Ode to the Coin Laundry

My parents didn’t get a washer and dryer until years after I’d married and moved away from home, and therefore many hours of my childhood were spent in coin laundries, and yesterday—-for some reason—-I found myself getting nostalgic about them.

I’m pretty certain that my mother doesn’t share that nostalgia. When she finally got her own washer-dryer set—-a hand-me-down from my grandmother, whose home was sold after she was moved permanently to a nursing home—-she reveled in the convenience. And no wonder: the ritual of washing clothes, all through my growing up, had been exhausting. Once a week, on Saturday morning, Mom would gather up the entire family’s clothes into five or six garbage bags, and Dad would load them in the bed of the pick-up truck. We’d drive to the laundry, unload, and Dad would go to the attendant to swap bills for quarters. Then, more often than not, he would leave for home or to do the grocery shopping, sometimes with my brother, and Mom would start staking out washers and measuring cups of powdered detergent.

From The Book Rack website

We went to several different laundry facilities over the years, but the iconic laundromat of my memory—-the one we kept coming back to—-was in a small brick-clad shopping center with a diner on one end and a grocery store on the other. One door down was a used bookstore called The Book Rack. I spent much of the time my mom was washing clothes hiding out in that dark, musty store, whose front room was filled with romance novels and comic books, its second room with mysteries, and where, as a pre-teen, I finally found the courage to venture into the recesses of the back-back room, a closet, really, with a cardboard cut-out of Hannibal Lecter on the wall and several shelves of beaten-up paperback horror novels. The Book Rack’s proprietress—-and she may still be there, for all I know—-was an elegant looking woman with large glasses hooked to a chain and hair that had been sprayed into romantic curls or a puffy chignon. She was always kind to me, patient with my browsing (which was more like long sessions of simply sitting in the floor and reading), despite the fact that I had no compunction in those days about entering places of business with blackened bare feet.

The next door after that was The Family Dollar. Now, our visits to The Family Dollar were always a matter of some controversy in our family, because my mom had a predilection for going there and buying items my father regarded as “doodads” or junk, and she was also a soft touch when it came to her kids’ desire for doodads and junk. One of my most vivid memories—-and perhaps this is why I thought of the coin laundry—-is of convincing her to buy me a novelty Valentine’s Day item that I can’t easily describe in a few words. It was a hollow plastic fox, covered with synthetic fur, lips painted a garish red, with arms that had been molded so that there was a little round opening where a vial of smelly cheap perfume was nestled. “Don’t tell your dad I bought it for you,” she said. I agreed. Then, weighted with guilt, I confessed to Dad as soon as I saw him.

And this is one of the associations I have with the coin laundry: hours alone with my mother, hours during which my mother exerted, however tentatively, her agency to spend cash and time as she liked, the two of us occasionally making plans and pacts that, at least in theory, excluded my father. My parents were, even by the standards of 1980s Kentucky, an old-fashioned married couple, one the cash earner and unilateral money manager, the other the full-time homemaker. My mother didn’t (and does not) have a driver’s license, and so there weren’t many opportunities for her to go to a store or a restaurant alone, unless she walked, and even then she wasn’t really alone, because my brother and I were with her. So I suspect that she enjoyed on some level the solitude of the work, the rhythm of wash and dry, the long stretches spent in a hard plastic chair, warm in a patch of sunlight, reading a book and drinking a bottle of diet soda and listening to the somersaulting clothes. She clearly liked the time spent among other women, too: the attendant, the other regulars. The coin laundry was a place where I saw black mothers and their families and later Mexican mothers and families. Whatever trepidations got expressed about race at home, at the laundromat, the interactions were friendly, casual. Women chatted about the weather and passed empty carts around. They warned one another about the dryer that wasn’t putting off good heat. And though I don’t remember much rowdy play among the children, we stood together eyeing the contents of the candy machines, invested dimes hoping that the plastic egg with the advertised “good” toy would roll down when we turned the crank. We sat in the lounge area together, eating Paydays and bags of Lance Nip-Chee. We sized one another up, filing away our observations for later consideration.

The laundromat, with a few rare exceptions, was a neutral place, an in-between place. It was a place where we all waited and bided our time. Some days that waiting felt like boredom, and other days it felt a bit transcendent, in a falsely floral-smelling, mote-caught-in-a-golden-sunbeam sort of way. The coin laundry of my memory exists always in summer, so that the plate glass windows are saturated with white light, the aisle in front of the dryers steamy, and everything is always revolving: the washers and dryers, the lazy ceiling fans, the wheels on the metal carts. If my feet aren’t bare, they are sweating in a pair of pale blue jelly shoes. I go to the RC machine, open the little glass door, and test a couple of bottlenecks to see if this is the day I get lucky and one slides free. It doesn’t, but there’s a puff of cold air from the refrigeration system, and I press my face into it.

When I help, it’s with the folding, and usually with the towels, working at a fraction of my mother’s speed. I tuck the towel under my chin, pull the end up. She sets me to washcloths, and I make little squares and stack them in a slanting pile at the edge of the table. When we’re finished, she piles the clean clothes back into the garbage bags, we lug them to the door, and wait for my father to return in the pick-up truck to take us home. If the weather is fine—-and in my memories, it always is—-my brother and I will ride in the back of the truck with the bags of clothes, but we have to promise to keep our bottoms on the floor of the bed, and we can’t sit on the wheel wells even if everybody else gets to.

There’s a point here, but it’s one that I may not have the skill to make. And it’s something like this: I am grateful for those steamy, in-between, light-filled Saturdays at the laundromat, and I wouldn’t have had them if we’d been another kind of family. The laundry was what I think Heaven ought to be like: clean, glowing, and luxuriously dull, and everybody is getting along, and the smell of chicken fried steak is wafting in from next door. 

