Christopher Swann

Friday morning I checked out of my hotel in Nashville and drove to Parnassus Books to pick up my signed copy of Bel Canto. (See my previous post for details.) Out of gratitude and solidarity, I purchased a copy of Ann Patchett’s Run, which Niki at Parnassus had recommended. Before I could pay for it, a cashier waved me over to a customer.  “This lady is buying a copy of your book,” she said.  The customer, who had her young grandson with her, was as delighted to meet the author as the author was to meet her. “I read about this book in the paper,” she said, “and I’m getting it for my book club!” She turned to her grandson and said, “Andrew, this man is the author of this book!” The boy grinned and shook my hand.  The copy she had purchased was one I had already signed, but I added a personal note to it. When the customer left, the cashier and I looked at each other and smiled, as if sharing a delightful little secret.

After meeting for coffee with my friend Ed and soaking up some more stories about publishing and book fairs and just being an author in general, I hit the highway for Birmingham. It’s a straight shot due south, and I spent the time listening to music, talking on the phone through the hands-off car system to my wife Kathy, and wondering when I was going to find time to get back to writing book number two.

Algonquin had put me up in two neat boutique hotels so far, and the one in Birmingham, Aloft, did not disappoint either. Imagine a modernist, industrial-looking loft, and that’s what my room looked like, sort of like what I imagine a hotel room in SoHo designed by IKEA would look like. Alabama Booksmith was only an eight-minute walk away, but as it was really hot and humid, I cheated and drove the third of a mile.

Alabama Booksmith is the most unique bookstore I’ve visited yet, starting with Jake, the owner.

Jake is almost completely bald, his remaining hair pulled back into a frazzled ponytail, but he’s got a lively spirit and a compassionate sense of humor. He met me in the parking lot. “I’m going to ask you the strangest question you’ve ever been asked at a bookstore,” he said. “Is your father’s name David?” Seeing my look of surprise, he continued, “A woman called the store and asked if your father’s name was David, because if so, and if your mother’s name is Nancy, she was in their wedding fifty years ago. She might come in and buy a copy of your book.” We walked up the steps to the front door. “Now, all independent bookstores are weird,” Jake said, “but this is probably the weirdest one you’ve ever been to.”

Inside, the store didn’t look weird, although it was empty except for the staff. Every single title faces outward from the shelves so you can see the front cover, and every single copy for sale has been signed by the author. Alabama Booksmith’s big gig is selling signed first editions, which they mail to their enrolled customers. “People don’t really visit this store,” Jake said. “Ninety percent of our customers buy the signed first editions, which we mail to them.”

“So they might come in to the store once, sign up for your program, and they don’t come back?” I asked.

“Exactly!” Jake said, beaming as if he were my teacher and I had just solved a difficult puzzle. “But that one woman in your parents’ wedding called, so we’ll probably get one. If we get two people, that’s wonderful. We don’t really get people who come in to listen to an author.”

Jake led me to a back room where around three hundred copies of my novel sat in stacks on a table. This was why I had come–not to speak with a group of readers, but to sign copies of my book. Alabama Booksmith had selected me as their August choice for their Signed First Edition club. These three hundred books had basically all been sold already–I would sign them, and then the store would ship them out to the members of their club.

Mike, another bookseller, shot a thirty-second video of me talking about my book, which they assured me was perfectly fine and that I didn’t sound like an idiot. Then, just before the book signing started, Jake placed a thin, narrow box on the table in front of me. “Huh,” he said, faking surprise. I opened the box and found a pen inside. Not just any pen, but one with my name and the day’s date engraved in it. “Well, isn’t that a coincidence?” Jake said, breaking into a smile.

I started signing books. Jake would hand me a book open to the title page, I would sign it, and his partner would take the book from me and place it in a stack, while a fourth staffer would whisk the stack away. About fifty or so copies in, Jake said, “He’s doing pretty good.”

Mike nodded. “Moving right along,” he said.

“He’s no Jimmy Carter, but he’s not bad,” Jake said, then added, “Jimmy Carter can sign a book in four seconds.”

There was an electronic chime–someone had entered the store. Mike raised his eyebrows. “We’ve got a live one,” he said. Another staffer left to greet the visitor. I kept signing books. A minute later, the young staffer returned. “Live one,” he confirmed. Several books later, another chime. Now Jake and Mike looked at each other and then at me. “Two live customers!” Jake said as if he had never seen the like.

