Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award winner Liam Callanan‘s failure to find the remarks he made when presented the award at the Council of Wisconsin Writers Awards Banquet last month so they could be included in this blog post, led him to worry (most likely only momentarily) that the “worst of writerly cliches” had come true. What if it hadn’t really happened, but was all a dream? Rest assured, Liam winning the award for his novel, Paris by the Book published by Dutton, happened and was the best kind of dream that came true. Here’s how he tells it:
The truth is, the Edna Ferber Award, my novel, this writing life, all represents the ongoing realization of a dream from which I hope I never wake. To be able to tell stories, to be able to share them with others, to be recognized for doing so, represents impossibly good fortune. I’m daily grateful that I get to do this work, and I’m grateful to all who make it possible: my students, who inspire me with their own dreams; my family, who foster mine; and my friends and fellow writers across Wisconsin and beyond who read and write alongside me and pull me, in that most excellent of Wisconsin words, forward.
My novel, Paris by the Book, follows a young family from the East Side of Milwaukee as they travel to Paris in search of the husband and father who’s gone missing. While there, mother and daughters come to run a small bookstore; in the passage that I read at the award ceremony, the narrator reflects on life in and around independent bookstores. Fiction is fiction, but I admit to sharing a passion for independent bookstores with my narrator, most particularly my local independent, Boswell Books, run by 2015 CWW Christopher Latham Sholes Award Winner Daniel Goldin. Here’s to him, my fellow winners, Edna Ferber, and everyone who, like the Council of Wisconsin Writers, believes in the power of a book.
[These passages come deep in the book; for those reading along at home, please note that I edited the printed version slightly so that it reads smoothly out of context.]
People complain it’s hard to find things in our store, but others say that’s what they like about our store. When I took it over, years of neglect meant that there was almost no organizational system evident whatsoever. I enlisted the girls’ help to reshelve things by genre and then alphabetically by author, but Ellie complained it was taking too long and suggested we do something she’d seen in a magazine: shelve everything by color. Daphne, my younger daughter, said that was stupid, Ellie, my oldest, said she was stupid, Daphne said Dad would think it was stupid, and then I intervened and said the first thing that came to me—that we’d organize the store by country. Because what organization we had inherited consisted of a single bookcase featuring books about Paris.
It worked. That is, it shut the girls up. It’s a strange way to organize a store and I recommend it to no one. Genres get jumbled and disputes abound: should Shakespeare sit by Thomas Mann? Yes, if it’s Merchant of Venice and A Death in Venice. But Hamlet goes next to Kierkegaard. Graham Greene’s Quiet American sits by Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and some waterlogged Lonely Planet guides to Vietnam. Greene’s Power and the Glory, on the other hand, goes next to Octavio Paz in Mexico. In short, suspect judgment rules. Chess books, Russia. Space exploration, United States. Physics, Germany. Ellie puts books she can’t find a place for in Switzerland and, because she’s still attached to her original suggestion, books with green covers (and occasionally Graham G. himself) in Greenland. Daphne’s catch-all is Antarctica; she’s also the author of little signs around the store that invite indignant browsers to reshelve books as they see fit.
I honestly think our system, capricious as it is, sells more books. I guarantee the man who came in looking for Thirty Seconds over Tokyo hadn’t meant to buy Basho’s Narrow Road (or a tattered copy of James Clavell’s Shogun, for that matter), for example, but he did.
[…]
I’ve never told the girls this, but one reason I like our geo-organizing of the store is that it reminds me of my husband’s and my adventures across Wisconsin, the ability to travel such distances—from, say, Moscow, Wisconsin to Belgium, Wisconsin—in hardly any time at all. But what I also liked of those cities, of every last one of our books, is the hope buried deep within them. Paris, France—or Paris, New York—didn’t work out? That’s fine. Try Paris, Wisconsin. Such hope is resilient; every town, every book, is a way to say, look, there’s a new way, a different way. Every book in a bookstore is a fresh beginning. Every book is the next iteration of a very old story. Every bookstore, therefore, is like a safe-deposit box for civilization.
Like that cave in Norway—Norway, Norway, not Norway, Wisconsin—where they bank the seeds that will save the planet: deep in my bookstore, we stock those same seeds. It doesn’t have to be a large store, just a good one. Our store has a few thousand volumes. They range from 10 words to 200,000. Let’s call the average 50,000. I have millions, maybe a billion words in stock. When the apocalypse comes—and it does all the time now—come call. Out of my billion, we’ve got a word or two that will get things going again.