 Hello. It's great to be here with you. My name is Andrea Nikolai, and I am the Arlington Author's Salon MC, and I'm also Director of Libraries for the Town of Arlington. As I was saying a little bit earlier, as I was forming up the crowd before 7.30 tonight might be our last virtual salon for a while, so I want you to savor your couch, your patio, kitchen, or wherever you happen to be sitting for this program. We'll share information about the location of the October Salon well in advance, but tonight we are so thrilled to be presenting an Author's Salon with the theme Spotlight on Small Towns. We're lucky to have with us Calvin Hennick, Jennifer Dupy, and Chip Cheed. The Arlington Author's Salon is a free reading series with a twist. Each Author's presentation includes a sensory experience to complement their reading, whether it be music, photos, tasty treats, fabrics, even sculpture and smells. Although Zoom webinar obviously has its limitations, and so we will be seeing some great visuals with our Author's this evening. The Salon normally takes place at the Kickstand Cafe in Arlington Center quarterly, the first week of January, April, July, and October, with some exceptions to navigate around holidays. Our next Salon takes place October 7th, and I want to give you a few notes as you settle in tonight. The Salon will be recorded and later viewable on Arlington Community Media's TV channel and on demand at ACMI.tv. The list of attendees is not viewable during the program and won't be viewable in this recording. Each Author will have 15 minutes to read and will have a combined Q&A at the end of the program. The chat and Q&A functions are enabled and you can enter a question for the Author's anytime during the program, and I'll pose them to our Author's during the Q&A period. I do want to give a nod to our usual host Emily and the staff of the Kickstand Cafe in Arlington, a home wave from home for many writers and Arlingtonians. I also want to credit Salon co-organizer is Anjali Mitterduva, Marjan Kamali, Whitney Sherer, and Amy Yellen. This program is supported in part by a grant from the Arlington Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council estate agency. This program usually takes place in the heart of the Arlington Cultural District, which was designated in 2017 by the Mass Cultural Council. Books are for sale tonight courtesy of the Bookrack. The Bookrack owner, Mike Buglio, has an Author's Salon page on bookshop.org and books by tonight's authors will be featured there. We will share out the link during the Q&A and in the chat. It is actually already in the chat, so please check it out after the program. Our first author this evening is Calvin Hennick. Calvin Hennick's debut memoir, Once More to the Rodeo, received the Pushkart Press Editor's Book Award and was named one of the 100 best books of the year by Amazon. A journalist by training, Calvin has written for dozens of publications including the Boston Globe, Esquire, and Runners World, and has published fiction and essays in outlets including the Bellevue Literary Review, Baltimore Review, and The Drum. Recently, he has funded his creative writing habit largely through corporate work, offering white papers and blog posts for Fortune 500 companies, while also occasionally finagling film travel assignments that have taken him to places like Italy, Costa Rica, Barbados, Antigua, and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and two young children. Please welcome to the stage Calvin Hennick. Hey everybody. I'm Calvin. This is my book. Thanks for coming to the world debut of my quarantine man bun. So this is a road trip memoir called Once More to the Rodeo. It came out in late 2019. And it's pretty appropriate for tonight because it's a road trip that I took with my young son who was five at the time, Niall, to my small Iowa hometown called Maxwell, population 800. And the title Once More to the Rodeo is sort of a play on the E.B. White essay title Once More to the Lake. Sorry, I'm starting a timer for myself over here. But it's also in reference to the fact that there's an annual two-day rodeo in my hometown for some reason somehow, right? Like this tiny 800 person town, which is like the size of a college dorm is able to hold an annual two-day rodeo. So tonight I want to read a couple of short passages. The book is really about family and race and fatherhood and manhood and class and geography and a bunch of different stuff that really doesn't come into play into these sections. Tonight I just want to sort of give you a taste of what Maxwell is like, which is, you know, a town that's small is kind of got its own personality and it's kind of unique. So the first piece that I'm going to read is actually at the rodeo. And I'm going to share some photos to give you a sense