All of a sudden, everything hits everywhere at once: The week after
Labor Day, virtually every venue in town started hosting the kind of
high-quality literary events that make Seattle the best book city in
America. On September 10, former New York Times restaurant
critic Frank Bruni read from his new memoir to a packed room at Elliott
Bay Book Company (the internet bubbled over the next day with
cell-phone photos of—and declarations of love for—the
formerly anonymous Bruni) and Pansy Division guitarist and new author
Jon Ginoli played a set at Bailey/Coy Books.
Also that night, Hugo House hosted its first Cheap Beer and Prose
event, in which four authors read to a huge crowd drunk on $1 cups of
beer. (“Ladies and gentlemen, the keg has been blown!” shouted
the bartender 45 minutes into the reading; a beer run became necessary
after the $1.50 cans of Rainier sold out, too.) The drunks howled at
the bawdy thrills: Highlights included Cienna Madrid reading a scene
from her still-in-progress novel about an awkward discovery of 54
hand-whittled dildos and Ryan Boudinot reading a brand-new short
story titled “News” about three asocial, obsessive siblings (one
brother uses the phrase “I’m going to kill myself” as a calming mantra)
who discover a tender secret about their parents.
As we head into fall, every day brings some sort of essential
literary event: The next night, author Lorrie Moore read from her new
novel, A Gate at the Stairs, to 200 adoring fans at the Central
Library, and she charmed with her quietly aw-shucks Wisconsonian method
of dealing with uninspired audience inquiries. All the questions were
basically “What does it feel like to be so great?” All of Moore’s
answers were elaborate, gratefully humble variations on “I don’t know.”
At the end of the reading, Moore affirmed that coffee was the “key
to literature” and that it should not be “wasted on friends.”
On Saturday, a few dozen people crowded into the sweltering
mezzanine at Barça for the latest installment of local poet Doug
Nufer’s Barroom Writer’s Initiative. Nufer wore a park ranger’s outfit
and introduced the readers. (In a staccato, authoritative voice, Nufer
claimed: “We all live in a world of menace. And as the ranger, I
am here to guide you through.”) Davey Johnston’s two hilarious stories,
about time travelers queuing up to murder Hitler and about Christ
returning in the middle of a parade honoring the Philadelphia Flyers,
had at least one slightly toasted person in the crowd literally falling
out of his chair with laughter.
This was just the first salvo, of course. The transition from summer
to fall has Seattle in a bookish state of mind again, and this is going
to be a legendary year for it—from Nick Hornby to Margaret Atwood
to Richard Price. It’s time to get excited again. 