Hi everyone! Hope you are having a great summer with kids in
camp, coming home sun-warmed and tired and sleeping soundly through the
night. We are judging the Fellowship
entries while we are on hiatus from Salons and let me tell you – there is some
stiff competition this year!
Meanwhile – we are thrilled to welcome a terrific novelist,
Scott Elliott, who lives and teaches in Walla Walla, Washington. Scott is the father of two boys and two
books, Coiled in the Heart and Temple Grove: A Novel. Click here for his bio.
Take it away, Scott—
Is it a good idea to go on a book tour with two boys, aged
two and five?
Probably not.
Nevertheless, my wife Jenna and I recently hit the road with
two red-headed, fun-loving, mischievous imps we happened to have around. I’ve long described the experience of having
children in one’s thirties as a descent back into the tumultuous emotional zone
you’ve worked your whole life to leave behind. As soon as you feel yourself
standing on solid adult ground blessedly free of such swings you look at your
life’s clock and say, “better have kids”
and embark on the wildest, emotional swingiest ride of your life. There
are occasions during certain confluences of child raising madness when one
looks to the sky and says, why… why? balanced with times of such beautiful tender reawakening
to the world and its wonders that one struggles to find words for such sweet
perfection. Both states intertwined.
Rather than have me hit the road alone, we decided to morph
an early summer vacation with a small Pacific Northwest book tour for my new
novel Temple Grove, which is set on
the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. The tour took me to some wonderful independent
book stores in Western Washington and Oregon. I started on my own at Annie
Bloom’s Bookstore in Portland, and the family went with me from Walla Walla,
where we live, to Olympia (Orca Books); Seattle (Elliott Bay Book Company);
Bellingham (Village Books); on up to Vancouver, B.C where I read at a tribute
to Joyland Magazine at the Railway Club.
Going on a book tour puts one in touch with one’s own
day-to-day persona to a greater degree because you also begin to think about what
your authorial persona ought to be. This persona may be a little different from
who you are. Fiction grants you license to
tap into selves who are not you—who may be more extreme in different directions—to
go into very adult and complex zones, sometimes verging on, or squarely within,
our capacity for depravity. So, the fiction writer’s persona in readings may be
pulled by the material away from the more accessible, friendly self your
friends and family are used to seeing.
We decided to keep the readings and time with children
separate, though we did plan to have the boys come see daddy read at least once….
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