Both sides of the table

This is not a post about our house. The "table" I refer to in the title is the book-signing table. Yesterday, I had the rather odd experience of being on both sides of it, signing books in the morning and then having a book signed in the evening. Strange, strange, strange.

In the morning, I went out to Hadley to participate in a group signing of a collection about the history of Hadley, Massachusetts. You can check out the details of the book at the UMass Press website here. I didn't write the whole book; I wrote a chapter about Mary Webster, a "witch" who lived in Hadley in the 1600s. The book came out a couple of months ago, and it coincides with the Hadley 350th celebration (1659 - 2009). So there are a lot of people in Hadley who are interested in Hadley history right now.

I had never participated in an author signing before. In fact, I'd never really heard of author signings for academic books. It's not like we have fans (except our family members & friends, obviously*). I kind of assumed we'd just be sitting around talking to each other the whole time.

But to my surprise and delight, the place was hopping. We had a constant stream of people who wanted to talk to us and have us sign their books. It was very fun. We sat in a corner of the Barnes & Noble cafe with name cards in front of us (yes, I kept mine) and signed away. [One of the other authors had a camera; I'll hopefully get some images to post here from her.] We chatted with folks and heard their stories of Hadley. I felt almost famous. At least as famous as one gets in academia without being at the center of a scandal or running some major center or conference (all things I'd prefer not to do).

After my own signing, I went to see/hear one of my very favorite authors, Margaret Atwood, who was talking about and reading from her new book, The Year of the Flood out in Cambridge. Jake heard about it on the radio and bought me a ticket. Thanks, Jake! It was awesome. She played some songs that appear in the book, read from the book, sang a song from the book herself (I'm not kidding), and then answered questions from the audience. Afterwards, she signed books.

Now, I'll provide some backstory here: In researching the article I wrote about Mary Webster (the one in the collection I was signing earlier in the day), I learned that Webster is actually an ancestor of Margaret Atwood. In fact, Margaret Atwood wrote a poem about her. So I wanted to include an excerpt from the poem in my article. Copyright is a complicated thing. In order to include the excerpt, I had to contact (and pay) the various publishers of the poem. This meant that I had to get in touch with Atwood's assistant to figure out the appropriate people to contact for permissions.

In my exchange with Atwood's assistant, I found out that she (the assistant) is also related to Mary Webster. How crazy! So I suggested that both she (the assistant) and Margaret Atwood herself might both like to read my article. Assistant said "yes!" so I sent two copies -- one for each of them. Oh, and meanwhile, I paid the permission fees and everything was cool with getting the poem excerpt included.

A month or two later, I got a very nice, hand-written card from Margaret Atwood on her personalized stationary, thanking me for sharing the article with her and saying that she had enjoyed reading it.

Margaret Atwood read something I wrote.

Margaret Atwood *enjoyed* reading something I wrote.

Just to be clear, this, for me, is a Big Deal. I've been in literary love with Atwood since I was in middle school, when, while babysitting, I would read Atwood while the kids were napping (and always wish the naps would last longer). I've taught Atwood's short stories and her novel, The Handmaid's Tale, many times. I admire her. A lot.

So when I got to the front of the signing line, I was really nervous. The line was huge, stretching around the whole room. Atwood was a signing factory. Two bookstore employees stood beside her, one to take the book, the next to open it to the right page. Previously, we had all been given post-it notes on which to print our name if we wished to have a "personalized" inscription. It was some serious assembly-line production here.

Atwood had nearly finished signing my copy by the time I was actually close enough to the table to talk to her. Here is my rough approximation of our "conversation":

Me (flustered, talking too fast; I actually had to repeat myself because she didn't hear me the first time):I wrote an article about your ancestor, Mary Webster.

Atwood: Good for you! Where can I get a copy?

Me: I sent it to you....you read it, and I wanted to thank you for your feedback.

Atwood: Oh, lovely. Thank you.

And then she was signing the next book and I was moving along. It was somewhat anti-climactic and rushed and awkward. I'm not complaining here, just reporting. I definitely understand -- she had a HUGE line of people asking for her signature, so it's not like she could have a conversation with anyone. She did a fabulous reading, and now I have a signed copy (I'm just a few pages in, but I like it so far!).

I was struck by how different it was from my signing earlier in the day. At my signing, I had been looking for something to say to people, since they would often just come up and hold out their books. My usual starting place was "do you live in Hadley?" since the book is about Hadley and all. This usually set people off talking about where in Hadley they live, what they wanted to know more about, and so forth. But I kept finding it somehow odd that people were there, holding out a book, clearly wanting this connection (whatever connection one gets from having a signed book) and yet not really saying anything. It was fun and flattering to sign books, yet the people we were signing for seemed to feel bashful. When I asked them where they'd like me to sign, or what they'd like it to say, they'd say "where ever you want" and "you're the writer!" While the latter is true, I kind of wanted them to tell me where they wanted the signature and if they wanted an inscription. Since it was a group signing, in some cases, we would sign on our individual essays, while in other instances, we'd all just sign on the title page. When this happened (all of us signing on a single page) I started to feel like I was writing in a yearbook. "See you next year" or "Have a great summer" or "I can't believe you failed calculus!" were tempting possibilities. I mostly just signed my name.

Mostly, I was struck by how the physical book seemed to get in the way of an actual conversation. I think that if I had given a talk on my topic, a lot of these people would have had questions to ask or shared interesting things with me. In fact, this is what happens when I do give talks on this very topic (I did exactly this last weekend in Hadley). But somehow, because my thoughts were in writing, and inside a hard-cover book, it was like we couldn't talk about the writing or ideas, and instead, we had this stilted conversation about signing the object. This seemed odd to me.

But as I stood on the other side of the table, facing Margaret Atwood, although I actually had something specific and personal to say to her, I found myself stumbling and unable to speak up loud enough, unsure how to address her. I realize this is largely because I'm very much in awe of her, and I'm not implying at all that in this analogy, I am Margaret Atwood, but I saw a bit more clearly how strange the book-signing ritual really is. More importantly, I felt like there was something strange about not just the signing itself, but this relationship between reader, book, and writer. Reading can be such an intimate activity, where we sometimes feel we know the author. It's understandable that we want to meet the author, but then, what do we do? What do we say? It's not like we're meeting her characters. That would be another dilemma entirely.

My students are always talking about authors by their first names, as if they're close personal friends. I try to correct them (at least in their papers), but I realize that in some ways, it feels that way, like we are friends (or sometimes enemies) with our authors. Then, when we meet the author and he/she is or isn't all that we'd hoped and dreamed and imagined, it's an incredibly strange feeling.

On the other hand, for the author, we send these words, sentences, paragraphs, off into the world and we really have no idea what the hell they're going to do out there. Will someone love them? Will someone hate them? Will someone name a child after some character of our creation? So meeting those unknown someones, seeing the audience in a literal way, is just as much of a disconnect as the reader experiences when finally meeting the author.

My, my, my, this post has gone on quite long enough now on a non-house digression. Thanks for reading if you got this far. I'm happy to send you a signed copy of this blog post.

*note: family members will be getting a signed copy of the book for Christmas, so don't go buying one for yourself. I don't get any royalties on this anyway. ;)