While I should be writing

Day of Dialogue and exploring Chicago

I was in Chicago for the Book Expo, but my experience of it began on Wednesday with Day of Dialogue, a gathering of librarians separate from the Book Expo but held in connection with it. For me, it was just one more reason to love Chicago, even though I guess it would have been lovely anywhere.

I was part of a panel together with some lovely people from Sourcebooks, talking about the process of writing, translating, editing and marketing a book. Sort of a way to illustrate the whole impressive chain that a book travels through before arriving at a library. It was such great fun, but then again, I was talking to a room full of librarians, so how could it not be absolutely amazing?

Afterwards, I met up with a friend of mine who had come to Chicago to visit me. Me, I’m a lazy tourist. I tend to want to pretend I live in a city, so I seldom do any of the traditional tourist-stuff. It seems strange to me to travel somewhere just to surround yourself with tourists. My friend on the other hand is very organized. He came to Chicago with a list of things to see for our one free afternoon there. This list included: a river architectual tour, the Sears tower, a bean, a park and Boystown. “What do you want to see?” he asked me. “I want to have pizza”, I said. Obviously.

And that was basically what we did. We had pizza at Giordanos. Walked to the park with the bean, that did turn out to be great. The bean was surprisingly fun, and the park absolutely beautiful. It was so beautiful that we msised the river tour-thing we had planned for five pm, but when we were just walking around idly trying to think up an alternative, we found another tour boat that was just about to head off. It was probably fate, because the boat was almost empty, the guide an hilariously nerdy girl, and the fog lifted the minute the tour started.

Unfortunately, I can’t remember any of the information she imparted in her fast, nerdy way, but I have never found architecture so much fun or so fascinating.  Part of the reason why Chicago is such a fascinating city, architecturally speaking, is of course that the enitre city burned down. The only thing that was left standing was a water tower close to our hotel on Michigan avenue. Rumour had it that the enitre fire was started by an Irish immigrant woman. Had that been just a rumour, a foot note on a guide tour, that wouldn’t really have mattered, but the rumour was first published by a major newspaper in Chicago right after the fire, and the Irish immigrant woman was named in the article. The city was then rebuild, using the ingenuity and the expertise of architects from all over the country as they flocked to the empty space available in the city.

“So it all ended well, in a way”, said our guide about the fire.

Except for the immigrant woman, of course. She was ostracized for the rest of her life.

The tour took about 70 minutes and I was sorry to get off that boat. Next time I go to Chicago I’ll take it again.After the tour it was quite late on a Tuesday evening at the end of a foggy day, so thanks to some sort of magic, Sears tower was practically empty. Sears tower is not called Sears tower anymore, but our guide assured us no one from Chicago bothered with the new name, so I won’t either. I find it very reassuring that a company can pay a lot of money for the name rights for the tallest building in the Western hemisphere and then be completely ignored.

The tower formerly known as Sears has see through little cubes that you can step out on, so that it seems like you’re standing on air ofter a hundred floors of the ground.

My friend forced me out on it, so naturally I made him go first. Just in case.

But I lived to experience the Book expo another day.

Chicago

I never fall in love at first sight with big cities. It happens all the time with small towns: I drive through them, or stop for lunch, or arrive at the hotel, and I feel immediately at home.

Not so with big cities. Big cities requires time for me: I have to approach them gradually. Find a street I like, or even a specific café, and then perhaps a certain part of the town. The infinite possibilities of a big city often make me hesitant and strangely recultant. Perhaps it’s some sort of awareness that it’s impossible to make that city into your own in just a few days, or even weeks: you need to live there to really be a part of it. And I want to be a part of towns I visit; I want to imagine myself living there, feeling what it would be like, eavesdroping to converastions, wandering around and taking it all in.

So no one was more surprised than I was when I found myself falling completely for Chicago within the first twenty minutes of me leaving the airport. I was not ready for love. I was tired and warm and uncomfortable and had been jostled about by O’Hare airport. I was only relieved to be in a car, with a nice, quiet driver.

And it’s not like I hadn’t seen a beatiful skyline at night before. The skyskrapers, the lights, I had seen it in a number of downtown areas before. But there was something special with this one. Perhaps the fog, slowly creeping in. Or perhpas it was the dark nothing-ness where the sea was. Maybe it made everything more manageable.

I don’t know. But however it happened I fell in love with Chicago right there and then, and everything I experienced in the next two days just strengthened that feeling.

A book luncheon with Book Vault

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.

We drove to Oskaloosa. The roads were still straight.
A book luncheon!
And a book vault!!

Dragonfly Books in Decorah

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.

Look! It's me! In a bookshop in Iowa!
Writing in a library book!

Straight ahead in Iowa

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!