 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
OmensJanuary 29, 2009 It's been a wild and woolly couple of weeks, including a four-day planned horse-sit followed by a four-day unplanned horse-sit and complicated by the goddamn ice. Somewhere in there was my second Mud reading, which turned out to be possibly the strangest event I've ever participated in. About 20 minutes before the appointed hour -- 5:30 p.m. last Thursday, January 22 -- I showed up at the appointed place, the West Tisbury library. I'd picked a couple of selections from the book and practiced till they read well. Since this was two days after the inauguration, and I'd actually (for the first time since about 1968) watched the new president's speech on TV and reread it after it was given, which I don't think I'd ever done before, I thought about the speech, the historic event, and my novel and prepared to improvise some comments on what having your feet in the mud of a particular place can tell you about the big picture. I live in West Tisbury and its library has a great reputation, so I was only a little bit disconcerted to find when I showed up that the room wasn't set up and the organizer was nowhere in sight. One audience member had already arrived. With her help and that of two library staffers who didn't seem to know what was going on, I moved chairs and tables and set up a little display: few books, bumper stickers, and flyers for my February 12 reading/talk at the Oak Bluffs library. By then it was almost 5:30 and the organizer still hadn't appeared. By 5:45 I had an audience of five, two of whom had only stopped in so one could buy the book and get it signed. Vineyard audiences are notoriously casual about start times, so I asked the library staffers if I should get started. They said I certainly should because the library closed at 6; one of them was decidedly miffed that she might have to stay later than that. They expected a reading that began at 5:30 to be over by 6? In the annals of book promotion, none of this is unusual, but in the stories I've heard over the years the big busts usually take place at a chain bookstore fifty miles from where the author knows anyone: two people show up, and one of them is under the impression that you're someone else. To have it happen at your town's library only a couple miles up the road? It wasn't a body blow, exactly; it was more like a weight that coalesces slowly in your spirit. Books need readers, readers need listeners -- add this non-event at the library to the near-silence on the part of island media and I was beginning to wonder if The Mud of the Place were a figment of my imagination and, especially, if all the people who'd read Mud in its various drafts constituted the only enthusiastic audience the book would ever have. Earlier in the week, I had managed to send out a few more review copies and press packets, to my high school, my alma mater, and Featherstone, a local arts center, among other places. On one hand this was good; on the other it reminded me of all the other review copies, contest entries, and press packets that haven't elicited much in the way of response, and if I can't generate some interest here what hope is there that newspapers, bookstores, radio hosts, and other gatekeepers across the water will pay attention? Fortunately the aftermath of the non-event was taken up with the unplanned horse-sit, work, much driving to and fro, and dealing with the goddamn weather. Last night my friend Sara and I went to see Milk (about which I'll try to write a little something tomorrow maybe). After an astonishingly icy start to the day -- it was the first morning all winter that Uhura Mazda was defeated by the glacial river that is Halcyon Way -- the snow and sleet turned to rain and the temperature hit 50 degrees. The fog from one end of the Edgartown-West Tisbury Road to the other was thick and shifty. Sara and I met for supper at the Newes from America. While we were catching up, drinking beer, and eating, a former colleague and her husband came in. She leaned over and said she was looking forward to reading my book. Later, leaving the movie, someone who has worked at my bank since Rhodry was a pup stopped me to say she'd got my book out of the library and she loved it. I got home to a phone message from Ann Bassett, host of the Vineyard View show on the local cable station: she wants me to be on her show, and could I do the taping on February 20? Earlier today Ann and I connected. She's read the book! She has interesting things to say and questions to ask about it! Amazing how fast that slow-coalescing malaise started to dissolve. Some of those bottles I've tossed into the ocean seem to have reached dry land and willing readers.
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||