Old Lady Trouble

I was 25 when I published my first short story (the first I’ll claim, at any rate, and the story that would eventually lead my first book). I was 28 when I found the first line on my face.

Allow me to pause there for a moment. On this day—the day I discovered the line—I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, getting ready to go to work, and there it was: a fine curve etched around the corner of my mouth. What I remember feeling, strangely enough, was a kind of tentative delight and pride. I was in my second year of full-time college teaching, and my young looks had seemed more than once to be detrimental to my ability to win students’ respect and trust. Such a little line—and troubling, perhaps, that it seemed to have appeared basically out of nowhere—but it symbolized what I’d spent my late teens and 20s hoping to achieve: wisdom, distinction, and a legitimate claim, finally, to my nearly decade-old marriage. I’d spent years pretending I had the right to be a wife and, later, a college professor, and this line meant that I could now stop the pretending. Adulthood: I had arrived.

The delight didn’t last long. In the next couple of years, the bathroom mirror kept greeting me with surprises: drooping eyelids, a crease on the other side of my mouth to match the first. The skin on my neck began to pucker. I went out and bought eye cream and collagen cream and a tube of Retinol. For my 30th birthday, I booked myself a facial. But the creams, the facial, the various spells I cast in an attempt to stave off the inevitable, did nothing. And finally this spring, I looked in the mirror one day to see—all at once, as if I’d suffered a terrible scare in my dreams the previous night—three coarse gray hairs springing jauntily from my line of bangs. Did I smile serenely and reflect on how my hair now told the true story of my wisdom? No, I started sobbing, and I called my mother. (Proof, of course, that age and maturity do not have to go hand in hand.) Then I plucked those suckers out and flushed them down the toilet.

This is, of course, not just the story of getting older—it’s an old story, a cliché. Most of us on the flipside of 30 could tell a version of it. 

But I started by mentioning that I published my first story at 25, and so bear with me as I return to this fact, considering this same trajectory of years through that other lens. My career, like my marriage, has in some ways (ways that weren’t obvious to me during the living of them) been on a fast track. Not an extraordinary fast track in the vein of, say, Karen Russell, but fast enough that the blurb on the cover of my first book credits me with “a wisdom beyond [my] years,” and I’ve been identified as a “young writer” about as often as I have a member of the other clubs to which I’ve belonged: “Kentucky writer,” “Southern writer,” or “woman writer.” The Young Writers Club is a nice one to belong to. It means your promise still exceeds the empirical evidence of the quality your output. It means, for some, getting singled out for special opportunities and designations, such as The New Yorker’s 20 under 40, Granta’s Best Young Novelists, or the NBA’s 5 under 35. Also, unlike other Young Clubs—Young Actors, for instance, or Young Popular Musicians—the literary world affords us a fairly long, leisurely membership. When I see Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney getting mocked online for trying to rock like they did when they were in their 20s, I give thanks for being part of a creative sphere that will give 91-year-old Elizabeth Spencer two standing ovations after a reading, and in which 81-year-old Alice Munro can release a short story collection to genuine awe and excitement.

But there are still some facts that can chill the blood, like these from from a 2010 New York Times essay by Sam Tanenhaus, “How Old Can a ‘Young Writer’ Be?”:

Unsurprisingly, in youth-obsessed America, writers have often done their best work early. Melville was 32 when “Moby-Dick” was published (after the successes of “Typee” and “Omoo”). The writers of the lost generation found their voices when they were very young: Fitz­gerald (28, “The Great Gatsby”), Hemingway (27, “The Sun Also Rises”). Faulkner lagged slightly behind. He had just turned 32 when “The Sound and the Fury” was published. Then again, it was his fourth novel.

Or the recent news of Philip Roth’s retirement from novel writing, including Roth’s claim, “I am seventy-eight years old, I don’t know anything anymore about America today. I see it on TV, but I am not living it anymore.”

I have different categories of fear about getting older, being a not-so-young writer. The cheapest fear is the fear of missed opportunities, the crass, scrabbling, unsavory yearnings of not the writer but the entity that is being marketed. It’s like graduating from high school without a Senior Superlative. (I didn’t get any of those, either.) If I wasn’t on someone’s Hot Young Thing list, have I missed the chance to be a Hot Not-So-Young Thing?

The more significant fear, which is the writer’s fear, is that I’m losing something, some abstract, wide-eyed audacity of the kind that got The Sound and the Fury out of Faulkner and The Sun Also Rises out of Hemingway by the time they were my age. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a better writer now than I was when I was 25. I’m writing better-crafted stories than those that appeared in Girl Trouble. I’m more purposeful, I’m smarter, and I have better habits. I’ve lived more. When I write now about the failings and pains of the body, I have some firsthand experience to cite. I’ve had time to identify some of the prejudices I took for granted then, to examine them and take them apart, and that’s a good thing, knowing that my default characters have been white, or heterosexual, because it never occurred to me to consider the perspective of a person of color or a gay person, or it did but I didn’t have the courage to try it. I wrote on this blog a while ago about how most of the stories in Girl Trouble fail the Bechdel test, or pass it on a technicality, and that’s information I’m glad I’m now armed with. Not because I want to be a more politically correct writer, but because fighting my default mode has given me new and exciting creative opportunities. 

