Provided to the QAM News
It’s mid-October and my husband and I are walking along the waterfront headed toward the ferry. We pass the marshy area where the red-wing blackbirds hide in the cattails, and when we reach the end of the path, we stop to take in the light, sea, sky, ferry and I think this would be the view I’d want to call home, if I weren’t, in fact, already home.
I don’t let myself think about my old apartment in Belltown too much because it still breaks my heart to remember what can happen in one panicky year to an inner city neighborhood. People look at me quizzically when I try to explain what the pandemic was like downtown, and say things like, “Oh, I never go downtown anymore,” but I still feel how the work I did from my Belltown desk, the books I wrote, challenged me personally, toughened me professionally, and I still rely on the courage living there taught me.
Which is helpful. Because I’ve known ever since the launch date of my new book was announced that I had something more to do. I just needed to figure out how.
I’ve experienced how well supported book events are on Bainbridge Island. So, with equal parts determination and fear, I walked into Eagle Harbor Book Company to ask to speak to the owner. Which doesn’t sound like much, but let me tell you, it’s really hard to ask for an event in a reputable bookstore when you don’t know if you’ll be well received. The owner and I exchanged pleasantries, and she told me her events person would contact me.
I was pretty sure he wouldn’t.
I smiled and thanked her and said, “I so appreciate it,” for good measure, and that’s when it hit me that while bookstores are my version of a temple — the hushed quiet and my devout belief in books — they can also intimidate me. I mean, I never know who needs who more. Authors need bookstores, and bookstores need authors, so you’d think we’d coexist as two halves of a whole. But too often it can feel like we are opposites, and that our approaches to books can hardly be more different. A bookstore’s reality is that it must choose what sells, while for writers, everything depends on getting emotionally past that reality.
I suppose some places just naturally make you feel more vulnerable. It’s the power bookstores have over an author’s visibility: Will they order your book? Place it in the window? Display it face up (please, oh please), or shelve it?
It’s a power-struggle I can’t let crush me.
I think being a writer has made this struggle a little easier. Writing teaches that a snub is always a possibility, rejection an even greater one. And it’s dicey to ask for something you really want when you are not in charge of when or if you will get it, and putting yourself out there never gets easier. Duh.
Luckily, the event planner at Eagle Harbor did contact me. And on the night of my reading there, I sat across the street from the store, watching people walk in (fortunately, I know people whose idea of a good time is to hang out in a bookstore).
The room filled. They set up more chairs. They set up more chairs again. I was awash in gratitude. “You have fooled everyone,” I thought, “they think you are a writer.”
Oh, she is mean, this voice.
So mean, she will now recall every mistake I’ve ever made. Like, when halfway through another talk at Town Hall Seattle, something went wrong, I lost focus. It was a little brain-freeze in the middle of a sentence. The worst of it is she acts like she has every right to bring up my mistakes while I, on the other hand, think she has none.
She is silenced as soon as my introduction is read, as if to say, “You’ve got this,” and I am thinking the same thing. Experience tells me what to do. And I do it. When I finally get to speak, there is no difference between who I want to be and who I am, and when I manage to do what I love this good, my god, it’s good.
And why, the next evening when a few men (only men, a first) showed up for my reading at Elliott Bay Book Company, I was fine with it.
Or . . . I pretended to be fine with it.
I don’t know why life is comprised to never run successfully for long, but by the time I finished that reading, I remembered how failure — or what can feel like failure because empty chairs are really hard to address — is one of those feelings my sister does not let me talk about even half as much as I’d like because there are real failures happening everywhere in the world, and we both know that this is not one of them.
And then.
Mr. Li walked up, spoke softly and graciously, like someone you would call if you were afraid or needed help. Actually he was even more gracious than that. And when he said he enjoys my column, “I just like it so much! When the paper comes, I always look for your piece first!” I saw.
I saw how I was so disappointed by all the people who hadn’t shown up that I hadn’t paid nearly enough attention to those who had.
That was my failure.
Maybe I hadn’t found what I thought I’d find (more of an audience, more women), but I’d found something far more generous.
Suddenly, everything felt so right again.
Except, maybe the rows and rows of chairs, many of which seem excessive, since authors perform at bookstores not rock stars.
But who is counting.
Mary Lou Sanelli is the author of In So Many Words, hew newest title that has been nominated for a 2025 Washington State Book Award. Please ask for it at your favorite bookstore. A professional speaker and master dance teacher, she has written a column for Pacific Publishing's
Seattle papers for seventeen years, also contributing to other newspapers and magazines. For more information visit www.marylousanelli.com.