Robin Hemley

Yes, Kindergartners Should Have Condoms

2010-07-09T08:31:00.000-07:00

A national stink has been created by the School Board in Provincetown’s recent decision to allow children as young as five access to condoms without their parents’ permission. As a frequent visitor to Provincetown, I have a few thoughts on the matter that might be different from the standard take. I think we should definitely hand out condoms to young kids. Here’s what they might do with them:

1. Make Water Balloons
In the 1970’s, in my early teens I founded an environmental group for kids with the grandiose title, Society for the Prevention of Environmental Corruption. We met on Saturdays in a Drug Rehab Center/Free University called Everyday People, in the same room that the Sex Education class met. One Saturday, bored with talk of saving the planet, or at least with plans to clean up Hinkson Creek, we poked around our room and opened one of the closets where we found a trove of sex education paraphernalia, mostly condoms and birth controls pills. We broke out the birth control pills and most of us, boys and girls alike, popped a couple each, pretending to be high (it was the 70’s, after all), then broke out the condoms and filled them with water. A popular fish and chips place next door, Alfie’s, had a lunch rush going on. Perched in the windows of the second floor of Everyday People, we shouted in unison at a group of college kids making their way to the restaurant. “Look up! “ They did and then we rained down upon them as if from heaven the giant distended condoms.
I only wish that Columbia, Missouri and Roger the Youth Minister (who ran Everyday People) had been as progressive about condoms then as Provincetown is now. It would have been so much nicer for me if Roger had simply said, “Not that I approve, but I suppose that none of your parents need to know about the condoms.”

2. Trade Them for Candy
A couple of years ago, I was in Provincetown with my wife and four daughters during the annual Mardi Gras celebration, which in Ptown is celebrated in August. The theme that year was the Wild, Wild West. The floats lumbered by to deafening music as men and women in cow folk regalia threw beads and candy and drag queens dressed like Miss Kitty and her girls waved at the enthusiastic crowd from convertibles. Mardi Gras beads rained upon us, and soon my daughters were draped in them. Then the Bacardi Float passed sporting bare-chested men dressed in tight shorts, cowboy hats and boots. They tossed handfuls of packets to us and my five-year-old Shoshie dove for them. Some sweet treat?
They were not. They were condoms.
A young dancer appeared in our midst and knelt beside Shoshie, “Hi, what’s your name?” he asked.
She told him without a hint of shyness.
“Oh, that’s a nice name, but you’re too young for this, sweetheart” and he gently took the condom from her. “Here, have some candy.” She took some, thanking him, just as I had taught. Always thank the stranger when he takes the condom and gives you candy instead.

3. Put them on Sticks
Years ago, I read a story about a village in a country (I forget which) with a population problem that was visited by a social worker who talked to the villagers about birth control. He handed out condoms to the men and told them how they could prevent their wives from having more babies. Demonstrating how to put on a condom, he placed a condom on a stick. “When you have relations with your wife, you put the condom on and you won’t have babies.”
A year later when he returned, the men complained that the method had not worked at all, though they had all followed the social worker’s instructions precisely. To prove it, they led him to a field covered in sticks draped in condoms.
The villagers of course were not stupid. They were simply following the instructions of the health worker. They had no other context for condoms.
Neither do five-year olds.
Not many five year olds would ask for condoms, but I wonder so what if they do? Condoms are good for grownups, a really good idea for sexually active teens, and best of all for five year olds, who are more inventive than the rest of us. I plan to give a dozen to my now seven-year-old daughter Shoshie and tell her to go wild, to do whatever she wants with them. Personally, I think she’ll still prefer candy.

A Day at the Prefecture

2010-01-22T12:19:00.000-08:00

It's been quite a while since I've posted on my blog. I'm now in France with my family, supposedly teaching for the semester at the University of Montpellier. The beginning of our time in France has been fraught so far . . . Not especially fun to live but perhaps worth reading about? So here's my first entry . . .

I thought I’d give you a little taste (or reminder) of the legendary French bureaucracy.

Last week, I was told by Madame Loretz in Personnel at The University of Montpellier where I’m teaching for several months that I had been given the wrong visa by the Chicago Consulate. It’s actually NOT the wrong visa, but it was impossible to convince Madame Loretz of that. The visa is a three-month visa with a note attached (in English though it should be in French) stating that the three-month visa was not a mistake, and that I needed to report to the Prefecture within a week of entering French territory and apply for a Carte de Sejour. “No,” Madame Loretz insisted. “You need a Scientific visa.” As a result, she told me that they couldn’t pay me until I applied for my Carte De Sejour successfully and at least returned to her office on Friday with a receipt.

“Do not leave the Prefecture without a receipt!” she told me.

Actually, I understood none of what she said, but my handler, Phil Carr, originally from Edinburgh, but living in France for the past eleven years, translated for me. Phil is a few years older than I am, has bushy white eyebrows and gray hair and a muted Scots accent. His wife is from Belgium, but she pretends she’s from England because the French make fun of her accent even though, according to Phil, the Southern French have accents that deviate from standard French too, Instead of C’est bon,” for instance, they say, “C’est bongue.”

Madame Loretz told me that if I returned on Friday (today) with a receipt, they would be able to give me an advance for twelve days to last me the entire month of February. Twelve days?! I had been expecting the better part of a whole month’s pay. That’s what my predecessor had reported and what I had assumed would be the case for me since the pay never changed for visiting professors, I’d been told.

So today, Phil and I met near the gate of the university at Le Ranch (a brasserie) and took the tram to the center of Montpellier.

At the front of the Prefecture, a lone policeman with a metal detecting wand gave us the once over and let us through without a word.

The Prefecture teemed with people applying for this and that, the majority of the applicants North Africans, women with head scarves, some with children. The French officials sat behind their counters like Legionnaire’s defending a dusty outpost.

To our right was a set of chairs where most of the crowd waited and a little deeper in the hall was the Welcome Desk (Welcome in this case means Go Away). We timidly approached the Welcome desk and Phil explained to the man there my situation. I knew that this wasn’t going to be easy and I thought, Okay, go ahead, tell us we’re in the wrong place.

That’s what he did. He said I needed to go to the place that fills visas for students.

“”But he’s not a student!” Phil said. “He’s a professor.”

“Same thing,” the man said. “Same place.”

That didn’t sound right to Phil. “They hear a foreign accent,” he said, “and then they screw around with you.” I suggested that we ask one of his colleagues, two equally chipper and welcoming women.

One, a woman in her early fifties, told us that we needed to go to the “Offis” where they handled international students and scholars, and she gave us the address: 29 Rue de La Wild Goose (or something similar).

“She was nice this time,” Phil told me after we had left. “Last time I was there she was absolutely horrid to some North Africans. But you have the right color skin.”

We trekked about half a mile to the Rue de La Wild Goose and found #29, a building called Place du Martin Luther King that housed many offices, all of them deserted, and none of them the one we wanted. We walked into the building, climbed stairs, peered into windows, tried to find someone alive, but could find no one.

Finally we gave up and headed back to the Prefecture. An African man was wanded by the policeman at the gate and briefly searched, but when it was our turn, the policeman waved us through.

“And the French say they’re not racist,” Phil remarked.

