Christopher Swann

The Townsend Prize for Fiction is Georgia’s most prestigious literary prize, awarded every two years to an outstanding work of fiction by a Georgia writer.  Alice Walker, Ha Jin, Ferrol Sams, Terry Kay, and Kathryn Stockett are all past recipients.

Somehow I ended up on the list of ten finalists for this year’s Townsend Prize, so I put on a suit and tie and drove with my wife Kathy to Decatur.  I live 9.5 miles from Decatur, and it took us almost an hour and a half to get there, the same amount of time it usually takes me to get to Chattanooga. Gotta love Atlanta traffic. 

The Townsend Prize ceremony was in the DeKalb History Center, located in the historic courthouse in downtown Decatur. In the lobby, we checked in and got our nametags–mine with a stylized “T” on it, designating me as a finalist–and perused the books on display, all of them written by the ten finalists. Joshilyn Jackson arrived with her husband, and we reintroduced ourselves.  Kate Whitman, who works for the Atlanta History Center, arrived shortly afterwards. Kate manages the reading series at the Margaret Mitchell House, where Kathy and I met her last fall when I read there, and she and Kathy instantly took to each other. Anna Schachner, editor of The Chattahoochee Review and one of the MC’s for the evening, stopped to say hello and congratulate me on my nomination. Then Joshilyn corralled us and led the way upstairs to the bar.

Upstairs in what was once the old courtroom, wide windows showed views of downtown Decatur on one side and the skyscrapers of downtown Atlanta on the other. A musical trio warmed up in the corner. Tables were set up throughout the chamber, and there were two separate bars. (Writers.) We got wine and searched for our table, and when we found it we ran into Tom McHaney, a retired GSU professor who, along with his wife Pearl, runs the Georgia Center for the Book. Dr. McHaney served on my dissertation committee, and we chatted about Melville and Faulkner. Kathy and I went to find food and ran into Daren Wang, another Townsend finalist and a friend who was on an extended book tour for his debut, The Hidden Light of Northern Fires.

Authors, I’ve found, are typically generous and encouraging souls. I wasn’t disappointed when we finally returned to our table and met some of the other finalists, including Stacia Pelletier, Man Martin, and Jonathan Rabb.  All of them were very pleasant and chatty. If they were nervous about the award, they fooled me. Of course we all wanted to win, but I knew I was lucky just to be nominated, and besides, direct competitions between authors feel awkward.  Jonathan Rabb and I talked about that, agreeing that it was a bit embarrassing. A young man with neatly slicked-back hair came over from the next table and stuck out his hand and introduced himself as Tom Mullen.  He was a Townsend finalist for Lightning Men, the second in his series about the first black police officers in Atlanta in the 1940s and ’50s.  He asked if I was local, and after chatting for a few minutes he went to go meet some of the other authors, but not before saying we should get together sometime over coffee.

Then Julia Franks stopped by–we had met at the Berry Fleming Festival in Augusta, where Julia and Daren and I had sat and talked in between sessions, and Julia had been very friendly and kind to me. She had also been a high school English teacher, at Lovett, and I had joked with her about my fear of becoming like the lead character in Mr. Holland’s Opus, the music teacher who composes his orchestral piece for decades while teaching. This night, Julia hugged me and told me she had enjoyed my book very much–“a real page-turner,” she said. “You are the emperor of similes,” she added.  I think I’ll print that out and hang it over my desk.

I sat down and finished eating my dinner when my phone dinged–a good luck text from my friend Clarissa, who had given me a Blackburne t-shirt at my launch party.  This was followed by another text, this one from Brian Panowich, the author of Bull Mountain, who I had also met in Augusta and who had told me he loved Shadow of the Lions.  He wished me luck and added, “Have fun–enjoy the moment.” I showed both texts to Kathy, and suddenly my eyes stung and I had to blink back tears.  I’m a high school English teacher who cries at sunsets and supermarket openings, but at this moment I realized that I was now a legitimate author, an honest-to-God novelist, who was drinking wine and rubbing elbows with Georgia literary royalty, as Anna Schachner would later pronounce from the podium.

