A few facts about Switzerland I bet you didn’t know: They have bomb shelter capacity for all 7.5 million Swiss citizens, secret hideaways all over the countryside where people can go in case of nuclear attack. Switzerland has four national languages, German, French, Italian and Romantsch, and dozens of local dialects, owing to the alps, which kept people from traveling outside their little isolated valleys for centuries. Swiss foxes now carry some sort of horrible, mad-cow-like disease which destroys your insides and doesn’t manifest for up to 10 years (we were warned from eating any low-hanging fruit the foxes may have shat upon). And the Swiss didn’t give women the vote until 1971. Yes, that’s a 71 at the end, not a 17.

I’m writing this on the plane home — sitting next to a woman with a 3-month-old infant in her lap, so I suspect it will be a very long flight indeed — feeling a bit blue to be trading the beautiful château with its lush gardens and spectacular views of the alps for my tiny, half-renovated, unlandscaped (and unlikely to be landscaped any time soon) house in Tivoli… Yesterday and today were heartbreakers, naturally — glorious, sunny, 80 degrees, the air so clear we could see Mont Blanc (highest peak in Europe) in the distance.

I think we all felt a bit triste to be leaving today. We could not possibly have wished for a more congenial group. There was Claude, the celebrated French novelist, elegant as only a Frenchwoman can be, but so kind and warm we all got teary-eyed saying goodbye to her; Maggie, who not only has a gift for writing beautiful fiction but for making everyone around her feel special; Nick, her husband, English gentleman extraordinaire, bringer of pillows, lifter of heavy objects, cheerful doer of many dishes, walking encyclopedia of information both useful and arcane, occasionally long-winded lecturer on matters historical, and court jester whose jokes kept us all in stitches; Grazyna, who was a late but essential arrival, and whose fiction (which none of us were able to read, alas, as it hasn’t yet been translated into English or French) is very popular in Poland; and finally, Khaled, our resident Egyptian and philosopher, who (it must be said) did almost no dishes whatsoever but charmed and fascinated us with his tales of Cairo.

The farmers must have finished their fertilizing because the week was blessedly merde-free. Last Sunday we gave a reading which was attended by about 30 locals, including many members of the Geneva-area writing community. I read from Mudbound, and the Mississippi accent seemed to go over well (though it’s quite possible none of them understood a word of it and were just being kind). Worked all week, then celebrated the seven hundredth and some-odd Swiss Independence Day on Friday. We all decided God must be Swiss, because after a dreary day of pouring rain, the heavens cleared miraculously just in time for the fireworks. We climbed to the top of a nearby hill and watched them go off all around the lake. Lausanne’s were the most spectacular, but even the smaller villages nearer to us had their proud displays, each trying to outdo the other. Then on Saturday I went with Khaled to Lake Geneva, and we spent the day toodling around by boat. We had lunch in a charming medieval village called Yvoire, on the French side of the lake, and basked in the beautiful weather and views. It was the first day I didn’t work and a welcome respite from Red.

All in all, a splendid residency, the best of them all so far. If only they didn’t make you wait ten years to reapply..

It must be said that life in a beautiful château, with a staff to cook, shop, clean and mow the lawn, ain’t half bad. I’ve been writing a lot (a lot being a relative term, I average about 2 pages a day) and Red is coming along nicely. The book is so dark that I’m very glad to have lovely surroundings to escape to after spending hours in my right-wing fundamentalist dystopia.

In the ten days we’ve been here the farmers have harvested the wheat in the field below us and made the stalks into big round bales which dot the fields picturesquely. All this bucolic charm does come at a price, however: the smell of merde that wafts up from the surrounding farms and vineyards (which are apparently in full-bore fertilizing mode) is so noxious some days that I have to shut myself in my room with the windows closed. Still, it’s beautiful here. The roses and giant hibiscus bushes are in full bloom, and the grapes in the vineyards are coming on, though we’ll miss the harvest, which is in September. They grow cold-climate grapes here: Gamay, Pinot Noir and a varietal I’ve never had before called Chasselas, a light, refreshing white which is almost a bubbly. We drink it every evening on the patio as an apéritif before dinner.

I haven’t had many adventures here — the villages within walking distance are small, quaint, and dull — but I’ve been very content to hang at the Château and write. Sunday evening we’re giving a public reading here, and Monday night we’ll go into Geneva to dine at the home of one of the foundation’s board members. We’re all still getting along, thank heaven. We speak a hilarious mixture of French and English, often within the same sentence, but it seems to work.

Signing off from (somewhat malodorous) paradise.

