Waystations
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How do I love my publisher? Let me count the ways:
1) They were the only ones to take a chance on me.
2) They are in the Flatiron, perhaps the most inspiring building in New York City.
3) There is an endless supply of kind and talented people who work there. For example:
Mike Flamini: This is my editor who has show remarkable faith in me and has thus far taken me out to two superb lunches. The first was for sushi back in the fall of 2004 when I first signed with St. Martin’s. Even though I was a minnow in the publishing ocean, Mike made me feel like a fair-sized tuna. Yesterday, he took me to BLT Fish, a restaurant governed by this French chef and which offers such delights as cream filled jalapenos. This time he made me feel like a smallish whale. I’m not sure what it means that we ate fish.
Elizabeth Coxe and Vicki Lame: Ahhh, the perks of dropping by your publishers’ office. Elizabeth and Vicki do tremendous work in the publicity department at St. Martin’s, so after my lunch with Mike I stopped in to say hello. As I have more than a hundred hours of driving ahead of me (St. Paul-Calgary and Denver-St. Louis are two of the more daunting stretches), I wondered aloud whether St. Martin’s had any books on tape they could lend me. Elisabeth and Vicki took me to the fourth floor (they are on the 14th) and it was like trick-or-treating, but better because it was audio books instead of little packs of Smarties. In my bag? ‘The World is Flat’ (Thomas Friedman), ‘Running With Scissors’ and ‘Dry’ (Augusten Burroughs), ‘A Year in the Merde’ (Stephen Clarke), ‘Snobs’ (Julian Fellowes), and ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell’ (Susanna Clarke).
Harriet Seltzer: We just randomly bumped into Harriet while waiting for the elevator, which was nice because we emailed a lot when she setting up a very special event in Dayton for me. I would normally not include this picture because I look like a bit of a ninny, but Harriet looks so lovely, how could I exclude it?
There are also many other wonderful people at St. Martin’s, such as Katherine Tiernan, but I didn’t get to take their pictures because my camera ran out of battery.
Posted in New & Notable, Waystations | Leave a commentFaolain & Miika
Faolain (speckled grey, white & black) and Miika (lovely brown) are two fabulous vegetarian dogs who are owned by two fabulous vegetarian people. (The people you will meet very very soon.)
Posted in New & Notable, Waystations | 1 CommentGig # 2
FreeBird Books
123 Columbia Street
Brooklyn, New York
What a brilliant little bookstore. It’s in the Red Hook bit of Brooklyn, and it faces out onto the river and you can see the Manhattan skyline from the front window. Inside, it is the kind of place where the books jump out of the shelves at you and you end up with something in your hand that you never knew existed but might have been written specifically for you.
The evening featured two very young talented writers, Nikki Westfall and Leslie Campisi, and me with my show and tell. I think it was a good mix, one of those perfectly balanced plates with dorade, rice and asparagus arranged all photogenically with a slice of lemon. I think I was the asparagus.
What really impressed me were the people who came. Amy Sather, an old friend from Paris who was actually supposed to be in the book until her ex-fiancee ordered me to bump her out. (Long story.) Leah Hayes, who edited the music section of Kilometer Zero Issue # 3 and showed divine taste and inspiration in doing so. Oliver, one of the founders of Atlantis Books in Greece, and his lovely partner Ryan, who lived at the bookstore in the summer of 2004 and travelled with George to the south of France. Then, there were all these Shakespeare people who I had briefly crossed or barely missed while in Paris and filled me with me with their memories of the bookstore, our art squat, and that general scene. I felt incredibly spoiled and lucky to have everybody there and I wish I had bought everybody a drink but instead Amy bought me a bourbon and that was the perfect finish to the evening.
Boston to New York
A bit of nastiness in Connecticut. Sure I cut off a truck driver while pulling into the Dunkin’ Donuts. And, yes, immediately after I did run through a stop sign because I was so flustered. But still, you wouldn’t think everybody would react with such anger. Nobody got hurt, nothing got dented and the sun was shining. People need to relax a little more or else the stress of driving will kill them.
