People sometimes ask me if I worry about people not showing up at my events. And in general, I really don’t. I’ve visited  a lot of bookshops and libraries in my days, and I’ve had great evenings with five people in the audience, and 30, and 50 and so on. I tend to focus more on the real people that do show up, than the hypothetical people that don’t. As long as the people there are friendly and nice and interested, it really doesn’t matter. And I have never met a person in a bookshop that wasn’t friendly and nice and interested.

Now, with Iowa, I worried.

I’ve written a book that is basically a love letter to Iowa and its past and its people and its corn; I’ve spent years of my life living with half my mind constantly among the cornfields of Iowa, and my publishers have gone to a lot of trouble to bring me to my beautiful Iowa bookshops. All this hit me on the way to Dragonfly Books. What if no one shows up? I thought. In Iowa, for God sake.

It did  not help that the bookshop had, for some bizarre reason I thought, practically filled the entire store with chairs. Couldn’t they have just put like five chairs or something in front of me, so that it would not look so bad when two people showed up?

But then they all came, in a steady trickle. Slowly at first, as the first people to show up took their place in the back. I went out for a quick cigarette, and saw small groups of people walking down Water street, and then into the bookshop! In the end, the only seats that were left were a couple in the first row: obviously it is some sort of universal thing to avoid the first row.

And it was great. I was there with Shana, my publisher, who is from a small town in Iowa (when she emailed me to tell me that she’d bought the book and that she was in fact herself from Iowa, my first thought was: “oh, shit“). So we talked about the processes of editing, of mistakes that had somehow slipped into the book, and everyone laughed at the idea that someone would serve store-bought cookies to a guest. Store-bought! The very idea. The bookshop served cookies, and I need hardly add that they were home-made.

There was even a Swedish group there: people meeting to learn Swedish, led by a Swedish-American, and there was people from the library, and I got to sign a library book. Writing in a library book!

I don’t think my first evening in a bookshop in Iowa could possibly have gone better. When I returned to the bed and breakfast where I was staying, I found a package waiting for me: a cd with music from Iowa, delivered while I had dinner, from one of the guest from the event. That’s the kind of town Decorah is.