I’m here at a marvelous artists colony in a small Swiss village called Morges, near Lausanne and Geneva. What an exquisite place this is. A big, pink, every-so-slightly shabby house perched in the mountains overlooking Lake Geneva. The château has a rich, fascinating history. It was the summer retreat of a famous German publisher named Ledig-Rowohlt, who published — and translated — many celebrated authors for the first time in German after WWII, e.g., Faulkner, Camus, James Baldwin, Updike, Thurber, etc. Harold Pinter refused to let anyone else translate his plays into German. Nabokov, who was a neighbor, was a frequent visitor here, as was Henry Miller, a few of whose watercolors (G-rated) adorn the walls of the living room. My office or study was Ledig’s library, and I write each day surrounded by books and by the friendly ghosts of all the writers who sat in this room. Ledig’s widow established this place as a writers’ retreat 12 years ago. And here we all are.

There are six of us: myself; a delightful English couple, Maggie Gee and Nicholas Rankin — she’s a successful novelist in the UK, he’s a former BBC journalist and non-fiction writer; a bestselling Arab author named Khaled Al Khamissi; an utterly charming and gracious French novelist in her 70s called Claude Pujade-Renaud; and a Polish novelist, Grazyna Plebanek, who just arrived last night but seems lovely. No jerks or serial adolescents in the bunch, for a wonder, and everyone is incredibly passionate about ideas and books and film and culture. The people at the château are very generous and take excellent care of us. The only way I know I’m not in heaven is that I have to go down the hall to pee.

I’ve done little this last week but recover from jet lag — harder than usual for some reason, but I’m almost there — and write. I think that’s how it will go. Three weeks is such a short time, and my creative juices are flowing here. I will venture into Evian and Lausanne one day toward the end, and perhaps take a boat ride on Lake Geneva, but apart from that and daily walks in the countryside, I’m going to work. This is the perfect place to do it, and after having lost a month at home with the dreaded bathroom renovation, I’m eager to make progress on Red. That’s my job now (she said, pinching herself).

The book tour is winding to a close, and I’m back to being a writer again after several hectic months of being an author. My feelings are mixed: part hallelujah, part letdown. Being on a book tour is exhilarating, exhausting, fun, tedious, gratifying, occasionally humiliating, and totally consuming. Here are some of the highlights:

Favorite indie bookstore: Lemuria in Jackson, MS

Best meal: Big bloody Porterhouse steaks at Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville, MS

Funniest outdoor ad: Seen somewhere in Tennessee or Arkansas, a billboard sponsored by the Council for Healthy Marriages (or something to that effect) showing a man lying under the covers in bed with a dead deer, and a headline that said, “Hunting won’t keep you warm nights.”

Most elegant venue: The Arts Club of Chicago

Favorite radio station: 95.5 Hallelujiah FM in Jackson, MS

Most humbling moment: The live interview I did for a local news program in Memphis where I was bookended by what was clearly the star attraction of that day’s show, a guy eating a 7.5-pound hamburger

Most surreal moment: Sitting between Cokie Roberts and Peter Carey on a dais in an Indianapolis ballroom inexplicably designed to look like a Mexican Village circa 1900, eating lunch in front of 950 women, all with pink quilted book bags

Coolest hotels: The Hotel San José in Austin, TX and The Alluvian in Greenwood, MS

Strangest sight: The life-size diorama of a small T-Rex frolicking with Adam & Eve in paradise at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY

Loveliest views: Oxford, MS as seen from the balcony at City Grocery; the horse farms of Lexington, KY as seen from the plane; and HOME, when I finally got back here after two months on the road

Had an incredibly special event on Saturday: a reading with my dear friends James Cañón and Jennifer Cody Epstein at Hudson Opera House. James’ novel, Tales from the Town of Widows and Chronicles from the Land of Men, debuted in January 2007 (it’s now out in paperback) and Jenn’s novel, The Painter from Shanghai, came out this year a few weeks after Mudbound. The three of us met eight years ago, in our first workshop at Columbia, and wrote our novels simultaneously. James and Jenn were my primary readers, a lame term for two people who read and critiqued so many drafts of Mudbound that they could probably recite it from memory. And of course we all had many doubts along the way that we would ever finish our books and find agents and publishers and become real live authors. So it was really wonderful to read with them and celebrate our mutual success. We were joined by a great crowd of Hudsonians, including friends Tom Swope, Val Shaff, Tom Froese, Maureen Cummins, Sarah Sterling, Carol Derfner, and Marc and Christine Heller. A big merci to Gary Schiro, Joe Herwick and E. Fout for hosting us and beating the drums.

