Bookstore

In my fantasy world, Jeremy and I buy a building between Easton's Books and Steve the old hippie (who knew Di Prima and Burroughs) in Mount Vernon, WA, where we live upstairs with our beagles (and cats) and run Books Off Jameson downstairs, possibly augmented by a small coffeeshop or automat-drink-serviced reading area. Jeremy putters around the bookstore during the day, while I walk a few blocks to my new, exciting job (which I actually have) helping advocate for the voiceless invisibles, then come home at lunch to eat with my man and walk the dogs along the river revetment and downtown. My best friend, Rob, who works for a cool bookstore in San Diego moves up with his husband, who, like my husband, has a career in computers, and manages the bookstore. He knows everything about book retail. More importantly, we get to workshop our writing together, like we did in the old days; we get to talk about, breathe and live books. 

And maybe we publish our own books and the work of our friends, like the amazing poems of my other best friend, Sarah, that are sitting like Emily Dickinson's in drawers and journals and computers, unread, when they are truly, unbiasedly some of the most breathtaking poems I've ever read. I've never read one and not gotten the chills, and I am cold-hearted when it comes to feelings. They would probably make normal people wail.

And this is how it was done by the Beats and City Lights and the Lost Generation and Shakespeare and Company. Granted, someone had to get credibility the old fashioned way first, through legit or semi-legit publishing and hype ... and sometimes through dubious magazines and infamy. Kerouac initially carried the Beats via Sterling Lord, Hemingway had Charles Scribner, and Fitzgerald had Maxwell Perkins. It's hard to imagine the three of them sitting at their desks writing pitches and mailing off pages, but I guess they must have. 

I know agents and publishers are as important as writers. They are. An unpublished book is just scribbles on a page going nowhere. And I know I'm not Kerouac, Hemingway, or Fitzgerald, but I can still sniff along their trails, following the best I can, just in case I've put some words together in the right order to capture some ideas or emotions or information that other humans might identify with and need to hear.