Shoemaker Book Launch in Northport Next Month

 

Sarah Shoemaker of Northport, Michigan, author of the critically acclaimed Mr. Rochester, has a new novel coming out this fall. Children of the Catastrophe, set in the city of Smyrna in the early 20^th century, is, as the author herself describes it, a story of family, love and loss, crisis and survival. The book’s release date is September 6, the day after Labor Day, and Shoemaker will be at the Leelanau Township Library that evening to meet and greet the public. Dog Ears Books will be on hand, as well, to sell books to those wishing to purchase, which the author will be happy to sign. 

 

In her new work of historical fiction, Shoemaker goes behind the bare facts to imagine two families over the course of years leading up to a tragic real event in history. Early in the novel a marriage is arranged within Smyrna’s Greek community. The bride is one of four sisters, the groom an only child. Parents of the two (especially the mothers) have traditional concerns about qualities they wish to see in a partner for their respective children, but happily for the bride and groom in this case, they are attracted to one another from the start, and soon a new generation of Greeks is growing up in a happy home in Smyrna, little suspecting that their world is about to be utterly destroyed. 

 

There are, Shoemaker said in a recent interview, 27 million refugees in the world today, and every one of those people represents “a family, a community, a way of life that is forever lost to them.” In large world events – every catastrophe, especially – it is easy to lose sight of particular individuals and families. Yet every war, every famine, every horrendous headline event changes the world forever for people who were up until then, most of them, living very ordinary lives. 

 

What must it be like to have almost everything and then suddenly to lose it all? How does this affect families, and what differences are there in the responses of different family members? Different generations? These are questions Shoemaker sought answers for in her novel.  

 

Shoemaker has lived in Greece and also for two years in Izmir, Turkey, the present seaport city on the former site of Smyrna. She knew the history and heard the personal story of one survivor whose entire family was lost in the Great Fire (1922), also known to Greeks as the Catastrophe. So, all in all, she felt this was a story she could write. 

 

“Every time I see pictures from Ukraine,” Shoemaker said to her interviewer, “our most recent world events that impact people’s lives – seriously -- I see those people now, having written this book, differently, because I see them as individuals who’ve had lives.” She observes that it’s easy to lose sight of individual lives when we see masses of refugees in events not happening to us. But – “This could be us sometime. Or this could be somebody I care about sometime.” What tragic events do to real people’s real lives is what Shoemaker wants readers to take away from her novel. And in this aim, she succeeds brilliantly. 

 

As a reader, one comes to live inside the story, to live inside houses inhabited by people one comes to know. One hundred years later in time and far distant in space, while reading we inhabit the world of early 20^th-century Greek Smyrna and feel connected to the characters’ hopes and dreams, sympathetic to their problems, concerned for their lives. In the end, we realize that their tragedy is our tragedy, in that it is a human tragedy, and we are all human beings, despite our differences.

-- Can you tell I am excited about this book? It is going to be an excellent choice for book clubs, too! 

Tuesday, September 6, 7:30 p.m., Leelanau Township Library, Northport, MI: Sarah Shoemaker and Children of the Catastrophe

P.S. You can hear the complete interview with Sarah Shoemaker on the Library Love Fest podcast from Harper Collins, publisher of Children of the Catastrophe. Sarah Nelson, vice president and executive editor of Harper Collins, introduces and interviews Sarah Shoemaker in the podcast.

 

Fullness and Connections

Woods, fields, meadows, gardens are lush by the last days of July, especially this year, following our long, drawn-out, cool and moist spring and early summer. Cherry boughs bend low with fruit not yet shaken off the trees. Corn displays its near-tropical growth, and small grains wave richly in the breeze.

Hotel and motel rooms and B&B accommodations are also full. (Woe betide the would-be visitor looking for a room now for August!) Restaurants are full to overflowing, and grocery store lines stretch long. I’m sure many beaches are full on sunny days, but if Petoskey stone hunting in the rain is your thing, you might have the shoreline to yourself today.

Tuesday night was the last evening in the Friends of the Library Summer Author Series, and Sarah Shoemaker had the crowd eating out of her hand and lining up afterward to buy copies of Mr. Rochester, my runaway best-selling book for 2017.  Selling out of a title and having to restock sounds like the opposite of fullness, but it's been terribly gratifying to me to see Sarah's sales numbers mount since Mr. R (as I call him familiarly) was released on May 9.

