Molly Gloss' Amazon Blog

Portland to Yakima by car is 200 miles, give or take.  You head east through the Columbia River Gorge, which is one of the world’s most astonishingly beautiful creations, a deep 80 mile long canyon that frames the broad river with basalt cliffs, mountainous forests, hundreds of white ropes and veils of waterfalls;  turn north at Biggs Junction (somewhat less beautiful—a truckers' plaza of gas stations and quickie marts and fast food diners); cross the river and climb the switchbacks onto the Columbia Plateau where wheat ranches stretch to the horizon;  cross the Klickitat Valley and head up into the pine forest of the Simcoe Mountains and through Satus Pass (4100 ft elevation); then downhill onto the Yakama Indian Nation (side note:  Horse Heaven Hills lies at the eastern edge of the rez) (second side note:  The Yakama Indians have changed the spelling of their tribe to more accurately reflect how they pronounce it, but the town, county and valley called Yakima continue with the old spelling);  and finally down into the Yakima Valley, where the veteran crops are apples and hops, but the wine grapes are now making a run at the title. 

    It’s a beautiful drive, just about every inch of it. 

    The Yakima Art Center, the Yakima Library and the Downtown Rotary had pooled their resources to invite me up for a couple of talks, and we settled on Wednesday and Thursday, November 28 and 29.  On Tuesday morning the forecast called for snow in Central Washington by Wednesday evening.  I’m thinking, new tires on the car, I'm fine, and on Wednesday I headed east up the gorge.  It was raining in Portland, which was not a good sign.  Our weather arrives from the west, and what falls as rain in Portland often turns to snow as it passes east over the Cascade Range and picks up colder air.  But I left the rain behind, and the drive to Yakima was dry and quick.  A bit more than three hours, and I found the hotel without trouble (it’s apparently only the city of Phoenix that jinxes my internal geographical compass).  Half an hour later, standing at my window on the third floor of the Hilton, I watched the first flakes fall. And fall.  By the time Linda McCracken from the Library arrived to pick me up for the reading at the Art Center, six inches had piled up on the ground and the trees and the roads.  It was their first real snow of the year, so everybody in and around the hotel was pretty happy and excited about it, and they’re used to snow, right?  Not like Portland, where everything shuts down when we get two inches.  So I’m not worried, or at least not worried about the event tonight.  Thinking, however, that I might have to spend the winter in Yakima if it keeps snowing.  New tires, but no chains. 

    Linda has a four-wheel drive Jeep.  We had no trouble getting across town to the Art Center, but I did notice she was driving cautiously, shifting sometimes into four-wheel mode.  Noticed, also, that the snow was very glittery.  Turns out this is because the humidity in the Yakima Valley is high, and the snow therefore very icy.  Good thing to know.  Wondering where in Yakima I can buy chains.

    Doors at the Art Center opened at 6:30 for schmoozing, cookies and coffee.  I was scheduled to come on at 7:30.  At 7:10, it was still just me and Linda.  Oh, and Elizabeth who runs the Art Center.  Still snowing like mad.  But then a few intrepid people wandered in out of the darkness, and by 7:30 there were eight of them.  A perfectly respectable crowd, inasmuch as they were people who had gone to some trouble to get there.  So we ate cookies, drank coffee, I read a bit from THE HEARTS OF HORSES, talked a bit, and then we headed back out into the snow.  Which was still falling.  On the drive back to the hotel, Linda’s jeep took us for an interesting 360 degree spin in the middle of the road.  No cars coming from any direction, which was lucky.  Linda steered into the skid, and we didn’t hit any hydrants, telephone poles, fences or parked cars.  Whee.  

   In the morning it was still snowing, but the cars on Broadway in front of the hotel had worn paths of slush.  My Rotary Club event was scheduled for noon, and by then, though it was still snowing, it had warmed, and the streets were mostly wet. 