of what it looked like. These are photos that I took on the road trip when I was with my son. All right, so this is from late in the book, once more to the rodeo. We meet Bryce and his family. Bryce is my high school best friend, for dinner back at the park where things have finally picked up. It's still not the same old settlers. That's the name of the annual carnival that I remember from years ago, but it's no longer completely dead like it was earlier in the day. Kids shriek on the rides and farmers eat with their families under the big tent near the van stand, waiting for the rodeo to start. I get an aisle a slice of pizza from a food truck and order myself a walking taco, which is a bag of Doritos with seasoned beef, cheese, lettuce, tomato, and sour cream all stuffed inside served with a fork and a napkin. My wife claims that this is the most disgusting thing she's ever heard. We eat a picnic table and a parade of old friends and acquaintances screams bye. This is my son Nile on the screen when he was five, he's 10 now. Some are surprised to see me, but others let out only the barest chuckle of recognition and then greet me with a casual, hey Calvin, as though we just saw each other last Tuesday. I don't fool myself into thinking that I could live here again, but I also don't feel out of place. Not since college have I run into so many people I know in one spot. I forget entirely that there's anything different about Nile, up until I see a black teenage boy walk by with a group of his white friends, and I find myself wondering the same thing other people must think when they see my son. What's he doing here? We finish our food and walk over to the trailers lining the rodeo arena, browsing among spurs, bandanas, cowboy boots, and neon lassos. Amy plays over the arena speakers while we poke around. One table is full of t-shirts with slogans like the second amendment is my gun permit and I'm all for gun control. I use both hands. Just this sheer aggression of the slogan sets me on my heels a bit. Never mind the fact that the people who buy them will presumably be well armed. Owen, my friend Bryce's son, picks out a black cowboy hat with blue blinking lights at the six points of a silver sheriff's star and he looks hilarious wearing it with his neon green Batman t-shirt, jean shorts, and tall cowboy boots. I offer to buy Nila hat but he says he doesn't want one. You don't want a cowboy hat, I say. I really have turned you into a city boy. I just don't want one, he says. Okay, okay. I let the outburst slide without comment. He's tired. We all head inside the arena where we went run into Brett and Courtney who graduated with Bryce and me and who are named homecoming king and queen during our senior year of high school. They have a boy named Nolan who's a year older than Nile and a daughter of the same age as Peanut, my daughter, and we all find seats together in the top couple rows of the bleachers. It's not yet dusk but the shadows elongate as the sun prepares to set stretching out over the middle of the muddy rodeo oval. As the crowd settles in I spot a handful of cowboy hats but more people are wearing Hawkeyes or Cyclones or John Deere gear. At seven o'clock the emcee, a stocky man and a green button down on a white cowboy hat rides out into the middle of the oval on a white horse holding a wireless microphone in one hand. Ladies and gentlemen, he says, his voice echoing over the PA. Who's proud of this great nation that we live in? A big whoop goes up from the crowd. Tonight is a celebration of American heritage and a cowboy's way of life, the emcee says. If you haven't already, I ask you to stand with me and please remove your hats. I expect the national anthem to begin playing but instead after a brief pause the man leads the crowd in prayer. Our most gracious and heavenly father tonight we, he begins, the horse, Nile says. I shush him quietly but I was whispering. The many blessings you bestow upon us each and every moment the emcee continues. As cowboys and cowgirls we don't ask for any special favors. We only ask that you help us to compete as honest as the horses we ride and in a manner as clean and as pure as the wind that blows across this great land of ours. So when we do make that last ride that is inevitable for all of us to make to that place up there where the grass grows green and lush and stirrup high, you'll tell us, come on in cowboy, your entry fees have been paid in full, amen. All right, so that was the rodeo. I wanted briefly to read just a page or so to about the Maxwell Museum and again it's an 800 person town and they have a museum that spills into two buildings. One question I get asked about the book sometimes is how I got so much detail into the book and as my bio mentioned I'm a journalist by training and during the road