The evening festivities started with introductions and thank-yous from Joe Davich, followed by Ron Aiken, president of the Atlanta Writers Club.  Ron introduced the winner of the AWC scholarship, a young woman who was going to be a journalist.  We all clapped and cheered for her, and I remember thinking we really needed people like her in today’s world.  Then Anna Schachner got up and, contending with a wonky mic, she introduced Brad Watson, author of Miss Jane and the keynote speaker for the evening.  Brad looks like most folks’ idea of what an author looks like, bearded and wearing a sports jacket and looking very slightly rumpled.  He held up a printed copy of a speech and said, “I’m throwing this away.  It’s no good.”  He then went off-script in a meandering, funny speech about how he improbably became a writer, including an attempt to set fire to a box of his own short stories that didn’t quite go as planned.  I’m tempted to say that he mumbled, but his articulation was very clear–he just spoke low and softly, and we all leaned in to hear him.

The moment finally came when Brad finished and sat down and Anna got up to announce the winner.  All the writers in my line of vision sat up a little straighter, but we were also all smiling. “All the finalists are winners,” Anna said, and although it could sound corny or clichéd, that evening it rang true.  I certainly felt like a winner just beig there.

When I was a teenager living in Asheville, downtown was empty. I can imagine tumbleweeds rolling down the streets. There was the bank where my father worked; the Civic Center; a single upscale restaurant, 23 Page; a few X-rated theaters that my mother forbade me to enter; and a whole bunch of office windows with “To Let” or “For Rent” signs in them.

If you have been to Asheville anytime over the past ten years, you know that now it looks more like this:

Asheville is now hopping with art galleries, restaurants, shops, breweries, wine bars, and festivals. That has its own problems, such as crowds and parking, but overall I’d much rather have downtown Asheville like this than have it remain the wasteland it was in the mid-to-late 1980s.

Malaprop’s was one of the first stores to usher in the new era. While it began in 1982 and developed a core following, it wasn’t until it moved to its current location in 1997 that it became one of the premier independent bookstores in the South, if not the United States. (You can read about its humble beginnings and goals here.)

My family moved to Atlanta in 1988, and while I have a vague memory of possibly going to Malaprop’s at its old location, I didn’t make a proper visit to its new location until well into the 21st century. I’d heard of it, of course. But the store is truly a delightful place. I’ve been a handful of times over the past few years, and each time feels a bit like a pilgrimage. It has the same sort of feng shui of most indie bookstores, striking a balance between crowded and comfortable–a sort of cozy atmosphere, where everywhere you turn there are books but there are also enough places where a customer can have a private moment alone with an old or new favorite book.

I’d been growing more excited about going to Malaprop’s as an actual author since two friends of mine, Claire and Quinton, posted this picture on Facebook on July 1 with the caption “Guess what we spotted in a bookstore window in Asheville tonight!!!”

This was the first time someone had spotted a notice about my book in an actual bookstore.

The night of my reading at Malaprop’s, I was joined by my wife Kathy, who had driven up from Atlanta, and our sons Whitaker and Sullivan, who had been spending the past two weeks with my parents in Asheville. We arrived at Malaprop’s about an hour ahead of time, which allowed us to get a picture of both boys with the sign outside of the store. On setting foot inside the store, both boys began roaming the store, peering at shelves. Sullivan wanted the next book in Alan Gratz’s The League of Seven series. Whitaker was drawn to Malaprop’s “blind date” shelf of books wrapped in brown butcher paper. The staff writes a few choice adjectives for the wrapped book on the outside of the paper, and those are the only clues as to what kind of story is hidden beneath the paper. Whitaker carefully chose one, which turned out to be The Madman’s Daughter, a revisioning of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau.

I was a little jealous, watching both boys. I wanted to wander around the bookstore and discover a new book. Instead, I was preparing to talk about my own book, with not a few butterflies in my stomach.