    Rotary Club is a world I’m not very familiar with.  I had imagined a noon meeting on a snowy Thursday might draw a handful of old men taking their afternoon nap while I read to them.  How wrong.  The downtown Yakima Rotary is one of the largest in the world, they claim, and I can’t dispute it.  There were probably 150 people in the convention center ballroom, and I didn’t catch anybody napping.  I should mention here that Rotary—this Rotary at least—prides itself on sticking to a rigid time schedule.  Noon to 1:30, no matter what.  We sang God Bless America and took care of quite a bit of Rotary business—two minutes for God Bless America, three minutes for Rotary Trust Report and so forth, according to the agenda.  I’d been given the last 25 minutes of the meeting, but by the time I came up to the podium they were running (gasp) two minutes behind.  I’m pretty good about keeping to time schedules too, and I had planned out pretty nearly exactly 25 minutes worth of reading and talking.  But two minutes before I would have wound everything up, President Jim (as he was called) passed me a note that “we” were out of time.  Um.  Er.  I bumbled to a stop and sat down.  And we were out of there by 1:30 as promised. 

    By a quirk of scheduling, I was due to read at Annie Bloom’s Books in Portland that night at 7:30, so I signed some books for Rotarians (or rather for their wives and daughters, which has me guessing that Rotarians as a group may not read too many novels), packed up and hit the road.  The wet road. The beautiful wet road.  Snow, lovely snow, on the hills and mountains all around, but the roads entirely bare every bit of the drive home.  Whew.  No need to spend the winter in Yakima.  

    When I topped out at the edge of the Columbia Plateau above Biggs Junction, there were great rags of black cloud hanging above the snowy white bluffs where the snow line ended, and below me the river, entirely slate gray, a broad flat ribbon running west between the lion-colored walls of the gorge.  I can’t begin to describe how beautiful it was.  I was wishing I had brought my camera with me, but I don’t think a camera would have captured it.  

    I made it to Annie Bloom’s on time—an hour to spare for a bowl of soup at home and a change of clothes.  I was so very tired, but it was a warm crowd at Annie’s, and they gave me a second wind.  What a good day.

Lost in Phoenix

My excuse is that this city is laid out weirdly:  Streets and avenues run parallel, which means 7th Street and 7th Avenue lie a mere 14 blocks apart, both of them running north-south (or is it east-west?).  Add to this the fact that Monday was Veterans Day, and Phoenix puts on one of the largest Veterans Day parades in the nation—huge sections of the city cordoned off to traffic, 200,000 people gathering along the parade route.  So you can see (can’t you?) why I wandered lost in the desert and arrived a good 45 minutes late for my appearance on KTVK/TV 3 “Good Day Arizona.”  They were forgiving, fortunately—said they were used to people getting lost in Phoenix—and they quickly shuffled the order of the schedule in order to save room for me, just after the national news feed and just before a feature about hair styling and makeup. 

Changing Hands Books

Tempe is a suburb of Phoenix known for its wide boulevards.  Oh, and strip malls at virtually every major intersection.  But Changing Hands Books is in a green little oasis, sandwiched between a Trader Joes and a bakery that specializes in hand-made artisan breads.  It’s a lovely big store with a wonderful space for readings—that rare thing, a room unto itself, apart from the bustle of the store.  Which would have been great if only a crowd had shown up.  A couple came in early, sat down with their sandwiches from the next door bakery, and I thought, Cool, folks are streaming in early, anxious to get good seats, making do with sandwiches for dinner.  But when they finished their sandwiches they got up and left—before I’d started to read.  By the time I started, there were five people in the seats, and I suspect some of them were merely taking this chance to sit down after a busy day on their feet.  The Touring Author’s Rule of Thumb is:  If you can take your audience out for beers for under $20, do that instead of reading to them.  I would have, except one of the five was a young Apache woman—not yet old enough to drink beer—and she was actually there because she’d heard about the book and wanted to hear me read.  Afterward, she bought a book, which pretty much salvaged the whole event.