And yet perhaps there’s a downside to all this self-awareness, self-analysis. When I was a 20-something graduate writing for a workshop deadline and an audience of one professional and about a dozen other mostly young writers, I didn’t spend much time second-guessing myself and what I professed to know. I hadn’t read enough to compare my work to that of others, much less publishing writers in my peer group, and so I told stories that had been told thousands of times before as if they hadn’t, my ignorance giving me a brazen sincerity. I was so earnest! I find it hard to muster that kind of earnestness now. 

The story in my first book that people seem to react most strongly to is called “Parts.” It’s a very dark story, narrated from the first-person perspective of a woman, a mother, whose only child was murdered violently by two young men, one of whom escaped prosecution. The story lingers on difficult physical details of the daughter’s suffering—the degree of burns she sustained in a fire—and takes as its literary touchstone Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, a play that is itself often cited for violence so extraordinary that it is almost inadvertently comic. I was consciously toying with that reputation, of course. In fact, the project was fairly ambitious in the sense that I was trying to write sincerely about a sensationally violent crime, using Titus as my tip of the hand but still (because I truly loved the play) making an argument for its right—and mine—to stare slack-jawed at disturbing material.  

In those rare cases that I hear from a fan of Girl Trouble, “Parts” is usually the story cited as the one that made the person cry, that the person had to share with a friend or a spouse. Each time this happens, I think about the fact that the story has long been the one in the book that makes me most uneasy and even embarrassed. It’s the story that for years I didn’t have the courage to read aloud (and have still only read from a few times), that I revised heavily after the book was accepted for publication, even though my editor didn’t ask me to. The qualities about it that unsettle me are undoubtedly the ones that appeal to those who love it. It’s not worthy of this comparison, but I find myself lumping it in a category with the story “Lawns,” by Mona Simpson (published, from what I’ve been able to piece together, when she was 27), which, when I was teaching from The Vintage Book of Contemporary Short Stories, was the selection I could depend upon to hook my raw, earnest 20-year-old charges. 

I don’t think I could write a story like “Parts” now. (I could barely write it then.) The volume is turned up too high. The version of me who wrote that story was young, strong, and relatively unencumbered. Her father hadn’t yet had a heart attack. She didn’t have any physical markers, however small, of her own impending mortality. That me had an easier time connecting with big-scale, Shakespearean tragedy than with the everyday sadness of a gray hair. That me had more in common with the teenager I’d been, smoking cigarettes and swinging at night with her best friend at the city park, talking in lofty, dramatic fashion about the loss of childhood, than with the woman who is about to see an orthopedist about her aching hips. 

Which is not to say “Parts” is a bad story, or an immature story. And that’s the sadness here, the question: If that’s a very good story, and I can no longer write it, am I still any good? 

Well, I’m not getting on here to announce my retirement, and so I assume I can be, in a different way, and that an evolution in writing style is a think to be celebrated and not lamented. I can miss the writer capable of a story like “Parts” just as I miss my young firm neck, but I’ll ultimately be happy to pass my Young Writer mantle along to some other whippersnapper, with the hope that by the time I do I’ll have settled into a rich next writing phase with its own rewards. 

Kentucky Fried

Blogger, Kentuckian, and all-around nice person Amanda Hervey let me share a post today on her site, A Lovely Place to Land. Since Amanda's blogging interests tend to focus on family and home, including home improvement/craft projects, cooking, and reflections on being a parent and a wife--roles she takes on in addition to working on a novel and freelance writing--I thought it would be appropriate to use her generously offered real estate to talk about food, specifically a cookbook of family recipes my mother assembled for me. Along the way, I discuss my feminism and how I've come to reconcile my earlier notions of what that meant with the pleasure to be found in cooking and sharing food.

Speaking of which, I just came off a rare and delightful weekend in which my husband, who has been very busy lately with work and setting up his backyard woodshop, spearheaded two major cooking projects. On Saturday, he used a recipe from a cookbook I picked up for a quarter at a book sale, Maria Polushkin's The Dumplin Cookbook, to make homemade gyoza. Reader, they were the bomb. And this cookbook, published in 1977, is pretty awesome, too--very easy to follow, and delightfully all over the place, with recipes from around the world united in their essential dumpling-ness. Good stuff.

Yesterday, he tackled fried chicken. For over two years now we've owned a Lodge cast iron frying skillet that we got specifically for the purpose of chicken-frying and have only used once or twice, and never to tackle bone-in chicken. You could say we kept chickening out. (Ba-dum-bum-ching. I'm here all night.) But we had some buttermilk left over from a couple of my cooking projects, and so we thought we'd get a two-fer, chicken and biscuits, out of what was left in the jug. Brandon took charge of the chicken and sweet tea. I covered the red-skinned mashed potatoes and biscuits.

Chicken frying in our honking Lodge skillet.

Biscuits. 

Final plate.

It's going to be a rough New Year.

New short story

I have a short story, "Who Cooks For You," up this week at Five Chapters. Check in each day between now and Friday for a new installment.

Q&A with Peter Levine, author of THE APPEARANCE OF A HERO: THE TOM MAHONEY STORIES

I met Pete Levine in 2006, at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. We were both there as scholars, and Pete was in the same workshop as my roommate, Rebecca Kanner, another scholar. None of us had published more than a few short stories at the time, and now Pete has this fantastic book of stories, The Appearance of a Hero, Rebecca’s novel The Sinners and the Sea is due out next year, and another scholar from that year, Jamie Poissant, just reported scoring a two-book deal. Shannon Cain, who shared a bathroom with Rebecca and me, won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in 2011 for The Necessity of Certain Behaviors. In other words, lots of good things have happened in the last six years for good people, and Pete—who kindly agreed to the Q&A below—is the best of people.

