by Ronald Rice
This might sound like a spectacular example of how a bookstore gave one author his big break, but a more realistic picture is the million little breaks that occur each and every day. Smaller authors gradually become bigger ones, starting out at little literary journals and tiny presses before getting picked up by large corporate publishers. For years, aside from being booksellers, the St. Mark’s Bookshop had been the prime downtown location where established writers found a market and young writers were given a chance. I find it hard to imagine how the Internet, which focuses on specialty websites, can offer these eclectic services to the future of literature.
ARTHUR NERSESIAN was born and raised in New York City. He is the author of ten novels including Gladyss of the Hunt published by Verse Chorus Press.
Kate Niles
Maria’s Bookshop, DURANGO, COLORADO
Old snowshoes serve as decor on the high walls above book displays at Maria’s Bookshop. So do Navajo rugs and local artists. The Southwest oozes through the store, because the mountains and deserts we all live here for are our muse and deserve a place in this haven of bookdom.
I have read about the demise of the independent bookstore and think: Not Here. One thing about living on the Western Slope of Colorado is the feeling that you are somewhat impervious to trends elsewhere, that the housing collapse or gangland murders or Amazonia’s huge Kindled tentacles can’t and won’t happen here. This feeling is of course somewhat of a myth; I am good friends with Maria’s book buyer and I know she’s seeing all the same handwriting on the wall that other booksellers are. But if Denver’s Tattered Cover is down to one store (reduced! Such a shame), Maria’s keeps on shinin’ on.
I gave my first reading here as a published novelist. More than forty people showed up, and when one of the bookstore personnel told me that this was their largest reading as far as she could remember, it gave me a belief in myself as a writer that the store has nurtured for me ever since. If no one else is buying my books, someone at Maria’s finds mine and purchases a copy or two every so often. I get little checks out of this, a trickle of Keep Going. It’s OK.
I once had a dream in which Virginia Woolf gave me six brown-paper-wrapped books and said, “These are yours.” I’ve written three of the six so far. In this lull of mine at age 50, this middle-age transition place where my past has wrung itself out on the page and future writing is struggling to commence, I have to trust dreams like this. I have to trust, too, Maria’s staff, who still value me as a writer, who whisper, after someone famous does a reading, Was that you who asked that question? Because, I mean, why doesn’t she just get a therapist? And we chuckle and I feel a bit redeemed even as I admire, greatly, the other author’s writing.
Another packed house: The Ed Abbey Memorial Reading, sponsored by a now-defunct magazine I used to write for. Me and a bunch of guys. Me and Art Goodtimes, the mushroom-hunting, Green Party County Commissioner helluva poet from Telluride. Me and B. Frank, M. Michael Fahey, Ken Wright, Dave Feela. Most of them the drink-beer-and-regale-ourselves-in-writing-with-the-latest-river-running-adventure crowd. I love their outlaw reverence for the land. I love Art’s tie-dyed bard-dom, Dave’s droll poetry. But I hardly fit in. That’s why I was there. To read my little essay, 1,200 words straight from the hip and shaped perfectly, as it had sat there, inside, editing itself for twenty years over Cactus Ed’s misogyny, his brash mid-20th-century male bravado that split the feminine and the family from adventures in the wild. I could be wrong, but I think I saw the snowshoes nod their toes ever so slightly in approval as I read.
Another reading. Watching Karl Marlantes read from Matterhorn. Watching that crowd. That aching audience of aging men, Vietnam vets all of them. I see a former colleague in the crowd, a few other men I knew who pitched a fit when John McCain, in a desperate act, came to town to campaign; who attend each Memorial Day with a patriotic fury at what was done to them and what should never be done to anyone again. Karl Marlantes reading, talking, too, about process, about that Endless Book his family joked would never see the light of day. The writer in me appreciated that.
