While I should be writing

My next stop in Iowa was Oskaloosa, where I attended a lovely book luncheon organized by lovely bookshop The Book Vault.

It was my very first book luncheon, but as you can imagine, it was great: nice people and a nice lunch and talking about books. When I think of it, I can’t see why we don’t have more of those. It’s an interesting idea with daytime events.

After the luncheon, naturally I visited the bookshop, and it turned out that there used to be a bank there, so the book vaults were litterally vaults. You see me here in front of the Crime Vault. They could have locked me up there forever and I wouldn’t have minded.

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.

I’ll tell you all about my visit at Dragonfly Books in Decorah, but first I want to tell you how I got there.

I don’t think you’ve really travelled on a straight American road until you’ve been on a road in Iowa in May, before the corn takes over. Everything is flat. The road you’re on is flat, the earth is flat, and every now and then it’s interrupted by a intersecting road. Also straight. It’s as if someone had taken a ruler and just drawn it all up; planned, organized, nothing in the land that requers detours or turns. I imagine that’s precisely what happened.

I was picked up outside of the TV station in Des Moines by Daniel of Hometown Taxi. It’s based in Decorah, and he was certainly more comfortable there than in the big city of Des Moines. I was standing outside waiting, twenty minutes before the scheduled time, and it had just begun to seem very likely that I would be waiting in the rain, when the Hometown taxi pulled up.

“You wouldn’t by any chance happen to be Mary, would you? Miss Bivald?”

I am Mary: it’s my middle name, but since it appears first on my passport, it’s the name used for most of the bookings during my trip. A side-note: for several drafts, right up until I got a publisher, Sara was called Mary. But the sales/marketing/pr-department of my publisher put their foot down firmly on this one: “We can work with the strange title, and somehow manage to get people to know that this American novel is written by a Swedish writer, but we can’t have an American novel written by a Swedish writer with a main character with a Brittish name.” It did sound reasonable, when they put it like that.

Anyway, I was Mary, and we were off to a good start, managing to get out on the right Interstate and so forth. Daniel is not a modern technology-kind of person. He has a smartphone, but he got it reluctantly three weeks ago because he’s partners at the taxi company insisted. He can call on it, he has just figured out how to text people; a few days ago he had even taken a photo with it! “But then I didn’t know how to send it.” He looked at me, with phone in hand. “But you seem to have mastered them things?”

Naturally, he did not have a GPS. He had the adress written down in a clear, precise hand on small notes that he seemed to carry with him everywhere. But we got on Highway 35 in a couple of hours, straight ahead, and then we turned sharply onto Highway 9, also straight ahead, until eventually we arrived in Decorah, Iowa.

Decorah is nothing like Broken Wheel, except that the people are as friendly. Daniel showed me all the places in town, including the college, the two (!) microbreweries, the place where his father proposed to his mother and the three biggest streets in the town: Broadway, lined by trees and impressive Victorian homes owned by retired doctors and lawyers. And Main Street, the non-main street in town, lined by trees and slightly smaller homes. And Water street, the main street: “Water street is our main street”, said Daniel. “Well, there is a Main street as well, but that’s not the…” – “Main street?” said I. – “Eh, no”.

Naturally, he also showed me the bookshop, which is pretty much all I need to know, and a coffee place that had suprisingly good coffee.

I don’t want to insult anyone, but american coffee is sometimes something of an oxymoron. If they had called it lightly coffee flavoured tea it would have been closer to the truth. I am normally a very polite, generous person, but lack of coffee does not bring out the best of me.

Then again, great coffee apparantly bring out slightly worrying sides of me as well. And the coffee in Decorah was amazing. Everytime I stand in line I debate the age-old question: Americano or regular drip coffee? I prefer drip coffee, but the likelihood of a disaster is greater than with an Americano. Still, I decided to be brave. A tried the drip coffee. I added milk. I noticed the coffee colour was still a dark brown, almost black, and the smell! Tentitavely I tried it. Coffee! Real coffee!

I had to double back with my take away cup to the man behind the counter. “Excuse me!” I said, slightly manical. I think I might have interrupted the three ladies waiting in line. “Your coffee is great! Amazing!” I then proceeded to empty my pockets of all the coins I could find, into the tip jar. The ladies looked slightly nervous as I gave the poor man a 100 – 200 % tip

But my God, it was worth it!

I have been writing the last few blog posts at my hotel in Des Moines, Iowa.

Des Moines. The name has a magical sound to me. So, indeed, do all places in Iowa. I am here. Back where I and my characters surely belong. I have been in Iowa before, once, when I saw Spencer and its public library that once had a library cat named Dewey who touched the world, and corn, and high ways.

One thing I did not see during my last and only visit to Iowa, though, was bookshops. So in the coming two days I will find myself and my book in bookshops in Iowa for the very first time, and I hope to see you there, too.

First up is Dragonfly Books (beautiful name!) in Decorah, where I’ll be tomorrow at 7 pm.

And on Tuesday, I’ll visit the Book Vault and Hunter’s Café in Oskaloosa for a book luncheon at 12.30 pm. I have always liked the word luncheon, and I am sure it is going to be lovely!

I’ll keep you posted about my Iowa adventures, and enclose a photo from my last visit here.