The Appearance of a Hero is a collection of stories united by Tom Mahoney, a handsome, charming young man who has a magnetic quality that makes him an object of fascination for the book’s various point-of-view characters. The book is obsessed with Tom, and yet Tom is really not the point; rather, he’s the common factor that allows Pete to write about work and wealth, fatherhood, the diminishment of youth’s promise, adult friendships, and the ways in which men and women in their 30s settle into relationships very different from those that were characteristic of their passionate 20s. The Publishers Weekly review describes Pete’s characters as “emasculated by modern life,” and I have to admit that this isn’t a theme that would normally have captured my interest—in fact, I think it reduces the book to something less subtle than what Pete actually offers. The Appearance of a Hero is deeply humane, careful in its treatment of both male and female characters, and never did I feel that it was some kind of lamentation about the lot of contemporary men or manhood.

HGJ: I've been trying to form a theory about a quality that the book has, a sort of old-fashioned interest in a certain kind of masculine ideal, and I can't seem to get my thoughts ordered to my satisfaction. The book obviously references Gatsby--the cover design, with the crisply folded shirt, is a nod to that comparison. But it also reminded me, in turns, of the Russell Banks story, "Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story," and maybe a little of Bret Easton Ellis if Ellis had a soul. And--this is the most half-baked part of my thinking--I thought there was even something kind of Victorian about the approach. I kept thinking of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and how you had this one man frankly admiring another man without the central point being homoeroticism. A certain earnestness, if that makes any sense. So I'm wondering how you came to be interested in building a book around Tom Mahoney. And--this is the harder question to frame--does this idea of earnestness resonate with you? I can see how another writer could pursue a similar project to this and be much more cynical about Tom and the admiration he inspires, but this doesn't strike me as a cynical book at all.

PL: You’re right on with all these points. I’ll try to get to all these good questions. In the first place, the origins of Tom—that was personal. Guys I know or knew. I was trying to capture on the page what I’d experienced first-hand. That is, trying to distil the essence of a certain kind of person who I think we all know.

To me, it’s not that Tom is perfect, though like the character “Ron” in the Banks story, he seems that way. Like Ron, he has a light and he’s unaware of the light and how it affects people around him, how it ushers him through life.

Earnestness is the right word. I think of Tom as earnest, but so too is the affection others feel toward him. But they really can’t speak of it. The book observes and records this but doesn’t describe it, or at least not much.

There are parts of the book that are homoerotic, but I intended them to be that way. Women examine each other: how they look, how they dress, what they admire about each other, and men do too, but they can’t admit it. Tom is an object of desire, and himself desires other men, albeit in a non-sexual way.

  

I once had a professor observe the same Victorian quality you describe when talking about Jekyll and Hyde—the idea of men enjoying the company of other men. I wanted to explore that. By centering on Tom, who’s universally attractive—an ideal, as you put it—to both men and women, it kind of gives license for both the characters, and the book, to examine how men fawn over each other. Bromance is a goofy term, but kind of apt, too.

I recall a Friends episode (yep, just brought up Friends) where Chandler and Ross are expecting an old buddy from high school or something to visit. If I remember correctly, they called him Gandalf because he was so cool and powerful (I just confirmed this online, I was right: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcNhuHVfz20). He was the party wizard.

And it’s not very highbrow, but look, that’s what Tom is, or what people think he is. And that was the spirit I was trying to capture, examine, as well as subvert.

HGJ: So do you think there are fundamental differences between the ways men connect and the ways women do?

PL: Women have this ability to talk with such openness. If something’s up, they talk. If there’s a rift, they talk it out, examine it, unpack it, and at the end, they tell each other how important they are to each other. And I’m not trying to suggest that the guys in the book are these Carveresque-Joe-6-pack types who are completely unable to express their feelings toward each other, but there are some obvious differences. This inability informs some of the drama in the book, and in particular, Tom’s relationship with his dad.

HGJ: Did your Tom Mahoney stories just start to accumulate, or did you set out to write a linked collection?

PL: They just accumulated. In fact, this is funny—the name of the document I sent out to agents was “The Tom Mahoney Stories.” Real clever. There were some that got cut, some that got added, and some new ones.

HGJ: One of my favorite devices in the book--you use it several times, in the stories "How Does Your Garden Grow?", "Our Hero David Katz," "The Northernmost Point," and "Princess," perhaps also in small touches elsewhere--is when you have a character telling a story within the story. It even gets more complicated than that a couple of times. In "Princess," which begins as a man telling Tom the story about how, in his youth, he and a couple of other fathers take their daughters on a camping trip, you even have stories within the story within the story: a campfire ghost story, a story of one character's past sexual exploit. What do you like about his device, and why did it seem right for this book? 

PL: What I like about the technique is its intimacy. I really like the feeling of a narrator telling you a story as if you're there with them. I think the books I like best do this. There's someone talking to you, and it helps to orient me as a reader. I have a harder time with big, historic books in which the narrator seems really distant. 

In those stories you mention, it felt natural to keep burrowing deeper, having stories within stories (and, as you point out), adding even another layer sometimes. It made the writing feel very easy, casual and natural for me. It's how we speak and tell stories in real life. 

I didn't use this technique on purpose. I wrote the stories separately, not knowing they were going to all be in the book, nor in the order they ended up. But in the end it made sense, because the idea of Tom was the idea of a guy who everyone had a tall tale about. 

HGJ: I thought your approach to point of view in the third-person stories was often pretty gutsy and surprising. There are stories here that are told in more conventional limited third person perspective, such as "Havasu" and "Code Pink" (if I'm recalling correctly), and then there are other stories, such as "La Jolla" (a story about a friendship that develops between a wealthy couple in late middle age and a young couple just starting out) and "For the Reception to Follow" that are more broadly omniscient. How did you make these calls? When you were writing your omniscient stories, did you ever feel that you were having to unlearn some of the MFA workshop truisms about POV "violations"? 

