Tag Archives: Books

Like Hearing the Sound of Your Own Voice

Well that was awkward. I recently experienced an impromptu live reading from my poetry collection, A Year in Love: Daily Glimpses of Life’s Most Worthwhile Virtue. Even though I was not the reader, hearing my words read aloud to a group of strangers felt a bit weird at first, but it wasn’t all bad.

A good friend of mine periodically throws Sunday afternoon dinner parties at his home for no reason other than to celebrate food and fellowship among his friends and family. These gatherings are wonderful, almost therapeutic. Invitees often bring beverages, salads, side dishes, and desserts to share with everyone and the thirty or forty people who show up for these gatherings generally leave stuffed but happy. I seldom know more than a few people there, but that never seems to matter. There is always much laughter, no arguments started, no judgments passed, and everyone pretty much just wants to enjoy one another’s company.

And so it was on this cold Sunday in February when my wife Karen and I found ourselves seated around our friend Frank’s dining room table with a number of people, all but one of whom we had never met before, eating copious amounts of fantastic homemade food and talking about everything under the sun. After everyone had eaten and had settled into socializing, an attractive, dark haired stranger came into from another room and sat with me just long enough to extract the details behind the spinach mandarin salad I had brought. It’s a sought-after recipe that a work associate introduced to me twenty years ago and I was only too happy to pass it on to her.

Moments later, our host stepped in to see how everyone was doing, held up his copy of my book for everyone to see, talked it up for a quick minute, and then pointed to me adding, “…and this is the author; you should talk to him about it!” With that, Frank tossed the book onto the table and went off to visit several other tables that had been strategically set up throughout the first floor of his home to accommodate everybody. A flurry of questions ensued as people began passing my book around the table. What had I written? How did I write it? Why did I write it? I did my best to satisfy their curiosity.

An older gentleman, who had been sitting at one end of the table, began leafing through the book as our Q&A session continued. During a brief lull in the conversation, he held up one finger for attention and asked, “Michael, would it be alright if I read one of your poems to everyone?” Nobody had ever asked me this before.

“Of course,” I replied, having thought of no reason to object. And with that, the gentleman read his selection.

“May 28,” he began. I should point out that all but one of the poems have no titles, but are simply marked with a day of the year. “Sometimes I gently trace the contours of your lips with one finger,” he began. The entire table had fallen silent, hanging on every word. I tensed up when he got to the part about “…memorizing every aspect of your delightful mouth…” and prayed silently that no one would laugh out loud at my words. But when the reading had concluded, nobody was laughing. There was just this stillness, as if the words were still landing after having been read aloud.

I glanced over at my dear reader as he looked up from the book, drew a prolonged breath, and then exhaled slowly with lips pursed and eyebrows arched skyward, as if he had just set down something heavy. One of the ladies fanned herself as another uttered one word, “Wow.”

“That bad, eh?” I offered.

“No!”

“Not at all!” The responses came in a flurry.

“There’s just… no mistaking the feeling behind it.” I took that as a compliment as the conversation rolled along. A delightful lady who had joined our table just prior to our spontaneous poetry reading shared with me her own writing aspirations. I think the book idea she’s working on would be a hoot to read and I hope she sees it through to fruition.

An hour or so later, as my wife and I were preparing to depart, I went looking for our host, to bid him goodbye and thank him for his hospitality. “Hey, Frank,” I called out upon finding him, “you should have seen it. This one guy started reading my book out loud and…”

Frank stopped me in midstream. “I saw the whole thing,” he said with a knowing grin. “I was watching you guys from the hallway.” I guess it’s not easy to scoop my friend, especially in his own house.

I love gatherings like this because they remind me of the extended family gatherings of my youth. The attention that my book and I got, thanks to my friend, was merely icing on the cake, but the love, warmth, and camaraderie — to say nothing of all that fabulous food and drink — that was the cake!

As always, thanks for hanging with me.

