Finding magic at the book festival

I’m supposed to be there at 9:15 and it’s two hours away, which makes for a very early Saturday morning. I have to give myself enough time to eat a bagel, which is always time-consuming, but even more so when I’m still carefully chewing around the gaping hole in my mouth.

We’re two weeks away from Daylight Savings Time, which means the sun takes forever to come up. Some mornings I wake up convinced it’s two in the morning, only to look at the clock and find it’s already seven. I hit the road in the dark and the fog.

The route the app picks for me includes no interstates and winds along the Kentucky River for most of the way. I descend into the river valley and it might as well be midnight. I climb back out of the valley and it’s a sunny morning, only beside me flows a broad river of fog. The road is so empty I’m able to come to a complete stop to let a deer pick it’s leisurely away across the road, along with a squirrel and a chipmunk later. The only other cars I see are trucks parked along the side of the road, hunters, I assume. Sometimes the sun lights up the fog so it turns a pinkish-orange and then I really do feel like I’m driving through a cloud.

Of course, I get there early, with plenty of time to spare. Blurry writers with sleep still in their eyes line up to check in. This festival is in the Joseph-Beth store in Lexington, a huge bookstore with a vaulted ceiling hanging far above, a veritable temple to books. I find my table, beside a Civil War historian and an anthology of essays about those we lost to the Covid pandemic. It’s an odd place to be with my weird little collection of books: a nonfiction book about gender told as a choose your own adventure; a nonfiction book for kids about gender, sexuality, and race in sports; a young adult novel about a girls’ basketball team who challenges the boys to a game. You could line me up with the tables around and me and play a game of which of these things is not like the other, but it’s too late to do anything about it now.

A very impressive bookstore

Having done a book festival before, I’d come up with what I thought was an amazing plan—free book stickers for every sign-up to this newsletter. But, of course, between the earliness of the morning and the struggle with the bagel, I forgot the stickers. I put the newsletter sign-up sheet out, anyway, (hello, three new subscribers!) along with a few business cards I had made up over the summer.

The doors to the bookstore open. The festival begins. And then I sit.

From the second floor of the store, I can sort of make out the words of the scheduled speakers. After an author talks or is on a panel, a line forms at their table. The last book festival I went to, Wendell Berry was there and he had a line at his table pretty much all day. Fair enough, he’s Wendell Berry. For the rest of us, there’s no line and who can predict what makes people stop at your table and check out your book? Candy? A friendly face? The color scheme on your book covers? A free book sticker, which, dammit, I forgot? At any rate, we’re an hour into a 7-hour day before someone finally buys one of my books.

It's an odd feeling, being an author at a book festival, a strange cross between science fair and animal at a zoo. Should I stand up and explain my book to the people passing by? Also, how do you explain a book? Should I have a sales pitch? I try one—“Do you like choose your own adventures?” “Yes,” a few people answer. “Nope,” I get just as often. I feel sometimes as if I should put a box with a coin slot on my table or perhaps attached to my chest. Fortunes for a quarter. Deposit here and I’ll tell you how that collection of paper and binding you’re holding in your hand is, in fact, a piece of my soul. Yes, I’m happy to tell you what it’s all about. No, I will not cry when you set my book back on the table and walk away.

I forgot the stickers, but I did bring my knitting. I brought the fall leaves I’ve been knitting lately. I like the oak and the birch pattern. The maple leaf is only okay.

I also brought the spell I’m working on, a knitted spell to summon readers. A book festival feels like a good place to do that work. The knitting uses two strands—one fluffy white and one soft blue—to represent the idea of binding people together. Spells are metaphors and I’m good at those. As I knit, I murmur the words of the spell to myself and imagine the magic spreading out over the big space of the bookstore. Maybe the murmuring explains why so many people shy away from my table?

The festival organizers bring us our boxed lunches, which are exactly as good as you’d expect a boxed lunch to be. I sell a few books. I have a few conversations. A couple of people pick up a business card or sign up for the newsletter. When my tablemate sells a book, we both cheer. Was this worth the two-hour drive, I can’t help but ask myself, and then I remember the deer and the fog and that, after I’m done, I’ll pick up Indian food to take home for Jeff and I to eat together for dinner, back home in the safety of our house, where I sit in the room upstairs and break off the little bits of my soul to sell.

I get up to get some water and when I come back, there’s a girl with her mother, standing in front of my table. The girl is maybe eleven years old. The tables are configured in such a way that I can’t get back behind my table with the mother and daughter standing there, so I wait. The daughter picks up my young adult novel. She reads the back cover, slowly and carefully. Her mother might be waiting in line for another table or just for the room to get through the congested aisles.

As I’m standing there, the girl turns to her mother. She holds my book up toward her. “Mom,” she says, “This is awesome.”

Ah, the spell worked.

When you publish a book, it’s always a good idea to be clear with yourself about what success will look like. It’s also a good idea to be conservative. If success looks like a spot on The New York Times bestseller list, you will probably find yourself disappointed.

I will admit that when I self-published my young adult novel, I tried to keep my expectations as low as possible. Then I sold a hundred copies in the month before the book actually released and those expectations got out of hand. Since then it’s been a painful process of dialing myself back and back and back.

But in those bad moments, I did think about a more moderate idea of what success might look like. Success, I thought, would be a young person, probably a girl, and someone I didn’t know, finding my book and having it speak to them. A moderate goal, but one that’s hard to measure. A book goes out into the world mostly on the wings of faith. You don’t much get to see people reading and loving it, or at least, not if you’re an obscure writer like me who doesn’t have an army of Instagram followers. I could tell myself that this had already happened—someone who needed to read the story had found it and it was important to them and I just had to believe in my heart that this was true.

And then I saw it. I saw the very idea of my story light someone up. Not because I’m a famous writer. Not because their aunt is my friend and gave them the book. No, just because they happened to pause in front of my table and pick it up and read the back cover and I was lucky enough to be there to see it.

When the book festival ended, I went and picked up Indian food. I re-traced my steps back home. I drove up along the ridge, the valley stretched below me. Down along the river, visible now without the fog. The leaves drifted in front of my car through the tunnel of trees. My back hurt and I was tired, but I made it down the last hill, Madison spread out below me, just in time before the evening church service started next door and all the street parking disappeared.

Jeff made me a cup of tea and I settled in beside him on the kitchen couch.

“How was it?” he asked.

I thought about the hours spent sitting at my table in that uncomfortable chair. The stuffiness of the space filled with people. The awkwardness of making small talk with strangers. The little sinking feeling when no one stopped at my table.

I thought of the girl.

“It was magical,” I said.

Next up for me, the Louisville Book Festival, which is November 10 and 11 in the Kentucky Exposition Center from 10-6. I’ll be one of the lucky ones giving a talk there, at 12:00 on Saturday, called “When Cheerleaders Were Boys: Gender Segregation in Sports.”

Then on November 11, I’ll drive north up I-65 to Indy for the launch of the Playing Authors Anthology from Old Iron Press at Tomorrow Bookstore at 7:30. Have you pre-ordered your copy yet? No? Get it here.

Wouldn’t you stop at a book festival if you saw this amazing cover?