Phil tried to tell the sometimes nice/sometimes nasty woman at the Go Away Desk that the place didn’t exist and she shrugged. She accused him of lying. “Don’t tell me you were unaware this isn’t the place to apply!” she said and called over the next person in line. I feebly tried to show the other woman my little note in the passport stating that I should apply for the Carte de Sejour at the Prefecture. She said she understood and then told us to bugger off. “We’re not going to deal with you two all day!”

But before we left I told Phil to get the phone number from them of the place where we were supposed to go. Reluctantly, they gave us the number and we buggered off.

With the number in hand, Phil called the office and they told him that no, they were not at Rue de La Wild Goose, but far away in another building.

Phil was incensed. “I’m going to go back and tell that woman at the Prefecture that she has the wrong address for the Offis.”

“Right,” I said. “I’m sure she’ll care a lot.”

We took the tram to the center of Montpellier to the Place de la Comedie,, and eventually found the right building and office. The woman there told us we had to go to the Prefecture. “But we’ve already been there,” Phil said, “and they told us to come here.”

“This is not the place,” she told us.

Phil asked her to call the Prefecture and I asked her for a note. A colleague of hers went to a back office and supposedly called the Prefecture and she put a little sticky note in my passport stating that they did not handle Carte de Sejours, that it was the Prefecture’s job. And then she affixed the most important thing in French life to the note: the Tampon, a little stamp making it official. The French are crazy for these things. A saying in France goes. The basic things in life are wine, bread, cheese, and the tampon.

My friend the writer Bret Lott made his own tampon when he taught a semester in France. It was a rubber stamp of Oscar from Sesame Street, which he’d smudge a little, and with this stamp in hand, he never had any problems with documents.

Phil and I were both deathly afraid of returning to the Prefecture Go Away Desk for a third time. He told me about a woman from New York who had been on the faculty two years ago. She never received her Carte de Sejour, he told me, though she went six times. She finally received her appointment for an interview three months after she had returned to New York.

“Well, this will be my third visit to the Prefecture, and all in one day,” I told him.

I gave him my passport and suggested he walk up to the Go Away Desk with my passport open to the page with the tampon, brandishing it like a vampire slayer might hold it to ward off vampires. He thought this was a good idea.

At the gate of the Prefecture, the policeman seemed to take notice of us for the first time.

“Where are you going?” he demanded.

“To the Prefecture,” Phil said, with an implied, “you Git,” appended to the sentence.

“What’s your business?”

Phil said something about an American professor and the policeman waved us in.

This time, we faced neither of the women at the Go Away Desk, but the first man who told us we had to go elsewhere. We showed him the note and he kindly told us that maybe we should go to the window where all the North Africans were waiting and talk to someone there.

“But once the number reaches a hundred, they will be done for the day, and all the numbers have been given out. You should come back in the morning. Or you could cut in line and ask them to help you.”

That was a lot of help. We went up to one of the windows just as the woman behind it was finishing with another customer. She said she wouldn’t help us without a number and that maybe we should go back to the guy we’d just spoken to and speak to him again.

People had been lining up for numbers since 5 a.m. A person who had arrived at nine received number 99. It was hopeless.

We gave up and decided we would try again another day, but as we were leaving, the policeman at the gate stopped us and asked us what the problem was. Phil told him in great detail and the policeman listened , then reached into his pocket and Voila! produced a ticket with a number! But it had already been called. So he reached in his pocket and pulled out another crumpled number. Number 56.

What? What had just happened and why? Phil and I were both baffled. But now Phil told the formerly indifferent, racist policeman (who might still of course be racist and indifferent to others, and of course by osmosis I was racist and indifferent for accepting the number when others had lined up since 5 a.m., but I was also tired and crumbling emotionally and I hadn’t eaten anything and it was nearly noon) he was tres gentil and we entered the Prefecture again. This time we waited with the North African women, who were laughing and joking among themselves, even as they were turned away, brushed off, and generally derided by the women in the windows. Phil chatted with several and we all commiserated and compared numbers. By this time, Phil had missed both his classes and was going to also miss a lecture he needed to supervise at one.

We waited an hour and a half. We were afraid that we might get the same woman who had told us she wouldn’t see us without a number. Phil worried that she might turn us away even with the number so we concocted a story that I, had taken a number idiotically , with no purpose in mind, just because that was my habit (some mild form of OCD) and that when she had asked him for a number, I had been too much in my own American world of numbers (56 being a favorite of mine) to realize that my number actually had a purpose.

It wasn’t quite that bad a story, but almost.

There had been only two women behind the window all morning, but eventually they put three on the job and the cases started moving rapidly. Usually, the scenario was this: North African man or woman pleasantly greets the dour woman behind the window. She asks for a dossier and papers are produced, after which she looks at the people as though they have asked her to serve them a coffee when obviously she has no coffee to give them. Why are they asking her for coffee? She, shakes her head, shrugs, and waves the person away.

Next!

When it was my turn, another dour woman took my passport and looked at it with great disapproval. We were summoned to a back room then where another official, a man, explained that we were in the wrong place.

Again with the wrong place.

This time, he produced a form, an actual form with all of the requirements I needed to bring and an address of the place I needed to bring it to. Not Martin Luther King Place. Not Rue de La Wild Goose, but somewhere new.

“Huzzah!” Phil and I cheered. “You mean we get to go somewhere else? We so love this type of day. We are filled with fondness and appreciation for all your many kindnesses.”

Or we might have looked at one another in astonishment.

But we did learn at least that I had, indeed, the correct visa, whether Madame Loretz believed it or not. He pointed to a capital “D” and gave us a nod of approval.

We asked if the man would call Madame Loretz for us. He wouldn’t because that would be seen as putting pressure on his office. We asked if he might then write a note to her explaining that my visa was correct. He consulted with his boss who said absolutely not because that might jeopardize their office’s good relations with the university.

At least, we had a piece of paper, though it was not the piece of paper Madame Loretz had asked for.

Back at the university, Madame Loretz was, of course, unbending. Yes, it was a Scientific visa, but not the correct scientific visa. Even when and if I ever got my portfolio together, it might still be rejected. And then she delivered the coup de grace. Yes, she would give me a pay advance still but now I wouldn’t receive it until February 10th.

They would only give me twelve days advance because she had been aware of my physical existence with twelve days left in the month. My payment started based on the day Madame Loretz first set eyes upon me, December 18th. This was something that no one had bothered to tell me. Or Phil. Otherwise, he would have brought me to see her the day after I arrived in Montpellier on the 11th. Still, I should have known this even though there was no way of knowing. It was a well-known fact, at least to Madame Loretz, that until you see Madame Loretz, you do not exist, and in fact, you still might not exist, no matter how many times you present yourself to her.

And by the way, she needed my birth certificate.

But I had sent it to Phil and he had given it to her.

“No,” she said. “I don’t have it.”

I probably looked ready to burst into tears when I left her office.

“Courage!” Madame Loretz called cheerily after me.

Lawrence Reid's Do Over Story

2009-07-22T06:55:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm sponsoring a new contest and giving away five copies of Do Over. all you have to do is tell me what you'd do over. Send me an email at Robinhemley@gmail.com

Below is a do over story from my friend, the well-known linguist Lawrence Reid:

Anything other than a cup of coffee on a hot summer’s day.

