Scott Elliott guest blogs on BOOK TOURS WITH KIDS – part 3

Here is the last of a three-part guest blog by 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.

Okay,  Scott – We are about to hear about the one reading the boys were going to be invited to see. Do go on….

On the day leading up to the reading, we hiked down to Teddy Bear Beach, where we caught shore crabs, threw rocks, and looked at purple sea stars. Time in the sun out on the beach, and the hike back up the trail tired them out. Both of them napped briefly in the car on the way back to the house we were renting, but too briefly. In our attempts to get them to rest or nap, Jenna and I bet heavily on that the reward of getting to see daddy read that night with its added bonus of a later bedtime would give us enough leverage to get them to rest or nap. But they flipped this leverage on us and began alternately saying they did and did not want to attend the reading, sensing, in the expert way kids develop so early, that to say they didn’t want to see daddy read carried power, a sting. 

At first it did sting a little bit; I wanted them to be there at the reading’s close, to build that memory for them, to let them share in the symbolism of celebrating the years of work that go into brining a literary novel into the world and perhaps also so I could make even more exquisite the strange pleasure of switching from author to daddy in seconds, being both at the same time in the eyes of the crowd.

It wasn’t to be. As the time when we’d need to leave for the reading approached and they hit a low point at dinner, refusing to eat and throwing food, getting wilder-eyed by the minute in that reckless spiral parents recognize. Like boxing referees deciding whether to call a fight, Jenna and I realized at the same time that they were in a potentially event ruining frame of mind and it was best they didn’t go. Itching to morph personae and feeling bad for Jenna, when the time came I let the door shut on the madness behind me to feel the quiet and the night’s breeze. Full of guilt and relief, I walked to the event, leaving the car keys in case there was a miraculous reversal and she thought they could make it.

Someday we’ll show them pictures of the trip, or I’ll bring it up if they ever decide to read the novel on their own. “You know, you were with us on the tour for that book. Do you remember that?” And they’ll say, “No, but I do remember being really close to a grizzly bear.” 

Perhaps the fact of the reading will click into place later, become for them one of those shadow awarenesses they’ll remember sensing in the background at the time as they were experiencing the bright and fleeting immediacy of their own lives.

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Thanks, Scott! Everyone: you can buy Scott’s newest book, TEMPLE GROVE through this link.  Please stay tuned for more exciting guest-blogs from the trenches about BOOK TOURS WITH KIDS!

P

Summer, with its long days and extra Vitamin D, is a great time to tie up loose ends on half-finished projects. Get working! 

Scott Elliott guest blogs on BOOK TOURS WITH KIDS – part 2

Here is the second of a three-part guest blog by Scott Eliott, 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.

Tell us more about your recent book tour with the kids, Scott – you left off with a decision to keep author-time and daddy-time separate, but to allow the boys to see one reading. Do go on….

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Before I left for each reading, I asked the boys to wish me luck, kissed their heads, fielded a few questions about where I was going and why I had to go, asked them to be good for mama. I don’t think they really understood what was going on. On the way to each venue I’d shift identities and summon the energy necessary to transform from worn out daddy to audience-commanding author. The energy always came, its supply aided in some ways rather than hindered by days spent running amok with the boys—throwing rocks at driftwood at Discovery Park, hiking in Whacom Falls Park, fishing at a few small lakes, hitting playgrounds in Stanely Park, going up the tram to Grouse Mountain to see a clever logging show and stand a few feet from grizzly bears, continuing our pursuit of food we can’t get in Walla Walla at Pike Place and Granville island Markets, participating in what we came to call the “Bellingham sandwich explosion.”  

I should say that doing this alone, short of a substantial childcare budget beyond our means, would not have been possible without a generous second adult. My wife Jenna played this role expertly. Overall, the demands on her didn’t constitute as much extra childcare as it would have if I’d said “see you in a few weeks!” and left, but it did mean extra work for her, for which I’m grateful, especially on two nights when she needed to get the boys settled  into new places without my help.  Jenna attended two of the five events on nights when we did pay for baby sitters.  

I thought the whole thing worked very well, overall. So well, in fact, that I came to think that if I had time and the resources, I could go on traveling indefinitely like this, moving from town to town, seeking adventures, finding new readers for the book. I enjoyed the strange experience, the lively jolt, of switching from daddy to writer, sloughing off the concern for dependents to move more easily, made newly conscious of my lightness (like taking off a heavy backpack) into a fluid adult world, in one its best places, rich with possibility and in which I was able even to move outside of myself a little bit to play the role of author and to stretch a little further still to play the roles of the characters in my novel. I felt immensely fortunate for the opportunity to enter this world of greater freedom with its potential for meaningful connections enabled by the book, and equally fortunate to come back to my better-defined role in the family-- to sleeping boys, a wife who must have sensed once I’d crawled into bed as quietly as I could that I was still charged up from the reading and who’d whisper, “How’d it go?” Except for the fact that it came too early, the boys could always be counted on to provide crazy morning energy that swirled into my memories of the reading of the night before like cream into coffee, or maybe coffee into cream. Or maybe like a dinosaur into a figurine emporium.

There were moments on the trip that only boys in this zone could provide: lots of discussion of sasquatches, bears, and wolves and acting like these creatures as we passed through the Cascades both ways. We raced along a boardwalk in Bellingham giving each other high fives; fed pigeons we named in Pike Place Market; played hide and seek in the Olympic Sculpture Garden; lay together in a hammock, wind off the Puget Sound in our hair. Gus, the five year old, got really excited about big trout and steelhead we came upon in hatchery enclosures in Whatcom Falls Park and asked repeatedly when we were going to get out the fishing rods and catch them. One night at a Syrian restaurant in Seattle, after hearing that a belly dancing show was expected later on, Harper, the two year old, raised his shirt and gave everyone his own early belly dance.   

The boys were supposed to attend the reading in Bellingham, in part, because we couldn’t secure a babysitter there. It also seemed like a good night for them to come out because a lot of my relatives from around the Peninsula and from nearby Lynden would be there that night. I thought perhaps Jenna could bring them by toward the end of the reading.  I wanted the boys to see this part of what I do, to show them that I write and read stories for other people, not just for them. I wanted to to give them a hazy memory to reflect on later in their lives, maybe something they’d wonder if they dreamed…

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