Juggling Sinclair

March 160 pages, 20 illustrations, 5”x7” paper, 978-1-4780-1960-2 $15.95tr/£13.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1696-0 $84.95/£76.00

Stewart Lawrence Sinclair is a writer and editor whose essays, reportage, and narrative nonfiction have been featured in LitHub, Guernica, New Orleans Review, Creative Nonfiction’s True Story, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at the City College of New York and juggles whenever he can.

Juggling

STEWART LAWRENCE SINCLAIR

“Describing juggling as a hobby, an obsession, and a world, Stewart Lawrence Sinclair pulls us deeper and deeper into not just the world of the juggler but the mind of the juggler. Juggling is great catchy fun and way deeper than I expected.” —ANDER MONSON, author of Predator: A Memoir, A Movie, an Obsession

In Juggling, Stewart Lawrence Sinclair explores the four-thousand-year history and practice of juggling as seen through his life as a juggler. Sinclair—who learned to juggle as a child and paid his way through college by busking—shares his experiences of taking up juggling after an episode of suicidal ideation, his time juggling on the streets, and ultimately finding comfort in juggling during the COVID-19 pandemic. In many ways, this is a book about loss and recovery. From his own juggling story to clowns braving military checkpoints in Bosnia and Rwanda to perform in refugee camps to contemporary avant-garde performances, Sinclair shows how the universal language of juggling provides joy as well as a respite from difficulties during hard times.

PRACTICES A series edited by Margret Grebowicz

From Juggling I never know what makes people stop to watch me, approach me, buy me whiskey, tell me their story. I suspect people come across someone like me juggling in the street, and if they pay any attention at all, they get lost in the strange amalgam of skill and nonsense that constitutes this craft—and maybe that’s what makes them want to tell a stranger about themselves. Whatever it is, years of incidental connections have rendered me almost incapable of denying people a show. It’s that inability to juggle for juggling’s sake that led me, for years, to relegate my props to the closet. That is, until the lockdown. Now, once again, I’m juggling while the world burns, trying to maintain, sometimes inadvertently helping someone else do the same.