I went out into the store and sat at the table set up for me. The table was next to a shelf of signed first editions that were true collector’s items, including a set of Pat Conroy novels, which I felt was a good sign. And it was, because in all, six people came into the store to purchase one or more copies of my book. They all came in separately over the course of the next hour, but they came. Jake was astonished. “This is some kind of record,” he said. Of the six, Jake knew four of them by name. The woman who had been in my parents’ wedding never came, but another friend of my mother’s did.

At the end, Jake took down the poster advertising my visit and promised to mail it to me. Behind the front counter, staff were stacking newly-packaged copies of my book, ready to be mailed out into the world.

Back home to Atlanta for the weekend.  Next stop – Raleigh, N.C.!

The story of Parnassus Books and its origins is already legendary. (Read it here if you haven’t already.) Yes, I hoped to walk into the store and meet Ann Patchett, who would then happily sign my worn copy of Bel Canto. I had also hoped to meet Mary Laura Philpott, editor of Parnassus’ online magazine, and see if she is as funny and delightful in person as she is online. (I had previously learned that she would be out of town.) But more than that, I simply wanted to walk into the store and find that special something that bookstores–real bookstores–have.

Parnassus has that. In spades. And no, it’s not because they had a big old display of my novel right at the front.

I have long lamented to anyone who wants to listen — and probably to several who did not — the loss of Oxford Books in Atlanta, the last unique independent bookstore in Buckhead. Oxford Books has been gone for several years now. Walking into Parnassus was like walking into Oxford Books 2.0. The floor plan is open and brightly lit without being drenched in harsh fluorescents. The shelves are packed with books and dotted with handwritten notes from the staff highlighting certain texts. Books cover a series of tables without being messy and are organized without seeming arranged by a fascist.

A young woman behind the cash register saw me wandering around the shelves. “You’re tonight’s author!” she said brightly. She took me to the back office to introduce me to Niki Coffman, who was in charge of the evening’s event. Niki wore a lovely sweater with some sort of shawl or scarf. It wasn’t until about fifteen minutes later that I realized the shawl was actually a sling holding a very mature long-haired dachshund. “This is Mary Todd Lincoln,” Niki told me. Mary Todd Lincoln glanced at me and snuggled closer to Niki.

I’m not sure if there is some sort of magical hiring process at Parnassus, or if the store just draws the right people in. Regardless, Niki was everything you would want in a bookseller: warm, friendly, passionate about books, a good asker of questions and a good listener, and wearing a dachshund in a sling. She asked about my tour and whether or not I was driving a lot, which led to a conversation about audiobooks. When I confessed that I had not yet read Ann Patchett’s novel Commonwealth, Niki dug around on a shelf and found a CD audiobook version of Commonwealth narrated by Hope Davis. She handed it to me. A gift, she said, “for all the driving you’ll be doing on your book tour.” Feeling like a stalker, I asked if Ann Patchett were around, and held up my worn copy of Bel Canto which I had brought from Atlanta for the sole purpose of looking like a fanboy desperately hoping to get his favorite band to sign his album cover. Nope, Niki said, she’s heading to the beach tomorrow morning. “But just leave it with me and I’ll get her to sign it at some point,” she said. “Oh, and if you want to buy anything in the store, you get the author discount.”

There was still time before the event, so I went back out into the store, determined to make good on the author discount. Staffers were setting up folding chairs; it looked like they were setting up a lot of them. I picked up a copy of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Kate Quinn’s The Alice Network, then saw another Algonquin debut novel, When the English Fall by David Williams, and put The Underground Railroad back on the shelf for another day in favor of David Williams’ book. At the sales desk, I bumped into HI alum Avery Robinson, who had come straight from work for my event. As always when I see a former student after a few years, I was stunned by how grown up Avery seemed. I don’t mean she had been immature and could now be trusted to use the right dinner fork; I mean she had transformed from a teenage girl into a young, confident woman. She had the same bright smile and engaging air she had always had, and we chatted for a minute before I went to get a drink of water.  Fifteen minutes until show time.

Ed Tarkington appeared, along with his wife Elizabeth-Lee and their two young daughters. Ed and I shared an editor, Andra Miller, before Ballantine hired Andra away from Algonquin. Ed is also a high school English teacher and had his first novel published by Algonquin last year, and since then we had become friends. Tonight we would be having a conversation about my book in front of however many people would come. We sat down in the back to talk about what Ed would ask me and if I should read a short passage aloud or not. Niki came back and said we had about five minutes until go time. She paused and looked at me. “I think you are going to like the crowd size,” she said.