I made a midlife career switch from teaching to psychotherapy for my day job not long ago. In a job interview for a therapy position, one of my interviewers asked me whether I was OK with starting low-ish again, giving up what I’d gained elsewhere. I answered in some professional tone then, but later I realized that no job switch, no low woman on the totem pole, was as deeply a trial by fire as being a bona fide writer in an era of rampantly dysfunctional Big House publishing. I was lucky to have been published at all. I know this. I have won a prestigious award or two. I have a small, small, but very loyal fan club. I will never, I doubt, see an advance above a grand, which I will promptly spend on book promotion. I could weep about this if I wanted to. All those Grand Dreams! That false myth of Making It!
I usually stop myself. Seems so self-pitying. Dumb. Not snowshoe-approved, as they are so hearty and have never been self-indulgent. Yet when another award-winning author, who is one published book ahead of me, comes to another of my readings in another brick-and-mortar blessed beacon of community enlightenment in another Four Corners state, I ask her what’s she’s doing now. Her lip curls, the despair trying so hard not to slide into bitterness. She says, “I’m waiting to see what New York does. I have six unpublished novels. I just fired my agent because she wants me to write trash. Unless your name is Jonathan and you are from Brooklyn, forget it.”
Amen, Sister of the Four Corners. Amen. Just as we do not understand Brooklyn, Brooklyn will never understand why there are snowshoes—those symbols of local perseverance—hanging in a bookstore in Durango.
I think those snowshoes in Maria’s are the luckiest alive. They are the old-fashioned kind, the kind lashed to feet of miners in 1890, or mail carriers in 1910, or mule skinners. Webbed, made of curved wood and sinew woven into flat baskets. They have stories to tell themselves. And they’ve heard so many in Maria’s. So many writers and readers and questioners and lovers of split bindings and falling-apart paperbacks and the chance to reserve a book in your own name behind the counter.
And that’s the point, isn’t it? The indie bookstore is what’s left of The Commons. It’s the one place people can still come with journals in hand and not feel self-conscious. The one place where veterans and punk college students and extreme sports fanatics and brokenhearted writers all mingle under the same roof, unafraid to discuss ideas. Jesus. What kind of country have we become that this is it? That this is what remains? No Amazonia of the Kindled tentacle can possibly take that place.
Maria’s stays open till 9 p.m. Around here, that’s late. So if you’re walking Main in Durango on, say, an average Wednesday, you will hear faint laughter from the restaurants, maybe a raucous hoot from the El Rancho Bar because that is what the El Rancho is for, the whoosh of a car or two. Not a whole lot else. And the light shining out, the one that matters, is in the middle of the block between 9th and 10th, with the discount rack out front.
KATE NILES is the award-winning author of the novel The Basket Maker. Her second novel, The Book of John, was published in 2010. She also has a book of poetry, Geographies of the Heart, and is widely published in several genres. She is the recipient of ForeWord Review’s Book of the Year Award for Fiction in 2004 and a Colorado Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship. She was nominated for a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award in 2004. A former archaeologist and teacher, she now makes her living in the social-work field. She lives in Durango, Colorado, with her family.
Ann Packer
The Capitola Book Café, CAPITOLA, CALIFORNIA
The Capitola Book Café is tucked into the corner of an unprepossessing shopping center, hard to find unless you know it’s next to the pizza place and catty-corner to the sewing machine repair shop. It’s one of the finest independent bookstores in northern California, but more to the point, it’s a haven for writers on tour to promote their books. I should know—they’ve hosted me for every book I’ve p
ublished.
Which is kind of amazing, given my first visit.
It was 1994, and I was promoting Mendocino and Other Stories, a collection of short fiction. It had been six years since I’d finished my MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and four years since I’d left a fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, and so I’d been out of the academy for a long time. Yet it was the academy model that I envisioned for my maiden bookstore appearance.