Calendars are full (and already filling up for September, believe it or not). Days and nights and hours are full. We squeeze in visits with family and old friends wherever and whenever and however we can. An old friend I hadn’t seen for 25 years came for a breakfast visit with his family one morning this week. At my suggestion, they came to our house so we wouldn’t have to stand in line at a restaurant and then worry that their little girl would get bored and fidgety, and we had a lovely time. Now it may be another five years before we see each other again. And wouldn’t you know I forgot to get my camera out at the house! Made up for that omission at bookstore and gallery.

Summer is a time for reconnecting. Some people are reconnecting with their summer places, vacation memories, and retracing childhood souvenirs. Families and friends reconnect with reunions and shared vacations. And in the bookstore I reconnect with customers who are coming for an annual visit or coming back for the first time in ten years. One woman today had to hunt through photographs on her phone to find one she had taken of Sarah – she thought two years ago, then tried three and four, but it turned out to have been five years ago that she’d photographed our little darling. Thus today’s memorable bookstore quote: “I’ve deleted pictures of my relatives, but I couldn’t delete this picture of your dog!” Darling little Sarah!

Above was written on Wednesday. Now on Thursday I feel compelled to note that our basswood trees are full of sweet-smelling blossoms, and once the sun burns off the morning dew the bees will again come buzzing, irresistibly drawn to the nectar. Last year the blossoming branches seemed far too quiet. This year they are once more humming, afternoon and evening, with busy pollinators weaving tight, complicated, but invisible webs and trails through the air. That's more like it!

Not Much Time for Commentary

"Take your dog to work day?" someone asked. After the work, we had a lot of fun.

This is obviously not our private playground any more.

Instead of dogs frolicking, there will be golfers soon.

I'd eaten quite a bit of chicken curry before realizing I hadn't taken its picture first,

but I got a photograph of David's refreshing rice noodle and shrimp sausage before too much of it was gone. This was the first evening of Thai food at Lelu Cafe.

This morning I captured spiderwort's blue better than the other day.

Many blossoms yet to come on this stem!

Time for beautiful lilies ...

... and the first raspberries are coming on, too.

I did not take my camera on yesterday afternoon's mini-vacation with Sarah. We were living in the moments, luxuriating in a refreshing pool created by a rushing creek emptying into a large lake. A mother duck and two ducklings kept their distance. Brilliant blue dragonflies were not bothered by our presence. I picked through small stones. Sarah stood around in water up to her belly, content to be cool.

Tonight Loreen Niewenhuis will be at the Leelanau Township Library in Northport, beginning her presentation at 7:30 p.m. Loreen has done two 1,000-mile walks, one around Lake Michigan and the second comprising different stretches of the five Great Lakes. On book tour now with her second book, she has also begun her third adventure, exploring Great Lakes islands. Most of the library series events are on Tuesdays, so a Thursday event is unusual, but it's when Loreen had time in her schedule. She is a lively, personable presenter. Catch her if you can!

Take Time, Find Treasure

1973 El Dog w/ 501 cu. in. engine

David and Sarah and I went to Northport in style on Sunday morning, where David and I had breakfast at the North End on Mill Street, outdoors on the back patio. After breakfast I took Sarah for a stroll around town. 

We do not have magnificent mountain ranges in Leelanau County or monuments dating back to the Middle Ages, but anyone who takes the time to look carefully will find sights worth seeing, such as these pretty little spots in Northport.

Rustic sign for a one-of-a-kind B&B

Northport Creek winding to Grand Traverse Bay

Paperback classics, used

And that’s how I feel (are you surprised?) about the books in my bookstore, too. I don’t have a Gutenberg Bible, and I may not have the latest bestseller you want the minute you walk in the door (I’ll gladly order whatever it), but there are so many possibilities that sometimes it makes my head spin! There are books for every budget and for almost every taste and field of interest--so much variety that anyone who leaves empty-handed probably did not really want a book in the first place. 

A variety of treasure awaits, from brand-new...