Completed the final lap of my official book tour last week/weekend, beginning with a stop in South Hadley, home of Mt. Holyoke and the excellent Odyssey Bookshop. I’m in Odyssey’s signed first editions program, so I spent a wrist-wilting hour signing 250 copies of Mudbound before the reading. (I did the math just now and I estimate I’ve autographed somewhere around 2,500 copies. You’d think I’d be heartily sick of it, but I’m not. There’s something profoundly satisfying about the act of signing one’s own book that defies description. I suppose that’s my narcissism showing…) Afterward, I joined Odyssey’s gracious owner Joan Grenier, events coordinator Emily Russo and some friends of theirs for an outstanding meal at Food 101 Bar & Bistro. Many thanks to them both for their hospitality and their enthusiastic embrace of Mudbound.

Friday I drove to Wellesley for a few bucolic — if cold and rainy — days at the home of my old college pal Phyllis Spinale. It was an eye-opening glimpse into the life of a full-time mom. She has three kids age 9, 11, and 13, a recently-adopted dog, and a husband, all lovely, and all of whom she looks after and makes nutritious meals for and folds shirts for and drives to lacrosse practice and takes for walks and counsels and consoles with a serenity I found awe-inspiring, while also running five miles a day and, in her spare time, being a one-woman band for Mudbound — which, if every adult in greater Wellesley isn’t already reading it, they soon will be or they’ll have to answer to Phyllis. You amaze me, Phyl. Vive la différence.

Friday night I read at the First Church of Jamaica Plain, an event set up by my buddy Chuck Collins and hosted by the Jamaica Plain Forum. Chuck and I met last fall at the Blue Mountain Center, along with the indefatigable Susan Freireich, who also attended the reading. Both are excellent writers: Susan fiction, Chuck non. He’s a liberal activist who has spent his adult life battling economic inequality (at BMC, Chuck taught us all to sing the union song “Solidarity Forever” to the tune of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” — which we all did, passionately if somewhat bemusedly, because it was Chuck leading the choir). We had a crowd of 25+ people at the church, and they actually asked me to read extra passages, which almost never happens. Doesn’t get much better than that for an author on book tour. Thanks to Chuck and to Daniel Moss for setting up the event.

The final event of the weekend was a reading at Porter Square Books in Cambridge. Another unusually large crowd, swelled by lots of friends and friends of friends: Phyl, her sis-in-law Sue, Chuck, Susan, my friends Tom Alpern and birthday girl Charlotte Dixon. You’d think with all this support (and after being on book tour for two solid months) I would have felt completely at ease, but in fact I gave one of my worst readings of the tour, at least initially. Stammering, blushing, uh-ing — I could have been running for junior high school treasurer. I pulled out of my nose-dive eventually, but man, what a humbling and excruciating couple of minutes. Thanks to all those who didn’t get up and leave, and to Nathan Hasson for coordinating the event.

I’ve joined Maggie Moran’s “Southern Reading Challenge” for summer 2008. Maggie’s a librarian from Mississippi whose mission is to get more noses in books, specifically Southern books. All you have to do is pledge to read three books set in the South and written by Southerners over the summer, and then blog about them. Join the challenge at http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/

My three books, in no particular order, will be:

The Hamlet by Wm. Faulkner

Smonk by Tom Franklin

Thirteen Stories by Eudora Welty ( a reread)

Drove from Indianapolis to the Windy City for a long weekend with my aunt & uncle, Gay and John Stanek, and my mom, who joined us from Dallas. Chicago is a dangerous place to go for a stroll when the weather’s nice due to all the fabulous (and fabulously expensive) stores clustered together along Michigan Avenue: Max Mara, Stuart Weitzman, Chanel, Saks, Vuitton, etc. etc. etc. Safer to go to Millenium Park and enjoy the art and architecture, as Gay, Mother and I did on Sunday.

Sunday afternoon I did a signing at yet another wonderful indie bookstore, The Book Stall at Chestnut Court in Winnetka, then had dinner that night with dear friend and playwright Lisa Dillman. We put our literary talents to dubious use, composing bawdy limericks using the words “Kaczynski” and “Lewinski.” (Don’t ask.)

Monday I gave a luncheon talk at Chicago’s famed Arts Club, which has hosted everyone from Marc Chagall and Jackson Pollack to Martha Graham and William Butler Yeats. Talk about being in good company! That night Gay and John had a splendid soirée for me at the club, attended by about 70 of their friends and family. My friend, artist Sherri Wood, who among other things makes the most gorgeous quilts you’ve ever seen, happened to be in town and was able to stop by. A marvelous time was had by all.

Chicago really is one of my favorite cities in the world. I would seriously consider living there if it weren’t for the cold and the wind — and the accents, which are almost as dreadful. Oh, you betcha.