Exploring the Charms of a Used Bookstore

We don’t need anymore books! My wife and I have more volumes shelved, stacked, and stuffed throughout our home than we could ever hope to read during whatever remains of our respective lives. Adding more to the overflow is just not logical. This truth has never stopped us from regularly going out on our book hunts, mind you. So far it hasn’t even slowed us down. And few things are more alluring in these pursuits than a good used bookstore, those celebrated purveyors of used and antiquarian printed matter. The best of these establishments are full of character and sometimes a few characters, too. The structure in which these are found doesn’t much matter. We have discovered awesome booksellers in strip malls, repurposed warehouses, and wonderfully timeworn buildings. The real magic, the allure of a good used bookshop, is always on the inside.

We will often incorporate book hunting day treks into our birthday celebrations, anniversary celebrations, and spontaneous “let’s get out of here” days. Such was the case recently when we decided to celebrate Karen’s birthday and Valentine’s Day with a little daytime road trip down to Springfield, Illinois to checkout a shop called Prairie Archives.

On the way down, we stopped at Wally’s, a travel-themed mega fuel center, convenience store, gift shop, popcorn stand and more, with really clean restrooms. The only Illinois location is just off Interstate 55 near Pontiac. Road travelers who appreciate places like Sapp Bros. Travel Centers and Iowa 80, aka The World’s Largest Truckstop, will also appreciate Wally’s. Try the popcorn.

Image from Google Maps

Prairie Archives is nestled in a row of shops on the Old State Capitol Plaza. The Old State Capitol Historic Site, the centerpiece of this plaza, is currently closed for restoration and site improvement projects. Visitors can’t get much more downtown that this location, but motor vehicles are not allowed anywhere on the plaza, which includes Washington and Adams Streets between 5th and 6th Streets. As such, it’s not possible to park in front of Prairie Archives or on the portions of 5th and 6th Streets adjacent to the plaza. Parking anywhere near the plaza can be, shall we say, interesting. This presented a potential challenge for my wife, who uses a mobility scooter to traverse distances of any consequence, but we were optimistic.

We thought we had it made when we drove down the tight entrance ramp into an underground parking garage directly beneath the plaza. With the Old Capitol Building closed, there seemed to be plenty of vacant parking spaces down there, including an ADA spot right next to the Adams Street pedestrian exit. Alas, when we tried to exit there, we discovered an “out of order” sign on the elevator, which would have been the only ADA-friendly exit available. We even tried buzzing the locked door beneath the temporarily closed Old Capitol Site, and eventually a guy came out apologizing and letting us know there was no safe way for Karen to get out of that underground garage. Fortunately, they didn’t charge us for parking.

Did I mention that the down ramp into the garage is tight? Baby, that’s nothing compared to the up ramp, which is not only tighter than the down ramp, but also blind until the very point of exit. Once out, we began circling city blocks and eventually snatched an ADA space with a two-hour parking limit, as opposed to the fifteen minute spots that are common in this area. From what we were told, they don’t seem to enforce the meters by the old capitol, but they strictly enforce those time limits. Go figure. In any case, we had our space and only had to walk a couple or so blocks up 6th Street, which took us past some official-looking state and federal offices as well as the Lincoln-Herndon Law Offices, the only remaining building in which Abraham Lincoln maintained a law office, also closed for renovation as of this writing.

Moments later, we were at our destination. The storefront facade of Prairie Archives is meticulously maintained but also a bit misleading. At first glance, a first-time visitor might be fooled into thinking that this is just a small shop, a quick in-and-out for most book browsers. Oh, but fooled is the right word! Once inside, visitors will discover that the shop goes on and on from front to back, with additional rooms off one side, all of it covered with volumes and volumes of books. Printed art, too.

As is the case with all good used bookstores, the bookshelves at Prairie Archives are tall, plentiful, and full. I found my head starting to spin as I attempted to look over all the titles in my favorite sections, but I was grinning the whole time. Every so often I came across a card sticking out of a row telling patrons that there were over 20,000 more books shelved elsewhere and that the staff is always glad to look up specific titles in their database, to see if they are available. That friendly staff, by the way, quickly became one of my favorite things about this shop. They were always available to answer questions, explain the layout, and more.

There is also a friendly shop mascot, a smallish, cream-colored Golden Retriever named Lola, who greeted us when we arrived and checked up on us a couple of times while we were browsing. Never intrusive, Lola would just calmly approach to make sure we were okay and to see if we wanted to pet her. Of course we always wanted to pet her. Then she would wander off in search of other patrons. Karen and I are both extremely fond of shop animals, be they dogs, cats, birds, or something completely different. Shop pets tend to add character and enrich the customer experience. They tell us something about the owner, too. This is something you will never find in a big chain store.