We then stepped out of the back office and through the kids’ books section to the center of the store, where there was a small stage with two leather club chairs in front of a signing table. There were easily twenty people in the seats, with more straggling in. I keep reading stories about debut authors going to bookstores and speaking to groups of five, or three, or sometimes two, counting the salesclerk. Ed had clearly spread the word for me, and I had also had some good press. Then I saw Maryanne Stumb McWhirter, another HI alum, with a group of friends. Go Bears!

Niki introduced Ed, who introduced me, all to a nice round of applause. We had microphones but elected to ditch them, using our teacher voices to project to the back of the audience. Ed was the quintessential interviewer, displaying his knowledge and understanding of my book but leaving me plenty of room to answer his questions and to elaborate. People laughed politely but sincerely at my jokes. I read the opening two-and-a-half pages of my novel and Ed led the audience in another round of applause. I’ve grown more comfortable talking about my book in the past few days, so it was more than okay. It was fun. The audience asked lots of questions: did I plot out the mystery of Fritz’s disappearance beforehand or let it develop organically as I wrote; do I write for a particular reader or kind of reader in mind; how did I find time to write (short answer: my butt goes in the writing chair for an hour or so after the boys go to bed).  Afterwards people bought copies of my book and I signed them, an activity that I still find delightful. Maryanne bought four copies. A third HI alum, Ashley Bahl-Binder, appeared with a hug and a book for me to sign. Never in my life had I thought about how deep and wide the social net of HI alums would be, nor how beneficial it would be for a book-touring English teacher.

Finally, the customers were all gone, and the Parnassus staff told me it had been a fabulous turnout. Then they asked me almost hesitantly if I would mind signing the rest of their copies. “Gladly,” I said. Ed and Elizabeth-Lee left with their daughters amid promises for Ed and I to get together tomorrow morning for coffee. I really didn’t want to leave, but I knew the staff needed to get home, so I finished signing the books. They also brought me a Moleskine notebook the size of a flatscreen TV as a sort of guest book that visiting authors sign. Their most recent book was full, so I got to be the first to sign in a brand-new one.

That’s when Niki approached with Mary Todd Lincoln. “Okay, I have a strange request,” she said, “and feel free to say no. Would you like to have a picture of your signed books with Mary Todd Lincoln?” She smiled. “She’s famous on social media.”

“You want to put a cute dachshund on top of a stack of my books?” I said. “Wait until I get my phone.” And so I present you with this picture.

I went back to the office to collect the two books I had bought, along with the audiobook of Commonwealth and my old copy of Bel Canto. Niki held her hand out. “You can leave that here,” she said, meaning Bel Canto. “I’ll get Ann to sign it. You can come pick it up tomorrow morning. We open at ten.”

“Tomorrow?” I said. “But you said Ann is going to the beach tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” she said. She picked up her phone. “I’ll call her and see if she can sign it tonight.”

“Seriously?”

Niki shrugged and smiled, as if to say This is what we do.

[Update: Ann Patchett did sign my copy of Bel Canto.  Wrote a really nice note, too.  Achievement unlocked.]

Next stop – Alabama Booksmith in Homewood, AL!

The day after my launch party, I catch a flight from Atlanta to Richmond.  By the time I check into my hotel, only a block away from Fountain Bookstore, I’m fading fast.  A quick check of social media turns into an hour of replying to well wishes, kind notes, and new posts.  A Twitter message from the wonderfully named Kelly Justice at Fountain Bookstore pops up, informing me they don’t really do readings but have conversations and Q&As and that she will look out for me around 5:30 or so.  Then another message from Beverly, an old friend who lives in town, wanting to know if we are still on for dinner after the event.  I message her back “Absolutely,” then yawn.  Time for a quick nap.

At 5:00 I get an avocado BLT and a latte from Shockoe Espresso and Roastery.  Best late lunch/early dinner sandwich ever.  I’m carrying around a copy of my book and I’m not sure why.  Back to the hotel to brush my teeth–my wife told me I shouldn’t show up for events with food in my teeth–and then to Fountain Bookstore.  Which is where, for the first time, I see copies of my book on display in an honest-to-God bookstore.

Kelly welcomes me and we chat for several minutes as I walk around the bookstore.  It’s small and cozy rather than cramped, with hand-written notes on particular shelved books.  There are several wooden folding chairs set up at the back of the store, facing a card table with a tablecloth bearing the store’s logo.  Kelly is alone that evening as the rest of her staff are on vacation, so she warns me that she may have to interrupt our scheduled conversation and Q&A if customers enter the store and get too loud. 

