March 2003 Archives

I've just received official word from Paul Dry Books that The Verb To Bird has been chosen as a Barnes & Noble Discover selection for Summer 2003.

I am very happy.

1:52 PM

SCENES FROM THE VIRGINIA FESTIVAL OF THE BOOK

--PC, Kelly Dalton, and Gretchen Laskas (The Midwife's Tale) swooping down on the Gordon Avenue Branch Library Book Sale for a thirty-minute frenzy of book-buying.

--Janis Jaquith (Birdseed Cookies: A Fractured Memoir) carefully enunciating the name "READERVILLE DOT COM" repeatedly at her reading at Barnes & Noble.

--Kelly introducing herself to Aimee Liu with, "So--pitch your book to me!"

--Crystal Wilkinson (Blackberries, Blackberries) noting that her college friends, marveling at her east Kentucky accent, used to beg her to say the word "night" to them.

--Liu, Fantasy & Science Fiction editor Gordon Van Gelder, and an unnamed woman sitting on the bare floor of the shuttle van taking guests from the Omni to the authors' reception at Carr's Hill, home of UVA President Casteen.
*GVG: "I feel like we're being taken to summer camp."
*PC: "Promise me you won't start singing 'Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.'"

--Brian Hall (I Should Be Very Glad of Your Company) laughing as I compared Lewis & Clark to Paul McCartney & John Lennon, then fetching Kelly a custardy dessert I found too distasteful to approach.

--Several anti-war authors crying "Vive la France!" and having themselves photographed in front of the portrait of Lafayette in the main room of Carr's Hill.

--Gretchen being pinned down in a single spot on the patio wall throughout the entire reception.

--PC complimenting Van Gelder on his excellent rejection letters.
*GVG: "I get that a lot."

--Rosemary Graham (My Not-So-Terrible Time at the Hippie Hotel) making certain the guy we passed on the way out of the reception was not, in fact, a former classmate.

--Kelly quoting Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer in noting our buxom waitress's revealing attire: "Golly, look at those."

--PC, Kelly, Gretchen, Rosemary, Janis, Dwight Allen (The Green Suit), and George Harrar (Not As Crazy As I Seem) hanging out on the patio until the lights were turned off around us.

--100 pounds' worth of The Readerville Journal issue #3 disappearing from the Festival headquarters' main tables.

3:26 PM

PC'S BUSY DAY, Part II

Having digested my first review, my bagel, and a cup of Italian wedding soup, I moved on to the serious business of getting ready for my first reading. First we swung by the bank to pick up fifty ones so that we'd have some change. We then went to the Cavalier Best Western, where I discovered the reading had been set up in the Madison Room, outside which was a large sign proclaiming that it would soon feature a Va. Festival event with "Peter Cashwell, author of The Verb." I grabbed the sheet of paper and added a self-caricature with the word balloon "Well... pretty close, anyway."

I'd introduced myself to the desk clerks when I asked about the room, and as I was rushing back to the room, one of them yelled, "Sir--we've got something for you." I figured it must be some kind of material from the Festival--my nametag, for instance, or at best a tote bag full of ballpoint pens and post-it notes. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be a longish rectangular box with tasteful wrapping paper from Foods of All Nations, one of C-ville's gourmet food stores. The weight and imbalance of the box suggested that something inside was much heavier at one end than the other, and I began to wonder if the Festival's budget was higher than I'd thought. The card, however, wasn't from the Festival at all--it was from my friend Sarah, a C-ville native now living in Baltimore. She'd been unable to come down for the reading and had instead chosen to send a bottle of champagne, god bless her. (It later turned out that she'd sent e-mails, given shouts on Readerville, and even phoned to make sure that I identified myself to the desk clerk--all in vain, as we'd left for C-ville so early; it's a good thing my mom taught me to introduce myself.)

The set-up wasn't too complex. There were two tables and a desk outside the room. I set up one table with copies of The Verb 'To Bird', made a sign announcing the prices for each version, and put Ian on sales duty. The other table was where I put the 100 pounds worth of free samples of The Readerville Journal that I was planning to hand out at the Festival. Dixon was put in charge of handing out freebies, and he immediately set about making a sign proclaiming him the guy in charge of Free Stuff. The desk, I decided, would be where I'd do the book signings. Dela from the Va. Museum of Natural History showed up at about 6:30, gave me my Festival nametag, and added some free Museum-based handouts to Dixon's table; he was very happy to get the extra inventory.

As people (guests? attendees? audience?) began to arrive, I started seeing familiar faces--my mom, my aunt, my former assistant debate coach, the science department chairman, my birding partner Tom Parker--but I was also tickled to see two not-quite-complete strangers. Two Readervilleans arrived: Janis Jaquith, who lives in Charlottesville, is the author of Birdseed Cookies: A Fractured Memoir and a regular commentator on WVTF radio, and she arrived with her husband. At almost the same moment, Rosemary Graham, the author of the forthcoming My Not-So-Terrible Time at the Hippie Hotel, came up to us. I was amazed that they recognized me until I remembered that I had a nametag on.