I had spent three of the best years of my life, straight out of high school, mixing with a small group of highly motivated young musicians struggling to complete a music degree at what was then, fifty-five years ago, Canterbury University College in Christchurch, New Zealand. Although not a talented musician myself, I had acquired some skill as a pianist and watched with awe, as one of my best friends competed for, and won the piano concerto contest which gave him the right to tour the country with the National Symphony Orchestra, performing Grieg’s A minor piano concerto. I had worked on the concerto myself, but knew I would never have mastered it well enough to even enter the first stage of the competition.
Growing up on the other side of the tracks, in Sydenham, one of the poorer neighborhoods of the city, my first purchase, on time payment, as soon as I got out of high school was a new piano, on which I used to teach the neighborhood children how to play. It provided me with enough income to pay the monthly fee for my piano, and to buy the scores I needed for my classes at the University. But as I looked to the future, I decided to re-evaluate my life. What did I really want to do? I knew first, that even though I would have loved to be a performer, I simply didn’t have the talent for it. Secondly, I knew that even though I enjoyed teaching, I felt guilty about taking money from parents whose children had no interest in the instrument, and who came to see me every week at the insistence of their parents, and apparently without ever having practiced the work that had been assigned them the previous week, and the week before that. Was that what I really wanted to do, month in and month out, in a small, back street studio, in a little town, at the bottom of the world?
The answer was clear. I needed to break away from it all, and begin anew at something I wasn’t sure I even knew what. The opportunity came at just the right time. My oldest brother had gone to Australia several years earlier, and sent me an invitation to be the best man at his wedding. The biggest problem however was where I was going to get the money to pay for my fare on the Wanganui, the steamer that plied the Tasman Sea between Wellington and Sydney. I had managed to save some, but it wasn’t enough. It then occurred to me that I probably no longer had use for the piles of music scores that I had diligently studied through the previous three years. Within minutes I had prepared a pin-up sheet with the names of all the works, carefully listed from Beethoven to Bartok, my telephone number and a willingness to accept any offer, as long as it included everything on the list. This I stuck on an announcement board in the music department of the University, and anxiously waited for my first caller.
A few days later it came. A young woman, with a warm, pleasant voice called me and offered a sum that was way beyond anything I could have dreamed possible. And it was just enough to make up what I needed for the fare to Australia. I accepted eagerly, and with pencil in hand asked for her home address so I could personally deliver them to her. When she told me where she lived, I immediately understood why she had offered so much for my music scores. She gave me an address in Fendalton, the suburb where the rich and famous of the city had their homes. I had often ridden through it on my bike, admiring the beautiful homes, set among lush gardens and carefully trimmed hedges. But this would be my first time to set foot within one of the gates.
As the weekend drew near when I would deliver the scores, I was beset by a rush of uncertainty. Was I doing the right thing? I had carefully looked at each piece as I packed it recalling the themes and the harmonic progressions that I had had to memorize for my classes. It was like saying a final goodbye to close friends. It was almost like attending a wake for family member who had suddenly passed away. But the decision had been made, and finally after carefully wrapping and tying them, I attached them to the carrier of my bike and began the five mile ride to Fendalton.
I reached the address, picked up the package, and slowly headed up the long, carefully raked gravel pathway to the door. My heart was beating faster, and I was breaking out in a sweat with nervousness as I pushed the door knocker. And then the door opened, and the young lady who had called me appeared. She was a vision of loveliness, dressed in a light, summery gown, with her long, auburn hair swept back and tied with a bow. She welcomed me with a smile that struck my heart, and invited me in. I begged off, but she insisted. It was a hot summer day, and surely after a long bike ride wouldn’t I like a drink?
She took the package I had brought her, and escorted me into the lounge, carpeted with a magnificent white rug from wall to wall, the windows tastefully covered with drapes in cool summer prints, and a Steinway grand piano against one wall. I had never been in such a luxurious home, and was tongue-tied as her mother came in and offered me a cup of coffee. A maid appeared bearing a tray with a plate of small biscuits, and several fine china cups and saucers into which she poured the coffee. I was never good at small talk, and in this environment and under these circumstances I felt completely out of place.
And then it happened. Was it my nervousness, or did the young lady brush against my elbow, or was it her father offering me his hand? All I remember is the shock, the blood rushing to my face and my stammering my apology as the fine china cup slipped off the saucer I was holding, spilling its contents in a great brown splash across the carpet. I made my retreat as gracefully as I could manage it under the circumstances. I don’t ever remember being paid for the music, although I must have, as I left for Australia and my brother’s wedding the following month. But after all these years, I do remember thinking, that if I could have done it over, I would have asked for a glass of cold juice that I could have held in my hand, rather than accepting a cup of coffee on a hot summer’s day.

Susannah Charleson’s Reading Disaster Story

2009-07-21T03:22:00.000-07:00

Infectious Prose
A reading. On a Friday afternoon. In spring. Not even the most optimistic of us could say the house was packed when seven of the faculty were invited to read from their recently-published work to an audience of fellow-faculty and students, most of the latter bribed or threatened to attend. There was nothing inspired in this setup. The auditorium could seat 400, and there were probably 100 students there – most of them slumped in the back rows – which from the rostrum made the back-heavy room appear to be sinking, like the Titanic.
I was scheduled to be the seventh reader, and by then many students (and some of the faculty) sat in a brown stupor. A poet read before me. A fine poet, a celebrated guy, but this audience couldn’t even manage the little unnhs of appreciation that generally follow the last line of a poem.
Since I have a book on working search and rescue coming out, I thought I’d read from that, and I had bookmarked several passages. Right here, right now, the group seemed to need a little bang. So I decided to read a particularly harrowing account of a house fire. Just as I was heading to the rostrum, a late student came in, pushing her way to an empty seat in the middle of one of the back rows. I saw the ripple of students moving to let her in and briefly wondered if her teacher would really give her credit for attending the last ten minutes of an hour-long event.
And then I started reading about a late-night flight home, piloting a Cessna 172 and overflying what I first thought was a lakeside campfire, then realized was a house - a house that exploded with such violence that the hot, rising air thumped the underbelly of my airplane at 4500 feet.
The reading seemed to be going well. I read on, about contacting air traffic control and emergency services, about circling the fire and looking for survivors, about coyotes creeping forward to the brightness, about watching the double-twitch of light flashing from a single fire truck winding through the dark toward the blaze. The audience appeared attentive—especially in the back rows, where I could see a double handful of students leaning forward in uncomfortable postures, some with their arms gripped on the seats in front of them, as though they clung to every word.
Wow, I thought. Score!
When I finished reading, there was applause (which I’d hoped for) and mass exodus (which I’d expected), but a few came forward to talk to the readers, among them the late student who’d plopped herself in the middle of one of those back rows. I was speaking to someone else when she touched my shoulder, and as I turned she beamed at me and honked a little – a young woman with a face like a swollen, streaming gourd – the mother of all head colds, or worse. This was the spring of Swine Flu, and suddenly I could understand those back row students and their attentiveness, their strained postures and fixed expressions. They weren’t leaning toward my story; they were leaning away from her. And who could blame them? She was sick-on-a-stick. A right mess. “Wudderful,” she shouted, a literature lover clearly deafened with mucus, “zo eggziting.” She tilted close so I could hear her, smiled wide and clasped my hands.

Broadcast writer Susannah Charleson’s Scent of the Missing: Love and Partnership with a Search and Rescue Dog will be released in April 2010, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Welcome and New Contest

2009-07-19T01:17:00.000-07:00

Hello. Welcome to my new blog! I've decided to migrate to this blog format from my website (Robinhemley.com, which is still fully operational) on the advice of some internet guru friends.