trip I took all these photos that you're seeing and I also had a recorder going in my pocket for much of the road trip and then also was taking notes. So I'm going to read this first paragraph about the museum and then I'm just going to show all the photos that went into that paragraph and then I'll keep reading a little bit. We let the kids go on a couple of rides at the park and then head to the Town Museum on Main Street where Bryce's wife Christina meets us. The museum's displays are impressive if a bit random. There are rooms made up to look like the old school like old school houses and general stores but there are also old Peruvian coins a copy of a French newspaper from the day after FDR died and a jar labeled $1,000 or more of shredded money. There are extensive collections of pencils, geodes, seashells, license plates, and barbed wire. The basement is full of ancient farm equipment. On a table on the first floor a tattered orange swim cap sits on a white styrofoam dummy head on which someone has scrawled in black sharpie. Remember when we all wore bathing caps? All right so forgive me but I'm going to read most of that paragraph again going through the photos. There are rooms made up to look like old school houses and general stores but there are also old Peruvian coins a copy of a French newspaper from the day after FDR died and a jar labeled $1,000 or more of shredded money. There are extensive collections of pencils, geodes, seashells, license plates, and barbed wire. The basement is full of ancient farm equipment. On a table on the first floor a tattered orange swim cap sits on a white styrofoam dummy head on which someone has scrawled in black sharpie. Remember when we all wore bathing caps? I still don't know why that's in the museum. So you see sort of you know the trick here is that I was documenting everything as much as possible and then sort of figuring out what I wanted to put in the memoir later on. I'm actually stunned by people who are able to write completely from memory and obviously that's how most memoirs are written. They're not reported in this way. But here are some of the photos that I left out or I didn't mention you know in the book itself. You see this extensive collection of antique baby gear, records of tragedies in the town, an old phone that looks like an insane cartoon character, a buffalo pelvis donated by someone named Richard Welch. Again very random. A horseshoe collection. There's the doctor's office. Oh and then this was according to the signage it took first place in woodworking in the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. So I don't know how the Maxwell Museum ended up with that and then this is an old-fashioned sort of movie theater facade. All right I'm going to continue reading the rest of the page then I'll be done. We come to a hallway with all the Maxwell High senior portraits from before the schools combined with Collins and I find my grandfather in the class of 1949. Papa stares out at me from behind the glass, 18 years old, his hair neatly parted beaming and dressed in a striped suit jacket. In his grin I see my own big front teeth. I see the squinty eyes that Nile and I share. Unlike in the photos in his widow's basement Papa looks happy and hopeful filled with energy. His entire life lies in front of him. In another room I'm surprised to find a photograph of myself. It's part of an exhibit called Citizens of Tomorrow featuring the donated school portraits of a bunch of kids from the 1990s. Such as these. Their preteen awkwardness enshrined forever. Alice must have sent them my picture. It's quite something. These aren't me yet. I'm 12 years old in the shot wearing a sweater vest over a denim shirt and holding Alice's pet shitsuit Bridget smiling like an idiot. I'll get to it in a minute. Take some courage. Bryce cracks up when he sees the picture then leans down and snaps a photo the photograph with his cell phone so we can show our other friends and make fun of me later on. I'm glad I'm not in any of these, he says putting his phone away. We leave the room and follow the kids to a display on military uniforms. Whatever I say, I'm immortal now. And here's the grand finale that shouted me at 12 with the dog. Thanks. Thank you so much, Calvin. Oh my goodness. Who wants to go to the Maxwell Museum? I know I do. Just made my bucket list. That was amazing. And that picture. Wow. Worth the wait, Calvin. Worth the wait. Okay. We are going to move on to our second reader for the evening. Jennifer Dupie's debut novel, The Little French Bridal Shop, was chosen as Good Housekeeping Magazine's April 2021 Book of the Month. She is a graduate of Brown University where she received her honors in creative writing. She's an active member of Grub Street Writing Community in Boston and has published in the Feminist Press. She was a semifinalist for the 2016 James Jones first novel competition and a semifinalist for the 2016 Falker Wisdom Competition. Jennifer lives in a historic house just outside Boston with her family and is currently at work on her next two novels. Please welcome to the stage Jennifer Dupie. Hi everybody. