad. Let me go for five minutes to feel sad. Your work is to feel your sadness and fear and anger whether or not someone else is feeling something. Fighting it doesn’t help because your body is producing the feeling. If we allow the feelings to happen, they’ll happen in an orderly way, and it empowers us. Then we’re not victims.”
Boy, can I relate. Over the past 100 days I’ve learned a ton about feelings about feelings.
I feel bad about feeling normal. The world goes on. I’m in it. But then in a second the loss comes rushing back and I’m struck with the overpowering sense of: how can I - how can anyone - just go on?
Other times I think about Charlie and it hurts, physically. I clench up. My throat tightens. I feel acid creep up the back of my throat. Call it Grief-Flux. I learned a word from the flight medic who treated Charlie on the helicopter that took him off the mountain: AGONAL. It describes a pattern of breathing and brainstem reflex. It’s involuntary. It happens after the heart stops beating. I can’t get that word out of my head. And then I feel bad about feeling bad.
And then there are times I feel OK, good even. The truth is that over the past 100 days I’ve been connected to the world and the people I love in ways I never have before. Sunsets have been more vivid, jokes have been funnier, conversations have been deeper and more vulnerable. So many good people have shown up, people I haven’t seen in ages, laying themselves bare, opening up about their own losses.
And then I feel bad about that.
But Kessler is right: there’s no use ranking our losses or feeling bad about how we feel. We’re better off riding the feelings as they happen.
Right now people in New York and Italy and elsewhere are banging on pots and yelling from windows every night to honor emergency response workers. I hear that some are taking the opportunity to release howls of grief and shouts of frustration.
I like this idea very much. A lot of us could use a good primal scream right now.
In crisis there will be moments of normalcy, boredom, heart-wrenching agony and intense connection and satisfaction. The only way out is through.
It’s too early to talk about how we can all come out better from this - trying to frame this is as a “growth opportunity” feels offensive or worse, a betrayal. The loved ones we lost don’t get to “grow.”
But at the same time I’m hoping that my friend Michaela is right - the other day on a Zoom call she said what’s happening around the world now feels like “a hard reset.” We’ve unplugged, stopped moving, powered down. We’re taking walks, cooking for ourselves, doing the dishes, holing up with our nearest and dearest.
And from this semi-quarantine I send out my sincerest hope that we’ll all emerge from 100 AC with a deeper appreciation of life and what comes after.
* Among the stories I keep thinking about: the time Charlie gave a campaign speech at Harvard Westlake about how the entire student government system was a sham. Or the time he had a heart palpitation while working in a robotics lab at UC Berkeley, and how he befriended the cardiologist who treated him, and how he ended up getting an internship in that cardiologist’s lab. The time just before surgery to repair his heart condition, as the drugs were flowing through the IV, he said again and again, “I must retain my faculties!”
How does this story go?
A friend texted the other day: the show must go on.
Must it?
I keep hearing his voice, seeing his smile or the arch of his eyebrow. It’s not that I think he’s still alive - it’s just that I keep feeling how it was when he walked in a room or picked up the phone: the warmth, the kindness, the formality, that brilliant Charlie essence.
The point is: he was just here.
In stories, people die at key moments - they’re sacrificed or struck down or lost as part of a larger struggle or narrative.
So how does this story go? Is there really no lesson, no reason, no sense, no story, no sacrifice, no purpose? How does a complex, brilliant, soulful 20-year-old boy-man just cease to be?
There are no answers, obviously. No sense to be made. There is only the loss and the living with it.
Meanwhile my stepmom Pam is seriously ill, hooked up to a breathing apparatus at Kaiser with advanced COPD. She’s 82 and fierce; she and my mom (her wife of 40 years) are coping as best they can, but it’s not looking great. Sitting with her over days and weeks, watching her make her final departure, it felt like the absolute reverse of what happened with Charlie: this was drawn-out, painful, medically complicated. Between the two, we got the full range of death.
All of which is only underscoring an unavoidable truth: life is precious and fragile and the end is coming for us all.
Hurray!
I will say I’ve gotten a lot of relief from a mysterious but super effective therapy called EMDR, and I feel better writing and drawing and walking - getting up and moving connects me to Charlie in a real embodied way. It has also been great to read Charlie’s writing - short stories have been trickling in from friends at Columbia, and they’re amazing and also spooky (one includes a ski accident, another involves organ donation). Also, crucially, I’ve been helped by friends near and far who’ve reached out with well wishes and prayers and love - the only real consolation in any of this is a feeling I can only describe as “with-ness.” Thank you for being with.