PL: I'm laughing. You know, I wasn't doing this technique when I was in grad school but I could totally see someone getting called out for it. In any case, it's been some time since then, so I don't have those voices haunting me, telling me what I'm supposed to do and not do (you're right about having to unlearn certain things). 

So, it wasn't something I was worried about as a technical matter. But it was something I was aware of and played with, as you point out. I wanted to give different characters time on the page, be in their heads, and so, as in the story "La Jolla," I dipped in and out of everyone a little bit. 

It was very much the idea of the "camera" panning around, zooming in and out. In that story you mention, you had one scene where two guys are passing a football back and forth, and so the football served to move the lens around, and therefore, the POV. Or in another scene, where two women are jogging, the characters' physical locations allowed me to make that move. In the story you mentioned, "Code Pink," which is a more traditional third person POV, the viewpoint begins with Tom's father in his car and ends with an image of the car--a source of his strength and also a symbol.

Again, as you know, it's not so much something you're planning or strategizing in the writing, but something that you notice later.

HGJ: I think I’m fixating so much on the technique as used in “La Jolla” because, though you’re able to get in the older couple’s heads at various points in the story, why they take such a profound interest in the younger couple is only hinted at. So accessing them doesn’t solve certain mysteries—and yet, I was happy to have had the access. Why did omniscience seem like the right move for that story?

Same thing—I wish I could say that this was a decision I made but it was more organic than that. But thinking back, though the story is really about a young couple trying to start a life in a new city, and an older couple that tries to sap their youth, the omniscience allowed me to avoid making villains out of the older couple.

The time spent in this older couple’s heads is time concerned with their admiration of the younger couple’s youth and light—how they perceive the kids, as they call them. And since that struggle for youth is central to the story, it seemed important that I let the reader hear them in their desire for it.

HGJ: What was your experience like finding a publisher for this project? Was there ever pressure on you to turn this into a novel, or even just to package it as a novel, the way other linked books of stories--A Visit from the Goon Squad, Olive Kitteridge, for instance--have been marketed as novels? 

PL: Well, certainly the fact that the book was a collection of stories was a big hurdle for all the publishers. No way around it. Not desirable. 

But at the same time, the book did get published. So who knows? Fortunately, my publisher never asked me to try to package the book as anything other than short stories--not a "novel in stories" or whatever (BTW, I did not know that Olive was positioned as a novel, though I think I knew that A Visit From the Goon Squad was). There is this sense that you want to call a book anything other than stories, even if that's what they are. 

I guess my experience told me that things were not as bad I'd been led to believe (i.e. don't even bother trying to get a big publisher interested in a collection), but at the same time, I have to confess that a lot of the old truisms about collections were retold to me, only this time, rather than a writer or blogger or teacher saying it, it was an editor. Despite all of that, though, there were still editors who seemed genuinely interested in working with the book and honoring the form. Hope that's worth something to your readers.

HGJ: What’s next for you?

After I submitted the manuscript for this book, I wrote a number of stories about Tom that picked up where the book left off, as well as some unrelated ones, and I hope to place them. As far as something bigger, a novel, for instance, still TBD, though I do feel as if I have a lot more to say about Tom’s life, filling in some gaps and history.

But what’s next for me, Holly, is hopefully some sleep! Every time I sit down to write, my newborn pipes up. So we gotta teach him to sleep, and then I gotta sleep, and then we’ll see where the work is.

Conversations with Indie Booksellers, 3/3: Crystal Wilkinson, The Wild Fig Books

The final Q&A in this little independent bookseller series is with Crystal Wilkinson, owner (along with partner Ron Davis) of Lexington’s The Wild Fig Books, which sells used books and a limited number of new titles. The Wild Fig opened in 2011, a year after my last trip to Lexington, and so I haven’t been able to check it out firsthand. I’ve been curious about it, though, because Crystal Wilkinson is a fiction writer—author of two wonderful short story collections, Blackberries, Blackberries and Water Street—and one of those people I feel like I know, because we share so many mutual friends, though I don’t think we’ve once met in real life. (I hope to soon remedy that.)

HGJ: I haven’t been to Lexington since The Wild Fig opened, and so I haven’t gotten to see the digs firsthand. Can you tell me about it? What’s the atmosphere, and what do you want customers to feel when they come inside?

CW: We have a wonderful collection of bookstores in Lexington. New and used. We want people to feel as though The Fig is a different experience. We have an eclectic mixture of books including extensive literary fiction, sci-fi, cookbook, art and classic sections. There are a couple of signs in the store that say "Friends gather here." We want people to feel that they can come and browse and be at home. We've had lots of people to scramble around for words to describe us. "It's so..so...so..so..." And finally they settle upon "Warm!" We like that. The second greatest compliment is  "I always find the book I’m looking for when I come here."  That also makes us feel pretty good.

HGJ: I have to admit that I have occasionally fantasized about opening a small bookstore—especially when I’m having a bad teaching day (and on those days I amend it to a bookstore/bar)—and so when I heard you’d bought The Wild Fig, I thought, “Well, there’s a writer living the life.” Can you tell me a bit about why you came to buy the store? Had you also long harbored the bookstore fantasy, and if so, how has the reality compared to the dream?