The first person to arrive is Aiden, a classmate from Woodberry, and his wife Mary Jo.  Aiden now works at Woodberry and tells me he is the school’s official photographer for the evening.  More members of Aiden’s family arrive, including his niece who suggests a few books my sons might like.  A young woman approaches, smiling, and I realize it’s Katie, a former student and fellow English teacher.  While Kelly rearranges some chairs and glances at the clock, Katie and I quickly catch up.  I mention I still teach Moby-Dick, and Katie sighs.  “I loved Moby-Dick,” she says.  I knew I had always enjoyed teaching this one.

Kelly and I sit down in front of an audience of eight to ten people.  It’s a far cry from the launch party the night before, and yet this feels right, more intimate.  The customers are attentive and listen as Kelly asks me questions and I try to respond without babbling or wandering off-track.  Another former Woodberry classmate, Mike, arrives and waves from the back row.  I’m asked about the title, about working under an honor code, how long it took to write the book, did I always assume I was writing a “literary thriller” and what does that mean, which authors inspire me.  My former student Katie asks me if being an English teacher helped me in the writing of my own book or if it got in the way.  (Yeah, she’s smart.)  I answer everyone’s questions and then sign books.  My friend Beverly arrives near the end and waits until the store empties.  Before everyone leaves I get a picture with the Woodberry folks, and then Kelly has me sign all her remaining copies of my book.  Seeing them stacked afterwards with “Autographed Copy” labels on them is yet another realization that this book thing is really happening. 

Beverly and I walk up the street to a restaurant and have a light dinner, chatting and reminiscing.  Afterward, as we are about to leave, a woman approaches.  “Excuse me,” she says, “but are you the author of Shadow of the Lions?”  I manage not to have a big, dopey grin on my face as I answer yes.  The woman says she had walked by the bookstore earlier and saw the sign for my visit, but she and her husband had lost track of time.  “Do you have a copy on you that I can buy now?” she says.  She’s disappointed that I do not, but Beverly tells her there is a big stack of them at Fountain Bookstore, all signed, and that they open at 10am.

Now it’s midnight and I’m going to bed.  Next stop–Parnassus Books in Nashville!

As Mrs. Corpening marched our eighth-grade class into the Revolutionary War, she announced that the unit would culminate in a Project. Everyone at Wiley Junior High knew about the Project. The girls would make patchwork quilts and dolls out of calico and stuffing, and the boys would write a book report on Johnny Tremain. This year, however, Mrs. Corpening presented us with another option that grabbed hold of me by the front of my shirt: we could write a diary—or, for the boys, a journal—from the point of view of a fictitious character living during the Revolutionary War.

Most of my classmates were puzzled or annoyed by this choice. I was thrilled. This was the first time at school that someone had asked me to write creatively. As a child, I read books everywhere—including the dinner table, to my father’s bemusement—and I had a vivid imagination that allowed me to transform my backyard into an Army base, an undersea laboratory, or a space station. I also played Dungeons and Dragons and other RPGs, which were all about inventing stories and characters and entire worlds in your head. Who wanted to write a stupid book report on Johnny Tremain? Instead, I invented a frontier woodsman who was swept up by the Revolution and fought in the Battle of Kings Mountain in South Carolina. In that battle, the death of the British commander sealed the Patriot victory. Of course, my character was the hero who shot the British commander.

What I loved about that assignment was the sheer audacity of the idea that I could make up whatever I wanted. I scanned the encyclopedia and my social studies textbook for background info, but otherwise, the story was all mine. It was like the best kind of daydreaming, except with the permanence of ink on a page.

*   *   *

After eighth grade, I left the Winston-Salem public school system for boarding school in Virginia. There my classmates and I felt that a lot was expected of us, that the stakes had been raised. I dutifully buckled down and learned how to write a persuasive five-paragraph essay, my eighth-grade creative journal consigned to a drawer and forgotten.

In my fifth form or junior year, however, Mr. Blain, who taught the novel genre, created an unusual assignment for us. Mr. Blain was tall and slim and wry, and he would often stand at the front of the room and lean back against his desk, arms folded comfortably across his stomach. He did this as he told us about our assignment. “We’re going to study the novel,” he said. “And we shall read a lot.” He paused and smiled. “But this trimester, you are also going to write a novel.”

We weren’t sure we had heard correctly. Write a novel? We were going to write a novel? Ourselves?

That is exactly what we did. Fifteen students, fifteen chapters, one per student. Any topic, any plot, any writing style of our choosing. “Barring egregious and unnecessary profanity and pornography,” Mr. Blain added, which led to a few muffled groans. We made committees—Character, Plot, Setting. I was on the Plot committee, where I sensed the action was. And I wanted in. I wanted to help decide what would happen. And so I volunteered to write the opening chapter.