The room had roughly forty chairs, and about thirty-five of them were occupied by 7:00. I recognized about fifteen people in the room, which meant there were far more strangers than I'd expected. Dela introduced me and I strode down the central aisle to the lectern. The room was small enough that I didn't need a microphone--then again, I'm loud enough not to need a microphone in most rooms smaller than Madison Square Garden--so that was one thing I didn't have to worry about.

I'd originaly planned to read a thirty-minute section from the book and then answer questions for another thirty, but Victoria Zackheim, another Readervillean, had suggested that I read for only a few minutes at a time, and the more I thought about it, the more her advice made sense. I read the first nine pages of the book, which deal mostly with birding in terms of grammar and religion, and entertained some questions. I got several about the kinds of birds I'd seen, but was stymied by one question about "the five best haigs I'd ever heard." Since the term "haig" is my own, I felt a little stupid that I couldn't come up with any good examples. Janis chimed in with several friendly questions, as did a couple of unfamiliar people. Eventually one asked me a question about how I got started as a birder, which led me to read a second section, in which I discuss how my Pine Forest HS colleague Mary Stevens got me to participate in a bird count.

The questions went on. Ian asked why I'd put in the part about him knocking over all the volleyball sets at Sears; consequently, I had to read that section. After another question, I remember complaining about the Red-Bellied Woodpecker, whose eponymous field mark is damned near invisible to the casual observer. At that point I left the lectern and pressed myself against a column on the left-hand wall as if I were a woodpecker, illustrating that such a bird's belly is effectively obscured by the tree trunk; there was loud laughter, particularly from my former assistant coach. Dixon asked why I'd read the part about Ian knocking over all the volleyball sets.

Eventually someone asked about my most memorable sighting and I turned back to the book to read part of chapter 5, "Great Unexpectations." It was nice to get a shot at one of the less comic sections of the book, and I cheerfully read about my first viewing of a Painted Bunting and Kelly's and my close encounter with a family of Mute Swans in Scotland. And with that, my hour was up.

I fended off a few questions at the lectern before Kelly came up to drag me to the desk for signings. I signed books for a girl of about thirteen, a man of fifty-something, for Janis, for Rosemary, for Tom's mother, brother, and sister, and several others. (I'd bought a new pen that morning, and it held up beautifully.) All in all, we sold thirteen trade paperbacks and three hardbacks, with the promise of more sales when I got back to WFS.

And then suddenly I stepped out of my Writer role again. It was raining outside, and it was time to head home. We loaded the books and the Journals back into their boxes and loaded the boxes into the car. But it wasn't quite time to go home yet. Mom, my cousin Indira, and our friends Shari and Greg decided the evening needed one more thing to be complete: a stop by Fuji Sushi to snarf down unagi.

So what did I learn? That writing and being a writer aren't exactly the same thing. The stress levels, the short-term and long-term demands, and the rewards are different. But I think I can handle them both. They're pretty close, anyway.

4:11 AM

(Oh, and by the way, I'll be doing a reading at Woodberry Forest School this Friday. More details about other readings will be posted here as they become clear.)

4:11 AM

PC's BUSY DAY, Part I

Yesterday morning I did a lot of the usual things--coffee, cereal, a little SSX Tricky on the kids' GameCube--and a few less usual things--cleaning the kitchen, taking out the garbage, etc. The big difference between yesterday and the 40 years + 18 days preceding them is that yesterday I had to get ready to be a Writer.

I've been writing original material since slightly after I could read, so technically I've been a writer almost all my life--but this was the first time I would ever have to stand up in front of a group of strangers and admit it. Since I was on the schedule for the Virginia Festival of the Book, however, there wasn't much else I could do--people were going to come to the Cavalier Best Western expecting to see a writer, and it was going to have to be me.

Or were they going to come? What if it was just me at the lectern and Kelly and my mom and my aunt in the audience? Wouldn't that be humiliating? Wouldn't that be worse than never having signed up for the Festival at all? Jeez! And I had five boxes of books to sell! Who'd buy thispiece of crap?

Eventually I recognized some of these symptoms; they're the same ones I get when we're hosting a party. Kelly describes these paradoxical feelings as "No one's going to come and there won't be enough food!"

So I settled down a bit, marked a few passages, checked my Amazon.com ranking (840,000+), ran to Readerville for some calming affirmations, got some advice, remarked some passages based on the advice, packed my stuff, showered, argued with myself over what to wear for a while, loaded the car with five boxes of books and two boxes of free samples of The Readerville Journal, and headed off to Charlottesville.