I should explain. At a university reading an eminent writer, or even a not-so-eminent writer, reads for quite a while, choosing either a longish chunk of a novel or a full-length short story. It is a Literary Event. At a bookstore, an author reads for twenty minutes and then signs books. This is a promotional event. Unfortunately, I had not spent enough time contemplating the difference between a writer and an author, and for my first visit to the Capitola Book Café—which was also my first appearance at any bookstore anywhere—I read an entire short story, taking at least forty-five minutes. When I finished there was a rush for the exit—or maybe that’s just how I recall it, memory making sure I got my just desserts. In any case, it was very clear that I had gone on for far too long. (Years later, an author escort—a category of being I didn’t know existed until my second book tour, when I flew around the country from strange city to strange city and was met by kind people in clean cars who drove me from radio stations to bookstores to hotels—anyway, an author escort told me his bookstore appearance guidelines: twenty minutes is good, thirty minutes is pushing it, forty minutes is a hostage situation.)
And yet… the wonderful people at the Capitola Book Café invited me back. Again and again. They invited me when I’d written a best seller, and they invited me when I’d written a not-so-best seller. They set up a taped interview in their back room so a local radio journalist could talk to me while I was in town. They scheduled a book-group event on one visit, and my reading/signing was preceded by a delightful round-table discussion with a dozen avid readers. When I made a stop at a nearby bookstore for the paperback publication of one of my novels, a Capitola Book Café employee was in the audience because she’d missed my appearance for the hardcover publication of the same book a year earlier. In other words: wonderful, welcoming people.
And the store! It’s big enough that there are corners and aisles to get lost in, small enough to feel intimate. The selection of fiction reflects the sensibilities of the staff, who love to share new discoveries and old favorites, to lead a customer into the interesting backlist of an author whose early books may not have received the attention they should have. Then there’s the café—this is, after all, the Capitola Book Café—where visitors can have coffee or a snack while thumbing through a book still under consideration: It’s as close to homey as any retail establishment can be. Located at least an hour away from where I live, the Capitola Book Café is one of my hometown bookstores, and my gratitude to its book-loving staff and owners is deep and abiding.
ANN PACKER is the author of Songs Without Words, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, and Mendocino and Other Stories. Her most recent book is Swim Back to Me, a novella and five short stories. She lives in San Carlos, California.
Chuck Palahniuk
Powell’s City of Books, PORTLAND, OREGON
When your novel is first published all the book snobs ask: “Are you reading at the Tattered Cover? At Dark Delicacies? How about Cody’s? Or Barbara’s? Or Powell’s?”
A book tour is just as exhausting as doing old-time vaudeville on, say, the Schubert circuit. It includes appearing at the Strand in New York… Books & Books in Miami… Lemuria in Jackson. It’s a long series of one-night engagements sandwiched between early-morning flights and train rides. Left Bank Books in St. Louis… Rainy Day Books in Kansas City… Malaprops in Asheville. Late in life Mark Twain lost most of his fortune and was forced to pay the bills by almost constant tours of this sort. That’s how he died: The stress killed him. Vroman’s in Pasadena… Booksmith in San Francisco… Elliot Bay Books in Seattle.
In Portland, Oregon, Powell’s City of Books is the equivalent of playing the Palace.
Each room of the city-block-sized building is named for a different color. Please understand, each of these rooms is the size of most independent bookstores. The Green Room, for example, is the store’s main entrance. For years Powell’s staged book events in the Purple Room. The drinking fountain in the adjacent Rose Room is legendary because longtime employees swear that the ghost of the store’s founder, Walter Powell, occasionally appears there, almost always on Tuesday nights. The Orange Room is where the store buys used books, and insider sources report that surly, less-socially-apt staffers are relegated to work there. The Orange Room is the Alba of Powell’s. For years a canister of ashes moved around the store, bumped from shelf to shelf. These were the cremated remains of a book lover who wanted to spend eternity at this, his favorite place. In the street entrance to the Orange Room is a column sculpted to look like a stack of books, and it’s sealed inside this stone column that those ashes found their final resting place.