About that: I worried about posting this message, and others like it, to social media. I don’t for a moment want to be seen to be performing or seeking sympathy with periodic #griefupdates. Honestly, I shared these because #1) writing and drawing are just what I do, and I’m not stopping now, #2) it’s draining and difficult re-processing with everyone I care about, so I share in part to let my close and extended circles know how it’s going, and, most importantly, #3) writing these feels like putting more Charlie in the world and keeping his memory alive - and that makes this feel less horrible.
Pure, unwavering band of light
My mom gave me a paperback of “Breakfast of Champions” when I was fourteen. I devoured it, then “Cat’s Cradle” and “Sirens of Titan” and “Mother Night” and eventually all of Vonnegut - he was my first literary love, the first writer who seemed to speak TO me. He was deep, strange, sad and playful - and he drew pictures! Like the doodly star shape in “BoC” which he included with this note: “To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is a picture of my asshole:”
When Charlie was fourteen I found that old paperback and passed it on to him. He loved it too. He read a few more Vonneguts but moved on to Neil Gaiman, Haruki Murakami and Don DeLillo (plus a ton of genre fantasy writers like VE Schwab and Brandon Sanderson). During our week in Park City we went to a bookstore in town and got Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and Ben Lerner’s “The Topeka School.” He gobbled up the Carver the day before the accident. He loved it and we had a good talk about how Carver managed to create whole worlds with so few words.
This week I re-read “Breakfast of Champions.” Happy to report it holds up - it’s just as deep and gonzo as it was when I was sixteen (it’s also, happily, smart about sex and race - the 1973 version of woke). I’d forgotten that Vonnegut wrote it as a 50th birthday present to himself - this felt especially meaningful now as I creak past 51. The ending is rough - there’s a burst of violence and hopelessness that was not at all the inspirational message I was hoping for.
But there’s one passage I love and that has something to say about this moment and Charlie and how it feels to grieve him. It comes during a scene in a hotel cocktail lounge, where the townsfolk of Midland confront an abstract painter about a work recently purchased by the town for $50,000:
The original was twenty feet wide and sixteen feet high. The field was Hawaiian Avocado, a green wall paint manufactured by the O’Hare Paint and Varnish Company in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. The vertical stripe was day-glo orange reflecting tape. This was the most expensive piece of art, not counting buildings and tombstones, and not counting the statue of Abraham Lincoln in front of the old (black) high school.
The painter is named Rabo Karabekian (Vonnegut is up there with Pynchon in his love of names - the heroes of the book are Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover). A cocktail waitress tells him that his painting is stupid and bad and that she’s “seen better pictures by a five-year old.” Here’s what happens next:
Karabekian slid off his bar stool so he could face all those enemies standing up… “Listen—” he said so calmly, “I have read the editorials against my painting in your wonderful newspaper. I have read every word of the hate mail you have been thoughtful enough to send to New York.”
“The painting did not exist until I made it.” Karabekian went on. “Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all the five-year-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and playfully what it took me many angry years to find.
“I now give you my work of honor,” he went on, “that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal–the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us–in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.”
That’s it - the unwavering and pure band of light. I’m holding on to Charlie’s, summoning it as best I can and hoping that even though he’s gone, we can keep it here on earth.
Shloshim. He’s Still Gone.
It’s 31 AC/ one month after Charlie. Or as the Jews have it, it’s Shloshim—which means I can now get a haircut and sit on an actual chair but I still shouldn’t go to a concert or redecorate my house.
Update: he’s still gone.
I’m against it.
Things that help: hot and sour soup, saying the kaddish, walking.
Today I listened to a recording Charlie’s girlfriend Izzy made of friends from Columbia sharing memories. One girl remembered how she once mentioned she didn’t know what yuzu was; he showed up at her door that night offering a package of yuzu gummies. A number of friends talked about how he liked to wander the city, how he made a big show of drawing the perfect espresso from the inappropriately fancy machine in his dorm, how he got into heated debates at parties over his preference for Camus over Sartre and his belief that Toni Morrison was derivative of William Faulkner. Also his love of dogs, “wholesome memes,” and super complicated puzzle games.
“There were so many moments that felt like secret worlds for him,” one friend said. “You could see him doing his own thing and he entered a secret world that you suddenly got to be a part of.”
For me, this is all happening in present tense: Present. And tense. Charlie is walking those streets, pouring that perfect coffee, exploring those secret worlds.