Please take a look through the posts. I've transferred my feature on book tour disaster stories here, so you can read them together. Well-known writers have shared with me (and you) some of their worst reading experiences. We've all had them. I'm always looking for more, so if you have any good anecdotes of readings and/or signings going terribly awry, please send me an email at Robin-hemley@uiowa.edu.

Likewise, I'm sponsoring a new give away of 5 copies of Do-Over. If you know of anyone who might like a free copy, please have them drop me an email relating an emotional fender bender from their childhood, something they'd like to do over. I'll post them on the website and when i have about fifty or so, I'll put everyone's names in a randomizer and give away the copies. THIS contest is open to anyone anywhere in the world, not only the U.S. and Canada.

A couple of truly eccentric contests to follow, so stay posted for chances to win books by the some of my book tour disaster story authors and cash prizes.

Sybil Baker's Book Tour Disaster Stories

2009-07-19T01:14:00.001-07:00

The Reading That Was

On a recent trip to my husband's native South Africa, my Lorraine, mother-in-law (who lives in Johannesburg), offered to set up a few book readings for me. One of the events was at a ritzy wine cafÃ© where Lorraine bribed thirty friends with free wine and hors d'oeuvres to come and listen to her American daughter-in-law read from her novel. The scheme worked. We let the guests drink for an hour, I read for twenty minutes, the drunker people bought my book, and we carried on drinking for about four more hours.

The Reading That Wasn't

The other reading was arranged with Lorraine's dear Auntie Athley, who lived in a retirement community about 45 minutes outside of Joburg. I was to attend the weekly gathering of Auntie Ath and the other women from the community and peddle my novel, THE LIFE PLAN, which is about a 29-year-old drinking her way through Thailand as she deals with her crumbling marriage. Oh, and there's jungle sex too with a hot English bloke. Seemed like a good match. We were to arrive between 3 and 5 pm, and--this was the important part--bring two cakes. Unfortunately, a late doctor's appointment, rush-hour traffic, and a sudden thunderstorm brought us to the retirement village just at 5. Although I'd optimistically packed a stack of books, I only brought one book in so as not to get the others wet. Rowan could run back to the car and retrieve the books once I'd wowed the women with my reading.

I entered the room sopping wet to meet the gaze of 15 grandmothers obediently sitting a long table. Some were knitting. Auntie Ath informed us the women had stayed at little later because they didn't want to go out in the thunderstorm. After she introduced me and Rowan, one of the women asked--so you wrote an article or something? Before I could answer, the woman, along with the others, abandoned me for the cakes Rowan brought in. Auntie Ath put the kettle on for tea and instant coffee while another woman cut generous portions of the cake and placed them on china plates. One woman told me how she'd escaped boring Britain and become a nurse traveling the world. Another discussed the beauty of South Africa. Another wrapped her cake in a napkin, saying she was saving it for dessert that night. And then they were gone. At one point my novel was passed around the table like some strange artifact from an unknown world. But as soon as the cake and the rain disappeared, so did the ladies--after all, at their age, their Life Plans were working just fine.

The Reading That Should Have Been

A few days later, I was in a truck with 12 other tourists from Australia, Canada, and South Africa beginning our incredible two-week trip through South Africa, Botswana, and Zambia, when I had an "aha moment." Most of the tourists were reading books, we would be in the truck 4-8 hours every day, and these tourists were the demographic group for my novel. Did I have any copies of my book with me? Of course not, I was on vacation, damn it, and I wasn't going to pimp myself another day. A rookie mistake, for I've since realized that a writer with a book is a pimp 24/7. An author carries copies for just that kind of moment--a captive audience, with cash, and desperate for reading material. Every night around the campfire I could have read another chapter, who no doubt would have been begging for more. And I should have also had copies to leave at every lodge we stayed at--after all how many writers can say their novel is being read in Zambia?

Sybil Baker's novel THE LIFE PLAN was published by Casperian Books in March 2009. You can read more about her at her website at www.sybilbaker.com

Peter Nelson's Book Tour Disaster Story

2009-07-19T01:13:00.000-07:00

I did a signing at a bookstore in Manhattan (I want to say Benedettos or Bennitons or Brentonios or something like that --- I think it's out of business now) when I was nominated for an Edgar Award by Mystery Writers of America for a book I wrote called "Scarface," a YA about a kid who finds Al Capone's treasure. I was there with a large group of fellow nominees including luminaries like Elmore Leonard and Laurence Shames and Carl Hiassen, and felt more than a little flattered to be in the same room with those guys. I wasn't expecting anything like an equal amount of attention. In fact, more people stopped at my table than any other, because I was stationed on the landing by the top of the staircase, where several dozen people asked me where the bathroom was. Not one asked me about my book.

I did another signing in a cavernous exhibition hall at a place called The Big E, in Springfield, MA, which was home to what might be described as the western Massachusetts state fair. The room was full of booths with people selling lawn care services and Florida time-shares. Across the aisle from me was a man with a very loud microphone, selling miracle no-stick cookware. I almost bought a set --- he was very convincing. The woman who'd prepared my display (a professional author-escort --- I didn't know there was such a profession) had ripped the cover off one of my books and scotch-taped it to a piece of poster-board, upon which she'd written with a red Sharpie, "Author Signing." She didn't even form the scotch tape into concealed loops to stick to the back of the cover --- she just plastered a piece of tape across each of the four corners. For a while, she hung out with me and told me how she cuts up half a year's worth of onions and green peppers at a time and puts it all in her freezer because it's cheaper that way and why the hell not? More often, she left me alone a lot because she smoked three packs of Benson and Hedges cigarettes daily and needed to step outside for frequent "ciggie-breaks." She had a gravel voice and sounded a bit like Tom Waits or Louis Armstrong. Mostly I sat there, alone, and people would come up to my table, pick the book up, glance at the cover, make sounds of disgust and toss the book onto the table like they were throwing away a used Kleenex --- I don't think they realized I was the author. I did this for six hours.

I heard a story once the some university invited Stanley Elkin to come give a reading, but showed him very little respect or hospitality. Ultimately, after a lame post-reading reception at a dorm lounge, some young college girl dropped him off at his hotel and told him he could order dinner from room service if he was hungry and charge it to the university. According to the story, Elkin was so annoyed that he ordered dinner for 200 people and flushed it all down the toilet. I wouldn't do that, but I get it.

Pete Nelson writes books and magazine articles and lives in Westchester, NY, with his wife and son. For more info, go to: http://members.authorsguild.net/ipetenelson/

A Book Tour Disaster Story from Barrie Jean Borich

2009-07-19T01:12:00.000-07:00

By the time I arrived in Bellingham in the fall of 2000, touring My Lesbian Husband, I thought my experiences plugging the book in the Midwest and California had prepared me for anything. I'd been one of two authors in a Bay Area feminist bookstore reading to an audience of one, while seated at a round table (were we expected to reach consensus?) as bored collective members washed dishes and filed endless stacks of index cards; I was impressed by the pre-reading crowd gathering in an Ohio store, until I realized they were the local lesbian roller skating club, rendezvousing before their weekly outing; I'd kept my cool while the guy in another Ohio store noisily flipped pages of a gay entertainment magazine, then interrupted my reading to ask visitor's bureau information questions about the Minneapolis setting of my material.