The Pearl Room is on the third floor, where the Rare Book Room occupies one corner and the rest is given over to art, architecture, film, and erotica books. My insider sources swear the Pearl Room is the store’s cruisey sexual pick-up spot. Otherwise, it’s a gallery, a wonderfully big, empty space where authors present their work almost every night.
The trouble is: Nobody teaches you how to do a book event. A publisher might send you on a tour to promote a book, but they don’t coach you about what to actually do while standing in front of real-live readers. It’s theater, but—usually, for the audience—inconceivably boring.
Go look for yourself. Check out a few nights at Powell’s. It’s one train wreck after another. But they’re wonderful train wrecks. In the interest of full disclosure, I studied writing with Joanna Rose, the person who for many years organized author events and publicity at Powell’s. She and I were students in Tom Spanbauer’s weekly workshop, and our respective debut novels—mine, Fight Club, hers, Little Miss Strange—were published within a few months of each other. She was succeeded by Steve Fidel who coordinated author appearances until he joined the Peace Corps and went to work in Budapest. Both worked with hundreds of authors.
Through my friends at Powell’s I learned that Amy Tan doesn’t like to touch people, or books. It’s for some reason having to do with germs or viruses, and most of her autographing consisted of people sliding their open books past her while she leaned over them and wrote her name at arm’s length. The game changer was the tour when she hurt her leg boarding her flight and had to be taken to the emergency room upon arrival. With the help of painkillers she did the Powell’s event that night, transformed. She touched the books. She hugged her fans. Giddy, she laughed and juggled her two tiny Yorkies, to everyone’s delight.
At Powell’s you see the literary gods at their not-best. Exhausted from weeks of sleeping in a different hotel bed every night. Starved. Lonely for family. Hung over. Here they are. When Bret Easton Ellis came to promote his story collection, The Informers, his novel American Psycho was still freshly stuck in everyone’s craw. So many politically outraged people telephoned the store, threatening to plant bombs, to throw pies, to splash red paint on him, that Ellis spent the evening in a scrum of bodyguards.
When Jonathan Franzen appeared to promote The Corrections, he told what seemed like wry, funny stories about the local publicist who was escorting him around town. Unknown to him, everyone in Portland adores this woman, Hallie. To date, the Portland literati still spit on the ground when his name is mentioned. Hell hath no fury like an audience of Portland book snobs.
Few stores manage author events as well as does Powell’s. There are seats for everyone. The microphone works. There’s no competition from any loud espresso machine, and they even cease overhead announcements. The exception was when Diana Abu-Jabar launched her lovely novel Birds of Paradise. Her reading there was inspired. Spellbinding. Listeners were enthral
led as Diana built dramatic tension. Nothing existed outside of the sound of her voice until—
“Attention, Powell’s employees…” the PA speakers blared, “Does anyone have a copy of The Catcher in the Rye?”
The narrative spell was broken. There were a few nervous laughs. Still, Diana forged on. Reading clearly, enchantingly, she built to a new climax, and just at the cusp of her payoff—
“Attention, all Powell’s employees… Does anyone have a copy of The Catcher in the Rye?”
Twice more she pushed on past the interruption, and twice more the announcement drowned her out. By the Q&A session, she was almost in frustrated tears.
What no one knew was that a larger drama was taking place. When anyone loses a child at Powell’s the store goes into lockdown. The Catcher in the Rye is the coded cue for staff members to block all exterior doors and prevent the lost or kidnapped kid from leaving the building. There are other book titles, representing other crisis situations, but really, you should read Birds of Paradise. It’s a wonderful book.
More important than seeing a seamless, perfect show, the magic of Powell’s is that you see these authors in the flesh. Tired or grumpy—especially tired and grumpy or loaded on painkillers—they’re living proof that actual human beings write books. It’s a kind of reverse miracle to see that this profound story came from this profane source. Authors, even brilliant ones, get flustered, act badly, but at Powell’s you can shake their hands. Yes, the same hands that wrote The Joy Luck Club and Infinite Jest. It’s amazing.