What was the name of my book again? — Book tour stop #1: Seattle, January 27

My Vagabonding book tour started in earnest this morning at about 4 a.m., when I woke up with a twinge of anxiety at the prospect of my first actual bookstore reading, to be held at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle. It was a multi-faceted kind of anxiety, partly composed of beginner’s jitters, partly due to the fact that I hadn’t fully outlined my presentation yet, partly because I’d been sick for the past three days and was on the verge of losing my voice.

But, as much anything, I was afraid that nobody would show up at my book event — and if by chance a few people did show up, I feared they would all roll their eyes at my presentation, call me a loser, and walk out.


Fortunately, I knew that I was not alone in my pre-event anxiety Anne Lamott just came off a book tour, and, despite her literary experience, confessed this in Salon:

“I love readings and my readers, but the din of voices of the audience gives me stage fright, and the din of voices inside whisper that I am a fraud, and that the jig is up. Surely someone will rise up from the audience and say out loud that not only am I not funny and helpful, but I’m annoying, and a phony. Or they will show a video, of me at home, alone, in the bathroom. The whistle is always waiting to be blown, and in some ways, it gets me to do better work. But onstage with a hundred people watching, it causes me to swing back and forth between self-abasement and megalomania.”

My anxiety didn’t call to mind the exact same images as Lamott, but it was close enough. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I was certain that I was somehow going to Blow It at Elliott Bay Books. Just exactly how I was going to Blow It was not yet clear to me, since I’d never done a book reading before.

Thankfully, radio interviews kept me busy enough to hold off the anxiety for most of the day, starting with a live feed for Iowa Public Radio at 6:30 a.m. It was my second telephone radio interview, and I confess I’m still coming to terms with the postmodern weirdness of it all: sitting in a suburban Seattle living room talking to a guy in Iowa named Fred, who was hosting a drive-time NPR show two times zones away. Fred was familiar with my book and asked good questions (about dangers overseas, road romance, spontaneous itinerary-making, local economies), but whole time I couldn’t get over the fact I was so far removed from the Iowa drive-time audience, and that my friends Brian and Marne were quietly getting their preschool-aged kids ready for the Seattle day in the next room. I talked to the disembodied people of Iowa for 35 minutes before my old Korea expat friend Steve showed up and drove me into downtown Seattle for a five-minute interview on KMPS, a Seattle country music station. New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin was in the studio touting his book just before me, and he came out looking as disoriented as I felt. For all the glamour that’s associated with book tours, I suspect there are a lot of moments just like that one: when you feel less like a literary pundit than a harried guy out running random errands.

The remaining hours before my Elliott Bay reading were spent doing an interview for Young Pioneers magazine, then drinking Guinness with old friends in the Pioneer Square district of downtown Seattle. Jen Leo and Chris Heidrich had come up from Eugene in BootsnAll‘s charmingly low-speed BootBus, and Jen gave me a few last-minute presentation pointers (most of which I was too jittery to remember later). I drank a goodly amount of Guinness and did a shot of bourbon to take the edge off.

When we walked down to the bookstore later, I got my first big shock: Over 50 people were already milling around the room — most of whom I’d never seen before. By the time I was ready to take the podium, there were about 100 people packed into the room, and Elliott Bay was out of chairs. Since I’m certainly no household name as a scrivener (and since I didn’t get all that much local press before the reading) I can only attribute this turnout to the fact that — despite the recent downturn in what is called the “travel market” — people are intrigued with the idea behind Vagabonding, and the simple notion of taking time off to travel the world.

The big turnout was encouraging, but I was as jittery as ever. I had the audience part taken care of; now I just had to ensure that nobody sneered and walked out on me. The Elliott Bay event coordinator introduced me, and I got a nice round of applause when I told everyone that this was my first ever book event. Encouraged, I proceeded announce that I would read from my first chapter — then, in a flourish of nerves — I suddenly forgot the name of my first chapter.

I retrospect, I guess there are worse things to do at a book event than forget the name of the first chapter of your own book, but at the time it seemed like an unforgivably stupid thing to do. I turned to chapter one, finally noted the name (“Declare Your Independence“) and read it aloud to the audience, but all I could think was: “How could I have just muffed that?” I read the chapter haltingly, nose in my book, and there wasn’t much reaction from the crowd.

Fortunately, I had an ace in the hole, which was my slideshow. My travel slides, while interesting, are nothing spectacular, but the first one in the tray is a real zinger: a studio photo of me as a 1989 high school senior in Wichita, Kansas, complete with a mullet hairdo and a Cosby Show-style computer-knit sweater. This got a big laugh just like I hoped, and underscored a point I’d wanted to make to all the people who’d shown up: if the provincial, mulleted, 18-year-old dork in the picture could go on to travel the world for years at a time, anyone could. The rest of the show was kind of a rough chronology of my travel career — working as a mountaineering guide in Colorado after high school, traveling the USA for 8 months after college, earning travel money by teaching English in Korea, setting off to wander Asia for over three years. I picked photos not on their composition or beauty, but on the story or lesson behind them — improvising on the bad roads of India, chumming with the friendly Iraqis and Kurds of northeastern Syria, volunteering as a teacher in Myanmar. The audience was hooked, and by the time we got to the Q&A, there were lots of hands in the air.

In the future I’ll have to do a better job of managing the questions, since some of them had a pretty esoteric angle — i.e. what brand of sandals to buy, what the weather is like in Burma in the summer, how much do plane tickets to Athens cost. These are all valid questions, of course, but not everyone in the audience is interested in such narrow-focus topics (i.e. I need to try to keep the conversation focus more general). Since I don’t think it’s constructive to flaunt my position as a “travel expert” over everyone (after all, nobody is a true travel expert, and he who presumes to be beyond scrutiny on the road loses out on the joys of trial-and-error), I encouraged travel veterans in the audience to add their perspective and help answer each other’s questions. Jen and Chris helped get this rolling, and we ended up having a nice informal rap session. Everybody laughed a lot, and my lingering anxieties eventually melted away. By the time I’d signed everyone’s books and things wound down, there were only two copies of Vagabonding left in the store.

I had drinks in Pioneer Square with a dozen or so stragglers afterwards (including old traveler friends I knew from Korea, India, and Thailand), then drove back across Lake Washington to catch up with some more friends in the eastern suburbs. There I met up with Jeff Nienaber (my original vagabonding buddy, who went across the USA with me in 1994), who was closing up after a night of tending bar. His uncle Paul, who was my pre-travel landscaping boss in 1993 (and an accomplished vagabonder in his own right), was there smoking a stogie, and we all swapped road stories and did bourbon shots into the wee hours.

I was exhausted from the day, happy to be amongst old friends, and aware that I would have to do it all again in Portland the next day.

Next: The bungled tale of Kurt Vonnegut’s asshole — Book tour stop #2: Portland

Previous: The Amazon.com factor

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Category: Book Release and Tour Diary

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