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Muffins and Mayhem, Recipes for a Happy (if disorderly) Life
AUTHORBUZZ: Discover new books, "meet" the authors and enter to win: Goto: http://authorbuzz.com/dearreader
Dear Reader,
I grew up in a small town, Cuba City, Wisconsin population 2,000. So today's folksy guest column makes me feel right at home. Please welcome author Wendy Welch. Send her an email, say hello, she will personally reply and enter you in her book giveaway. Wendy has 15 copies of her upcoming book, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book for readers. Please be sure to include your mailing address when you email her.
Email Wendy at: [email protected]
Take it away, Wendy...
My husband and I always dreamed that we'd run a used books shop "someday." So when we spotted the perfect location--a five-bedroom Edwardian house with squeaky wooden floors and huge windows--we did what any sensible, over-educated, bibliophilic couple would do: we leaped without looking, bought the place just as the real estate market tanked, and declared ourselves booksellers. Who needs a plan when you have a dream, right?
Ha! We learned--fast--how to buy books, shelve books, value books, sell books, clean books, and repair just about anything that could go wrong with books. Repairing people turned out to be harder. What we didn't know (then) was that owning a bookstore is tantamount to running an intellectual pub, where people tell you their struggles. Although we'd expected to be surrounded by the saddest, sweetest, scariest stories ever, we had thought they would be in the books, not the customers.
Six years on, our "someday" bookstore is firmly lodged in the community, and the community is ensconced in our hearts. We run special events, have a customer core, make new friends every day, put the kettle on for endless cups of tea, slice up salads, and--when we get a moment--sell books. We can't imagine life any other way.
Bookstores are magic places, but I don't have to tell you that. They are watering holes of like-minded souls, the gathering spot for the tribe. It seems to me that readers have begun noticing how much more fun it is to shop with real people than online, and that independent bookstores are being celebrated and safeguarded more and more by the book-loving community.
That's why I wrote THE LITTLE BOOKSTORE OF BIG STONE GAP: to celebrate this way of life that some proclaim dead or dying. Jack (my husband) and I are grateful to be booksellers in a small town, and to be community members of Coalfields Appalachia, a region as misunderstood as it is fascinating. We will never willingly leave our little bookstore in Big Stone Gap. It is a place to belong.
I hope you enjoy reading about all the silly, fun things we did to reach this conclusion, as much as we did doing those bizarre, unlikely, lunatic things in the first place. And I hope you'll come visit us in our used books shop someday. We'll look forward to it.
Wendy Welch
Email Wendy at: [email protected]
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
www.muffinsandmayhem.com
* This month's Penguin Classics book is THE TUNNEL by Ernesto Sabato. Start reading now and enter to win a Penguin totebag. Go to: http://tinyurl.com/Sept12Classics
AUTHORBUZZ: AN OUTLAW'S CHRISTMAS (Fiction) by Linda Lael Miller
Restless Sawyer McKettrick saddles up in Arizona and heads for Blue River, Texas. Injured in a blinding snowstorm, he wakes up in the arms of prim and proper school teacher Piper St. James. Now he's stuck in her room behind the school house for the holidays.
Go to: http://authorbuzz.com/dearreader click on AN OUTLAW'S CHRISTMAS to read more and to email author Linda Lael Miller, you'll get a reply.
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