...to very old,

from special bindings...

...to paperback books for the beach.

July marks our 19-year anniversary, making this the 20th summer of Dog Ears Books. Hard to believe. We're now just up the block from our modest 1993 beginnings, but we've come a very long way.

As for me, I’ve been reading further in Teresa Scollon’s wonderful book of poetry, To Embroider the Ground with Prayer, and continue to be impressed and moved by her work. Many people tell me they “don’t get” or “can’t understand” poetry, and I have two responses: (1) Poetry is best appreciated, in my opinion, if a reader or listener begins with total immersion, rather than trying to analyze or attach symbolic meaning to each word or every line. (2) Maybe you’ve been reading the wrong poetry? Good poetry does not have to be incomprehensible. Sometimes it may be difficult, but not even always that. Stop in and try a poem with me: I promise I won't let you drown.

I also started reading Moby-Dick for one of my reading groups. It was our first selection for the coming year, and we'll begin discussion in September, but it seems I couldn’t wait. Marvelous early chapters! I was prepared to slog dutifully through this tome but am turning pages with a glad heart. Of course, that could change when I hit the technical chapters on whaling....

A couple of notes to this week’s Northport calendar:

Featured book for Thursday, July 12, author visit

(1)       Bill O. Smith, author of the illustrated children’s book, Chickadees at Night, will be at Dog Ears Books on Thursday, July 12, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Those with discerning minds no doubt already figured out that Thursday is the 12^th and not the 11^th as I had it in my calendar column. (Bill and I had been playing around with dates....) Anyway, it’s this coming Thursday! Children, parents, grandparents, bird-lovers and everyone else, welcome!

(2)       The first event in the summer author series at Leelanau Township Library, featuring Stephanie Mills, scheduled for Tuesday, July 10, has been cancelled. Friends of the Library decided not to substitute anyone at this late date but to begin on July 17.

See you on Thursday? Or before! It's summer, our 7-day-a-week time of year!

Sarah sometimes catches a snooze on the job.

Improvements, Mysteries, Plans, Excitement

If you haven’t been to Northport in a while, you might not know about all the renovations and additions to the marina park. After driving by and gawking for weeks on my way to errands and work, I finally walked down with Sarah one day to see the improvements up close. Northport's sheltered harbor and easy walking distance to bank, library, post office, shops, galleries, restaurants, and grocery store make it a popular stayover for boaters, who also enjoy Music in the Park concerts throughout the summer on Friday evenings.

Beautiful, big new bathhouse at marina

One other boating note: See new link in my blog list for Northporter Kevin's solo Atlantic sail. Follow him! The word "intrepid" definitely applies.

A local team working with a hired consultant has been exploring how our community, Northport and Leelanau Township, can come together on “Designing and Achieving Our Potential” in the near future. Property owners in the township will receive notice in the mail along with their summer property tax bill, and I’ll have more information, too, as the first public meeting, July 29, comes closer. The entire process is intended to be community driven, fluid, and transparent.

Mystery Poem #3 Arrives

On a more personal note, a third Mystery Poem appeared in my post office box last week. (In principle, it should not have been put in the box, since it bore only a street address and no p.o. box number, but our local post office went the extra mile, and I thank them.) This one does not say on the back “This is a poem,” and it lacks the sender’s initial--H., you’ll recall--but otherwise Mystery Poem #3 follows the pattern set by the first two. It was typed on a manual typewriter on lined paper, paper folded with poem inside and address typed outside, adorned with a variety of interesting postage stamps, and postmarked “Metro” (i.e., Detroit). The poem this time is short and sweet, and I’m no closer to identifying the poet than when I received the first one, but it’s a charming mystery, isn’t it? And I love the poem:

My summer calendar has pretty much come together, in a very exciting way, with the following bookstore events planned:

AUTHOR EVENTS at DOG EARS BOOKS

July-August 2012

Thursday, July 12, 11 a.m.

Bill O. Smith – recitation & signing

Chickadees at Night

Wednesday, July 18, 4 p.m.

Laurie Kay Sommers - signing

Fishtown, Leland

Sunday, August 19, time TBA

Bonnie Jo Campbell – reading & signing

Once Upon a River

AUGUST DATE & TIME TBA

Lynne Rae Perkins (illustrator)

BOOK LAUNCH PARTY!!!