Understand that I’m not complaining. I’d been dreaming of writing a novel since I was in eighth grade. This was, quite literally, part of a lifelong dream coming true. But now I was going to do my dog-and-pony show in front of my parents and their friends, some of whom had known me since I was a teenager. And my throat was a little sore. That was all I needed, to lose my voice. Fortunately the café served a lemon-infused camomile tea that I dosed with honey, which did wonders.

Jacob, one of the store staff, was setting out about a dozen folding chairs. “Jacob,” Kathy said, shaking her head in mock disappointment, “we’re going to need a lot more chairs.”

I laughed, then felt the butterflies come back. How many people were going to come? Would the store be packed? Would no one come at all? Which would be worse?

Then my parents arrived, followed soon by my godparents Croom and Meriwether. Before I knew it, I was shaking hands with many more of my parents’ friends and introducing Kathy. Then a tall man hove into view with a familiar, easy smile. It was Kirk Duncan, my former head of school and now head of Carolina Day School in Asheville. Somehow seeing Kirk set me at ease.

Before I knew it, Jacob had me sitting on a stool at the front of the seated crowd–while the store wasn’t technically packed, it was a close thing–and adjusted a microphone on a stand so it hovered right in front of my mouth. Both Whitaker and Sullivan sat in the front row, while Kathy sat in the very back. Later she told me she stayed back because she thought I was nervous and would do better if she wasn’t sitting right up next to me. 

Jacob introduced me to a round of applause, and I began speaking. Despite years of teaching students, I still get nervous before addressing a group. The microphone had dipped perhaps half an inch, which led to me hunching over slightly as I spoke into it. At the back of the room, Kathy was gesturing with her hands, palms up toward the ceiling. I thought she was telling me to sit up, which I couldn’t do if I wanted to keep speaking into the microphone. She was instead telling me to speak louder.

I began reading the more dramatic passage from the prologue that I had read the night before in Charlotte. The audience was still, listening. Whitaker seemed to be listening pretty closely. Sullivan, meanwhile, was mostly reading from his own book. Occasionally he would turn around in his seat to find Kathy, sitting in the back, and he would wave at her or hold up his book to show her what he was doing. Kathy would gesture at him to turn around and pay attention to me. I found the whole thing funny.

Everyone clapped when I finished reading. They asked me a few polite questions. A few were grinning openly, clearly getting a kick out of seeing David and Nancy Swann’s son–an honest-to-God novelist!–giving a reading in Asheville. There was a pause in the questions, and then Kathy raised her hand in the back. “Are you writing a sequel?” she asked, one eyebrow lifted. Laughter.

Afterward, I sat at a table by the cash register signing books. Some of my parents’ friends had dinner dates and dashed off, promising to get me to sign their copies later. One mom with her son who had just wandered into the store right before I read liked what she heard and so bought a copy. And then a woman stood before me, saying, “Well, hey, Swanny!” It was Martha, aka SmartyKate, an online friend I had never met before in person. Martha is one of the early members of the Fiction Files, a group launched on MySpace in the early 2000s by author Jonathan Evison. Johnny was just about to publish his first novel, All About Lulu, and the rest of the group consisted of avid readers and hopeful writers.* They had been my peer group, something I had missed after grad school. And now I was hugging Martha and signing a copy of my novel for her.

Then the line was gone and I stood up and stretched. Jacob came over, and I asked if the store had any copies they wanted me to sign. “We sold out,” he said.

My parents took our sons home with them so Kathy and I could go have a celebratory dinner. We found a local Italian place, Modesto. When we sat at our table, I put my copy of Shadow of the Lions face-down on the table. Kathy looked at me and then turned it face-up. A man and a woman dining next to us noticed. “My husband wrote a book,” Kathy told them, while I smiled and blushed and tried to look both proud and humble but probably just looked awkward. The woman took a picture of my book so she would remember it. The waitress was suitably impressed enough to offer us dessert on the house.

All in all, a great way to end the North Carolina leg of my tour.

*Johnny Evison has gone on to publish four novels–All About Lulu, West of Here, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, and This is Your Life, Harriet Chance!–with a fifth in the works. He has been a mentor and a friend to me, and now we are both Algonquin authors. Other Fiction Filers include Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day and the upcoming Tales of Falling and Flying; Hugh Schulze, writer and director of the film CASS; and James P. Othmer, author of The Futurist, Adland, and Holy Water.

