Dear Jane-Friends:
It’s been a glorious sprint to October since my book, Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Unntamed Jane, was published. The positive energy for Austen as we approach her 250th birthday has been palpable, with audiences so very ready to laugh at her best comic lines and to find the joy in one-on-one conversations. My own energy hasn’t let up, which is good because there’s much yet to come before December 16, 2025!
Today I’m back in Phoenix, where the beastly three-digit temps are finally breaking. It’s a big deal for someone like me who grew up in Minnesota. The well-worn joke in my home state is that there are only two seasons, 1) winter and 2) road construction. Here in Arizona, our version of the joke has the two seasons as 1) whining and 2) gloating. We’re finally emerging, as Jane Austen put it in her letters, from the “dreadful Hot weather” that’s kept us in a “continual state of Inelegance.” If your state or province has a two-season joke, please share it in the comments. I’d love to add more of them to my repertoire.
HIGHLIGHTS SO FAR FROM THIS UNBELIEVABLE 16-CITY, 4-COUNTRY WILD FOR AUSTEN BOOK TOUR
About the continued relevance of the Minnesota road construction joke? Can confirm. Last week I got to travel to Minneapolis for a Wild for Austen event at the beautiful Magers and Quinn Bookstore. Would you believe four (!) of my undergrad professors from Augsburg University attended? And they no doubt also braved countless “Right Lane Closed” obstacles to get there. All of September’s Wild for Austen events—in Phoenix, Dallas, Tulsa, Pittsburgh, and Atlanta—were amazing, but having my incredible profs from the 1980s there in the front row, cheering me on? Still brings tears to my eyes thinking about it. They made my work possible.
I’m grateful it was all recorded on video. Andrea Kaston Tange led a fun conversation on wildness in Austen’s writings, life, and legacy. Old friends from my college dorm floor reassembled. My parents were in the audience, too, with my aunt and a cousin. I think they were mostly on good behavior? My aunt did lose her mind temporarily when we first stepped foot into the bookstore. She accosted a total stranger, who was in line buying some completely other book, telling her that an author had just entered the store, then pointing to me. The stranger naturally high-tailed it out of there, and I attempted to hide behind a bookcase. Call it my own a little moment of insight into the fictional world of Jane Fairfax—one in which a person simply must be grateful to be so fiercely loved.
THE WILD FOR AUSTEN BOOK TOUR CONTINUES
This week I’m excited to be heading to the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting in Baltimore. It’s the largest meeting of its kind to date, with *950 people* expected. The conference theme is “No Check to My Genius from Beginning to End,” and I’m participating in a plenary panel with three other authors. Our impossible task of a morning is to attempt to describe Jane Austen’s genius in five minutes. How could that go wrong? With Name That Tune on my mind, I’ve been joking, “Five minutes? I could do it in two.”
After that, I’ll be heading to Australia, the United Kingdom, then back to the US and Canada, with upcoming book events at the National Library of Australia, the State Library of New South Wales, the British Library, the Huntington Library, and the Toronto Public Library, as well as a lovely event near to home at Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale. The British Library event is being livestreamed to other libraries across the UK. Never in my wildest dreams! (A full book tour list with links follows this message.)
PODCASTS! PODCASTS! PODCASTS!
I’ve gotten to talk Wild for Austen with radio and podcast audiences, thanks to Phoenix and Atlanta NPR interviewers and hosts of terrific shows. If podcasts are your jam, then check out these just-released episodes:
The Austen Pod Squad, with the JASNA Virtual Region
The Upper Pen Podcast with Dakota Van Linden
Kickass Women of History with Amy Cotterill (on Austen and Sydney Owenson)
Sports Will Save Us All with Sasha Graham (on Austen and roller derby)
Thanks to the hosts of these wonderful shows for being so welcoming, for reading and appreciating Wild for Austen, and for posing such thoughtful questions. I’ve recorded a few more interviews that I can’t tell you about yet, but fingers crossed! And stay tuned.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT . . .
My TBR pile has not budged at all this month. My bad. Plans to read for pleasure on planes were not executed. But I did do some non-Austen things, including letting our older son escort me to an actual movie theatre. He kindly arranged for us to see Spinal Tap: The End Continues together the weekend it opened. He knows the first Spinal Tap is one of my all-time favorites. (I might quote from it annoyingly often?) It’s true this son often has some big John Thorpe energy toward me, but this was not one of those days. He was the perfect companion to the theatre, and he read the room right that straight-up comedy was just what a mom needed to get her mind off of everything she might be trying to get her mind off of.
That same son also talked me and my husband into going to see the new Paul Thomas Anderson film, One Battle After Another. That son promised, if we went, that he’d discuss the film with us afterward. Clever kid. Motivating factor. He also said he rated it a five-star feature and thought we would, too; he was absolutely right, once again. I cannot recommend this movie highly enough. We got to see it in IMAX (wow), but really, see it however you can. (Fun fact: It’s loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland.) I can’t get One Battle After Another out of my mind, in the best possible way. That kind of film. Not easy to watch, but so memorable. Art! Go.
ONE LAST CUTE STORY
This past month has been a lot, right? It’s also had some really heartwarming moments for me, which I do not take for granted at all. At the book launch at Changing Hands, Phoenix, I was in conversation with my dear friend the fiction writer Tara Ison—truly a treat—and shared space that night with many Arizona State University colleagues, current and former students, longtime friends, and new neighbors. Also in the audience were some of our old neighbors, a father and his very poised 7-year-old daughter. (To repurpose a line from Austen’s Persuasion, these aren’t just good neighbors; they are the best.) He told me afterward that his daughter left the event full of questions for me. She especially wanted to know exactly how many books I’d written. Her father told her, “I think five?” To which she replied, “What? I’ve already written 20 books.” She’s definitely one to watch! Love her.
Your aspirationally humble and selectively obedient servant,
Devoney
P. S. BOLD REQUEST. If you haven’t yet purchased Wild for Austen, today’s a great day to do it on Bookshop.org, where they’re offering free shipping as part of their Anti-Prime Days. This book will make a good holiday gift! I’d be happy to sign and snail mail a bookplate to you, especially if we’re not going to see each other at one of the events listed below. Just drop me an email.
P. P. S. RATE AND REVIEW IT? If you’ve read and enjoyed the book, then I would certainly not discourage you from rating and reviewing it in any of the places you might do so. (Goodreads, they say, has the most impact.) Thanks in advance for any efforts you might make to get this book into more readers’ hands—and Austen’s 250th onto more radars! Send me a photo of Wild for Austen if you spot it at your local bookstore or library or “in the wild.” I’ll leave you with a pic from a friend with a great sense of humor at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Until soon!
WILD FOR AUSTEN UPCOMING BOOK TOUR EVENTS!
Oct. 11th (Baltimore), JASNA Annual General Meeting (in person and virtual)
Oct. 23rd (Tempe, AZ), ASU Book Group (in person and virtual)
Oct. 26th (Canberra), Canberra Writers Festival, National Library of Australia (in person)
Oct. 30th (Sydney), Sydney Writers Festival, Library of New South Wales (in person)
Nov. 1st and 2nd (Canberra), Jane Austen Society of Australia (in person)
Nov. 6th (Edinburgh), Edinburgh Bookshop (in person)
Nov. 9th (Online), Jane Austen Society of North America (virtual)
Nov. 10th (Durham), Collected Bookshop (in person)
Nov. 12th (London), Waterstone’s Tottenham Court Road (in person)
Nov. 13th (London), The British Library (in person)
Nov. 14th (Cambridge), Jane Austen Society of Cambridge, Clare Hall (in person)
Nov. 20th (Scottsdale), Poisoned Pen Bookstore (in person)
Dec. 2nd (San Marino, CA), The Huntington Library (film discussion; in person)
Dec. 6th (New York City), JASNA Greater New York (in person)
Dec. 9th (Toronto), Toronto Public Library (in person)
Thank you to Changing Hands Phoenix (9/2), Dallas Museum of Art’s Arts & Letters Live (9/4), Magic City Books, Tulsa (9/10), Andrew Carnegie Free Library, Carnegie, PA (9/16), and Magers and Quinn Bookstore (9/24)!
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