Seed to Seed: The Legend & Legacy

of John “Appleseed” Chapman

Am I thrilled that Lynne Rae Perkins wants to have her book launch party in Northport? You bet! After all, as a Newbery winner for her YA novel Criss Cross, Lynne has a place in the children’s literature Pantheon. The new book she has illustrated, Seed by Seed, by Esme Raji Codell, about Johnny Appleseed, will be released on August 21, and I’m already thinking of how to involve local apple growers, cider makers, and history folks, so keep a watch here on “Books in Northport” for details concerning that late summer book party. Maybe a Caldicott is next for Perkins?

Before then, however, only a couple of weeks from now, we will have the author of another beautiful and fun illustrated children’s book, Bill O. Smith, coming to do a recitation from his lovely Chickadees at Night. Birders and grandparents, mark your calendar for Bill’s appearance on Thursday, July 12, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., and if your grandchildren are visiting, bring them along, so they can sign Bill’s petition to have the chickadee replace the robin as Michigan’s state bird. Bill will convince everyone, I'm sure! He is a passionate chickadee advocate.

In an upcoming post (as soon as my copies arrive) I’ll tell you more about the Fishtown, Leland book and Bonnie Jo Campbell’s return visit to Dog Ears Books (Once Upon a River, now in paperback, available here now). You’ll also want to check out the summer author series sponsored by Leelanau Township Friends of the Library, because they've got a great lineup this year.

For today I want to showcase a new 500-piece jigsaw puzzle from Avery Color Studios in the U.P.  because all Avery products are “proudly printed” in the U.S.A., and nothing says “Vacation!” and “Summer cottage!” like a good Michigan jigsaw puzzle.

New from Avery Color Studios

Coming from a very different angle, Avery’s new book this season is I Talk/You Walk: 40 Years of Winning Defense Strategies, by U.P. lawyer Thomas P. Casselman, and if you’re wondering why you would want to read such a book if you’re not a lawyer, I’ll tell you that it will fascinate you for the same reasons it fascinates me: Casselman is a terrific story-teller, and his stories provide an insider’s view on Michigan’s criminal justice system. Okay, okay, I am also fascinated because all the cases come from my beloved U.P.

Can you believe it’s almost the 4^th of July? Around Memorial Day it seems that the 4th will "never" get here, then in late June we're amazed that it's "almost here," and suddenly it's past, and we're shocked that Independence Day is "already over!" for another year. Would you like to invent another holiday to add to the summer calendar? What would it be and when, and how would you celebrate it?

Evening light through walnut tree branches

Village Hearts

The photo above was taken in early morning in early June, which explains all the empty parking spaces. We’re much busier now. In fact, mid-June felt like July in a business sense, I'm happy to say (and I'm also happy that the weather was not yet midsummer broiling), but I decided to open today’s post with this photo because I like the light coming over Grand Traverse Bay and always enjoy the view from the top of Nagonaba Street. If you came into town this way, you’d be coming by the back streets, and down at the corner by the Filling Station you’d turn right to reach Dog Ears Books.

“This is the beating heart of Northport!” one of my fans exclaimed the other day as he walked in the door with a big, gusty, satisfied sigh, happy to be here. Welcome as the compliment was, I couldn’t help thinking I knew better, and I sighed, too, but with less satisfaction. My sigh was, in fact, a bit wistful. There are some people—many of them summer visitors--for whom my bookstore is important, but it’s hardly the community hub, as the long "off-season" makes painfully clear.

Then I got to thinking further about about the question. What would you say is the “heart” of our community or yours or of any other? In Northport, some people identify Barb’s Bakery, their daily social contact place, as the community heart or hub, and for some it is. Yet there are other locals who never sit down to gossip at the coffee table at Barb’s.


Our small but beautiful township library, where Deb Stannard, the librarian, has a gift for making everyone feel welcome, must be the heart of Northport for many, while for others the school or one of our five churches would be the most important place, the center of social and/or spiritual and/or intellectual life.