Efes

Around the corner from Changing Hands, unlikely in this sea of chain restaurants, was a Turkish place called Efes.  They had furnished the room with low tables, big colorful pillows and cushions on benches barely off the floor, and hung the walls with Turkish tapestries and rugs.  Lovely.  Comfortable.  Welcoming.  My friend Gretchen and I were the only customers, and there were only two people still at work in the place, a young woman waiting tables and a young man working the kitchen and the bar.  Sweet faces, both of them, with big sweet smiles.  We ordered lamb shanks, and also, to console ourselves for the poor turnout at Changing Hands, a martini and a Lemon Drop.  Half an hour passed, more or less.  We peered over the backs of the cushions and glimpsed the young woman and the young man in whispering consult, standing over two martini glasses.  In due time the drinks appeared.  My lemon drop was fine.  Gretchen’s martini was a murky and strange thing not resembling a martini.  The young folks, watching worriedly from the shadows, came rushing out as soon as Gretchen said, “Oh dear,” and puckered her mouth.  Turns out they’d never made a martini before—had rooted out a recipe for a Lemon Drop, but martinis were considered so simple, no recipe was on file in the kitchen.  They had improvised—squeezed a whole lemon into a glass of vodka. We laughed and helped them figure out the secret to martinis, then spent the rest of the evening, the four of us, sitting together talking.  And we licked our plates to get every fork-tender bite of lamb shank.  It was a good evening.

Tucson

Tucson isn’t a bit like Tempe, or anyway that was my impression.  No strip malls in sight, for one thing.  KXCI radio, where I sat down to an easy, relaxed interview with Elaine Schramm, aka Page Turner, is a funky community radio station that reminded me of KBOO in Portland.  And Antigone Books was in a funky hippy neighborhood that reminded me of Hawthorne Street and the store itself a bit like Looking Glass Books here in town.  The reading drew, comparatively speaking, a booming crowd of 12 or 15 people, the neat thing being that most of them knew my work, had read earlier books, some had even read The Hearts of Horses already.  Two were old Portland friends, Janice and Mimi.  Driving back to the hotel afterward, 9:30 on a Tuesday night, we were stopped by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bicycles passing up the street.  All ages, all kinds of bikes.  We asked one of the crossing guards, What’s up with this?  “Oh, just our usual Tuesday night bike ride.”  My kind of town. 

Arizona Inn

When I asked Elaine Schramm for directions to the hotel Houghton Mifflin had booked for me--The Arizona Inn--she gasped.  “You’ll be in the lap of luxury,” she said, and it turns out she wasn’t kidding.  It’s a 1930s resort with acres of manicured croquet lawns, clay tennis courts, gorgeous fountains and trees.  The bellman leads you along narrow stone paths through hedges of bougainvillea to an iron and oak gate set in a plastered wall.  Behind it, your own private patio, and your tucked-away room—really a small house—with a fireplace, book shelves, walk-in closet, bathroom with 1930s octagonal tiles. You can borrow movies to watch on your television, but they only supply movies starring people who have stayed at the hotel.  No problem.  The list was two pages long.  This is the hotel by which I will judge all future hotels.

Montezuma’s Castle National Monument

1000 year old cliff dwellings of the Sinagua peoples, nestled into a towering limestone cliff.  Huge, multi-trunked Arizona sycamore trees with handsome pure white bark, standing in a lush green ribbon along Beaver Creek as it threads its way through a landscape of prickly pear, hedgehog cactus and cholla.  Amazing.

Sedona

We arrived late, left early the next morning, so the only thing I can safely say about Sedona, not having really seen it, is that the shower in my hotel room was pure joy—a huge tiled room you walked right into, with a dishpan-sized shower head in the ceiling pouring down a soft rain.  The Well Red Coyote bookstore did a good job of getting the word out, but to no avail.  Five people wandered in, two of whom thought they were coming to a poetry workshop.  Sigh. 

Arizona

The sky in Arizona (once you leave the smog that hangs over Phoenix) is eye-wateringly beautiful, an enormous dome of purest, deepest blue.  And driving up from Phoenix to Sedona, you round a certain corner and the red rock cliffs are suddenly spread out in front of you.  It’s a moment that takes the breath right out of your body. 

Unless you’re J.K. Rowling, your official publication date is NOT marked by midnight parties where long lines of excited readers breathlessly watch cartons being opened and the fresh new books finally revealed to the world.  For most of us, books ship during the several weeks leading up to the date, and most bookstores go ahead and display them as they receive them.  So The Hearts of Horses had already shown up in many stores in the weeks leading up to November 6 (the official launch date) and this might have made the whole thing anticlimactic except Publication Day began with a most beautiful and artful bouquet delivered to my door, sent by my most excellent and esteemed Houghton Mifflin publicist, Patrice Taddonio;  and ended with a reading at Powell’s City of Books in Portland, where the warm home town crowd weighed in at a hefty 140.  (And the 90 books sold that night put me—briefly?—on Powell’s best seller list!)  I will hold this in my memory for the nights when two people show up for a reading!

