Village Books Blog

A Magical Evening with Terry Tempest Williams

 It's been five days since the event with Terry Tempest Williams here in Bellingham and I can still feel the warm glow.  And, I'm certainly not the only one.  I've talked to a lot of folks this past week who count the evening as one of the most memorable they've spent in ages.  It was the kick-off event for the 25th Anniversary of the Whatcom Land Trust and Terry, with her own land trust involvement in Utah, was the perfect person to listen to that evening.  Speaking from the heart about land trusts, independent bookstores and her latest book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, Terry, by turns, had folks laughing and crying.

Never have I known a writer, or anyone for that matter, who connects so deeply with those she meets.  In the years I've known her I've never seen her have a superficial interaction with anyone.  It was an especially gratifying time for Dee and me.  Terry has been a dear friend for many years and it had been a long time since we'd been together. On Monday, we were nearly inseparable for more than a dozen hours.  The memory of the time together is something we'll cherish forever.

A Sad, Sad Day in Bookselling

Early Saturday morning I received a call from my friend Carol Grossmeyer, President of the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops in Milwaukee.  I knew it was unlikely to be good news and, it was not.  Carol told me, with great sadness, that her bookstores were closing--a result of tough economic times and enormous shifts in publishing and bookselling.  It wasn't like receiving a call about the death of a member of the family; I was receiving a call about the death of a member of the family.

Harry W. Schwartz opened a bookshop in the back of a beauty parlor in Milwaukee in 1927.  His son David joined the business in 1963, assumed ownership in 1972 and grew the business to four stores in the Milwaukee metropolitan area.  By the time I joined David on the board of directors of the American Booksellers Association, fifteen years later, he, and his Milwaukee bookstores, were icons in the book business.  David lost his battle with cancer in 2004.  His wife Carol and daughter Rebecca, with the able assistance of general manager Daniel Goldin, have been operating the business in these recent, difficult times.

Losing the Schwartz stores is far more than losing places to buy books.  David Schwartz summed up for many of us what it means to be booksellers when he said:

"Bookselling was and is for me a cultural and political expression, an expression of progressive change, of challenge to oppressive authority, of a search for a community of values which can act as an underpinning of a better world.  The true profit in bookselling is the social profit; the bottom line, the measure of the impact of the bookshop on the community."

It is, indeed, a sad day for booksellers, for Milwaukee and for anyone who cares about the value of ideas and community.

On Biographies, Briefly - Guest Post by Dave Wheeler

One of my favorite sections of Village Books is the biographies. Now, I haven't always loved biographies. I remember having to do a research report in elementary school on a historical figure of my choice. I picked Davy Crockett—for obvious reasons, I think—those being that I am very fond of hunting and sleeping out of doors. Actually, namesake alone as my interest in the king of the wild frontier, I spent a good deal of time flipping disinterestedly through a dog-eared copy of Davy Crockett: Young Rifleman from the Childhood of Famous Americans Series and a history of the Alamo that smelled a little like the dog that had been ear-ing the other book. Sufficed to say, the only thing I got out of the project was a theme song that lasted well into high school. You know which one I mean.

Biography is much more interesting now, but I'm not sure if it's simply because I'm older or if the trends in memoir make other people's lives so much more fascinating to me. In fact, I can't get enough memoir, and not just heavy-hitters like David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs either. The essayist Sloane Crosley has a book called I Was Told There'd Be Cake that made me laugh hard enough to draw attention from passers-by on the Fairhaven green when I was on my lunch break. And I am dying to dive into AJ Jacob's The Year of Living Biblically.

As someone with particular interest in matters of spirituality, I think one of my favorite spiritual memoirs is Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water. We all remember A Wrinkle in Time, the curious sci-fi fantasy about a bunch of kids who travel between time and space with three inter-dimensional spinsters. L'Engle takes the opportunity in Walking on Water to consider the events that surrounded writing that book and her many others. And it's her reflections on both the art and the faith of the matter that I find truly inspiring. I had never read A Wrinkle in Time until I read Walking on Water, but I had always known about it, like I'd always known about the Alamo but just never really got around to looking into the matter.

Dave Wheeler recently graduated from Western Washington University.  He works as a bookseller at Village Books and writes the blog, Tongue-Tied Poetics.