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks so much to the Arlington Author Salon and Calvin, that was amazing. Those photos were incredible. Thank you so much for sharing them. So let me take a moment here to share my screen. I'm really honored to be here tonight with Calvin and Chip and honored to have you here with me. Tonight's theme is about small towns and really my debut novel, The Little French Bridal Shop, is a story conceived of small towns. I grew up north of Boston on the North Shore of Boston and my grandmother lived for many years in the small seaside town of Beverly Farms next to Manchester by the sea and Rockport, Massachusetts. In fact, I got married in Rockport. So these small seaside towns are really ingrained in my psyche and I really drew on them, particularly Beverly Farms where my grandmother lived and my father grew up as I embarked on the opening pages of The Little French Bridal Shop. So I thought that I would just tell you some of the stories behind the book to give you a sense of where they came from. But first, let me tell you a little bit about the book itself. The story is set in motion when my protagonist, Larissa Pearl, returns to her small seaside hometown upon the death of her great aunt Ursula. She's a bit of a funk. She's just been fired from her job. She's broken up with her boyfriend and she's struggling to cope with her mother's failing health. On a whim, she wanders into the local bridal shop and buys a dress, though she has no groom, and as you can imagine, small town chaos ensues and the story develops from there. Really, it ends up being a story about Larissa's struggle to cope with her mother's worsening dementia and how Larissa engages in more and more deception to escape that dementia and then eventually finds a way to cope with it. The story for me started with a house. I've always had a fascination with old houses and I had a house and I imagined it a brick house kind of up on the hill overlooking the ocean. I named the house Elmhurst. A lot of people have asked, does Elmhurst really exist? The answer is yes and no. As I said, I've always had a fascination with old houses and when my husband and I started dating, I realized he had a fascination with old houses as well and we would often take walks down nearby Elmhurst Road in Arlington to admire a historic house there and we kind of imagined what it would be like if we lived in that house and just sort of fantasized about it. I was writing these opening pages of the book and I had this house on a hill and I named the house Elmhurst, in tribute to that house on Elmhurst Road. Flash forward for years. I'm now married to said husband and Elmhurst from Arlington goes on the market and we think, oh my god, it's Kismet, right? It's fate. We're meant to have this house. It's in the book and we're going to get the house and then it's going to be a huge book and it's going to be made into a movie. You can imagine how your mind as a writer starts going. We make a bit on the house, but as many of you may know, the housing market in Boston and particularly Arlington is red hot and there's 10 bids and we don't get the house. But I'd already written the house into the book and so Elmhurst stayed as part of the book. But in addition, aside from Elmhurst and Arlington, I had some houses in my mind's eye of ones that I actually knew on the North Shore in Boston and I thought I'd share some of those with you tonight. So here on the left hand side is Long Hill in Beverly. It's a house that's part of the trustees of reservation and Elmhurst, I imagined to be sort of that. I think it's a Georgian look of a house, sort of a stately house like that. And then there's Misslewood here on the right and you'll see that there's a Rolls-Royce here in the foreground, which I sort of liked because my book actually also has a Rolls-Royce in it, although my Rolls-Royce is a 1979 Rolls-Royce and not one as old as this. But then there were some actual houses in Beverly Farms in Manchester that I wanted to share with you as well. And these are older houses that I grew up around when I was walking the beaches of the North Shore. So over here on the left hand side, this house was actually owned by a childhood friend of my grandmother and her husband. And you can imagine the ocean on the other side of the house there and we would kind of park ourselves in front of her house on the beach. This is one that's nearby that one. And it's an older photo. I sort