A poem for Banned Books week

I saw this poem in the display window of my wonderful local indie bookstore, Annie Blooms. It brought me to tears. (Particularly the final two stanzas.)

Manifesto

To you zealots and bigots and false
patriots who live in fear of discourse.
You screamers and banners and burners
who would force books
off shelves in your brand name
of greater good.

You say you’re afraid for children,
innocents ripe for corruption
by perversion or sorcery on the page.
But sticks and stones do break
bones, and ignorance is no armor.
You do not speak for me,
and will not deny my kids magic
in favor of miracles.

You say you’re afraid for America,
the red, white and blue corroded
by terrorists, socialists, the sexually
confused. But we are a vast quilt
of patchwork cultures and multi-gendered
identities. You cannot speak for those
whose ancestors braved
different seas.

You say you’re afraid for God,
the living word eroded by Muhammed
and Darwin and Magdalene.
But the omnipotent sculptor of heaven
and earth designed intelligence.
Surely you dare not speak
for the father, who opens
his arms to all.

A word to the unwise.
Torch every book.
Char every page.
Burn every word to ash.
Ideas are incombustible.
And therein lies your real fear.

— Ellen Hopkins,
bestselling author of Crank and newly published Tricks

Where's your Favourite Book Shop?

I had a nice jaunt to San Francisco last week. My wife and I were celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary (yes, we were child bride and groom) and we decided to make a splurge of it. We stayed in the Union Street Inn, a lovely B&B, the best part of which was drinking white wine and sampling cheeses during the pre-dinner hours in the sun-dappled garden. At times like this I give in and admit I am a complete hedonist: I could spend my life sitting in gardens, reading books, and sipping tea and other libations. I swear to you I was switched at birth. If there is some Panamanian-born Duke somewhere who actually pines to do 8 loads of laundry a week, please contact me as soon as possible.

One of the other pleasures of the trip, beyond being in the presence of my beautiful wife and being free of the constant cries of "Dad?!" from every quarter, was a revisit to the City Lights Bookstore. City Lights was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It has all sorts of Allen Ginsberg and Beat poet history and is a lovely warren of book stacks with a sweet, sweet selection of books. If you want your international fix--Japanese, Indian, Middle Eastern--you'll get it there. It's not the sort of place you see the likes of a Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck screed, nor anything mass-market--though they did stock Steig Larsson's Millenium trilogy. (Yay for them!)

I love grazing in indie book stores like this one. Nobody bugs you when you wander in (hello, Borders? Can you change your egregious policy of having your wired handmaidens stalk customers through the store with "can I help you find anything?" bleating like a broken record?!) and you get the feeling they wouldn't mind if you browsed for hours. In fact, I liked it so much I bought the t-shirt.

In Portland, we have Powell's which is, no joke, a city of books. Sometimes I come over a bit faint when I pass through Powell's--it's like falling into the world's largest smorgasbord after you've already had a substantial dinner. My own local, in Multnomah Village, is Annie Bloom's which is much more manageable--sort of the cheese and wine in the sun-dappled garden effect. I hope these type of book shops never go out of fashion. The world would surely be a much less lustrous place without them.

Where's your favorite book shop? Let me know so I can add it to my book tour itinerary. (One can but dream, eh?)

Why You Should Never Give Up

While relaxing at the beach this weekend, I took the opportunity of delving into my stack of waiting-to-be-read magazines. One of these was the May/June issue of Poets and Writers, a magazine which is well worth every penny of a subscription.

I came across the following article by Eryn Loeb. I had heard about Karl Marlantes in The Oregonian, but Loeb's piece was much more thorough. Briefly, the story is this: In 1968, Marlantes was shipped off to Vietnam to serve in the Marine Corps. While there he kept a journal of his experiences and used said journal to help him start a novel called Matterhorn. That was in 1975. He began shopping the novel around in 1977, but the general reaction was distaste about the subject. People wanted to forget about Vietnam. Marlantes stopped querying and got a job as a lumber salesman in Portland.

Fast-forward ten years. Marlantes once again started studying the market and sent out queries. Once again, the subject of Vietnam was a deal-breaker. He kept revising his manuscript. Another ten years went by. He queried again. This time, people responded by asking him to set the story in the Gulf War.

In 2007, Marlantes got a lucky break. He sent the manuscript to a friend to read and that friend mentioned it to another friend, a person called Tom Farber who was both a professor at Berkeley and the founder of a small non-profit publishing house called El Leon. It was El Leon's senior editor, Kit Duane, who fell in love with the novel. El Leon made an offer to print 1200 copies.

I guess Fate decided that such extraordinary patience should be rewarded because Marlantes sent several advance copies to book stores such as Annie Bloom's (yay! my local indie bookstore)and got a favorable response. That's when his story was picked up by the Oregonian. El Leon also submitted the novel to Barnes and Noble's Discover Great New Writers program. The folks at B & N loved it too and one of them brought it to the attention of Morgan Entrekin, president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic. El Leon and Grove/Atlantic came to an agreement, Marlantes found an agent (funny how that happens!) and the first print run of Matterhorn was set at 60,000 copies.

The moral: Write a good book; never give up believing that it will be published. You never know when that old friend will set the ball rolling and someone will fall in love with your work!

That's my feel-good story for the month. Feel free to add yours in the comments.