Gratz Industries relocates
Also, a big Captain America book giveaway!
The big news here at Gratz Industries is that we have relocated from our old headquarters in Asheville, North Carolina, all the way across the country to Portland, Oregon! Wendi and I made the five day drive in our car with our dog Augie in the backseat. The journey took us all the way across Tennessee, up into Kentucky, briefly through Illinois, through the middle of Missouri from St. Louis to Kansas City, up into Iowa, across the breadth of Nebraska, and all along the bottom of Wyoming. We made a right turn at the Great Salt Lake, cut through the bottom southwest corner of Idaho, and then drove all the way across Oregon just south of the Washington state border, threading the Columbia Gorge until we hit Portland. Whew! It was an often pretty drive, but a long one, and we’re all awfully glad to be in our new home.
Why Portland, Oregon?
A lot of people have asked us that. No, we don’t know a ton of folks out here, though we do know a few. And no, we don’t have family here either. The long, windy answer begins with our first visit to Portland on a family vacation eleven years ago, when we fell in love with the city.
Portland has the same “weird,” green, artsy vibe we loved in Asheville, but is six times the size. So mathematically, there’s even more green artsy weirdness. But even though it’s a bigger city, it still feels smaller and more manageable than a lot of other “big cities.” We live right downtown in between two streetcar stops, and in a month of living here, we haven’t once taken our car out of the garage to drive anywhere. In the meantime, we’ve been to pro soccer games, sing-along music shows, literary events, and local art markets—and all the boring places like the grocery store and the doctor’s office too. And the IKEA. We have made lots and lots of trips to the IKEA.
So the long answer is…we uprooted our lives because Wendi and I are both in our 50s, and we wanted a new adventure, and we wanted to go on our new adventure while we were young enough to really enjoy it.
The short answer is: I came to Portland to continue my lifelong search for Bigfoot.
Does this mean we’ll never see you again?
Who are you, my mother? No, Mom, (and any other interested parties,) I am not disappearing into the Pacific Northwest woods like Bigfoot. In the six weeks I’ve lived in Portland, I’ve attended events in San Luis Obispo, California, San Antonio, Texas, Columbia, Missouri, Bethesda, Maryland, and Santa Monica, California, and I’ll be speaking and signing at the Children’s Festival of Reading in Knoxville, Tennessee this weekend, Mom, where you live, and where I will see you for the second time since I moved to Portland! Which is more than I saw you for like all of last year! So yes, you will see me again. Geez.
In addition to my upcoming event in Knoxville, Tennessee, you can also catch me online for my last free, virtual school visit of the year on Thursday, May 16th at 11am ET/10am CT/9am MT/8am PT. That’s this week! (The Crowdcast page knows where you’re logging on from, and will show you the start time in your local time zone.) Each virtual visit is an hour long. I give a presentation about some of my books for the first half hour, and then answer viewer questions live for the second half. I hope you’ll join me!
I’m home for a lot of the summer, but still have a few events lined up in the coming months. For a complete and ever-growing list, check out the Events page on my website! (And I’ll be seeing you again in August, so relax, Mom!)
You said something about a giveaway?
Oh yeah! I have a whole bunch of signed, hardcover copies of Captain America: The Ghost Army that are taking up too much space in my new house, and I’m giving them away for free!
Each entry will be assigned a number, and winners will be selected using a random number generator. So that everyone has an equal chance to win, please enter only once. Thanks! And sorry, due to the number of submissions I expect to get, only the giveaway winners will be notified of the results. But that means if you hear from me, it’ll be good news!
The last day to enter is this Memorial Day--May 27, 2024. Good luck!
What I’m reading for kids
April Henry’s The Girl in the White Van is an intense, edge-of-your-seat young adult thriller about a teenage girl who’s snatched by a creepy man driving a white van, and imprisoned in an RV with another teenage girl who was taken the previous year. Together, the girls have to figure out how to survive—and escape. April is the queen of YA thrillers!
What I’m reading for adults
I came to it late, but David Benioff’s City of Thieves is terrific. It’s the story of two young men sent on an almost impossible do-or-die mission to find a dozen eggs during the siege of Leningrad in World War II, when the entire city is starving. The book is funny, tragic, and action-packed, often all at once. Honestly, it’s the kind of book I’m always trying to write, but for adults.
That’s it for this month! If you liked it, please share this newsletter online, or with anyone you think would be interested:
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Thanks! You’re awesome.
I adore Portland. Your new adventure sounds so exciting!
Welcome to the Pacific Northwest!