of thought the older photos were fun to share. But then here's a newer photo of one of the houses. In this house, I will say is just way too grand to be the Elmhurst in my book. My Elmhurst is grand, but not quite this grand. And this one's been actually newly renovated. It was actually owned by Eleonora Sears, who was one of the first well-known ranked tennis players. And up in the corner here is that same house before it's renovated back in the day. This is at the far end of West Beach and Beverly Farms. And if you took a walk, you could see it there still. And this one is at the far end of Singing Beach in Manchester, Massachusetts. So my Elmhurst in the book, I imagined kind of an amalgam of these houses up on a promontory overlooking the ocean. Next, I want to give you a sense of the wallpaper, but first I'd like to do a short reading from the novel. Larissa has just inherited this house from her great aunt Ursula and she's kind of walking through the house and sort of trying to figure out what she's going to do with it. She left the photos behind and headed down the stairs to the dining room. She smiled as she always did at the wallpaper. A heavy navy blue imprinted with a repeating pattern of tan and white pheasants glancing over their shoulders apprehensive. The pheasants looked so silly, startled out of their forward momentum that she couldn't help but laugh. But her smile shrunk when she turned the corner and spotted a large strip of the paper peeling away from the wall above the fireplace dangling like a tongue on a cartoon dog. Crap, she whispered to herself. If her mother had been more with it, it was a sort of project they might have tackled together. A mother, daughter, do it yourself special. But no, it was too big to manage. Best to just make the repairs and sell the place. So after balancing on a chair and trying to no avail to press the paper back into place, she gathered her things, headed outside and tramped back down the hill toward Duffy's hardware where she hoped to find some wallpaper glue. She'd almost made it there when partway through Main Street her gaze alighted once again on the mannequin in the window of the bridal shop. She stopped and peered in. The model's hand she noticed now had been painted with a pale pink French manicure and she had a faux diamond adorning her delicately raised ring finger. Larissa snickered yet something took hold of her, a mischievous and imposterous side of herself that had recently been surfacing to her surprise and delight. Wouldn't it be fun just for a laugh she thought to take a peek at those dresses, to pretend for a moment that she was that mannequin or even her own mother pre-illness skipping down the steps of the church? How did one feel she wondered wearing such a dress? She suspected she'd feel ridiculous, pompous and overplumed like a peacock. But no one would have to know she wasn't serious. Would she dare? She sucked into breath and smiled to herself. Yes, she would. And you notice there's just this description of the wallpaper in the book. And that was something that was another kind of inspiration from a small town. This time in Rockport I had gotten married. We had the house. I had started the book and I also had a four month old daughter. And so I was struggling to kind of find time to focus on the book and develop it. So I gifted myself to a writing weekend at the Emerson Inn in Rockport, Massachusetts. And I got a good night's sleep. I was feeling like great. I'm going to get a great morning of writing in. And I was about to settle in, but I found myself completely distracted by this large pattern, repeating pattern of tan and white pheasants kind of looking over their shoulders. And they had this look that I described in the passage I just read where they're sort of looking over their shoulders going, kind of like gagging or something. And I kind of had a thing about wallpaper. I'm sort of drawn to wallpaper. Maybe some of you out there feel that way as well. So I was interested, but I also couldn't stop laughing and I couldn't stop looking. So I began to write the wallpaper into the narrative. And eventually it really became quite prominent. It's just a recurring theme in the narrative. And as I went back to revise those scenes several months later, I realized that I had neglected to snap any photos of the wallpaper. And you know, writers, we're an obsessive bunch. We need to like see the thing that we have. And we're also suspicious, right? We need to feel like, oh my God, if I don't have it in front of me and can't describe it exactly, the book is going to fail. So I started out by searching online to see, you know, what could I find? You can find anything online, right? And I searched Emerson in dining room wallpaper. And I found a whole bunch of wedding photos that features