Visiting bookstores has always felt like an adventure to me. This goes all the way back to my childhood years. My family was never wealthy and there were plenty of times growing up when my folks had to say “no” to this or that thing that I wanted them to buy for me. But to the best of my recollection, they never said no to getting a book. I had an aunt who sometimes took me to downtown Chicago and we would often stop at Kroch’s & Brentano’s, which was then the largest bookstore in the city. She always allowed me to choose a book and so I discovered the joy of bookstore browsing at a very young age.

As I was perusing the various aisles and side rooms at Prairie Archives, I began to wonder about the people who never visit places like this, the ones who don’t gain any pleasure or satisfaction from browsing bookstores, libraries, and such. Or worse yet, those who can’t. Isn’t it sad to realize that there are a substantial number of people in our society who will never know what they have missed in life. From fiction to nonfiction, classics to current events, poetry to comic books (and what a collection this place has), there are entire worlds and endless possibilities shelved in places like this, just waiting to be discovered by ordinary people like you and me..

I left with only addition to my personal collection, The Portable Oscar Wilde. The Viking Portable Library is a series that originated during World War II. The compilations were intended to be carried by soldiers fighting in the war, who were forced to move around often and travel light. The series itself continued growing into the 1970s and my particular paperback was published in 1981. It’s in remarkable condition and provides well over 700 pages of Wilde’s works. Not bad for five bucks, eh? My wife, as usual, came away with a handful of finds, including two more books from a children’s series that she has been collecting for decades. We were in there for well over ninety minutes and both came away quite satisfied.

There are at least three big used bookstores within about an hour of each other in this part of the state. We could easily have visited two that day, but as we intended to get home (about 180 miles) ahead of an approaching winter storm, we opted to head back after this one. We have been to one of the others, twice in fact, but Prairie Archives is the only one I have presented here thus far. Could someone visit all three in a single day? Yes, I’m sure they could, but it would be a long day indeed, as this would require arriving at the first store when it opens and likely leaving the third at or around closing time. Could be a fun overnight road trip, though. Or you could just be like us and keep coming back. Ha!

More to come. And as always, thanks for hanging with me.

Sort of Like Having a Baby

The whole thing began as a game. From 2018 through 2020, I had been amusing myself by creating motivational posts across several social media platforms, just to see if I could keep it going. By the end of 2020, though, that game had gotten old. I enjoyed the mental stimulation that the creative exercise provides, but ironically, I discovered that I had been losing my motivation to write motivational blurbs. After all, there are only so many ways to convey the same principles. At some point, a person either gets it or they don’t. But I had no desire to stop creating. All I needed was a new challenge.

My final choice came down to bad jokes or love poems and I chose the latter because I wasn’t sure whether I could come up with an original bad joke a day for a year. Love, on the other hand, has always been a favorite subject of mine and even though I didn’t fancy myself a poet, I was pretty sure I could deliver amorous free verse (short prose) poetry on a daily basis. And that’s exactly what I did. Every day from New Year’s Day through New Year’s Eve of 2021, I posted a different free verse love poem, never more than I could fit onto a square Instagram image. Nobody was ever going to equate me with William Shakespeare, but some of my followers enjoyed the ride and I had fun in the process.

While not every detail I wrote was autobiographical, the feelings behind them were genuine. Admittedly, that took some doing. Night after night, I reached back into every loving relationship I’d ever had and harvested all the positive physical and emotional sensations I could. Fortunately, I have a strong sense of recall so going back forty years or more wasn’t as difficult as one might think. And I only took the positive parts and none of the heartbreak, anger, or frustration.

About halfway through, I began to entertain thoughts of binding the poems into a book, after they had all been written, and self-publishing my year-long collection of romantic bits. And why not, I reasoned, it should be easy once all the poems had been written. Looking back now, I want to shout at that guy, “Oh, you foolish man, you!” I had grossly underestimated the task at hand. By a lot.

