On Book Launches and Flowering
Today’s post is a short one, as I’ll be launching my book, The Flower Can Always Be Changing, at Audreys Books in Edmonton this evening. The book is about flowering, but it’s also about art, photography, the writing life, library life. And because many of the pieces in it are quite brief, I think it will be fun to read from. As an added bonus, my good friend, the writer, Kimmy Beach, will be there to give me an intro – so come and hang out with us if geographically possible.
It’s nice to have a day off before such an event to just sit with the thing yourself. By now I’ve launched a few books, so you might think I’m blasé about it all, or relaxed, even. Alas, no. I’m always a bit nervous, that’s a given. And I think the further I go along on this path of a minor writer (keeping it real you know), the more deeply appreciative I am of the whole mechanism that allows a relatively unknown, shy person, to go on writing. I mean, it’s quite astonishing, and marvellous and I’m just full of gratitude for all those people who have bought my books, read, them, dog-eared them, underlined stuff in them, and shared them.
There was a tweet last week by the well-known author Matt Haig, which went like this:
“I am all for defacing books you love. Dog ears. Spine creases. Underlines. Highlights. Margin notes. Doodles. Whatever. It's graffiti of the soul. Books aren't sculptures in MOMA. Books are defaced trees. They are there to be touched and scrawled on and interacted with and loved.”
A couple of times since my book came out, readers have sent me photos of how they’d marked up this and other books, and how they’ve read them and interacted with them so much they also had to have another copy, a clean copy. So, I love that. And I do this with books that I love, so it’s fun to see other people doing that with mine.
So all that said, thanks for reading – this blog, my books, the works. Thanks.
And if you’re in Edmonton, perhaps I will see you at Audreys, which is a great place to support as well.
