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‘Bookstores’ Category

  1. Book Publication and Birth: A Tale of Two Converging Loves

    September 4, 2012 by katemeadows

    I never meant for it to happen this way.

    I couldn’t have planned it if I tried.

    Indeed, truth is often stranger than fiction.

    Here I am, though, with a new baby and two books being published this month. Yes, two.

    How? I don’t quite know, except that life happens.

    Tough Love: A Wyoming Childhood, published this month by Pronghorn Press, recounts my experience as an only child growing up among the raw and grisly characters in rural western Wyoming. It began in 2008 as a collection of essays for my Master’s thesis in creative nonfiction writing. I knew from the get-go I would go all the way with it, writing the pieces one at a time, piecing them together with a thread of a theme (what does it mean to be tough?), and eventually pursuing publication, sending out query after query until a “yes” finally came.

    The “yes” did come – but, unexpectedly, so did a positive pregnancy test, three days later.

    That “yes,” along with the blue “+” sign on the stick, came while I was knee-deep in work on my family’s small business history. Bucky’s: Stories and Recollections from 50 Years in Business, commemorates the grit and determination of a small-town service, repair and retail shop doing whatever it took to survive off of a quiet western main street. I began the project while Tough Love: A Wyoming Childhood grinded its way through the query mill, back before a pregnancy was even on the horizon. The business history was a grand effort in helping my family carve out its well-deserved legacy. It was to be for me a venture in self-publishing, my intention to learn the ropes of the trade to be better informed and equipped as a writer during this tumultuous time in the publishing industry. I planned to publish the “Bucky’s book,” as it affectionately came to be called, in June 2012.

    Then the nod came for Tough Love: A Wyoming Childhood.

    Then I got pregnant.

    In other words, life happened.

    And here I am, with a baby who was born the end of July, a book of essays to be published on schedule by a traditional publisher, and a self-published small business history that, due to life circumstances, was postponed for release until September – the month of the business’ annual grand open house.

    So we leave next week, traveling from California to Wyoming, where for the better part of the month I will be promoting my work. September will be a crazy month. But I can’t wait.

    I go into it with heart racing and eyes bright with excitement. Here are the moments where the hard, dogged work will be worth it. Finally, I will meet the finished products.  Works of art into which I put my whole self. I will get to talk about this craft I love so much. I get to share words, encourage others to share theirs, and talk about the value of preserving life stories and leaving legacies.

    This is work that I love. I am packing my bags now.

    Please, join me if you can. Click here for a list of events.  Stay tuned for upcoming readings and get-togethers in California. And, if you’re interested in using Tough Love: A Wyoming Childhood as a pick for a book group, ordering copies of either book, or learning more about the crafts of creative nonfiction writing and/or telling your own life story, please get in touch.

    Writing, at its very core, is about communication. If I can reach people, if I can inspire and encourage, only then can I smile and say to myself, “Job well done.”

    Category Books, Bookstores, Creativity, Family, Family History, Home, Life, Life Stories, Motherhood, Parenting, Place, Self Publishing, Small Business History, Writing, Writing Life, Writing Process | Tags: ,,,,,,,,,,,,,, | 2 Comments

  2. A Mother-Daughter Book Giveaway

    July 17, 2012 by katemeadows

    Speaking of your story being bigger than you, a friend of mine, Emily Cook, is giving away Kindle copies of her book, Weak and Loved: A Mother Daughter Love Story, this week. The week marks three years of seizure freedom for her daughter, Aggie.

    Here is a taste:

    “In October 2008, shortly after her fourth birthday, my daughter Aggie was diagnosed with epilepsy.  The year that followed was one of the most difficult years of our lives.

     Aggie’s early seizures were short and mild.  At first, we thought she might be just daydreaming.  As the months passed and medicine after medicine failed, her seizures kept getting more dramatic and more dangerous.
    Seizures are like time-thieves.
    They robbed her Christmas moments.
    They tipped her off a diving board
    They pushed her off a bunk bed.
    They sapped her energy.
    They stole her breath.
    They shattered my heart.
    As I struggled through those awful days of testing and waiting and fear, my Aunt encouraged me with the following words:
    “People say be strong. I say be weak and be loved.”

    So this story is not solely about Emily’s daughter’s condition, fight and brain surgery, but embraces a larger theme of motherhood and how to embrace weakness when all around us society says to “be tough.”
    “I am hoping to get my book into as many hands as possible,” Emily recently wrote in an email.

    Here’s what one reviewer said on Amazon: “…when she was often reduced to nothing, God carried her through, with or without her cooperation, her understanding or acceptance. This book helped me understand what true grace really is – the totally undeserved, bountiful love of God, which no circumstances can ever take away from us.”

    You can pick up your free copy here.

    To learn more about the book, this sweet little girl, and the author herself, visit www.weakandloved.com.

    Category Books, Bookstores, Family, Inspiration, Life, Life Stories, Motherhood, Parenting, Writing | Tags: ,,,,,,, | 2 Comments

  3. Feeling a Bookstore

    January 3, 2012 by katemeadows

    It’s happened before, more than once. I find myself standing in the middle of Barnes & Noble, overcome with a deep and inescapable sense of fear. I am surrounded by books, words, thousands upon thousands of other people’s masterpieces.

    I am a writer.

    I am seeking publication: for my first book, for a slew of articles, for a good handful of essays.

    And there I am, in a place where words – many of them artful and beautiful – outnumber people. Words that other people have penned, words with which other people have found success.

    I stand there and look around and think, I expect my own 50,000-word manuscript to compete with this?

    Inevitably, I shake off what little fear I can get to let go of me – enough, at least, to start moving again – and tell myself to get over it. It’s a futile attempt at rising above that fear, that self-doubt that is every writer’s nemesis, that voice that taunts, Who do you think you are and what do you have to offer to anyone?

    Turns out I am not alone in this experience with a big bookstore. In the Nov/Dec issue of Poets & Writers magazine, writer David Malki! (sic) speaks of a similar experience. His article, “9 Ways to Feel a Bookstore,” refers to the bookstore as “an ecosystem that we really don’t understand.”

    Until I read this article, I had never discussed with anyone except my husband the fear that bookstores produced in me, the power they had to belittle. Did I think I was the only writer to ever have experienced this phenomenon in the middle of B & N? Maybe not. I just don’t know that I thought outside myself at all.

    So as you can imagine, reading about another writer’s perplexities over a bookstore washed some sort of comfort over me, producing that “Aha” moment when I realized I was not alone.

    Malki!, though, goes further. He insists “that a person who wishes to be [of] the bookstore – a part of its innards, a piece of meat wending through its guts – must see the place differently, as a chessboard or as a forward battlefield encampment or as more than just a place to get lost.”

    In other words, as writers we have to look at a bookstore and take charge. Eat it up. Seek out those words that surround us and find out why they matter. And where our own fit.

    You can find my name in a Barnes and Noble, if you look really hard. Pick up a copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul: Thanks Mom, and turn to page 86. Or seek out the preteen book No Body’s Perfect: Stories by Teens About Body Image, Self-Acceptance, and the Search for Identity and turn to page 159 to read a rhyming poem I might blush over now.

    I have more words to share, though, than this. And I hope, in the coming months and years, that I will find myself standing in the middle of a Barnes & Noble, not shuddering in fear over the seemingly insurmountable challenge of making my name be among the others, but excitedly pointing out to someone where in this place I have made my words fit and why they matter.

    Category Books, Bookstores, Self-doubt | Tags: ,,,, | 11 Comments