By comparison the Pacific Northwest junket was going well. I was spending the last of a grant to team up with another writer to tour the now vanishing GLBT and women's bookstore circuit. My travel companion lived in Vancouver and her home crowd was so welcoming I didn't mind that the airline had misplaced my luggage, forcing me to read that first night in rumpled plane clothes. Attendance in Seattle was light, but Portland, where the feminist bookstore had a loyal clientele, was better. Our finale in Bellingham was to be an afternoon event in a little GLBT store called Rainbow something.

We drove up the coast after spending the night in side-by-side Howard Johnson's rooms. Considering our tiny budget we should have doubled-up; that we did not speaks to the tensions of a driving tour undertaken by two strangers. We two didn't have much in common aside from lesbianism, me a literary essayist and she the author of popular fiction and editor of erotica anthologies. We both had long-time beloveds at home and I can't say there was any particular spark between us. Yet those hours we spent in the car, the repeated shared act of gearing up for performance, and that we both, judging by the looks of our current lovers, vaguely resembled the sort of woman the other might hook up with, had we been single-- she a suit-jacket-and-tie sort of woman, me a girlier opposite-- added to our off-synch intimacy.

An hour before reaching Bellingham we shared the curious closeness of changing our clothes in a moving car, and for the rest of the trip rehearsed, prepping what was to be our crescendo. By the time we got to Bellingham we could have passed as old show-biz marrieds.

We pulled into town assuming we'd be able to find the bookstore easily. The stores and bars flying the queer rainbow flag in any locale tend to be off Main street, but Bellingham is not that big. We had the address, found the block. We circled. Where was the store? We circled again. The teenage clerk in the video shop said "Oh man that place closed months ago," but he couldn't be right. We'd hired a publicist who'd promised us this gig was verified, advertised. When we called the store the recorded voice was chipper. The first message I left was equally cheerful--we're here, we're ready, now where are you located? As we circled the block a few more times I kept calling, my messages increasingly tight, sharp, the last conveyed in the pitch that gets movie stars in trouble on celebrity gossip TV.

Our last time around the block I looked harder at a funny angled turn I'd mistaken for an alley, a shadow street I can't find on a map today. A few strides in I found what we sought, and I can see the moment still. The clean plate glass of the shop. The wide and slightly dusty expanse of empty shelves and bare walls. A little transparent rainbow flag sticker in the corner of the glass door the only evidence of what had existed here. The two writers, momentarily mated, dressed for company, hands shading our eyes, peering in, wondering if this was what the rest of our literary lives had in store.

--

Barrie Jean Borich is the author of My Lesbian Husband (Graywolf), winner of an American Library Association GLBT Nonfiction Book Award, and Restoring the Color of Roses (Firebrand), a memoir set in the Calumet Region of Chicago. She has essays forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review and Seattle Review and her work has been listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays and received Special Mention in the annual Pushcart Prize anthology. She is the nonfiction editor of Water~Stone Review and an assistant professor in the MFA program at Hamline University's Graduate School of Liberal Studies in St. Paul Minnesota.

Carlos Morton's Reading Disaster Story

2009-07-19T01:09:00.000-07:00

THE NUYORICAN POET'S CAFE
New York City

The Nuyorican Poet's Cafe was an exciting place to be in 1976, a
gathering place for writers, players and hustlers on the Lower East Side of
Manhattan. It was in a rough neighborhood, so there was always a certain
risk involved.

I lived in Manhattan, working as a free lance writer and wrote a number
of articles about the Nuyorican theater movement (a combination of New York
and Puertorican) for local newspapers and national journals. Miguel
Pinero, author of the prize winning play "Short Eyes," and Miguel Algarin,
a Rutgers University Professor were the ones who started the cafe.

One night Miguel Algarin told me the strange looking old white guy
standing at the bar was William Burroughs the legendary writer of "Naked
Lunch." I really admired his writing and so I went up to him and introduced
myself. It was very loud, people talking, music playing, and I said, I've
always wanted to meet you Mr. Burroughs, my name is Carlos MORTON.

Burroughs turned to me with a surprised look and exclaimed: Carlos
MORPHINE?

At least that's what he "heard."

Another time I got into a argument with a Nuryorican Poet named Lucky
Cienfuegos who pulled a switchblade knife on me. I can't recall what we
were arguing about, probably poetry.

To which I replied, "You win the argument, Lucky."

One night I read from a play I was writing, "Pancho Diablo," about a
Chicano devil who quits his job in hell and moves to Houston. (It was
produced at the Public Theater in 1987.) No one was listening, it was late
and loud and people were drunk . . as was the reader . . . so I just gave
up in disgust and threw the one hundred page script up in the air . . . it
all fluttered down like a ticker tape parade on Fifth Avenue.

I got the biggest applause of the night, people like Chicano writer Ana
Castillo still recall it.

CARLOS MORTON's professional playwriting credits include the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Denver Center Theatre, La Compania Nacional de Mexico, the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, and the Arizona Theatre Company. Morton's most recent book is Children of the Sun: Scenes and Monologues For Latino Youth, (2008, Players Press). In 2006-2007 he was named Distinguished Fulbright Lecturer to Poland. He is currently Professor of Theater at UC Santa Barbara.

Dinty Moore's Book Tour Disaster Story!

2009-07-19T01:08:00.000-07:00

My first book had only been available for about a week when I drove into Philadelphia for my initial bookstore reading, the preliminary leg of a very modest - meaning, drive yourself around, buy your own dinner - book tour. Still, despite the lack of airplanes or five-star hotels, I was excited. Years of dreaming and hard work had led to this moment.

My publisher had hooked me up with a longstanding, well-respected independent bookstore in center city, though in retrospect someone should have checked to see how the shop had been doing "lately."

I admit to a measure of dismay when the manager met me in a dirty, ill-fitting, pilled sweater at the front of an empty store and then walked me up a flight of steps to a narrow, dingy second floor. It wasn't the small number of cheap folding chairs that caught me up short, or the rickety podium. It was the vast array of "gently used" pornographic books and magazines that lined the walls. Though the main floor of this once-thriving bookshop contained the finest contemporary and classic literature, it seems the second-story skin books were paying the electric bills.

I won't dwell on the disappointing details of what followed. It was simple: no one came. Okay, one personal friend and his wife showed up a bit late, but they were also friends of the bookstore owner, so it is hard to say if they were there to see me, to see him, or to have a glass of wine, which is what we did when it became apparent that my reading was a total bust.

Live and learn, I thought. Of course bookstore readings don't sell books. This was normal.

I tried every justification to bolster my flagging spirits as I walked back to my sister-in-law's apartment that Sunday afternoon, down Walnut Street, toward Rittenhouse Square, where I hoped to grab a cup of coffee and just forget it all
But I saw the damn line a half block away. Hundreds of young couples, many, but not all, with strollers or toddlers, snaking along the sidewalk, into the sparkling new Borders, the one with the comfy chairs and coffee shop. I had to walk right by, and then, as if there was a lesson to be learned, I had to walk in, to see the line snake all around the first floor of the chain bookstore, up the steps, and once more around the second floor, until it ended at a wide table, where Chris Van Allsburg, flanked by four store employees, was signing copies of The Polar Express. Thousands of copies. He seemed very nice.