So now we’re out the gate, up and running.  I read twice in Seattle this week—at the Columbia City branch library, at a reading co-sponsored by Elliott Bay Books;  and at Third Place Books in the north suburbs, a gorgeous big store in an unpromising location.  Both readings drew near-capacity crowds of around 40 people.  I read a bit, told my story of getting into the round pen to “start” a wild mustang colt, and gave my usual pitch about the heroic cowboy myth in American culture.  Got lost getting to my radio interview but eventually found it, which is more than I can say for the interviewer, who had lost my book and couldn’t remember the title. Oh well, it was fine, he fed me a couple of questions and I babbled, and probably nobody was the wiser.  In my down time, I wandered through the newly expanded Seattle Art Museum, which was showing, among other things, an Andy Warhol painting of Elvis in full cowboy/gunslinger regalia, two six-guns on his hips.  And I popped into the Patricia Rovzar Gallery, which is Z.Z. Wei’s home gallery.  I have loved his work for years, and I kick myself for not buying something of his while he was still painting some small works I maybe could have afforded.  Now they’re large canvases and I’d have to win the lottery to pay for one, so I just go visit them in galleries whenever I can.  I find his work a little bit reminiscent of Henri Rousseau, although I can’t tell you why.  Rousseau is another artist I like a whole bunch, but his works are often lush and green with tropical vegetation, while Wei’s paintings are of dryland Eastern Washington wheat fields and barns and oddly nostalgic rusted cars.  Maybe it’s something about the boldness of the images, or the boldness of the colors…? 

Back in Portland yesterday for Wordstock, the city’s big annual book festival, a chaotic two day orgy of readings and panels and workshops, along with dozens of booths sponsored and manned by just about every organization, person and publisher associated in any way with books, literacy, reading, or writing. I was scheduled to read on the Borders Books Stage, sandwiched between Alexandra Fuller and Jane Hamilton, which seemed like an auspicious place to be, but the venue is kinda sorta challenging.  Lots of ambient noise and activity in the background, a huge cavernous space, lights in your eyes so you can’t even see who you’re reading to.  I was worried about people being able to hear me, but the mike was good and even folks in the back said they could hear fine.  And okay, now the story of the (sort of) marriage proposal:  One of the questions afterward was about my writing process; among other things I talked about how, when I had a family, I kept a regular schedule, nine to three, five days a week;  but now that I live alone I find it curiously harder to settle down and write—sometimes, now, I don’t get around to working until two in the afternoon, and then I might find myself still writing at eleven o’clock at night.  In the line of people waiting to have books signed was a man whose face I immediately recognized—I knew he was an actor, someone I should know, but of course I couldn’t put a name to his face.  As he slid his book toward me for signature, he said, “I was thinking of proposing marriage to you--until you said you were still writing at eleven o’clock at night.”  Afterward, one of the Borders folks leaned in to tell me in hushed tones, “That was Michael Constantine.”  I went home and Googled him.  Damn, such a near miss. 

I’m off to Arizona this afternoon, and then California.  If you’re anywhere near Changing Hands in Tempe (Monday), or Antigone Books in Tucson (Tuesday), or The Well Red Coyote in Sedona (Wednesday), or Book Passage in Corte Madera (Friday), please please please come.  If only two people show up, we could all go out for a beer!

These days, with westerns in decline, who would have thought we'd see two western films with major Hollywood stars released within weeks of each other?  I imagine the one that will make $$ and show up on every multi-plex screen is "3:10 to Yuma" but I was surprised to find I didn't like it much at all.  It's one of those films that tries to convince us it's authentic and "real" by making sure the violence is graphic, and the indoors lighting very dim, and that lots of folks look shaggy and dirty.  Let me point out just one of about a dozen scenes so far out of the neighborhood of "real," they might as well have been filmed in outer space:  The posse holding Russell Crowe prisoner is in danger from renegade Apaches as well as Crowe's outlaw gang, so what do they do?  Ride all night? N-o-o.  They make camp and build a big campfire.  When the shooting starts, were you thinking they'd kick sand on the fire and hide in the shadows?  Silly you.  They stand up and silhouette themselves against the fire as they shoot back into the darkness.  And, like I said, this is only one of many moments that made me cringe. 