CW: Well to clarify, me and Ron (my partner and co-owner) didn't buy the store. We bought the inventory after Morgan Adams Books closed and then re-opened The Wild Fig in this same location. Ron tells everyone that I've always secretly wanted to be a librarian but of course I have always loved and collected books and I have always wanted to own a bookstore. Ron is a visual artist and worked for the owners of the bookstore that was at the previous location. When she decided to close, we were kind of joking over breakfast about opening our own store and before we knew it we had bought the inventory, which included books and shelving. There was some question whether we would get the lease but no doubt that we had bought thousands of books that we might have to find room for in our two-bedroom house. Everything worked out so here we are. Bookstore Fantasy? I still salivate over a good book and of course we love it. It has really met my emotional expectations. Financially? We are always worried about that but after being only a little over a year old things seem to be working out. Are we rich or do we expect that? No not really, but of course we'll keep our fingers crossed. Ron says that books will be like vinyl soon that it will be the young people that sort of reject e-books over having an original reading device--a book! We kind of laugh at the idea that books will be extinct.

HGJ: Do you find that running a bookstore accommodates you as a writer—your mindset, your habits? Are there any ways in which immersing yourself in the retail side of things has complicated or changed your writing life?

CW: One thing that has been wonderful is that since we live in the neighborhood, I sneak over to the bookstore at three or four in the morning and write. We both do. I have always written while surrounded with books. I have more than a thousand books at home in my own collection but it's quite a different feeling to write surrounded by thousands and thousands of books and to have them all here so that when I feel uninspired I can run to the shelves for inspiration from Morrison or Dickens or Wideman or Doyle or Erdrich. The list is very long. Sometimes when I'm stuck like that, I choose a writer I've never read, sometimes never heard of, to read a few passages of before I go back to my own writing. I feel amazing and empowered by being surrounded by so many published words. So in that way I've been more motivated to write than before. I can't say that being immersed in retail has really affected my writing negatively (not any more than any of the other distractions that are constantly a part of my everyday life). Something is always lurking to interrupt. That part is a constant battle for me and it always has been. Bookstore ownership is bliss in comparison to the other things.

HGJ: According to your Facebook page, The Wild Fig sells used books and “a few recent releases.” How do you curate the store’s stock? Do you think it’s important to try to have certain books on hand, or is a central pleasure of the used bookstore its randomness?

CW: We try to have Kentucky writers on hand and a few bestsellers. We felt forced into carrying books like The Help, Fifty Shades of Gray, The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones. Our used inventory is very eclectic and we try to focus on books that people will want or have requested. Ron, as a visual artist, has a habit of buying books with beautiful covers. He is also a poet and so he gets excited about poetry too. I lean toward literary fiction and the classics. I've enjoyed learning more about areas such as Philosophy and Psychology even Science Fiction and Mystery. I'm not well-read in these areas so it's been fun to learn the classics in each genre.

HGJ: As a writer, you have probably often heard, like I have, that “hand-selling” is critical to getting your book out in the world. Now that you’re a bookseller, what do you think of this notion of hand selling, and is this as necessary in a store whose stock is mostly used?

CW: Hand selling seems such a cold way to describe engaging with people. I am generally a quiet person so as a writer if I am at a book fair or a store event my approach is to just be friendly and to tell passersby about my book given the opportunity. But most importantly I try to connect with the people on a personal level by asking them what they like to read, do they write, what was the last book they read, etc. In the store, because we are primarily a used store many of our customers come in on a mission looking for one or two particular books but often find other books to take home as well. With the popularity of e-books what's most interesting to me is that we get customers who have downloaded an e-book, love it, and want to have a paper and ink version of the book for their shelves. We try not to do the hard-sell but if someone is not sure what they would like but are just browsing I often tell them about the new books that we have, especially the Kentucky authors.  Being genuine and being helpful is most important. I prefer to not call it hand selling.

HGJ: I see online that the Wild Fig does host some in-house events. What kind of events do you host, and do you think it’s important that they have a different vibe than the average bookstore author reading? Is the audience different? I saw that you host a regular open mic night, for instance, which is perhaps more typical of the coffee shop side of things, since open mics don’t get to be an advertisement for a product, usually.

CW: We do have some in-house events and we are still trying to figure out our niche. Our readings and signings tend to be intimate, which book lovers adore. I am not sure the audience is any different than it would be at a larger bookstore. People who read want to connect with the authors of books. Our open mic is a gathering place for writers and those who love to be read to. We've had a few people come and read or sign who have never stood in front of an audience before. That is wonderful to see and sometimes Ron and I will join in and read from our work or someone else's. No, open mics aren't an advertisement for a product, but we want to do more than just sell books. I mean of course we want to sell books but we want to be a gathering place too. We have a few regulars who come and hang out. They buy a cup of coffee, they invite a friend to come with them, they have a business meeting, they sit and read, etc. And we know they will be back and they will buy a book when the need strikes them. That's fine with us. And speaking of a coffeehouse, that is our desire for one side of the store eventually. Meadowthorpe needs a good coffeehouse. We just haven't been able to afford it yet.

HGJ: Lexington is a city that has managed in recent years to have several thriving independent bookstores among, if I recall, at least a couple of the chains, such as B&N. The city where I live now, in comparison, has only one Barnes & Noble, one large used bookstore, and a scattering of very small used bookstores, even though Greensboro is comparable in size to Lexington and also a college town. Why do you think it is that Lexington can support this sort of book scene? What is The Wild Fig’s role in that scene?