I lived in Winston-Salem from 1978 to 1986. Aside from a short visit after graduating from college and another due to a wedding I attended about ten years ago, I had not been back to Winston-Salem since about 1986 until my book tour.

My family moved to Raintree Court when I was 8 years old. It is a short cul-de-sac of six houses, with mine located at the end of the street. It was green and had a pool in the back and beyond that a ravine that led to a trickling creek and woods where I played with the neighborhood kids.

The day after my book tour event in Winston-Salem, I had nothing to do until 7 p.m. that evening in Charlotte, a little over an hour away, so after having a great breakfast biscuit and coffee at Krankies downtown, I pulled up Google Maps on my phone and looked for my old neighborhood. Although I was 16 when we moved away to Asheville, I never learned to drive a car in Winston-Salem, in part because I attended boarding school starting in ninth grade and we weren’t allowed to have cars on campus. That means the only streets I really knew in Winston-Salem were ones I had ridden on my bike, and I’d never been on my bike downtown. Driving slowly west through downtown and toward Robinhood Road, I was struck by how much was familiar.  There was the curving, downward slope of the road as I approached Hanes Park and Reynolda Road. And on the far side of the park was Wiley Junior High, now Wiley Middle School, where I had attended in seventh and eighth grades. It was my eighth-grade teacher Mrs. Corpening who had launched me on my path toward writing fiction (see this previous post). I had never thanked her for that, and Mrs. Corpening had long since passed away, but I drove to Wiley to see if I could go inside and say hello to some memories.

I parked in the almost deserted parking lot just across the street and took a look. Like any place from childhood, Wiley seemed much smaller than I remembered it. I got out of my rental car and crossed the street, pulling out my phone to take a few pictures. The doors I had always gone in from the back were locked, so I walked around to the front to see if the school was opened. I recalled that my art teacher, an excitable man named Mr. Garibaldi or Mr. Grimaldi, had once thrown a chair out of a third-story window right above the spot where I was on the sidewalk, and I glanced up as if I would see a desk rotating through the sky on its way to the ground.

The front door was opened, and I stepped into a narrow foyer and then a larger entrance hall. The black-and-white tile was the same, but the paint was new, as was the library across the hall. There were a few signs in Spanish as well, another sign of change. But then I saw the picture of Mr. Wise, the principal of Wiley from 1968 to 1990, and remembered him immediately. I walked down one hallway, my footsteps echoing off the empty floor–aside from some murmuring in an office down another hallway, the building seemed empty. I stopped and retraced my steps, suddenly unwilling to try and visit an old classroom. I’d seen enough and was more interested in finding my old neighborhood.

Driving back to Reynolda Road and then turning onto Robinhood, I was bothered by a half-glimpsed memory. Finally I coaxed that memory out into the light, suddenly recalling what Winston-Salem reminded me of. It reminded me of Maycomb, the fictitious town in To Kill a Mockingbird. True, Winston-Salem is much bigger–even as a child I had known that. And I had never known anything like the Great Depression in Winston-Salem. But Maycomb is what I thought of as I drove up Robinhood past Coliseum Drive, which led to Wake Forest University. Perhaps it was because I had been the same age in Winston as Scout had been in Maycomb, or maybe it was because I read To Kill a Mockingbird when I lived there.

And then I hit the light at Buena Vista and turned right, and then I had to pull over. I wasn’t overcome with emotion, exactly. I just needed to pause, awash in memory. I had ridden my bike on these streets, knocked on these doors for candy at Halloween, talked here with the other neighborhood kids about the seminal movies of my generation’s childhood: Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. and Jaws.  Chip Shealey, my next-door neighbor, was the first to get HBO, and we would go into his basement and watch Jaws on his big cabinet TV, an experience that kept me from swimming alone in my pool from then on, convinced the shark would swim up the drain and eat me.  This was where my childhood was.

