The Real Amazon
July 7th, 2006 | Uncategorized
Tonight I read at Amazon Bookstore in Minneapolis, the oldest independent feminist bookstore in North America. My publisher wasn’t planning to send me to the midwest on my book tour, but this group of four women’s bookstores got together and said they’d pay my airfare if I’d come to Minneapolis, Wisconsin, and Chicago. Isn’t that amazing? Here’s the jar Amazon put out tonight for donations.
It’s a remarkable grass-roots effort. Here I am in the car with Ann Seidl who picked me up at the airport. She’s a librarian and filmmaker, who totally volunteered to drive from Madison to Minneapolis and back again, ferrying me to my readings. She’s working on a wild documentary called The Hollywood Librarian.
The reading tonight was pretty great. I used to live in the Twin Cities, so there were a bunch of old friends in the audience. Plus I have a special fondness for Amazon because it was the inspiration for Madwimmin Books, the women’s bookstore in my comic strip. Here’s Barb Weiser, who’s worked at Amazon at least since I lived here in the late eighties. She’s my bookseller idol.
There was an overflow crowd–not everyone could fit into the space.
While I was signing books inside, Ann apparently amused herself by convincing people to pose with my book on the sidewalk. Aren’t they handsome, though?
15 Responses to “The Real Amazon”
Whenever I meet people I am reminded of how inarticulate a speaker I am. Innyhoo, again thank you for coming and sharing your time and your process. I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but I discovered DTWOF soon after coming out in rural MN and it has been with me ever since. For a long time DTWOF were the only lesbians I knew, and they are fiction 🙁 (luckilly I discovered the Indigo Girls after a while). I live in MPLS now, but I will never forget the pilgrimages to the Cities to The Amazon Bookstore for your books and free publications that had your current work. I promise to get on the Lavender and pester them to start running DTWOF again.
Thank you for spending some time with us!
Beth
(the last dyke on the left)
Alison–congratulations on the success–you’ll learn how to handle it. I saw some of the work from Fun Home at the Comics Museum in San Francisco in May and thought, “I wonder how this book will change her life?” I knew from the poignancy of those few frames (your father wearing women’s clothing in college and you as a child at the cafe with him seeing the dyke), you were destined to tell a story like no other. Looking back, it’s probably no accident you learned to tell stories the way you have through pictures and words. I can’t imagine you telling this story in any other way. I wish for your continued success. You deserve it. Kate
The Web’s version of Amazon actually sued this local, independent bookseller in Minneapolis, incidentally. I forget the purported rationale for the lawsuit; basically they said the little store had stolen their name, despite the local Amazon having been around much longer. It came down to them not wanting to have their image muddied by its being associated, for some, with a GLBT type of place, though naturally nobody said that in so many words. I imagine Amazon.com offered a decent settlement to the little people to get out of the way and avoid the nuisance, but the women’s bookstore never accepted.
The big corporation threw its money down a legal drain trying to intimidate those folks with the donation jar for your travel fund. Makes me smile.
Sorry I can’t offer airfare, but you have a bed and meals at our home available when you come to Houston.
Handsome indeed. This “book tour” is every lesbian’s dream.
How can we contribute toward paying for Alison’s missionary jaunt to the benighted Midwest? Where can I Paypal? The Catholic guilt is killing me.
Alison, your journey is so fresh…But is there any reason as to why you won’t consider leaving the United States and coming abroad to promote Fun Home or any of the work that you have been doing for the past few years? In order for me to get your book, I had it sent from my home in Brooklyn, to Kingston, Jamaica West Indies to Havana, Cuba..Please reconsider…You have heavy fans all over the Caribbean…
Maybe that’s why your publisher underestimated how many books you’d sell, if they wrote off the entire midwest. Sheesh, what coastal thinking! If you look at the red/blue divide *by county*, you’ll see everwhere with a dense population (e.g. all along rivers & such) voted blue.
To Chaka and others who feel slightly snubbed that Alison isn’t speaking somewhere specific:
I doubt Alison has the luxury to “consider” the Caribbean, much less “reconsider” it. You’d be amazed at how little control an author has about where she is traveling/speaking. It’s the issue of who will cover the expenses. The Midwest let of the tour was exceptional and very grassroots, as you can see from the donation jar and a volunteer driver to take the road trip with her.
I say this as an author who also received emails from people who thought I was deliberately overlooking their town/country/bookstore. Unless/until the publisher is backing her up with a serious travel budget, it’s not fiscally possible.
Hopefully Fun Home will continue to climb up the NYT list, and her publisher will see it as a no-brainer to send her on a world tour. If that happens I will eat these words happily.
http://www.AbigailGarner.net
Speaking of touring, Tom Waits is planning an eight day tour of North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, and Ohio this year. His statement about the tour is “We need to go to Tennessee to pick up some fireworks, and someone owes me money in Kentucky.”
Perhaps if somebody owed Alison money in Kingston ..
You know you still have your feet on the ground when you can have a donation jar for your plane fare collected at the best grass roots book stores! Having started a few non-profit agencies the good old fashioned grass roots way, I really loved the pix of the donation jar! You may get as big as a “super star” but as long as you have a donation jar along the way in your stardom, you will be fine!
I fifty-something (how many of us were there?) thanks and appreciation for visiting the Amazon. And I know there were many more who’d dearly wanted to show up to express theirs in person but couldn’t make it. You’re incredibly gracious dealing with inarticulate stammerers–long practice? Like those who, instead of a simple adoring “thank you”, must mention the dumbest, most obsessive things. 😉 Here’s another of ’em, and I do feel bad about “outing” you when it’s something like this, since now it’s not just my boringly personal bullshit: we’ve both fallen victim to a misspelling/misprint/typo of “desiccated” in a horribly public way. And I have to kind of love you for it, even while I cringe in sympathy. I’m sorry.
(in case you wonder, mine was a company-wide office-supply conservation effort in the form of a poem. “Lament of a Dessicated [sic] Sharpie”. I told you I was a big dork. I suspect you’ll find some consolation in the fact that you have several million more fans than I have, are many orders of magnitude cuter than I could ever be, you can laugh all the way to the bank while the best I’ll ever manage is a feeble titter, etc.)
Oh, don’t mind me. Thank you, congratulations on the Times list, and happy touring/homecoming. Never forget, you rock like Bach.
I should add that, at the time of my misspelling, my duties included editing the company catalog. We were not in the coconut business, so I don’t think many people noticed (whew), but still. Just what you want in an editor, eh?
And, if you should happen to remember my turn through the book-signing queue at all, and have the time to answer pointless questions here, my girlfriend and I wonder: were you laughing with me, as she thinks, or at me, as most people tend to do? Don’t worry. I’m used to it. 🙂
[…] Thursday night Jen and I did something we rarely do – we went to a lesbian event. Since the event was one block away from our house, we hardly had an excuse not to go to Alison Bechdel’s reading/book signing of her new graphic novel, Fun House. Bechdel is the author of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a series started during the 80s and continuing today. The bookstore in the strip, Madwimmin Books, is based on Amazon Bookstore, formerly located near Loring Park (near where Joe’s Garage is now), but now conveniently located a block from our house. See Bechdel’s pictures and comments on the event here: http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/the-real-amazon […]
You’re the greatest, Allison! I’m sure I’m not the only gay man who wished he was a lesbian when DTWOF first appeared in print.
I finished reading Fun House tonight. Thanks.