And after a month of full-time processing, I’m trying to get back into some regular routine. Eliza and Oscar are back at school and doing pretty well (Oscar is just starting the new baseball season and doing the lighting on a school play; Eliza has a full schedule and is excited about her new classes). Hoping grief can be a part time job - albeit a really intense one. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to the friends and loved ones who’ve rallied around - one of the strangest things about this experience is how it brings you into such close, intimate and vulnerable contact with the best people in the world—at your absolute worst. There is no consolation, God doesn’t have a plan and there is no sense to be made. But I feel surrounded by love and so very grateful to our family and community.
Tell Me Why
He is gone, he is here
I keep thinking about Charlie as a little kid. I like looking at pictures of him - that amazing ‘fro, the brief chubby phase, the incredible costumes (Lego piece! Book! Lincoln!). He was and is all those things. He is gone and he is here.
All the love and razzing and study and arguments and travel and movies and music and food and adventure collected in that sweet soul.
He was just starting to really use it all on his own, to find his own way. There is nothing, nothing, good about his death. He had just really set out on his own and begun to taste a little, not nearly enough, of what it is to be fully awake and aware of his own weird brilliant self. And then he died. And it is not OK, not right, there has been a horrible mistake.
But it is also true that his life was beautiful and it ended in a split second on a mountaintop doing something he loved on a rolling stretch of downhill that was smooth and sweet.
Dear Charlie,
Eulogy for Charlie Noxon, 9/10/1999- 12/31/2019
Dear Charlie,
When you were little and in a snit - upset or wiggly or whatever - we had a trick: we’d look in your face and tell you a story.
It could be about anything, really. I used to make up crazy stories for you about a made-up race of creatures called the Wallawalladoodads. They had alien bodies and drank grape soda and they always shared their toys. Remember?
The point is, the minute we looked in your face and started talking, no matter how upset you felt, you’d get this intense narcotic look, and just lock in and listen.
Right now I want to tell you another story. It’s really sad - but I promise, it’s really good.
Today we put you in the underground, where we all began, and where we’re all going… dust to dust, all that. So much happens down there that scientists barely understand. Microbes move, nutrients fertilize and roots from different trees pleach together and communicate. Down there life and death are forever mixing, mutating and expanding.
And today you’re going down there, going on adventure. Don’t be worried.
As I say this stuff about nutrients and microbes I can feel you stirring, needing to say something. Your dad’s getting all woo woo and weird and vaguely mystical. You need to tell me about how you just read something about soil ecosystems and you disagree. You’ve got a study to cite and an article from the Economist to call up on your shitty old iPhone that proves you’re right.
And of course Charlie - you’re right - you’re pretty much always right. You lapped me on smarts (and height and handsomeness) years and years ago.
Oscar’s 14 and he just did the same thing. It’s killing me.
It’s not, I’m joking. Of course you know we’ll never stop being impressed by how much you know, how many books you’ve read, and opinions you’ve considered and languages you speak. It’s a pleasure to watch you speed across the vast network of data and knowledge you carry around in that big brain of yours.
Don’t think we’ll ever stop finding ways to tell people that our son missed one question on the SAT - and that was only because he left that question blank and he was pissed about it.
But I need to say that’s not what we really love about you Charlie. There’s so much else.
It’s all the stuff that makes you so kind and sweet and soulful. It’s what you wrote in your Dvar Torah about the spiritual value of apology and how God in the Torah has to answer for his mistakes—TELL ME ABOUT IT.
This week I’ve been thinking to honor Charlie we should all get into the streets to demand impeachment - of God. Talk about high crimes and misdemeanors.
Anyway. What we love is how you chase down random dogs on the street to give them pets. It’s how on Halloween in freshman year at Columbia… you dressed up as Ignatius T. Reilly from Confederacy of Dunces… and didn’t mind all that much that zero-point-zero-one percent of your classmates had any idea who you were. It’s how you and Eliza laugh and razz and love one another, no matter where you are.
It’s how you’re always the first guy at a family gathering to connect with a little kid.
You’ve also struggled a lot, I know. It’s just not easy being Charlie Noxon. You’ve had a hard time socially, and with girls and rejection and authority. You have strong opinions and a little bit of a fascist streak. You’ve wrestled with deep existential loneliness and thought a lot about whether this is even a world you want to live in.
But just look. Look how you grew. Look at how you came into yourself. Look at how over the past year or so you found such poise and confidence and happiness.
This is why YOU being the person of ALL people who died on a mountain far from home on New Year’s Eve can be something more than a tragedy. It is SO hard to see any pattern or sense in this at all… but even in this horrific week I can see the beautiful arc of your life.
What I mean is that lives are as long as they are. And yours is - WAS - too fucking short.