  The movie you should see if you care about authenticity is "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford."  Beautiful filmaking with attention to every detail. Takes its time, in a way that few films bother to do these days, which accounts for its nearly 3 hour running time. Some of the shots are so eye-wateringly beautiful they could be paintings.  Brad Pitt turns in some of his best work ever.  And if Casey Affleck isn't nominated for a Academy Award for this performance, I'll lose faith in the process.  Oh, that's right, I lost faith in the process years ago.   But if you can find this film in your town, see it quickly.  It's too artful and lacking in cliche to stay on screens very long.

I’m back from a quick trip up to Tacoma where the Western Literature Association was holding their annual conference.  This gathering, year to year, moves all around the West, so I was lucky to have it show up practically in my backyard this time.  These people are my tribe—scholars and teachers and writers whose focus is on the literature of the American West.  They’ve read the books I’ve read, thought about and written about and taught many of the same things I’ve thought about, written about and taught.  Such a pleasure to meet Richard Etulain for the first time, to reconnect with Mary Clearman Blew and Glen Love, to spend time with John Davies and his wife Jeannette, who came from Lincoln, England.  John has written about and taught the literature of the Pacific Northwest for many summers here at PSU, and also, amazingly, in England.  (At the conference, he read a paper about four coming-of-age novels by Northwest writers, including my young-adult fantasy Outside The Gates.)

   I drew a modest audience of 25 or so, at the end of their long day of panels and papers—and since I had worried I’d be speaking to nobody but John and Jeannette, I was happy with the numbers.  Read a short piece from The Hearts of Horses and then talked a bit about the influence of the western heroic myth on American culture—not new information to anybody in this audience, I’m guessing.  The discussion afterward was warm and praiseful, more than I could have hoped for.

   In the evening, I snuck into a talk by Sherman Alexie, his audience just slightly larger than mine, maybe 500 or so.  Sherman, of course, is known for his stand-up comedy approach to serious topics.  “Razor blades hidden in the pudding,” is how John Davies aptly put it.  And that’s what we got, along with some gossipy anecdotes about his days as a graduate student at WSU, chauffeuring visiting celebrity writers. 

  In the morning I had time to listen to just three papers read (one of them was John's), then had to hit the road for a white-knuckles drive home in a pouring rain.  (Why is it so many crazy/stupid drivers insist on keeping to 70 mph on the Interstate even when the visibility is down to something like 100 feet?)

  Among the email messages waiting for me were several from people who had seen copies of Hearts in local bookstores, or had gotten their pre-ordered copies from Amazon, even though the official publication date isn’t here yet, and they wondered what was up with that.  Well, pub dates are just meant to indicate when a book is sure to be available everywhere.  The books actually begin shipping to stores in the weeks leading up to that date, and many stores begin displaying the books as soon as they receive them—unless you’re J.K. Rowling and can control the day and hour on which your book is in world-wide release.  So even though it's not yet November 6th, The Hearts of Horses is sort-of maybe mostly or in some places Out In The World! Hurrah!

Flew to Denver this weekend for the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers conference, just a quick trip overnight. The hotel was great--no spiral staircase.  I had 150 galleys to sign the night I arrived so I ordered room service and ate it between batches of books.  Then, just before bed, I took the tray out to the hallway--and as I bent down to put it on the floor I heard the door click locked behind me.  Stood there in my skimpy pajamas thinking, hmm,  I'm in my pjs and there's about half a mile of hallway and elevator between me and anybody who can help me get back into my room.  Well, no, that isn't what I was thinking but what I was actually thinking is more or less unprintable.  I dithered a while, hopping from one bare foot to the other; stupidly tried the door two or three times; and finally remembered that I had met my next-door neighbor as we trooped down the long hallway earlier in the afternoon.  So I knocked on her door and she phoned down to the front desk,  let me wait in her room until someone came up with the pass key, and most of my dignity was salvaged.  This sort of thing usually only happens in the movies. 