CW: Lexington is sort of a literary mecca. The amount and variety of readers and published writers is pretty amazing. I would imagine that we have more published writers per capita than a lot of cities of comparable size and that has to translate into informed readers on the other side of those good books. When we opened, a lot of people said things like "How brave of you" or "Good luck with that in this economy." But we are growing and doing fine. Every day we have customers who say it's their first time in the store and we welcome them and show them around. I would like to think that Ron and I have managed to have our own little place in the book scene. We still have some of the old book flair that you love in a used bookstore and would like to consider ourselves a little eclectic kind of funky place for new books too. As I said before we don't really carry every new book and we don't try to. We carry some popular new books, we carry some new books by weird small publishers too. With Ron being an artist, we have an unusual assortment of popular art books and graphic novels. We've only been open a little over a year and a half and we are having fun and hope that our customers find what they want and have fun doing it. We are really not trying to compete with the other bookstores, I mean I know that sounds a little naive because of course we are all competing for some of the same people. I think that all of the bookstore owners in the area are really supportive of one another and I think there is room for us all. Our primary goal for The Wild Fig is just to make The Wild Fig the best bookstore that it can be and we are continually discovering what that means. It's a process and we are enjoying it. And we are so grateful and happy that people give us a try, leave satisfied, and come back.

Conversations with Indie Booksellers, 2/3: Wyn Morris, The Morris Book Shop

Today’s Q&A is with Wyn Morris, whose bookstore, The Morris Book Shop, opened in Lexington in 2008. I’ve known Wyn for a little over ten years now. I was an undergraduate marketing intern at University Press of Kentucky when Wyn left a position at Joseph-Beth Booksellers to become Sales Manager at the UPK. Wyn subsequently left UPK to open, along with store manager Hap Houlihan (another UPK alum) The Morris Book Shop.

The store has moved since I was last there in 2010, and so I’ve yet to see the new location (though you can check out some photos on the store website). My guess, though, is that The Morris Book Shop continues to offer Lexingtonians a smaller, more intimate alternative to Joseph-Beth. If the latter is grand in scale and classic in concept, with the space to accommodate hundreds of fans of cult writers such as George RR Martin or celebrity writers such as Lauren Conrad, Wyn’s store is something different, and perhaps even hipper (though I wonder if Wyn would bristle at that word choice). It’s a place where you can quietly browse, chat with a familiar store employee, and walk out with something you didn’t come in looking for.  

HGJ: I know, in sketch, the story of how you came to open The Morris Book Shop, but I wonder if you wouldn’t mind telling some of that story. Had you always dreamed of owning your own store?

WM: I spent my college years working at a local record store (remember those?), and as a music fan - but non-musician - I found that gave me a platform to share stuff I liked with other people. Sounds a bit simplistic, but the pleasure of handing someone a record and saying “I think you’ll really like this” is a really satisfying experience. Even better when they do like it and come back for more. I made a million mixtapes for a million girls, and every one of them meant something. Plus, I got used to being paid almost nothing.

I signed on as a bookseller for Joseph-Beth when I graduated from UK and sort of just stayed. They were experiencing a period of extraordinary growth and that afforded the opportunity to wear many hats. I learned a great deal about the business of books, and I realized I not only loved it, but I was pretty good at it. When I left after 10 years to work at the University Press of Kentucky I thought I might be done with the retail end of the book business.

But I missed all the other books. If you invited me out for a beer, chances were that you were going to hear about the bookstore I would someday open in Lexington. And it might have stayed that way.

In 2006 and 2007, a series of unfortunate events turned my world upside down. In short, I lost every “adult” in my family in less than a year. The sort of experience that makes one realize that life is indeed very short, and perhaps it was time to stop boring friends with talk of what I was going to do and get down to the business of actually doing something. My friend and frequent co-worker Hap Houlihan was foolish enough to sign up for the trip and The Morris Book Shop was born.

HGJ: What were the most surprising challenges of starting a bookstore from scratch?

WM: I felt like I knew how to “run” a bookstore. Starting my own business was another matter. Forms, fees, lawyers, landlords, banks, publishers, etc... a truly soul-sucking process starting a business is. You’ve really gotta want it, because it’s a gigantic pain in the butt. I still feel like I’m always waiting on the phone call telling me that I’ve not dotted an “i” somewhere along the line and that the government now owns my store.

Oddly, one unanticipated issue was the assumption that we were a used and/or Christian book store. It’s been a very long time since Lexington last had a traditional bookstore under 6,000 square feet, so I guess I understand the confusion. We’ve hopefully sent dozens of customers to Lexington’s many great used book stores, but we ain’t among them.

HGJ: Small bookstores are often celebrated for being “curated,” and it occurs to me, contemplating the huge task of opening a store, that it would be incredibly intimidating to build the stock, even though I consider myself reasonably well read. How did you go about doing that for your store? What are your favorite sections of the store? Do you focus on some kinds of books to the exclusion of others?

WM: Compiling our opening inventory was a hugely collaborative affair. We established a very close relationship with a representative from wholesaler Ingram Book Company (Marsha Wood - a Lexington native) and worked with her to sift through spreadsheets, catalogs, fuzzy memories, etc... and we got damn close! We had to make some leaps of faith, and we were wrong a lot, but on opening day we had a pretty decent selection. My experience at Joseph-Beth and at the University Press really came in handy as we compiled the Kentucky section. I’d crossed paths with many of the region’s authors and publishers, so often the relationships were already in place.

As for actual “inventory control” I’m not sure I do it like anybody else. I do meet with publisher sales reps, and I do look through catalogs (more and more in electronic form), but when I’ve attended sessions on buying at bookseller gatherings I feel like either an idiot or a rogue savant. Most of it goes on in my head, in Google Reader, on my phone, on NPR, in Entertainment Weekly, or the NYT Book Review. I seem to have some sort of filter that retains information about books and lets most everything else pass through. I have a bookselling brain, and it’s of little use elsewhere. I can’t go to the grocery without a list, but I’ll sure as shit have “Sign of the Beaver” on the shelf when your kid needs it for school.

