belated tidings from an american book tour ii

Bill Cotter’s novel Fever Chart (McSweeney’s), and

Annie La Ganga’s memoir, Stoners and Self-Appointed Saints (Red Hen Press).

Most of the venues at which Annie and I read and signed our books while on our authors’ tour of the States were utterly independent---not links in a chain of bookstores, not attached to a university or house of worship, not N.A. clubhouses, not fronts for illicit hold’em games. Some were so indie they weren’t even bookshops: In Rapid City, South Dakota, we read and signed at a coffee shop to a welcoming, attentive, and enthusiastic group of persons positively boiled in caffeine. Another venue, the KGB Bar in NYC, which trades on the quaint delusion that communism worked (and by that virtue will not sell brands of beer it deems capitalist), was also hospitable and seemed excited we were there. (Two other writers, Ernie Hilbert of Philadelphia, and Greg Sanders of New York, both in the Red Hen Press stable, also read that night, adding another storey of warmth to the evening.) And in Chicago, we read at the Green Mill, a saloon and the birth-hospital of Slam Poetry.

The Green Mill was one of the few events not populated in the majority by friends and shills; more than half were strangers! On hand to listen to people read their writing! Though also generously welcoming, my Green Mill reading did not go well. I write fiction, a genre not often read in places where poetry is expected, so the audience—at first merely disoriented by narrative prose with characters behaving in linear time---began to shift and yawn and politely exasperate. When I hadn’t stopped after five minutes, I became aware of budding menace and hostility. Since I was pretty tired after the 15-hour drive from Rapid City (q.v. above), and thus in no shape to tussle or dodge chucked bottles or endure reputedly gnarly Chicagoan rebuke, I raced through to the end of the planned bit and leapt from the stage to the safety of my booth. The emcee came on and gave me a little shit, and several people afterwards came up to me and said things like “Don’t worry man, it’s okay, happens to everybody,” and “Hey, you weren’t as bad as it seemed,” and “Glad I’m not you.”

Annie, not incidentally, blew the fucking place away. Go buy her book, you.  

Bill Cotter

Austin, Texas

bill cotter, annie la ganga, book tour