  At the big Literacy Breakfast the next morning, I shared the stage with Michael Korda (IKE:  An American Hero), Michael Chabon (Gentlemen of the Road) and Margaret Coel (The Girl With Braided Hair), each of us speaking for ten or twelve minutes.  Once again gave my talk about the cowboy myth in American culture-- nicely sandwiched between Korda, speaking about heroes, and Chabon, talking about how we all yearn for adventure.  

  And afterward, I had a few hours to kill until my flight home so I took a taxi to the new Denver Art Museum to check out their big Western art collection;  and the new Denver Library is right across the street from the museum so I wandered over there as well. Pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

22 September 2007 

I've never blogged, which always has seemed to me just a little bit weird, sort of like keeping a diary you hope someone will sneak into your bedroom and read, and then you further hope they'll scribble comments in the margins, like He's a loser, you should ditch him, or Awww, it's sweet how you dot your i's with hearts because if they don't leave their little notes, how will you know they've been reading?  and if you don't know they've been reading, why bother to write? But I guess maybe it's not much different from writing a novel.  While you're working on it, how do you know that anyone outside your friends and family will ever see it?  Maybe the manuscript will wind up spending the next 40 years in a beaten-up box shuffling from place to place looking for an editor who understands it.  Or somebody publishes it but nobody buys it.  Or a few people buy it but when you go to a bookstore to give a reading no one shows up.  Or a couple of people show up but when the Q and A session starts no one asks any questions.  Or someone does ask a question but it doesn't have anything to do with your book. So if writing a blog is anything like that, then I guess it's not really so weird or it's weird but a familiar kind of weirdness, since I've been writing novels for a long time and I know all about the nobody-showing-up part and the dead-air-during-the-Q-and-A part.  So, as with starting a novel, you just jump in. 

 

I've just come back from the PNBA conference (Pacific Northwest Booksellers Assoc.) in Bellevue, Washington, the first real pre-pub kickoff for The Hearts of Horses, which will ship to bookstores in about a month. I drove up from Portland on Thursday and spent the afternoon and evening with my friend Vonda McIntyre (vondanmcintyre.com) who lives in Seattle.  (Bellevue is sort of a suburb of Seattle.)  We talked about books, of course, we always talk about books, and also I asked her to explain to me about the moon, a complicated question to do with how it traverses across my transom windows in the eleventh hour in certain seasons, and which she demonstrated for me with a wadded up piece of paper and a computer mouse (ask Vonda anything;  she always knows); and then we had tikka masala at Chutney's Bistro and wandered through the shops in Wallingford Center and then I drove down to the conference hotel in Bellevue and checked in.  Strange room. It was on two floors.  You walked in on the sitting room, but then you climbed up a wrought-iron spiral staircase to get to the loft bedroom and bathroom.  Which meant I had to lug my suitcase up that narrow windey stair--and down again in the morning.  Good thing I had a small suitcase and strong arms.  Nice bedroom, but the heating/cooling unit was down on the sitting room floor so if I had gotten cold or hot during the night (I didn't but if I had...) I'd have had to get out of bed and climb down the stairs to adjust it.  Plus, the windows were two floors high and you couldn't reach the upper set of drapes from the bedroom.  I kept thinking there must be a remote to close the drapes but I never did find it, so I slept with the streetlights shining in all night long. 

 I was on the breakfast program at the PNBA with Sherman Alexie and Brock Clarke and the children's book writer Judy Sierra. They asked each of us to speak for 15 minutes, any topic, but of course everybody assumes you'll talk about your upcoming book, which I guess is why I didn't.  Or I did, but only in the most sidelong way.  I spoke about the cowboy myth and it's influence on American culture--gave Shane a good talking to, is more or less what I did.  And since Sherman was the next speaker after me, and he's whip-quick and speaks without notes, he used quite a bit of his time to beat up on Shane too, or rather, on the Indian wannabe Shanes--Crazy Horse, Geronimo--as if we had planned it. Pretty great. 

Next weekend I'm doing more or less the same thing at the MPIBA (Mountains and Plains Booksellers) in Denver.  Michael Chabon will be on that bill with me, and I'm thinking I might use my time to talk about his Yiddish policeman as the illegitimate heir of Shane, and offer my own cowboy theory for why Michael put his Jewish colony in Alaska--the last great Western wilderness--in the first place.  I'll let you know how it goes.