I pledged then and there that my next book would include trains, and polar bears.

But it didn't.

Dinty W. Moore's memoir Between Panic & Desire (University of Nebraska) was winner of the Grub Street Nonfiction Book Prize in 2009. His other books include The Accidental Buddhist, The Emperor's Virtual Clothes, and the writing guide, The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction. He has published essays and stories in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Harpers, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Gettysburg Review, Utne Reader, and Crazyhorse, and teaches in the creative nonfiction MA and PhD program at Ohio University.

Mary Elizabeth Williams' Book Tour Disaster Story

2009-07-19T01:07:00.000-07:00

An interlude from the Mishigas (craziness in Yiddish) going on in the Philippines regarding the book importation duty scandal that I've been covering. Here's some lighter mishigas of the book tour gone South variety. Enjoy. Mary Elizabeth Williams writes:

I have a new book out, "Gimme Shelter" (Simon & Schuster, 2009) about my hilarious misadventures in the housing bubble. The very last scene takes place in the cafe in my new neighborhood in uptown NYC.

So I had the brilliant idea to talk to the owners about doing a reading there.

Short version: Readings should be done at bookstores.

Long version: After weeks of checking in to see if he got the books, the owner called me Easter Sunday -- the DAY BEFORE THE READING -- to say they weren't in yet. I told him to let me know if he didn't get them by noon the next day and I'd call the warehouse.

An hour and a half before the reading, I called the cafe to check on the shipment. They'd never received the books.

So I carted down two dozen of my own copies and my laptop. More on that later.

When I got there, I learned

a) the owner had listed the start time a half hour later than I had told everybody to come
b) there was one waitress on duty
c) the mic I'd been given was broken
d) the regular knitting group that meets there once a week was LIVID at sharing the space

A half hour off schedule, I got up and bellowed into my dead mic that I was doing a special "two for one" deal. Anyone who would order my book online would get an ab-so-lute-ly free signed copy on the spot. (Lemons, lemonade, etc.)

I then proceeded to read, above the nonstop din of the incredibly hostile yarn bitches, who aggressively insisted on talking loudly the whole. entire. time.

And my friend's dad, at a loss for a seat, stood in front of me throughout the whole thing.

On the upside, my stalker didn't show up.

Philip Graham's Book Disaster Story, a Two-fer!

2009-07-19T01:05:00.000-07:00

On tour for my first novel, after giving a bookstore reading in Evanston, Illinois I did a radio interview the next day in downtown Chicago, around 2 PM. From there, I was scheduled to give a reading at 8 o'clock that evening at an arts center in Rock Island, on the Illinois-Iowa border. But by the time I hit the road, just before 3, rush hour had already begun--seems that news reports of an impending snowstorm had started an early mad dash of commuters. So I inched along on the highway, counting the minutes, until, a bit desperate and hoping to finally get past the logjam, I started to drive on the shoulder of the road, to the angry honking of drivers in the other lanes.

Eventually, in the western suburbs of Chicago, the traffic began to thin, but by this time the snowstorm had hit, big chunks of flakes that kept coming. Within an hour I was virtually the only one on the highway, which had reduced itself, from the growing snow drifts, to a single lane, yet still I drove on. I'm a professional, damn it, the show must go on, etc, I told myself, and once or twice I parked at a rest stop to call the readings organizer (this was before the era of wide-spread use of cell phones) and tell him that I was on my way, I'd be there, though I might be running behind a little.

By the time I arrived in Rock Island, 40 minutes late to my own reading, the world seemed asleep under a white glaze, and when I trudged through the snow to the arts center the lights were out, and my patient hopeful audience had long gone.

But the best reading story I ever heard concerns a colleague of mine, Paul Friedman, now retired. When he won an Illinois Arts Council Grant for his work, part of the deal then, besides the grant money, was that he had to give a few readings of his work at various libraries across the state. At one library, clearly the advance preparation had been minimal. As Paul sat on the stage of the small auditorium while the head librarian introduced him, he looked out at the single face in the audience. The librarian's intro over, she left the stage--apparently busy, she wasn't going to stay for the reading. So, Paul stood at the podium and began to read from one of his stories to that one fellow. In the middle of his story, two police officers walked in, arrested his audience, and dragged the guy off. Apparently, the fellow was a shoplifter and had been hiding from the police during Paul's reading. And there stood Paul, still in mid-story, his audience taken away.

Philip Graham is the author of two story collections, The Art of the Knock and Interior Design, and the novel How to Read an Unwritten Language. He is also the co-author, with Alma Gottlieb, of Parallel Worlds, a memoir of Africa. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post Magazine, North American Review, Missouri Review and elsewhere. He is the recipient of an NEA fellowship, an NEH grant, and two Illinois Arts Council grants. He teaches at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and he is a co-founder and the current fiction editor of the literary/arts magazine Ninth Letter. His dispatches from Lisbon, which have appeared regularly on the McSweeney's website, will be published by the University of Chicago Press this fall, in an expanded edition titled The Moon, Come to Earth.

Patricia Henley's Book Tour Disaster Story

2009-07-19T01:04:00.000-07:00

"My tour for In the River Sweet (2002) was a prolonged disaster. I visited 19 cities in five weeks. The best events, of course, were on college campuses where my esteemed friends and colleagues had arranged for audiences to be present. But, for starters, the book was a Border's Original Voices selection, yet I was not booked into a single Border's. Instead, I was sent to Barnes & Noble stores. In my editor's words: "Barnes & Noble did not get behind the book." I'd find waist-high stacks of The Lovely Bones and two or three copies of my novel.

But the capstone was my Boston experience. My escort was a hapless woman who confided a bit too much of her own real-life disasters as we headed to a feminist bookstore in Cambridge. She decided to park in a muffler shop parking lot, after hours, even though a sign gave explicit instructions not to park there. Towing threatened. We scuttled around the corner to the bookstore where a sandwich board about my reading/signing was up on the sidewalk. One glance into the bookstore made me long to return to the hotel and watch TV and order room service. The shelves were awry, and there were no books. We were met by a clerk/volunteer who told us that the store was going out of business, was, in fact, out of business. But the show must go on. We were given a tour of the defunct bookstore. Then the wait. One man came in off the street. I read to him, the clerk, and my escort. Good, feeble, cheer all around. When we went out to the blustery street, her car was up on the business end of a tow truck. We begged the guy to let it down. He resisted. She offered him money. He waited. She fiddled with her purse and looked up expectantly to me. I gave her $20 and the tow truck driver was satisfied with that. He let the car down and we drove off into the night . . ."

Patricia Henley's first novel, Hummingbird House, was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award and the New Yorker Fiction Prize (2000). Her second novel, In the River Sweet, was named a Best Fall Book by the St. Louis Dispatch, the Chicago Tribune, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She has also published three collections of stories (Friday Night at Silver Star, The Secret of Cartwheels, and Worship of the Common Heart). Friday Night at Silver Star won the 1985 Montana Arts Council First Book Award. Her work has been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Short Stories, Love Stories for the Rest of Us, and Circle of Women. Patricia has taught in the MFA Program at Purdue University for twenty-two years.

