Written by Matthew Guinn. Matthew will be joining us on on Saturday, May 2 as a Guest Bookseller to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day!
Let me tell you what an independent bookstore can do: it can change everything.
I came to Mississippi in 1992, an aspiring writer though not yet ready to admit it, and encountered Lemuria that fall. I say encounter because Lemuria was not like all the other bookstores I had known, but something bigger and better, sui generis. You do not shop in Lemuria; rather, you discover and consume. Between the bold yellow walls and bright green carpet, the signed photos of every significant American author of the last fifty years on the walls not covered with bookshelves, in the nooks and crannies of arcane subject matter, under the blues or jazz pouring out of the speakers in the store, one is reminded of the joyful truth that the world will never run out of books. Or curators of them, which is what Johnny Evans is, of the foremost rank.
I have seen Barry Moser’s King James Bible at Lemuria. I have met Jim Harrison at Lemuria. And of the southern legends, every one. Hanging around Lemuria over the years has been like getting another degree in literature. Without the lectures. Just all plot, all action. The only test is whether you are paying close enough attention.
And I have a novel on the shelves of Lemuria, and on the shelves of other stores, elsewhere, because of my friendships there.
The conventional route to getting published did not work for me. I had a manuscript, The Resurrectionist, with a literary agent in New York. She pitched it to the major publishing houses—19 of them—and got rejection after rejection. Then she pitched me.
Rejection led to dejection. Then one afternoon, just after he walked into the house from school, my eleven-year-old son asked about the manuscript. I told him it was in my desk drawer, most likely permanently. I did not tell Braiden that there were desk drawers like mine all over the country, the world. Where most likely the majority of novels end up, musty as the languishing dreams of the men and women who wrote them. But you can’t speak that harsh truth to a child. And I’m glad I didn’t, because Braiden then said (and I swear this is verbatim, better than anything I’m capable of imagining): “Dad, nobody writes a book just to put it in a drawer.”
Call it the Tao of Kid, the little Buddha of elementary school. The cafeteria Confucius. Regardless, it felt like scales dropped from my eyes. I heard him. This was one of the times I was paying attention.
So I gave it another shot, the best one I could think of. My friend Joe Hickman, the manager of Lemuria, had expressed an interest in reading my manuscript. I took it to him.
He called me one Sunday evening—February 13, 2011—after spending the weekend reading the book. “It’s really good,” he said. “We gotta get it published.”
Now is not the time to point out the obvious, I thought. Instead, I tried to focus on the enthusiasm in his voice. But the reality of us “getting it published” from little Jackson, Mississippi, when an agent working full-time in New York couldn’t get the job done, was hard to deny.
I should have remembered the parable of the mustard seed. Or maybe the mustard-yellow walls of Lemuria.
Because the first opportunity Joe had to pitch my manuscript to a visiting author turned out to be the only time he had to do it. As my quasi-agent, Joe batted a thousand from his first time up at the plate.
“Come down and meet Andre Dubus,” Joe said. “He’ll be here next month for Townie. He was a friend of Larry Brown’s, too. Maybe he can help you out.”
It’s a rare day that I don’t want to be at Lemuria, or meet a real writer, but I was uncomfortable about meeting Andre because I hadn’t read any of his work. I’d been taught by one of my best professors at UGA that it was the apotheosis of rudeness for a scholar to approach an author without having read something of his or hers. How much worse, I thought, for a creative writer to do the same thing—and hoping for a favor, to boot.
“Can’t do it,” I said. “I haven’t read a thing of Andre’s.”
“He’s a cool guy,” Joe said. “He won’t mind.”
“I doubt it. And anyway, I teach Wednesday nights.”
“Your loss,” Joe said.
As the date of Andre’s reading approached, I realized that the particular Wednesday night in March that Andre was to be at Lemuria was Tulane’s spring break. No class. When Joe learned that, I was on the hook.
Andre gave a fantastic and moving reading from Townie, signed books as long as people remained in line. The crowd dwindled down to some cousins who’d ridden over from Louisiana to have dinner with their famous kinsman. Otherwise it was just Andre, Joe, and myself. While Joe handed Andre books to sign from a stack of stock, he waved me over to the table and introduced me.
“I haven’t read any of your work,” I blurted. I figured I’d go ahead and get the unpleasantness over with and head home.
“That’s all right,” Andre said. “I gave a signed copy of House of Sand and Fog to my best friend back home. First edition. Next time I was over at his place it was propping up one leg of his couch and his dog had chewed on it. I said, ‘Please tell me you read it before you stuck it under there.’ ‘Andre,’ he said, ‘I stay busy.’”
“Matt was a friend of Larry’s,” Joe said. “He’s written a novel. I’ve read it. It’s good.”
“Oh yeah?” Andre said, still signing away as quickly as Joe could pass him the books. “What’s it called?”
“The Resurrectionist.”
“The Resurrectionist?” He asked. I nodded.
He put down his pen and said, “Holy shit! With a title like that, it’s got to be good.” Then he stood up and hugged me. “Will you send it to me? If I like it, I’ll give it to my editor at Norton.”
Just like that. Years of writing nights and weekends, hoping this one would be good enough. (My first, Murk, a novel of catfish grabbling, had long since gone to sleep with the fishes, where, sadly, it belongs.) A New York agent, then nineteen rejections. Then no agent at all. And here in quiet Jackson, Mississippi, on a rainy spring night in the cinderblock bunker annex that Lemuria calls its dot-com building, everything changed.
A year and a half later, W.W. Norton published The Resurrectionist and I had a reading of my own in the dot-com building. I’ve tried to figure it out, the sceptic in me running one scenario after another—the cumulative effects of spending time around good people; networks; chaos theory, etc. That maybe Andre sensed in me a particularly acute case of The Desperation of the Unpublished and took pity. But my better self, the one that now and then cuts through the white noise and reminds me to witness the mystery that surrounds us in the world every day, knows better.
The only thing I’ve concluded definitely is that my break couldn’t have happened anywhere else. Or any other way. Call it A Lemuria Event.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s a damned-near-perfect love story of a reader and a bookstore, a shared history, a friendship. I certainly could not have written it any better.
That is why, if my family someday decides to scatter my ashes, they need to save a pinch or two for Lemuria. To sprinkle over the green carpet in the southern writers section. Under a shelf where maybe, maybe still, there will rest a book with my name on its spine.
Matthew Guinn’s next novel, The Scribe, will be published by W.W. Norton in September 2015.
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