Kelly had discovered at work that C-VILLE Weekly, Charlottesville's free "News and Arts Weekly" paper, had reviewed the book. This was a complete surprise to me; I hadn't even known Paul Dry Books had sent them a review copy. So now, with my first reading still in the offing, I was also getting to deal with my first review. When Kelly, the kids and I reached C-ville, however, we couldn't find a copy of C-VILLE Weekly, not even in Barnes & Noble. Eventually we recalled, however, that Bodo's Bagels has the paper available, and the kids eagerly suggested we pay them a visit. (They love bagels--good kids...)

We found a copy (OK, I found five copies...) and dug into it to find the review. It wasn't listed in the table of contents. We soon discovered that this was because it was part of the CLS--C-VILLE Literary Supplement--a separate section in the middle of the paper that focused on the Festival of the Book. There were several stories and reviews of several Festival-related books. Including The Verb To Bird.

Which was the lead review.

Yes, I got reviewed ahead of Ann Beattie, not to mention Brian Hall's I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company. And given that the entire Charlottesville vicinity has a year-long Lewis & Clark hard-on because of the expedition's bicentennial, finding myself ahead of Hall's book was simply stunning.

The review, by Aaron Carico, was favorable. Very favorable. Not blindly, rabidly so, mind you; he notes that the book "at times can be a bit haphazard," which is to my mind a simple statement of truth, but he also provides several comments guaranteed to soothe the nervous author's heart, including these:

--"As a 'birder' himself, Cashwell treats the matter with wit and self-deprecating humor."
--"...he has the good sense not to bore the uninitiated with copious details and mind-numbing lists"
--"Cashwell, though, writes with ease, humor and clarity... about a topic that if written about poorly would be ripe for parody."
--"...a funny, eclectic and engaging book..."

My favorite comment was this:

--"His sense of humor has a sort of sunny derision about it--there's an element of cheerfulness to his sarcasm and a bluntness to his wit."

Well. My bagel went down much better after that.



1:00 AM

It's currently 6:05 p.m. EST, at least according to my computer's clock, which means that for the first time in eight years, Woodberry Forest School is in session and I'm not there.

Of course, I am there, in a sense--our house is on campus, after all--but I'm now officially on sabbatical. In honor of this momentous occasion, I am quaffing a sleeve of what must be one of the finest things ever put in a bottle, an Adelscott. It's a French product, a "biere au Malt a Whisky." It's 6.6% alcohol by volume, making it more potent than American beers, and it has a sweet smoky flavor that dances around your palate (and your nose) like the scent of a magnolia blossom dipped in bourbon. It's mighty, mighty fine, and I give kudos to m'learned colleague Wallace Hornady for bringing it back from his last trip to la belle France.

I don't get to drink this stuff when I'm on duty, let me say that much.

I haven't shaved, I'm wearing a stained and ratty shirt, and I'm listening to Derek & the Dominoes. I just hope the rest of my sabbatical feels this good.

11:14 PM

I'm back.

First, an update on the last set of messages:

1) One of my debaters finished second in the state in Student Congress, which qualified him for a slot in the Catholic Forensic League's Grand National Tournament. Last year he finished fourth, making him the first WFS debater to qualify for Nationals two years running. Unfortunately, he won't be able to travel to Nationals this year--it's the same weekend as his graduation. Ah, well.

2) I spent an intriguing week in Wyoming County, West Virginia. I now know more about trailer flooring than I would have believed possible. (I'll be writing more about the experience later, btw.)

3) I've been forty for a little over a week now. Other than needing to get my driver's license renewed, I haven't noticed a lot of changes.

As for new matters, I've got a UPS package waiting for me; I'm hoping it's my copies of The Verb To Bird, but I won't know for a few hours. Updates as events warrant.

Oh, and let me mention again that I'll be giving my first reading next week, on Wednesday, March 19th at 7:00 p.m. at the Cavalier Best Western in Charlottesville. See you there.

3:02 PM

A few pieces of news:

1) The Verb To Bird leaves the printers on March 7th and will be shipped out by Paul Dry Books on March 12th. If you want to get it as quickly as possible, you can do it by visiting www.pauldrybooks.com and thereby avoid the middleman.

2) I'm heading out on two missions tomorrow morning: first, lead a couple of my debaters to state titles, and then drive to West Virginia to spend a week building and renovating houses as part of the Appalachian Service Project. After that, my spring sabbatical officially begins--and about time, too--but it does mean that for the next week, I won't be writing in my journal. Sorry!

3) At 12:07 p.m. tomorrow, it will have been 40 years since my birth.

Bake a cake if you like, but please, no black icing.

Licorice. Ewwww.

3:39 AM