Rhonda Dossett's Book Tour Disaster Story

2009-07-19T01:03:00.000-07:00

"My very first book-signing was at a small library near where I work. Six weeks ahead of time I'd ordered a box of books from my publisher, just for this event. The box arrived in plenty of time. I didn't open the box, ! just stored it with my book cover posters, easel, bookmarks, etc. About twenty minutes before we were to leave, I decided to cut open the box of books there at my office, instead of having to take a knife or scissors with me to the library. A minute later, I was standing there in the parking lot, knife in hand, looking down into the trunk of my car at the opened box of books. My publisher had mistakenly sent me 30 copies of another author's books. My first thought was, 'I haven't even read this book, how will I talk about it for 30 minutes?' My second thought was not one that can be printed. But everything turned out okay. My secretary went around the office and confiscated all the copies I had previously sold to co-workers."

- Rhonda Dossett, (who writes with Marian Edelman Borden as "Evelyn David") author of "Murder Takes the Cake"

With thanks to Wendy Burt-Thomas for contacting Rhonda to share this anecdote with me.

Michael Malone's Worst Book Tour

2009-07-19T01:02:00.000-07:00

This great contribution from best-selling author, Michael Malone:

"On a snowy, slushy, sleeting New York winter night, I made my way to a Barnes and Noble bookstore on the upper West Side, where I was to give a reading from First Lady, the third in my trilogy of "Hillston" novels. A clerk thoughtfully waited at the doors, studying a flyer with my picture on it. I gave her my name.
As I did so, a fierce overweight man near us, bundled in a blue parka with a ratty fake-fur hood, shoved a wet Shop Rite bag at me. "Sign these!" he ordered. "I collect you. I drove in from Newark."

Despite the sleet, I started to reach for the bag, right there on the sidewalk, but the young clerk-- flushed with what? enthusiasm for my fiction?--pulled me away and whisked me inside and onto the escalator.

She smiled uneasily. "There's a, unfortunately, a problem."

It was only then that I looked over to the signing area. Around the otherwise depressingly empty cluster of chairs, facing a podium where a small banner looked to read "Michael alone," there stood milling about at least half-a-dozen men with NYPD on their enormous yellow slickers.

Despite her relatively petite size, the young clerk had so a firm grip on my elbow that I wondered if she was charged with turning me over to an IRS agent at the top of the stairs, someone who'd come to arrest me for some inadvertent claim I'd made about having an office in the home.

But then I noticed twisting yellow police tape snaking around the room and out the doors. Behind it, paramedics were lifting onto a gurney the corpse of a very elderly woman whose feet, encased in pink sneakers, stuck up stiff with rigor mortis.

At the landing, the clerk turned me over with relief to a harried bookstore manager. He and I watched the crowd below as they stepped back solemnly to make room for the medics. They bounced their gurney along with a cheerful nonchalance.

The manager apologized. "We had to cancel your reading. Someone died, waiting in a back row where no one noticed her."

"Waiting for me? I wasn't even late."

"No. Not for you."

This was oddly a disappointment. Not even the dead woman had come to hear me read.
He explained, "It's old homeless people. They sit in our signing areas to get out of the cold. They fall asleep. We try not to bothe r them."

He waved his arm at the nooks and crannies of bookshelves below. "Especially in the snow."

"It's kind of you," I agreed.

"I don't think we'll do it anymore probably. This is a total downer."

I tried to cheer him up. "She looked like she could have been in her nineties."

"I guess"

"At least she died surrounded by books."

"Ha." I wasn't sure what he meant by his sharp laugh.

He took me back down to the entrance and said goodbye. In front of the store, cops blocked off sightseers while the medics hoisted the woman into the back of the city ambulance.

"Just sign these books!" shouted the man in the parka, still out there, now skirting around the barricade. "I drove all the way from Newark!"

He hurled his soaked shopping bag onto the hood of the ambulance; it burst open and my first three novels slid into the slush of the gutter.

Suddenly the ambulance lurched forward with a shriek of its siren, astonishingly loud; louder than the man from New Jersey, who endeared himself to me forever by his wail of grief. His still unsigned books had been run over by huge ice-crusted tires, both front and back.

I signed them, wet as they were, against the bookstore window, on which the young clerk was posting a sign. 'MICHAEL MALONE READING CANCELED.'"

Michael Malone is the author of ten internationally acclaimed novels, including the classic "Handling Sin" "Uncivil Seasons," "The Last Noel," and the NYT bestseller "The Killing Club." His newest novel "The Four Corners of the Sky" appears on May 1. Currently at work on a sequel to his "Hillston" series of novels, he has also written plays, television programs, a collection of short stories and two books of non-fiction, one on film, as well as innumerable essays for such magazines and journals as Harper's, the New York Times, Playboy, Partisan Review and the Wilson Quarterly. Among his prizes are the O Henry, the Edgar, the Writers Guild Award and an Emmy as head writer of ABC's "One Life to Live." He has taught at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore and is now a professor in the Theater Studies Department at Duke University.

Xu Xi's Book Tour Disaster Story

2009-07-19T01:01:00.000-07:00

One feature common to a number of great book tour disaster stories is what we might call "The Visitation," an odd member of the audience, a crackpot, an insistent or obnoxious audience member . . . Such is the case in the following anecdote of Xu Xi.

"Okay so when is the worst possible time to begin a book tour? Try right after 9-11, which is what happened for my last novel THE UNWALLED CITY (a novel of Hong Kong). This was worse than even my next book launch for an anthology of Hong Kong writing two years later, right when SARS hit our fair city (the publisher canceled the book party, we all took our masks, went home and I accepted a travel writing assignment to Hainan Island instead where there at least was no SARS, the promise of one US dollar a word and a new luxury hotel).

But back to the post 9-11 era where I arrive in Seattle at Elliot Bay Books on the heels of Jonathan Franzen who, the weekend prior, drew a crowd of some 200 people. My crowd was somewhat more modest, and I knew at least four people in the audience of twenty or so. 20% friends & family isn't too bad as bookstore audiences go (better than 100% in Orlando of the audience of 2, and the bookstore forgot I was coming . . .;)

But to make this long story shorter there I was reading, keeping up spirits, trying to forget my Chelsea neighborhood I'd left behind where police barricades cordoned off life. The Q&A began, my friends asked the good questions to get things going, a couple of other typical reading questions followed (q: Where do you get your inspiration? a: Would you believe the city of Hong Kong? q: Do you write in Chinese? a: No)

And then the man in the middle - you know the one, intense eyes, frown of concentration, bad hair, bursting to speak - he raised his hand. What he wanted to know, what he desperately wanted to know, was what could I tell him about Chinese art? The old kind you know. All those scroll paintings in museums around the world? What could I tell him? Please?

To begin with, not a lot. I know as much about traditional Chinese art as I know about hydraulics. Hills. Water. Flowers. Birds. Bloated goldfish. Much Mist. I mean, I'm not much better with the traditions of Western Art either; my obsessions begin with the Surrealists. So I told him, honestly I thought, I'm not an expert. Next?

But he was the man in the middle, the one who doesn't give up. Surely there was something I could tell him, something about all this great Chinese art I could say?

My novel is about contemporary Hong Kong shortly before its return to China. Ambivalent characters. Sex. Miscommunication. Divorce. More sex. Advertising. The Inconsequence of politics in an apolitical city. It is not about art. There isn't even an art dealer, or a Chinese painter, although there is one modern Chinese opera scene (Tan Dun's "Marco Polo") and an American Sinophile who probably does know more about traditional Chinese art than I do (she definitely knows more about marriage to a Chinese businessman with a Harvard MBA than I care to). But she's fictional. I made her up. She's not the one at Elliot Bay Books trying to re-direct a mis-directed question.

