Special Guest Blogger

I thought I'd continue on yesterday's post to show Bev Night from Matthew's perspective. Once we went to a reading at Elliott Bay Bookstore because it was required for one of his creative writing classes. He sent me the write-up of the event that he did for the class, I think to pacify me, because I was always begging to be in one of the stories. And eventually I was! But I can't post that.

Do I feel guilty about not really writing a post today and instead using someone else's writing? No, I do not. Because it's kinda like I wrote it, since I was there and all. If you would like to be a special guest blogger, just write something about me.

Without further ado, I turn it over to special guest blogger Matthew, and the assignment he wrote about a year ago:
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I enter Elliot Bay Book Company just after six-thirty. Molly is there, browsing the wall of staff recommendations, and we greet each other with familiar comfort. She’s looking for a copy of Mary, the book we are about to attend a reading of, to mill over. The novel is historical fiction, told first person from the perspective of Mary Todd Lincoln as she recounts her life during her brief middle-aged stay in a mental institution.

I quickly look around, “there’s some over by the cash register,” I say.

“Yeah, but it would be awkward to look right there,” she says, eyeing the three cashiers manning the lone register. We’ve formed a friendship around noting and sharing our everyday anxieties and awkward moments.

Molly’s companionship was a given. Every Wednesday we meet for coffee in a ritual we saccharinely refer to as Bev Night. Bev is, naturally, short for beverage. Additionally, it’s the only time me and Molly ever hang out. Forgetting the copies of Janis Cooke Newman’s Mary piled at the registers, we go downstairs to the book store’s café. She orders a tall mocha while I linger, thumbing through the counter menus. Eventually I settle on raspberry iced tea and an espresso brownie, leaving a dollar tip out of guilt for the waiting barista.

We sit and begin sipping our drinks. A woman across the room enters with her large golden lab dog, prompting me to glare over at Molly. We both hate it when people treat dogs like humans.

“When I was younger,” Molly says to begin a story, “My parents drove me and my siblings around to all the civil war battle sites as a vacation.” She grew up in North Carolina and I always love hearing about the differences between our upbringings. “On one trip we took a tour of Mary Todd Lincoln’s childhood home. At the start of the tour, the woman who was running it, some elderly volunteer, asked if there were any questions. Now, keeping in mind that I was seven or eight at the time, I raised my hand and said that Lincoln once told his wife that God only had one D in his name, but the Todds had to have two. The families around all laughed, but the woman ignored me for the rest of the tour.” I laugh and easily imagine Molly as a precocious seven year old.

Minutes before seven-thirty I use the bathroom, as I wouldn’t want to interrupt the reading and there’s nothing worse than really needing to use the bathroom in public but being unable to do so. The room where Elliot Bay holds readings is dank and dimly lit with a tile floor you would see in a gym’s communal shower. Old books line the walls in rustic shelves, serving as a backdrop to a wooden podium in front of dozens of chairs with blue seats. Molly and I have been to readings here before, joining the crowd of fans anxious for readings by Bret Easton Ellis and Margaret Cho, on separate occasions.

Barely on time, we entered the room to see the employee coordinator chatting with the author off to the side. There was one lone woman seated in one of the chairs, curiously hiding at the edge of the row. I led Molly to the second row, center. “Maybe we should think of some questions,” she whispered.

Another couple and woman entered the room, ten minutes late, making us an attentive audience of six. Upon the suggestion of the coordinator, the author ignored the podium and
formed a circle with us in the chairs. She read a passage about Mary Lincoln volunteering at a hospital for injured civil war solider. In the six page segment she used the word “sweetest” three times and variations of the phrase “scent of death” at least five. I started to wonder if the problem with writing historical fiction was that the author becomes trapped in needing to tell certain events and while adhering to certain boundaries of a historic figure’s personality.

I shyly kept my comments to myself and instead sought to glean from the conversation going on around me. The manuscript was over one thousand pages long, her publishers wanted 500 to make the work more accessible and she settled at 700. The publishers wanted a one word title for the novel, initially suggesting Asylum. The author took three years to write and research the novel, and for the first two for fifteen minutes before sitting down to write she would read old letters written by Mary Todd Lincoln to get in the proper mindset and voice.

The author said that for her, writing the novel had been easier than memoir. Hearing this was the biggest surprise of the night for me, as I knew that all writers were taken up in voyeuristic obsession with other people, but I thought most also loved to talk about themselves.