I posed the question of Northport’s heart to a former NPS teacher, someone whose family has been in the area for a long, long time, confiding in her that at times I feel like a real part of the community, and other times not at all. She shook her head and gave this answer:

“The heart of the community is the lives you touch,” she said, “and you touch people’s lives!”

Her words touched me. I was grateful to her for saying that. As an individual in business in a small village, it was good to hear, but her formulation is good, I realized later, in a more general way, too, because it means that any community will have many hearts. What would it mean, after all, for our town or any other if there were only one beating heart and that heart stopped? No one is indispensable, but we can all be important to others by giving of ourselves.


Community reminder: June is the third month of the second quarter of the year, so Tom’s receipts for the Northport Promise scholarship program need to get into Promise boxes by the end of the month.

One Book, Many Different Views

Yesterday the book discussion group from the Leelanau Township Library met at Dog Ears Books, due to the fact that the library remodeling project is almost but not quite finished. The book to be discussed was Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. The librarian and I admitted—and discovered that we were the only ones who felt this way—approaching the novel with some trepidation. Could the white author truly portray black women’s experiences? I won’t give my answer to the question (quite honestly, I’m still mulling it over), but this morning I found a review online which is followed by a very long and completely fascinating series of comments which cover a wide variety of responses. There are comments by both black and white respondents, those who loved the book and those who hated it, mostly women but a few men. I haven’t finished reading all the comments yet but have been struck by many and recommend reading them all, as I intend to do. Whatever you do, don’t miss Malathy’s response. Okay, I’m going back now to read the rest....

I’m coming back to say more about these comments, in hopes that a lot of people will go read them. What is most striking to me is that there is no uniform opinion in any one group, divide the respondents up how you will. Southern white women: different opinions. Southern black women: different opinions. Northern blacks: different opinions. Northern whites: different opinions. Men vs. women: no clear-cut agreement within gender. Educational level: did not determine reaction positively or negatively, as far as I can see.

Thinking further about this, I guess what I love about the diversity of comments is that it completely explodes any notion that a particular group of American readers will fall into a monolithic response, based on gender or race or geographic region or any other way anyone might be tempted to draw the lines. This alone should tell us something, although I’m not sure exactly how to put that “something” into words.

Snippets from My World Today

That is not snow in front of the Leelanau Township Library (don't forget book discussion group this coming Wednesday at 1 p.m.) but petals drifted to ground from the ornamental crabapples. Soft spring rain arrived yesterday, bringing up the level of the creek I would still like to see renamed Wildcat Creek....

Last night was a lovely evening at home for reading on the porch until it got too cool for comfort, after which reading indoors by the fire was equally lovely. Finally, after a movie, came reading in bed, and that was good, too. I confess that the most recent book on my list as of today, one I read yesterday in its entirety, is a book I have read before, Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris. It was just as good the second time around.

When I read about food, sometimes a single word is enough to detonate a chain reaction of associative memories. ... The word ptarmigan catapults me back ten years to an expedition I accompanied to the Canadian Arctic, during which a polar-bear biologist, tired of canned beans, shot a half dozen ptarmigan. We plucked them, fried them, and gnawed the bones with such ravening carnivorism that I knew on the spot I could never, ever become a vegetarian. Sometimes just the contiguous letters pt are enough to call up in me a nostalgic rush of guilt and greed. I may thus be the only person in the world who salivates when she reads the words ‘ptomaine poisoning.’ - Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris

The movie? Don’t ask! No more Werner Herzog! I have suffered enough! Books are better!

So before falling asleep, clearing my mind of W.H., I got all the way to Part Four of A Suitable Boy. At the end of Part Three Lata was carried off to Calcutta by her mother to get her away from an “unsuitable boy,” and in Calcutta she will have to put up with her horrible tyrant of a brother, so there is plenty of conflict ahead, obviously, and I will not abandon this tome of over 1400 pages after a mere hundred and eighty-seven. I’ve thought of including a gadget on this blog, “Pages Read So Far in A SUITABLE BOY: 187,” to be updated as appropriate. That way, if ever I might be tempted (as I have not yet been) to give up on the book, the thought of public shame would be enough to keep me reading. Public? Not all that public. One or two people might notice. Still (my thoughts continue), it might be rather amusing....