The novel, such as it was, told the story of Trip, a senior lacrosse player at an all-boys boarding school. “Write what you know” was advice we all took, although we took liberal creative license with this rule. Trip discovers there is a drug ring on campus run by—gasp!—the assistant headmaster and disciplinarian. The novel, entitled Class Ring, is choppy, self-contradictory, and highly unbelievable. But it was a watershed moment for me as a writer. I think it was an important moment for everyone in that class. We would talk about the possibilities for our novel in class, on the way to practice, walking back to the dorms from dinner. We argued about the fate of various minor characters. We gave Trip a sidekick and accomplice, Walter, an unpopular nerd who sorts tee shirts and socks in the school gym. Mr. Blain made comparisons to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza that flew right over our heads, but we beamed at his praise nonetheless. We were writing a Novel.

*   *   *

“Write what you know” is perhaps the best-known advice that is given to writers. It made sense to me when I first heard it. But then, at the impressionable age of an undergraduate discovering his lifelong passion, I read John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. In it, Gardner cautions the writer about write-what-you-know: “Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination, nothing is quicker to turn on the psyche’s censoring devices and distortion systems, than trying to write truthfully and interestingly about one’s own home town, one’s Episcopalian mother, one’s crippled younger sister.”[1] This floored me. It also freed me, I thought. I could write whatever I wanted. It’s not that I felt ashamed or embarrassed about my own life. It’s that my life felt, well, boring. I wasn’t born on the lip of a volcano, or the child of secret agents, or haunted by some dark, secret tragedy. My father was a banker, my mother a homemaker. I had gone to boarding school and then to a small liberal arts college. What did I know from my own personal experience that I could possibly turn into fiction?

So I decided to write about things I didn’t know about.

*   *   *

Fast forward twenty years and I have a Ph.D. in creative writing, a teaching job at a private school in Atlanta, two young boys, and a fiercely intelligent wife. She is also patient, which helps when you are married to a would-be novelist.

I had spent more than a decade writing a novel set partially in Ireland and dealing with family drama, the IRA, and the sins of the past. It was my dissertation, and I learned how to write by constantly trying to hack my way to the story at the center of that thing, but the novel never quite came together. After reading yet another draft of it, my wife said, not unkindly, “Why don’t you write about something you know?”

“I’m a white Southern male who went to boarding school,” I said. “I teach high school English. Who wants to read that?”

“You don’t have to write about that,” my wife said, patiently. “But you could write a story that takes place at a boarding school.”

I resisted at first. I love Dead Poets Society and The Catcher in the Rye, but I didn’t want to copy those stories. I was also intimidated, truth be told. And John Gardner’s advice still lingered. But the Irish novel wasn’t responding to my latest attempts to flog it into shape. And I did have an idea about a young teacher plagued by an event from his own student days.

My wife encouraged me to explore this new story. “Give it a prologue where something shocking happens,” she said. “Like somebody dies.”

I considered this. “No, he doesn’t die,” I said. “He vanishes.” And I went down the hall to start writing.

Talking about his excellent debut novel, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, Ed Tarkington said he abandoned the macho “Western noir” he had been writing and went back to where he had started: “the memory of growing up in a small Southern town in the late 1970s and early 80s, in a family that was both typical and strange. I’d shied away from that place for years, afraid the soil wasn’t deep enough in which to root the kind of novel I thought I was supposed to write.”[2] I took a long, hard look at my Ireland novel and saw that it was the novel I thought I was supposed to write. Instead, I focused on what I had been writing about, what I wanted to write about: friendship, loyalty, betrayal, and redemption.

To my surprise, I found it enormously fun to plunder my own life and transmute people, places, and events from my own experience into fiction. All lives are particularly unique, so there is no lack of experiences from which to draw. It’s “write what you know” with a vengeance. Some of the characters in Shadow of the Lions have the same first or last names as some of my classmates from Woodberry Forest School, for instance. Some of the classroom and dorm scenes are based on things I have witnessed or done. But my novel is not autobiography, by any means. It’s a narrative that draws from my own life to deepen the story, to ground it in a kind of reality with which I’m familiar. But it’s not my life, or even my story. It’s the story of Matthias, stranded between the lions at the gates of Blackburne, watching his best friend disappear into the woods, then stumbling after him. And I’m running after them both, trying to write it all down.

[1] Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction. Vintage Books, 1983, p. 18.

[2] Tarkington, Ed. “How I Gave Up on the Great American Novel and Got a Book Deal.” Literary Hub, 7 January 2016, http://lithub.com/how-i-gave-up-on-the-great-american-novel-and-got-a-book-deal/. Accessed 20 November 2016.