I drove down the street and then turned right onto Raintree Court. There was Hartley’s ranch house. And Hank and Anna Willis’ white house, and Worth and Caroline Mitchell’s, and Chip Shealey’s, and the Wilsons’ up on the hill. And that was mine at the end of the street. The same green house.

I didn’t get out of the car, just pulled over to the side of the circle and took a picture of my old house and sat there for a minute. Worth Mitchell’s basketball goal was still up on the side of his house above the garage door. How many hours had I played Horse there? How many weekends had I ridden my bike around the cul-de-sac, listening to Casey’s Top Forty on my paperback-sized Walkman? How many days had I spent playing Chase and Army and all sorts of other games in the sprawling woods behind our houses?  How many nights had I had friends over and played Dungeons & Dragons and Top Secret and Traveller in my basement or on the patio?

Where had all those things gone?

I drove slowly out of the cul-de-sac, taking a right down Buena Vista for a final pass through the neighborhood. Then I turned around, gave a salute to Raintree Court as I passed it again, and then continued down Buena Vista. I didn’t need to glance at my phone to know that my old elementary school was down this road. And then I came up on it, and when I saw the sign I nearly bumped into the car in front of me. I’d forgotten the name of the school where I’d gone for third and maybe fourth grades, where I’d run the three-legged race in field days and played soccer games and won a quarter betting that the Steelers would beat the Cowboys in Super Bowl XIII.

The school’s name was Whitaker Elementary School. Almost twenty-five years after I left that school, my wife and I would name our firstborn son Whitaker. As the Police would sing in a popular album when I was a kid growing up in Winston-Salem: synchronicity.

I snapped a picture of the school sign, then tooled around the streets for another minute or so. I hadn’t gone past Brunson Elementary, where I’d attended for the rest of elementary school before junior high. I hadn’t gone looking for the house where a cute girl in my grade named Sally had lived. I hadn’t gone looking for the candy store where we used to go to buy candy bars and bubblegum with collectible NFL football helmets. But the morning was getting on. So, without fanfare or any sort of gesture of farewell, I went down Buena Vista and turned right onto North Stratford, seeking the highway. It was time to head to Charlotte.

Late on Tuesday morning I got to visit Algonquin’s Chapel Hill office to sign some books and meet some of the staff. The editors and some of the other staff were in New York for the spring sales conference, so I didn’t get to meet them, but I did get to meet my copy editor–who made sure the novel was free of grammatical and mechanical errors–and the art department, which came up with the gorgeous cover. They were all incredibly busy but took the time to say hello and ask me to think about what I might like on the paperback cover. I also met some very nice–and very young–interns. I signed something like three hundred books, then my publicist Brooke and Algonquin’s social media whiz Debra took me out to lunch and then to Flyleaf Books, where I signed their remaining stock and bought some thank-you notes.

Between the ages of 8 and 16, I lived in Winston-Salem, so driving into the small city was nostalgic in a strange way. As a kid, I had my own suburban neighborhood memorized, but I had not gone downtown very much, and I had not learned how to drive in Winston-Salem, so while some street names were familiar, I didn’t have a good internal map. Downtown Winston-Salem has also undergone a significant renaissance in the past thirty years–now there is a vibrant arts district and a general sense of growth and prosperity. (More on nostalgia and childhood in a subsequent post.)

Bookmarks is another interesting independent bookstore. For several years, Bookmarks has been a literary arts organization that puts on a yearly books festival, but this summer they opened a new brick-and-mortar bookstore. It’s non-profit, and Bookmarks supports a variety of things, including an authors in schools program.

The store looks a bit like an industrial loft, with concrete floors and bookshelves on casters so they can be wheeled away to make space for events. Charlie Lovett, an author and president of the board of directors of Bookmarks, interviewed me for a new podcast series he was creating, “Inside the Writer’s Studio.” I was to be the first author interviewed for the series. We sat in a pair of leather club chairs on a small stage in front of a small crowd of fifteen folks, including a few Woodberry grads, one current and one future Woodberry Tiger, and my old next-door neighbors in Winston-Salem.  Charlie, himself a Woodberry grad (class of ’80), brought his Woodberry letter jacket and draped it over the back of his chair for our interview. I enjoyed the conversation, although as usual, despite Charlie’s assurances to the contrary, I maybe went on a bit too long in my answers. What was just as enjoyable was talking with folks before and afterwards. Jule Banzet, another Woodberry grad, brought his two sons, one a current fourth or fifth former and the other a hopeful future Tiger. His youngest son approached me afterward as I was signing books and asked me very politely why I had called my book Shadow of the Lions. Not sure I would have been able to do that at his age.