Spoke to my largest audience ever — 950 ladies who lunch — at the annual Christamore House Author Luncheon and Benefit in Indianapolis. Christamore House is an agency that supports needy families in the community. We were given a tour of the facility the day before the benefit, and they do marvelous work there. They provide preschool, counseling, food, emergency clothing, senior activities, dental care, you name it, to people in need. A worthy place to send a few extra bucks, if you have them. Every city could use a half-dozen centers just like it.

One of the main ways Christamore House raises money is the annual Author Luncheon, which is organized by a Guild of volunteers. This year the Guild hosted me and four other authors, all way more distinguished than myself: Peter Carey, Australia’s most celebrated novelist, author of Booker Prize winners Oscar and Lucinda and The True History of the Kelly Gang and, most recently, His Illegal Self; Sue Miller, author of ten acclaimed books including the recent bestseller The Senator’s Wife; T. Jefferson Parker, two-time Edgar award winning mystery writer; and journalist Cokie Roberts, author of Founding Mothers and Ladies of Liberty, about the undersung women who shaped the birth of our nation. The night before the benefit, all of us authors (with the exception of Cokie, who hadn’t yet arrived) hung out late at the hotel over a couple of bottles of wine, swapping tour stories and talking about this crazy, solitary, maddening, wonderful thing that we all feel compelled to do. They were a lovely, funny and generous bunch, and it was truly an honor for me, as a first-time novelist, to be in their company.

At around 5:30 the next morning, I was awakened by a mighty rumbling and shaking, the hotel swaying and groaning around me. It felt a lot like the earthquakes I’d experienced when I used to live in LA. Nah, I thought, they don’t have earthquakes in Indiana. Must be a train. Or a dream. Or the wine. And I promptly rolled over and went back to sleep. Turns out they do have earthquakes in Indiana. This one was a 5.4 on the Richter scale. Jeff Parker took credit for bringing it from San Diego. Said it made him feel right at home.

After that, speaking to 950 people was pretty anti-climactic. I was seated with the other authors and the event chairwomen on a dais on a stage overlooking this gigantic room full of ladies. It was odd, eating in front of so many people; I was grateful they hadn’t served ribs or spaghetti Bolognese. The best part was that I got to sit next to Cokie Roberts and chat with her a bit. She is exactly as you’d expect: smart, witty, kind, and down-to-earth to boot. A class act in every sense.

Many thanks to the Christamore House Guild for inviting me to participate and to Kim Hardin, my minder, for shepherding me around Indianapolis.

A very belated blog about my wonderful time in Mississippi. The MDLT, whose mission is to “experience the place, the people, the food, and the music that inspired Mississippi writers,” hosted me and fellow writers Marion Barnwell, Dorothy Shawhan, W. Kenneth Holditch, and native artist Bill Dunlap for a lovely few days of outstanding food, company and literary talk. They put us up at the luxurious Alluvian Hotel in Greenville (a vast improvement over the grimy airport Radisson at which I stayed the night before, when I missed my connection in Memphis). Gracious staff, lovely accommodations and, as an added bonus, Harry Belafonte was at breakfast my first morning. Still looking impossibly handsome by the way, and — it must be said — going straight for the cheese grits, just like I was. The two young women working the breakfast room didn’t seem to recognize him, and I wondered whether that was a relief to him or a sadness. Impossible to know.

Monday were readings by Dorothy and me at Turnrow Book Company in Greenwood. Turnrow is that rare thing, a NEW independent bookstore (so many of the indies have been put out of the business by amazon and the big chains). Opened two years ago by owners Jamie & Kelly Kornegay, it’s a beautiful space, reminiscent of old European libraries. A terrific place to read and browse. And yet another reminder to us all to buy books from our local independent bookstores! If we don’t, we won’t have any, and that would be a real tragedy.

The following day we traveled to Greenville for a series of talks and readings at McCormick Book Inn. Owners High and Mary Dale McCormick are self-described “deltalogists” who specialize in all things Deltan. That night, we feasted on gigantic bloody porterhouse steaks and hot tamales at Doe’s Eat Place, one of the most famous restaurants in the South. Doe’s began as a strictly black honky-tonk in 1941. The food was so good that whites began coming to the back door for take-out, in an ironic reversal of segregation. Before long there was a white restaurant in back as well. Eventually the honky tonk was closed and Big Doe concentrated on the eat place — to the benefit of everyone. What a meal! We were all groaning when we left the table. I ended the evening playing cutthroat till 1:30 in the morning at the bar next door with charming tour coordinators Jimmy Thomas and Odie Lindsey. An extremely fun night, well worth the ensuing sore head.