Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Love Letter to a (departing) Bookstore

Dear Cover to Cover Bookstore,

The first time I stepped through your doors, I was in love.

Well, it's always that way with me and places that house books. Libraries. Bookstores. The spines lined up on the shelves, the scent of the paper, the people who tend to congregate in these spaces. Voracious readers. Aspiring writers. A kid here and there, cross-legged on the floor, lost in a story.

But you were different. You were special.

A store dedicated to children's books. An owner who reads everything, who loves and honors children's literature. I browsed for a year before I talked to her beyond the typical clerk-to-customer conversation. Can you recommend--? If my child loves that, will she like this--?

A year or two more before I told her I reviewed books on my blog. Her eyes lit up and she waved me into a back room. I nearly keeled over from book overload shock. Stack after teetering stack, books scraping the ceiling in high rise towers, books piled up on the floor and spilling out of boxes.

Advanced copies of forthcoming books, she said. She and her assistant couldn't read them all. They needed people to review them. Would I mind doing that for her?

Uh, no. I wouldn't mind!!! I walked out that first time with an armload, feeling like I'd won the lottery.

Somewhere along the way I told her I dreamed of being a published writer. From then on, she always asked how my writing was coming along. When I attended book talks and signings, she introduced me to the authors. When I had a manuscript on submission, she offered to take a look. She liked it, she said. And when the book was released, she threw me a spectacular launch party.

There's a wall in this lovely bookstore, several walls actually, of author and illustrator signatures. All of the people who visited the store in the thirty-five years of its existence. In my pre-pubbed days I used to read the signatures. Jacqueline Woodson. Virginia Hamilton. Kwame Alexander. John Green. Imagine my name up there.



I know, I know, this magical space couldn't go on indefinitely.

This week the owner is retiring. Someone's bought the place--the Cover to Cover name, I should say--because the building itself is closing and reopening somewhere else. The expansive inventory of children's books is being sold. The wall of signatures will be taken down.



Yesterday I browsed the shelves for the last time. I touched the book spines, sat cross-legged on the floor. Lost myself for a few moments in a story. Searched the wall of signatures for familiar names.

Smiled when I found my own.



I realize as I write this letter that it isn't to the bookstore. It's to the owner, Sally Oddi, book lover and children's literature champion, supporter of writers and illustrators, teachers and librarians, and loyal, supportive friend to me and to so many.

Thank you, dear Sally, for creating Cover to Cover.

May this wonderful place live on without you, and may you enjoy your retirement, surrounded by good friends and good books.


Thursday, June 22, 2017

Walking, Map-less, in Venice

I walk without looking at my map.


It's folded up in my pocket. Useless, because I can't find myself on it. The words are too tiny. The road I am on doesn't seem to exist. This church. This square. I can't find them on the page. It's okay. I've stopped caring about where I am, where I'm going.

Instead I look. I see.

It's possible that I am seeing for the first time.

Red dishtowels pasted against a blue sky. Ivy growing through window grates. A sign for cappuccino. The price is something I don't understand and I am too tired to calculate it.

Turn a corner and I am the only one walking down this alleyway. I look at my feet shuffling over 500 year-old cobblestones. Look up, at walls that Mozart might have trailed his fingers over on his way to conduct a concert. Up higher, a sky so blue it can't be real.

I can walk all day. Winding down passageways and over bridges. Admiring expensive clothing and glass and leather in store windows. Swirls of chocolates and pastries and bread.


This way leads across another bridge. This way, a dead end. A building. A locked door. Men selling masks and key chains. Statues. Ancient wells. The water shimmering in a canal.

A massive church rises up unexpectedly.


I move through a mass of people and I am one of them and somehow not one of them.

I don't know how I came to be in this place. I don't know where I am going next.

A split in the road, and I choose one of the paths with little thought because it doesn't matter which way I go. The truth is, I can't really get lost here. Even without a map. I've figured out that I can follow the signs painted on the sides of buildings, arrows pointing the way to the rail station. Or to the Rialto bridge. If you know these two places, you can trace your way to anywhere.

On a whim I stop to buy a gelato. I sit on an ancient wall and watch pigeons peck at the soggy roll that someone's dropped in the canal, at people taking selfies on a bridge. A burst of song from a roving acappella group. They sing faster and faster, the words in a language I don't know.

This gelato is the most delicious food I have ever tasted in my life. These pigeons are the cleverest birds I have ever seen. The people smiling at their phone screens are heart-breakingly beautiful.

This song, this song. How do I keep it inside me forever?


Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Churches, Cemeteries and Beer

*Trying to write this blog from my phone so bear with me if it's wonky.

The beer in Prague, they say, is cheaper, than water. This is true. Too bad I don't like beer.

Correction: I loathe it. I was joking to my friend on this trip that I haven't had a beer since I was seventeen years old, but the truth is that first beer probably doesn't count. I took one sip. Put it down. Walked away half gagging. I was at a party where I only knew one person and was feeling extremely self conscious. Later I overheard people mocking whoever it was who left behind a beer un-drunk.

I mean, who the hell would do that? they said, appalled.