Next stop–Charlotte!

Monday morning I’m back at the Atlanta airport, this time flying to Raleigh. I don’t know how my friends who travel for work every week manage to do this, but for me the novelty hasn’t yet worn off.

Every independent bookstore is unique in its own way. Some are the size of a Foot Locker store, packed to the rafters with books. Others are more sprawling affairs. Some are messy, others organized. What they don’t look like is one of several such stores in a chain.

That said, Quail Ridge Books looks like a Borders bookstore, if a.) Borders were still in business and b.) Borders only had a single location. It’s virtually brand-new (they recently moved to this new location) and open and cheerful, with wooden floors and low bookshelves divided into various categories: Fiction and Nonfiction, naturally, but also Southern Fiction, Biography, Award Winners, etc.

I arrived about fifteen minutes ahead of my event with my cousin Will and his family after we had all gone out for an early dinner. His son and daughter did their best to help sell their dad’s cousin’s book.

Julia, the nice lady in charge of my event, showed me where I would be and said she would introduce me and then let me do whatever I wanted to do. “I was a boarding school teacher for ten years,” she added, then gestured at my book. “You really got that part right.”

There were a few people sitting in the fold-out chairs, but before I could really pay attention to them, several people approached. Thankfully I recognized them all: Keith, a former HIES student; Jay, a classmate from Woodberry Forest, who introduced his parents; Dave, another Woodberry classmate; and Lynette, a W&L classmate and old girlfriend, with her teenage daughter in tow. I had already expected to see these folks due to exchanged e-mails and phone calls over the past few days. My publicist Brooke and Algonquin’s social media expert Debra also came, and it was good to finally meet these two in the flesh, as I had exchanged many, many e-mails with them over the past several months. I had expected them to come, too. It was the other folks I did not expect to see: Bo, H.H., and T, all Woodberry boys in my class, now grown men. I had not seen any of them in almost thirty years. “Jimbo’s tied up with family stuff,” Bo told me, referring to a sixth Woodberry classmate, “otherwise he’d be here, too.”

Then I was standing at a microphone in front of a crowd of twenty-five people, all of whom wanted to hear about my book. I read from the prologue, talked a bit about the origins of the story, and said of my protagonist Matthias, “I like characters who make mistakes.” (That last bit got tweeted out by Algonquin via my publicist.) I tried not to ramble, probably did a little bit anyway, but then got into a groove and spoke for maybe half an hour. The Q&A with the audience was interesting. A gentleman asked how I saw the difference between redemption–which I had said my protagonist Matthias was searching for–and salvation. Lynette raised her hand and asked if I had any advice for aspiring authors, which caused her teenage daughter to nearly die from mortification. A lovely young woman who I realized was a former student of mine, Meredith, asked if I had ever, in the middle of teaching class, been struck with an idea to put in my novel. 

Then I signed books and spoke to everyone in line. Belinda, a Quail Ridge bookseller, had chosen my book as a staff pick, and I grinned up at her as she said lots of wonderful things about my book. My Woodberry classmates all lined up behind me for a picture. Meredith gave me a hug and had someone take a picture of us. My classmate Jay had to leave with his parents, but the remaining five of us Woodberry boys went across the street for a beer. And Jimbo joined us half an hour later. I wish I’d gotten a picture of all of us, beers in our hands, copies of my book scattered across our table. We told some stories and laughed a lot. It seemed like none of us had changed a bit since high school, at least in our personalities. Sure, we were perhaps more mature, a little wiser, but otherwise it felt like we were seventeen again.

Next stop–Bookmarks in Winston-Salem!