And now at Dog Ears Books I have three books by Bob Butz:

(1) An Uncrowded Place: The delights and dilemmas of life Up North and a young man’s search for home; (2) Beast of Never, Cat of God: The Search for the Eastern Puma; and, finally, (3) Going Out Green: One Man’s Adventure Planning His Own Burial. I was fine with cremation as a plan until I found out how much energy is consumed along with the body. (Had I known, our Nikki would have been wrapped in one of her old blankets and laid to rest in the ground.) Not your kind of subject? What about those “big cat tracks” birders found in the woods of our neighborhood? Cougar, mountain lion, puma—whatever you call the cat, it scares me much more than why bears or wary coyotes.

Geese flew over the house this morning, honking.

Tonight there is a performance of “Cinderella” up at the NCAC, performed by Northport students, and admission is free. Plan to be in your seats by 7 p.m. 7:12: [Gotcha! It was "Alice in Wonderland," and you missed the curtain!]


This is the last weekend before Memorial Day weekend. Tomorrow is the last Sunday the bookstore will not be open until after Labor Day. Drive-Thru BBQ next door also shifts to a seven-day week beginning next weekend, and our local branch bank, after today, will be open on Saturday mornings. Here are a few other sights from Saturday morning, May 22:





Plenty of places offering morning coffee and sustenance in Northport, and this is only a partial list.

Reading vs. Working Out: Is This a Fair Contest?

One of the small reading groups in which I participate (How many will there be this summer? Will our Ulysses group choose another book this year? Will the small group willing to read something in French get it together to do so?) chose our next round of books last night, and it’s lucky I’m ahead of the game with two of the titles, because one of them is L-O-N-G! It’s Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, which does not end until page 1,349. There are even family trees on the endpapers, sure sign of many characters and plot complications to keep straight. I must say, though, that right on the first page I was interested and entertained, and the first 20 or so pages move along at a lively pace. Our first assignment with this book was 100 pages, but I can see I won’t be stopping there.

Other books chosen were Wendell Berry’s Bringing It to the Table (my choice); Season of Water and Ice; An American Map; and People of the Book. Three novels and two books of essays this time around--should be a good year for that group, regardless of how far we all get with Vikram Seth.

The Leelanau Township Library book discussion group will meet next on May 26 to discuss The Town, third book in Conrad Richter's The Awakening Land trilogy, and to choose books for the next year’s cycle. Everyone brings one or two recommended books, and all books go on the table. The group circles the table, examining the books, and then people have a chance to give a pitch for each recommendation, after which the group circles a second time, to for books they would like to read. If I remember correctly, there is no rule on how many books a person may vote for, which may sound odd, but somehow the system works out just fine.

Soon Memorial Day will be upon us, and the bookstore will be open seven days a week until Labor Day. Yikes! All those days in the bookstore and all those books to read in the evening—when and how will the bookseller squeeze in cardiovascular exercise and muscle toning? No problemo, my friends, when one lives in the country! Besides hikes with the dog, there are gardens to tend and grass to mow, and behold here the apparatus of my summer home gym, also known in environmental circles as “appropriate technology.”



It is technology appropriate to the worker (moi), to the task and to the scale of the projects. I love the absence of gasoline engine roar and the way I never have to worry about my tools failing to start.

Perhaps you’re thinking that with such slow tools, my reading time is sadly compromised. It’s all in the pacing. Frequent breaks are the answer. My energy for mowing, in particular, seems to last only for short spurts, and then it’s time to switch to reading or weeding.



There is a rhythm that establishes itself with the back-and-forth, accompanied by many tall glasses of cold well water. And after all, I do still buy, sell and read books on paper, another quiet technology needing no batteries, so my reading and my exercise are all of a piece in that way, too.

More country living: A woman at the post office this morning was picking up her box of 25 live chicks! I could only see toes and patches of down through the breathing holes in the cardboard, but their peeping sounded happy and contented. New books in Dog Ears this season, by the way, include Chicken Tractor:: The Permaculture Guide to Happy Hens and Healthy Soil and Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens: Care, Feeding, Facilities. As always, we also have many used books in stock on natural science and agricultural topics. It is gratifying to me to see the increased awareness and interest in these topics, always dear to my heart.