Seriously, I thought I’d have the darned book out within a year. When it became obvious that wasn’t going to happen, I made arrangements to steal away to a hotel up in Wisconsin for a few days to assess the job at hand and begin giving my proposed book some structure (see My Self-Imposed Seclusion). This was where I realized just what I had gotten myself into. First off, not all of my material was suitable for publication. It’s one thing to fire off a few lines of affection and post them on social media, but it’s a whole ‘nother thing to arrange them into a book that people want to pay for. And the key word is arrange. Besides the edits, rewrites, and outright replacements that surely lay ahead. None of these poems — 365 of them — had been released in any kind of logical order. Holy cow! Well, at least I’d had the foresight to bring some good wine along.

Imagine looking at 365 randomly written poems that had to be sorted out somehow. They had a common theme, but there had been no clear flow between them, no story to be told. None of them even had titles. I began looking at them individually, not with the intent of editing but just to see if I could at least place them into buckets.

“That’s it, buckets!” I exclaimed aloud, startling myself, to say nothing of whoever may have been in the neighboring rooms at the time. But I had no time to lose. I went back to the beginning of the pile and began placing each raw, unedited poem into one of four imaginary buckets, each representing a three-month quarter. The first quarter represented beginnings: meeting someone, being attracted to someone, becoming smitten with someone, you know, the early stages of love, in whatever form it might take. The second quarter dealt more with earthy, physical affection. Advancement, if you will, but still at a gut level. The third bucket was for the poems that attempted to see past mere physical affection. And the last bunch were the ones reaching for fruition, for something more permanent than the earlier pieces.

Lacking titles, I assigned each poem to a day of the year. Everything was still tentative at this point, but at last I had a loose sense of logic regarding how these poems would be presented in book form. I even added a placeholder for a 366th poem, not yet written, that would be devoted to February 29, the Leap Day.

Three days later, I thought I knew what I was doing. I left my Wisconsin hideaway with a logical structure for the book and one month out of the twelve drafted. As it turns out, I would still be making adjustments to my plan for two more years. That’s a very important strategic principle, by the way. When things don’t go the way you thought they would, as long as you’re sure of the goal you set, you make changes to the plan, not the goal.

From the beginning, my intent had been to self-publish this book, mainly because so many of the poems, or raw versions of them, had been placed in public view on social media platforms. Self-publishing gives the author a lot of control over all aspects of the book, but with that control comes responsibility — and quite a bit of work. The final manuscript had to be delivered as a 100% print-ready file meeting a lengthy list of technical, artistic, and legal requirements, enough to make a newcomer’s head spin. And every little change, whether to the content, the layout, or even from one file type to another, was an opportunity for something else to go wrong.

The first full draft of the book, including all the front and back matter, was completed sometime during the second half of 2024. Knowing I am my own worst proofreader, I asked my wife, who had worked as a public relations writer and editor in a past life, to have at my manuscript and give me her suggested edits. This she did no fewer than five times, including the proof copy, finding things that had passed before my eyes unnoticed. Besides the usual typos and grammatical glitches, Karen drew my attention to passages that despite being correct as written, I was able to make better. This is what a good editor does.

The most stressful part, for me, was the actual publishing. Despite having launched a half-dozen corporate websites, developed and contributed to various blogs, and even executed a few million-dollar direct-marketing campaigns during my professional career, I was as nervous as a kid on his first date putting out this little poetry book. There were so many choices to be made and questions to be answered, each a good bit of research. Then came the cover art, the marketing plan, and so forth. By the time I got to it, making the final click that would set everything in motion, was like pulling the trigger on a 10-gauge shotgun.

And then it’s over. A Year in Love: Daily Glimpses of Life’s Most Worthwhile Virtue, available in paperback and ebook editions, was officially published on December 17, 2024. The copyright registration process, a task in itself, is underway, as are some basic marketing activities, but the book is done. It feels so good to say, “I did it,” but there is also a letdown from realizing that the job is finished. Almost 30 years ago, when I finished my first full-color product catalog project, I told the head of the agency that had handled the project that I was both glad and sorry to be done with it. “Yeah,” she replied, “it’s kind of like the postpartum period.” Being a guy, I can’t know firsthand what giving birth is like, but my sense of things is that she was correct.

As always, thanks for hanging with me.