When you travel, when you walk through an unknown city, miles from home, when the conversations going on around you are in a multitude of languages and none of them are your own, you tend to have thoughts like these, flashes of memory, long ago humiliations in your non-drinking beer past.

I walk into so many churches here they begin to morph into one another. The church with the massive chandelier hanging over the pews, the cloister with a bearded woman statue nailed to a cross, the small tomb-like church with a statue of a black Madonna, the church that displays what they call "The Holy Infant of Prague," something that looks like a china doll wearing an elaborate poofy dress.

People around me pay coins to light candles. They kneel at the altars. They bless themselves and pray as they have prayed, in many of these churches for hundreds of years. I am overwhelmed in these sacred spaces.

Is it my once upon a time Catholic school girl upbringing? The cloying scent of incense drifting in the air? The familiar feel of holy water on my fingers as I bless myself? The prayers buried in the recesses of my brain leak out and I whisper the words I thought I'd forgotten.

Oh my God these cemeteries. Ancient tombstones falling over in the Jewish ghetto. The neat rows of raised garden beds behind an old Catholic Church. Someone is still putting out fresh flowers on these graves, dropping small stones, lighting candles.

I feel weepy walking back and forth over the Charles Bridge, the snippets of music playing. The heartbreaking "Moldau." And, weirdly, one night, a joyful rendition of "Mamma Mia." Beggars kneel, bent over, heads bowed, elbows on the pavement, holding out their up turned hats. No one gives them money. Some of them have dogs. Every dog makes me want to cry, and what does that say about me that I tear up for the dogs and not for the men?

I decide I am getting a damn beer.

I hear a band outside a pub playing Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song." I listen for a while with the crowd on the street and then I force myself to go inside. The man sitting by the only empty stool speaks English. He knows the owner, he says.

I tell him I haven't had a beer since I was 17. He smiles and says,  So, two years ago, right?

Haha, this guy is a funny one.

He recommends a beer, and it is enormous. I brace myself and take a sip.

Not like I remember. More... wheat-y?

Turns out the guy sells Aloe Juice. Whatever the hell that is. He's from England. He owns a factory in Bangkok. The band has veered from playing Led Zeppelin to monologuing about oppression, something something about how we're all being brainwashed by Abrahamic theology?

I am lost.

Half of the enormous beer finished, and it hits me that this aloe juice salesman may possibly be hitting on me.

He blabbers on about the dark turn the band has taken and how aloe juice can apparently be found in your upscale supermarkets and how much he hates hippies.

I finish my beer (!!!!) and then excuse myself to go to the bathroom. I sneak out another exit and walk quickly through the crowded streets, freaked out at first that the creep hippie-hating aloe juice guy will follow me, but he doesn't.

I walk the crowded streets, buzzing with my first beer, listening for random snippets of music, people prattling in every language but my own.



Saturday, June 3, 2017

That Thing Where You Agree to Go To Prague Without Actually Realizing You've Agreed to Go to Prague

Last month I was out with a group of my writer friends and we were going around the table how we do, sharing stories of our latest writing projects, when one of the writers jokingly, I thought, mentioned that she needed a traveling companion for a trip to Prague, and I jokingly, I thought, said I'd love to be that companion, and then she jokingly, I thought, asked if I snored and I assured her that I did not, and we digressed for a moment about how annoying it is to share a room with someone who snores and we all laughed and moved on to another topic.

Side note: I've been a part of this group for three years, invited after my book came out by one of the women whom I'd met at a book festival. The members are all young adult fiction writers who live in the central Ohio area. We call ourselves OHYA (for Ohio YA authors). We're not a writing critique group (although we've all read each other's works) but more of a support group, meeting up for dinner once a month to pick each other's brains about writing and publishing, commiserating with each other when things are not going so well and celebrating when they are. 

For months now (maybe a year?) Lisa Klein's been giving us updates about her novel Ophelia (a brilliant and gorgeously written re-imagining of Hamlet from his girlfriend's point of view) being made into a film.  I know several writers whose books have been optioned for film and through their experience I've learned that it is a REALLY LONG AND DRAGGED OUT PROCESS and 99% of the time the film never actually gets made. 

I confess that this thought was what was going through my mind when Lisa Klein would share her monthly updates about the Ophelia film. The producer would tell her they'd settled on a script or they were toying around with casting or they were scouting locations and considering filming in Prague or whatever, and it all seemed very precarious and likely to fall apart at any moment...

until, a few weeks ago when Lisa Klein called me and asked if I was serious about being her travelling companion because as it turns out, her novel Ophelia is really and truly being made into a movie, and the producer invited her to come to the set in Prague, and seeing as how I do not snore, she would love for me to join her on this trip. 

Oh, also, she was planning to do some research on another book in Venice.

Flash forward to TWO DAYS FROM NOW and I am boarding a plane to Europe to catch a glimpse of Daisy Ridley dressed up as Ophelia and apparently Clive Owen is in this movie too? and also the guy who plays Malfoy in Harry Potter. 


So yeah. This is happening. 

I will keep you posted on the adventure.