By now one of my friends in the front row is making throat-slitting signs. My face pleads with the audience, quick someone ask me something, anything. Perhaps now is the time to burst into song, "The East is Red" anyone?

And fortunately someone does ask a question, what I forget, and then, mercifully, time's up, I soon get to go for a drink and dinner with my friends, which is the best part of all this travel, when you end up in places where your friends are, the people who rally round when it matters, despite the man in the middle, the one who, after the reading, still tries to corner you and demand satisfaction about Chinese art. Read a book, you want to say, but you don't, because he isn't there for you, your reading, or even the bookstore. He's there because he has nowhere else to go and this leg of your book tour was as good a place as any for him to perch for an hour or two, before heading off into that wild blue and all the Chinese art in his dreams.

It could have been worse. He could have asked about kung fu fighting, grasshopper."

XU XI is the author or editor of ten books, most recently a collection of personal essays Evanescent Isles: from my city-village and Overleaf Hong Kong: Stories & Essays of the Chinese, Overseas. She teaches on the prose faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing. A Chinese-Indonesian native of Hong Kong, she now inhabits the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong and the South Island of New Zealand. Visit www.xuxiwriter.com

Michael Martone's Reading Disaster Story

2009-07-19T01:00:00.001-07:00

Here's a tidbit from the wonderfully inventive and always wry writer, Michael Martone. Michael has reminded me that he includes a story of a reading gone awry in his self-titled book, MICHAEL MARTONE:

"In Michael Martone Michael Martone writes of a bad reading event. He was teaching at Harvard and giving his first reading after getting the job and the audience was filled with writers who did not get the job and were rather wishing he would fail. And fail he did. He always always checks before he starts to read that the pages are in order but in this case he forgot to check to make sure all the pages were there. And the last page of the 15 page story was not. And so at the climatic moment he turned the page and had to announce that the page was missing and that the story goes something like this, just winging it and confirming to the writers in the audience that they of course should have gotten the job."

The Glamour of the Book Tour

2009-07-19T00:58:00.000-07:00

Most writers I know have wonderful Disastrous Book Tour stories to tell. I guess it's a misery-loves-company kind of thing, but they're often pretty funny.

One of the funniest I've heard has almost achieved urban myth status among writers. It involves a writer who has been invited to a college to give a reading from his new book. But when he arrives he's met by a rather harried department chair who tells him he's really sorry, but there's a meeting that he has to go to that conflicts with the writer's reading. It's one of those last minute emergency meetings that can't be avoided. So he leads the writer to the room where he'll be reading and tells him he can start at 4. There are only two people in the audience, a couple of students sitting in the front row. But he figures he's been invited to read so he's going to read - if it's only to two people, fine. At four, he gets up on stage, introduces himself, and says he's going to read from his new novel, but since it's an intimate audience, he tells the two guys in front that they can interrupt him if they have any questions. He starts to read and he thinks it's going pretty well - he gives it his all, just as he did in the writing of the book - and after about ten minutes he looks up and there's one of the guys with his hand in the air.

The writer stops reading and says, "Yes, you have a question?"

The kid in the front row clears his throat and says, "Yeah, we were wondering if you would mind keeping it down? We're trying to study for a test."

I have a story that's almost as bad.

When my book TURNING LIFE INTO FICTION first appeared, I gave a reading from it at Elliot Bay Bookstore in Seattle. At the time, I was a new professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, having been hired to replace someone who hadn't been let go. That person was now suing the university and oddly enough had named my new book in the lawsuit, though I had never met this person. It was odd, but I forgot about it.

Usually, I love to give readings, but this was a how-to book basically, and I made the mistake of trying to read from it rather than simply answer questions. I guess I was inexperienced, but even so, halfway through the reading, I was boring myself to tears. When the reading was over, the audience fled, all except for one woman, who smiled and asked if she could chat with me.

I smiled. Well, I had one admirer at least. The day wasn't a complete waste. She smiled and handed me a piece of paper, not a book to sign. It was a subpoena. This was the lawyer of the person who was suing the university. She had read in the paper that I was visiting Seattle where she was based and she thought she'd save herself a trip by serving me the subpoena at my reading.

And she didn't even buy the book.

Sue Silverman's Book Tour Disaster Story, Radio Style

2009-07-19T00:55:00.000-07:00

[I'm reprinting the book tour disaster stories i previously had on my website, and happily accepting more book tour disaster stories, if you've got them! RH]

"Where's the kinkiest place you've ever had sex?" I'm asked, on a live radio broadcast. I'm sitting in my living room in Michigan, talking to a talk-show host in Denver.

He must be kidding, I think to myself, as I scramble in my mind for a real answer, a witty answer, any answer...believing I'm supposed to dutifully respond to every question asked. After all, my publisher paid for this radio-book tour.

But my mind stalls. I say nothing. Did he really just ask that? Maybe I misunderstood. I'm supposed to be promoting my new memoir, "Love Sick: One Woman's Journey through Sexual Addiction," a book not about sex, not about positions or locations, but about recovering from an addiction. Now, several years later, I no longer even remember my answer.

Nor do I remember what I said to some crackpot on a radio call-in show based in Los Angeles. In the distance, through the phone receiver, I hear the sound of car tires, and I know, at 2 in the morning, that some pervert, wanting to know the details of my sex life, is aimlessly driving L. A. freeways, a sticky cell phone gripped to his ear.

One by one, radio talk show hosts, from all around the country, none of whom have read my book, call me, phone lines and air waves silently humming with all that I never wrote in my book.

Sue William Silverman's new book, "Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir," will be out in June, 2009. She is the author of two memoirs: "Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You" and "Love Sick: One Woman's Journey through Sexual Addiction," made into a Lifetime TV movie. She teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Smart Reviews Versus Insipid Reviews

2009-07-18T06:26:00.000-07:00

Getting reviewers to review your book is becoming more and more difficult as the traditional venues for reviewing are drying up. For me, it's odd coming out with a book because the map has changed so much since I began my writing career. I've published eight books over the past twenty years and I remember that my first little book, with a print run of 500 or so, seems to have had an easier time garnering reviews. That's not to say that my new book has fallen into a black hole. Not at all. It's had a lot of radio attention and some good internet attention but the reviews have been slow in coming. It's always odd, too, to write a book that takes anywhere from two to five years and to watch a reviewer or passing commentator on a blog complain that you haven't written the book they wanted you to write. Flannery O'Connor once wrote that if you receive any attention at all as a writer you will one day receive a letter from "Some inmate of the state penitentiary or an old lady in California telling you where you failed to meet their needs." Amen. But thankfully, there are still smart reviewers out there. I received a wonderful review in The Chicago Tribune today, wonderful not only because it was positive but also because it was smart. Contrast Brian Bouldrey's review in the Trib with a silly little review I received a little while ago in the Columbus Post Dispatch. Well, it comes with the territory . . . At least, Flannery O'Connor prepared me.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/booksmags/chi-0718-books-do-overjul18,0,5934153.story

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/life/stories/2009/07/05/2_HEMLEY_BOOK.ART_ART_07-05-09_E3_O6EB2LO.html