Posted in New & Notable, Waystations | Leave a commentGig # 1
Brookline Booksmith
279 Howard St.
Brookline, Massachusetts
I am not a fan of readings. Stories and poems are written with a reader in mind and reading is an internal process, an intimate relationship between the author and the reader. From my experience, written work often loses its thrust and elegance when read aloud to an audience of 30 or 40 people perched awkwardly on folding chairs. When we organized our Kilometer Zero Venue series in Paris, one of main motivations was having to attend other readings in Paris and sitting numb and bored while a writer droned on for 40 minutes. There had to be a better way for a writer to interact with an audience, so we urged people to become performers, we limited their stage time, and we asked them to, at all costs, avoid long monotonous passages.
When faced with presenting my book, I wanted to live up to the Kilometer Zero standards. With the voice of the legendary Tom Pancake ricocheting in my head, I came up with a bit of a literary show and tell, something I hoped would engage and entertain people. Did it work? I obviously can’t know for sure, but I think everyone at the Brookline Booksmith had, at the very least, an interesting evening. One person told me she had confused dates and thought it was a reading from a book about the coach of the New England Patriots. She said ‘Instead, I was treated to hearing about Shakespeare & Co. Thank you for that animated and interesting presentation.’ No, thank you Claire.
Boston is a great book town and the bookstore people were fabulous, especially the coordinator Janet Potter, who kept the panic away before the show started and gave me the wonderful gift of Cloud Atlas at the end. (She is the one smiling widely in the picture.) Janet was in Paris in 2000 and knew Shakespeare and Company so it was ideal. The other amazing thing was the old friends who turned up. The parents of Scott Stedman, a dear friend from Paris and a character in the book, were in attendance and were incredibly supportive. And another Paris fellow, Ethan Gilsdorf, biked madly to the Brookline and almost made it in time.
Onna & Craig
One of the greatest benefits of living a wandering life is all the people you meet and how you can just show up in their cities and demand to sleep on their couches. Seriously, the extended Kilometer Zero family acts like a worldwide shelter system, offering kindness, meals and bed whenever possible. In Boston, I am lucky enough to know two incredible people.
The first is Onna Solomon, who was in Paris during the Paris years and worked with Kilometer Zero to organize the 24 Hour theatre project at the Chateaudun Art Squat. She is now in Boston, taking an MFA at Boston Univeristy and writing really magnificent poetry. Here is one of my favourites.
Things Begin To Change
As workers scour the storefront windows clear,
Their plastic buckets slosh, a squeegee rakes
What’s left of winter down the stairs into
The streets. You don’t know what it means
To be anything but a pale-skinned girl
Men with drenched sleeves turn to watch in the early spring.
The knuckles of their bare hands gleam like pearl
Above the muck of sandy snow along
Your route each morning – so when they’ve gone
You think of how their gazes guided you:
The easy way your eyes met theirs while everything
Was opening – you smiled generously:
You knew that every lustrous day this year
Was still untouched and just ahead of you.
The second is Mr. Craig Walzer. He goes around telling people he is 24 but he is clearly lying. How could a 24 year old have attended Brown and Oxford, travelled the world, and spent two years opening the most joyful bookstore in Greece? (Atlantis Books. www.atlantisbooks.org. Visit sometime. I will be there February to May, 2006.)
Now Craig is taking a four year international law/human rights/hyper genius program at Harvard. He and his classmates had lunch with John Kerry last week. That’s the kind of place it is. (I find it amusing that Craig lives in the zip code 02138 which, according to him, is the zip code which writes the most letters to the editor in America.) This morning, Craig was such a gentleman and kind soul that he invited me along to a class taught by Michael Ignatieff. It was about how religions and human rights clash and it was brilliant for everyone but especially brilliant for me because Michael Ignatieff is Canadian and there are rumours he is going to enter politics. I accosted him after his class and vowed to support him. If he becomes prime minister, he could be Trudeau II.
