SAVE THE DATE! Thursday January 11, 2024 at 6:30pm Pacific. Live event only. Location: Saltwater Bookshop, 10978 NE State Highway 104, Ste 109, Kingston, Washington 98346. (360) 638-6136 saltwaterbookshop@gmail.com. Directions via Google maps
Readers of this blog know that the launch of my book, Intention Tremor (MoonPath Press: 2021), happened dead center in the middle of the pandemic, pre-vaccine.
It was a really tough time for me, having been a writer all my life and looking more forward to my “Author! Author!” moment than most every other milestone one might hope to surpass.
And of course, like so many personal milestones slated for celebration between March 2020 through the next couple of years, all those best-laid plans didn’t happen the way they were meant to… and in my case, not at all.
Naw, I’m not bitter.*
You’d think I’d be over it by now, and mostly I am. It has been a journey to keep myself from lingering on one of my life’s deeper disappointments.
Which brings me to today, as we near the end of 2023. I’m focusing instead on fantastic news: my new hometown has a brand-spanking-new bookstore, and they’ll be hosting a reading with me as top bill in a couple of weeks. Yep, I’m all smiles.
It’s the first bookstore reading I’ve had with Intention Tremor since it was released three years ago.
Yes. Three years ago.
For that I am so grateful. For once, I didn’t have to beg for a bookstore’s validation. They saw me as a member of the community with a book. They accepted me. That’s no small thing.
Since then, we’ve been chatting and planning, and I’ve brought in two of my favorite local poets to put forth a poetry reading to start 2024 off right.
What a treat it will be to have Seattle’s delightful Nicole Renee la Follette (Unique, Like Everyone) joining me and Ronda Piszk Broatch (Chaos Theory for Beginners), also a Kingston resident (who’s written quite a few bits about the bears all up in her apple trees), to round out this special night.
I hope you’ll join the three of us at this lovely literary destination in early January; it will feel so nice to be able to read to my neighbors and friends with the support of my local bookseller right there behind me to sanction a long-awaited celebration.
*All my contacts at my previous hometown bookstore (unnamed, but IYKYK) had retired literally weeks before my book was released. The new owners didn’t know me from Shinola and didn’t care, even when I gave them references. I was a nobody poet and every effort I made to get some kind of reading or signing or something was met with a slammed door. If I’m being honest, it was heartbreaking. One does not get a “redo” on a first book launch. Later, when they finally did get around to hosting readings again, I found zero space in their calendar, though I jumped through all their hoops to try to carve out a space. Which is a dreadful memory I’m still processing… after having practically raised my kids in that bookstore… after working side by side with them at writing conferences… after having sent so many of my former clients, with books in hand, to their podium… after helping them produce two in-house books of creative writing by locals, etc etc. … I really don’t know what else I could have done to show my value to them. To be rejected in that way… well, it was quite humiliating. All of my friends and my neighbors in my old hometown wanted to help me celebrate in the prominent way that new books by local authors are usually celebrated there, and yet, nothing materialized, not once. I hear there is a book buyer there now who’s friendly to poets. I wish her well. But once bitten, twice shy: I won’t be back.