But just look at how you grew, look at all the incredible people who adore you, look at the communities you touched and changed and brought life to. Look at how over the past three months you found intimacy and connection and the first gorgeous, intense phases of love.
Of course we’ll never stop wishing we could know what you’d go on to do from here - the discoveries and things you’d make, your career and family and all the rest of it. Thinking about that absolutely breaks all our hearts.
But look again at that beautiful arc. Look at the sweet, lonely, pained kid in the newsie cap - and how he grew into that beautiful man, who just a few days ago was shushing down a hill with his brother and sister and me, feeling good, riding so high, on the cusp of a new year and a big life.
It’s a good story Charlie. And we all know you love a good story.
I love you Charlie. And I always will.
Love,
Dad
Art exhibit, speaking dates
The Leon Family Gallery in Virginia Beach is putting up 25 giclée prints from “Good Trouble” and five original watercolors, with an opening and gallery talk on Monday Nov 4 at 6 pm.
It’s my first ever exhibit, and I’m overcome with excitement (and terror) at the prospect of seeing pictures scrawled in my journal blown up, framed and available for sale - all proceeds go to the Center for Popular Democracy and the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater. I’m happy to have these images seen outside a book, and doubly excited to unveil five new (full size, full color, actual AHHT) pieces based on interviews and research into racial justice in Virginia (landing site of the first slave ship, home to activists who protested school and bus segregation years before Rosa Parks or Little Rock).
If you’re anywhere near VA (or have VA friends or relatives into art or, you know, justice), come on out!
Or check out my Instagram: @noxonpics, where I post stuff all the time.
I’m also speaking at the Virginia Wesleyan University on Tuesday Nov 5 at 11 am, Agape Church at 10 am on Sunday Nov 3. Details below:
Monday Nov 4, 6 pm
United Jewish Federation of Tidewater
Virginia Beach
Leon Family Gallery
Tuesday Nov 5, 11 am
Virginia Wesleyan University
Refugee Sketches in NY Times
I got a chance to interview and draw portraits of refugees and asylum seekers who saw reflections of their own experience in the musical masterpiece “Fiddler on the Roof.” Those words and pictures were printed in the New York Times Arts & Leisure section on Sunday. These faces and stories need to be seen in a time of hostility and fear. Check out the drawings in “ILLUSTRATIONS.”
Jewish Book Council sketch-a-palooza
It was such a thrill to be back in NYC last week to pitch “Good Trouble” to the Jewish Book Council. The conference itself is a trip - I joined 45 other authors in a room packed with people who book writers at JCCs, synagogues and book festivals. Each writer gets exactly two minutes to talk about their book. It’s like literary speed dating. To calm my nerves while I waited I sketched all the other writers - in previous years those sketches have been published in the JBC literary magazine Paper Brigade. Check out 20 of the least-monstrous on my IG: @noxonpics.
Publication Party at the Strand, NYC
So excited to celebrate the publication of GOOD TROUBLE Tuesday, January 8, in New York City at arguably the greatest book store on earth, Strand Books on Broadway.
I’ll have stories to tell and pictures to share and a conversation with Jennifer Epps-Addison, the inspiring and fearless activist who heads the Center for Popular Democracy.
Please join:
https://z-upload.facebook.com/events/756492608038620/
GOOD TROUBLE drops Jan 7
Super excited to share my first book of words and pictures, GOOD TROUBLE. Publication is set for January 7. Here’s the back cover copy from Abrams:
Overwhelmed by today’s political climate and accompanying pessimism, journalist and illustrator Christopher Noxon found encouragement on a visit to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. He came away inspired and determined to learn the deeper lessons of the movement that would lead to progress today. Good Trouble is the result of that reckoning. In words and vivid pen-and-watercolor illustrations, Noxon dives into the real stories behind the front lines of the Montgomery bus boycott and the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins and illuminates notable figures like Rosa Parks and Bayard Rustin, all while exploring the parallels between the Civil Rights movement and the present moment. With a fresh look at historic episodes and new interviews with its heroes, Good Trouble gleans essential wisdom and tactics modern day activists can embrace, urging them forward to create change. Good Trouble is evidence that the past could be the best roadmap in inspiring action and hope not just for now, but for all times.
Atlantic essay on Plus Ones
Let the Coattail Promotional Tour begin. In advance of Monday’s Emmys, the Atlantic published my essay on men on the red carpet and “the plight” (really?) of the Plus One. Read on for the true story of a wardrobe malfunction fictionalized in the first chapter of the upcoming novel…