People are sometimes surprised by my relatively lowbrow taste in literature. I read mostly fiction, and while I happily anticipate the new Michael Chabon or Junot Díaz, I’m just as likely to be found curled up with a good zombie story, graphic novel, or an old John D. MacDonald or Elmore Leonard book. My personal tastes have little to do, however, with what you’ll find on the shelves. Our customers have led us, and will continue to lead us, where we need to be. Lexington’s reading habits are what curate The Morris Book Shop’s stock.

HGJ: As an author, I hear a lot about the importance of the “hand sell.” My publisher encourages me to do events, for instance, because they think it’s so critical that I meet the booksellers and make them want to put the book into a customer’s hands. What does “hand selling” mean to you? Is it a matter of being knowledgeable enough to match a customer with the book that’s a right fit, or is it important to you to spread the word about books you love?

WM: Handselling is bookselling at its purest. “What should I read next?” “THIS! I think you’ll love it!” I think it’s why we do what we do. You learn through the years to cater to each particular customer, but also to not pander - a Nora Roberts fan might find that they love Jennifer Egan or Ann Patchett, or someone who’s finished with Roberto Bolaño’s entire output might adore Richard Stark’s Parker novels. This is the fun part. This is why we do what we do. The parent who rolls their eyes and says “all he wants to do is read”? - we’ve got that covered. “I’ve just finished all three Fifty Shades of Grey books - what now?” - done. “Do you have any books on hot air ballooning?” - yes, one. The Balloon Flying Handbook by the FAA.

HGJ: Lexington is a city that has managed in recent years to have several thriving independent bookstores among, if I recall, at least a couple of the chains, such as B&N. The city where I live now, in comparison, has only one Barnes & Noble, one large used bookstore, and a scattering of very small used bookstores, even though Greensboro is comparable in size to Lexington and also a college town. Why do you think it is that Lexington can support this sort of book scene? What is The Morris Book Shop’s role in that scene?

WM: I have to give a tremendous amount of the credit for Lexington’s thriving bookstore scene to Joseph-Beth. For many Lexingtonians, Joseph-Beth has always been here. A bookstore has always been a place you go - to browse, to socialize, to have coffee, to pick up chicks, to research deck building, to meet superstar authors, to BUY BOOKS.

Lexington has also always had a thriving community of authors that it can be easy to take for granted. I honk and wave at my neighbor Nikky Finney on my way home every evening. Ed McClanahan walks by my house twice a day. We bump into Bobbie Ann Mason at the grocery. Silas House, C.E. Morgan, Erik Reese, Maurice Manning, and others are friends and customers. Crystal Wilkinson owns a friggin’ bookstore here! And Holly Goddard Jones sends me a lengthy Q&A and knows I’ll take the time to attempt to answer thoughtfully. Writers & books are just a part of our everyday life here in Lexington, and the community is dedicated to supporting them. Our role? Matchmaking - let’s get these people together!

The “Shop Local” movement has also taken hold in Lexington in a major way. As Lexington’s only locally-owned and operated new bookstore, we helped found Local First Lexington just over four years ago. There are now almost 200 member businesses. Folks here seem to really be concerned with shopping local, knowing where their money is going and trying to keep it here in the community, and I think Local First has done a great deal to educate consumers about how best to go about that.

HGJ: Let’s talk a little about events. What is the purpose of the in-store event? When an author like me gets discouraged, coming in to read to a couple of souls and one kindly store employee, are we wasting our time or doing some kind of good for our books? What do you think the events mean to the customers? What are the ingredients for a successful in-store event?

WM: Events are sort of a necessary evil for both authors & booksellers. We’ll never be the place that the publishers send their superstar celebrity authors. We choose instead to focus on mostly local talent - authors, poets, and musicians - and have had a great deal of success partnering with local organizations to bring authors in for events outside of the store. In September alone we are selling books at offsite events for German street artists Herakut, a Hospice benefit featuring Patrick Swayze’s widow Lisa, and the annual Kentucky Women Writers Conference with Ruth Reichl, Karen Joy Fowler, Kelly Link, and many others.

I’ve been fortunate to hear bestselling author - now fellow bookseller - Ann Patchett speak quite eloquently about the importance of booksigning events to an author, and I can’t begin to hope to do the same. The sense that an author is winning over one reader at a time is quite valid, but it must often feel like banging one’s head against a wall. I’ve seen that connection between author and reader many times, most recently at a book launch for Lexington author Gwenda Bond - you see one customer with the hair standing up on the back of their neck as they speak with an author. All kind of worth it in my opinion. If we sell a few books, well all the better.

HGJ: I know that you moved to a new location recently. What was the purpose of the move? What is your vision for The Morris Book Shop in the coming years?

WM: Our move to the Chevy Chase neighborhood has been huge. When folks from elsewhere ask about the area, I’ll usually tell them that, in a bigger city, we would be downtown. We’re surrounded by older residential neighborhoods, very close to UK’s campus, and there are about a dozen restaurants and bars within walking distance. You can pick up some Mediterranean food or a fresh baguette, snag a bottle of wine or a growler of craft beer, rent a movie at an actual video store, grab some Graeter’s ice cream - and, of course, buy a few books before heading home.

We also paid particular attention to the design of the store, and I think we’ve built a bookstore that looks like no other. American bookstores have come to all look a certain way over the past few decades, and we willfully went for an entirely different vibe. Local artisans and designers crafted nearly every element of the store, and I think we’ve got something really special.

In the coming years, we’ll basically be following where our customers lead us. This city has embraced us more than I ever imagined, and I look forward to what we’ll build together.