the wallpaper in the background. So you know, I don't know these people. These are just stolen from, you know, Heather Fuller's photography site. And it gives a pretty good representation, at least it gives you a sense of sort of the volume of these like pheasants together. But I found, understandably, that the photos were not focused on the pheasants because it's a wedding. These are wedding photos. And I really needed a photo of the pheasant himself. So I called up the inn and I said, can you just snap a photo? And they said, well, the inn is under renovation and they are tearing down the pheasant wallpaper. But we have extra rules of it. And if you'd like to come, we'd be happy to give you a large swath of the wallpaper. And indeed, of course, that's just what I did. And I had a framed photo. In fact, I have it here. I had this framed photo of the pheasant wallpaper in my office for the duration of the writing of the book. The last thing I'd like to share with you is a special flower that's in the book. The book, as I mentioned, deals with some challenging topics. The mother's worsening dementia and liver so struggle with that. But ultimately, it's really a hopeful book. And I think this flower is a symbol of that hope. It's a flower called the night blooming serious. And I know about this flower from my mother-in-law who cultivated them. And it's a flower that, well, you may have it for some amount of time, like the years, like for instance, we had a cutting for seven years and it did nothing other than produce these sort of gangly shoots and no blooms. But then one day, a bloom will start to develop. And in the morning, the bloom will start to open and it will spend all day opening. And then at the end of the day, it will be open. Let me just read one short passage about it so you can get a sense. And then I'll show you some pictures. And the three of them sat silently, watching the flower emerge. They paused. They looked away. They met each other's eyes. And always after looking away for several minutes, amazingly, the bloom had revealed a bit more of itself. Its crinkled white petals slowly unfolding into a still scrunched star. The transformation was slow but steady. They could almost see it in real time. They took a break, finished dinner, made some tea. And when they returned, cups in hand, that's when Jack began to understand the magic of this plant. The fully-beared bloom was enormous, a huge, creamy, white, multifaceted star as big as a saucer around. And the smell was intoxicating, heady and potent and tropical with hints of vanilla and rum, jasmine and musk, absolutely filling the room. So I'll just give you a quick glimpse here. Here's our bloom at 11.30 a.m., the morning that it bloomed. And you'll see it's really fully closed. And then all the way at the end of the day at 9.50 p.m., it isn't really quite close to fully open. And then finally at 11.30 p.m., fully open in all its glory, just, you know, spreading its aroma across the room. So I'll leave you with that. But I want to thank everybody for joining. I want to also mention that I'd love to visit your book group. So if you care, oh, and here are three of them together. So I hope you'll seek me out and invite me to visit. With that, I'll hand it back to you, Andrea, and look forward to hearing Chip's talk. Thank you so much, Jennifer. That was wonderful. And that flower is absolutely gorgeous. All right. Our final reader of the evening, Chip Cheek, is the author of the best-selling novel, Cape May, which received starred reviews from Perkis and Booklist, was an American Booksellers Association indie next pick, and Indies introduced selection and has been published in six languages. His stories have appeared in the Southern Review, Harvard Review, Washington Square, and other journals and anthologies. And he has been awarded fellowships to the Bredloch Writers Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, and the Vermont Studio Center. Chip lived in Massachusetts for many years and is a recent transplant to Redondo Beach, California, where he lives with his wife and daughter, where he is at work, and where he is at work on his second novel. Please welcome to the stage, Chip Cheek, our final reader of the evening. Welcome, Chip. Hello. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Andrea. Thank you to the salon for having me. And those were just amazing presentations, Calvin and Jennifer. So I am the author of Cape May. Here's the book. And so my Cape May, the beautiful seaside town of Cape May, New Jersey, will be the small town I'm representing. So it's going to be some echoes with Jennifer's presentation. Actually, I also have some beautiful houses and seaside locales to show you. But so I'll tell you just a little bit about the book. The novel is set in 1957 and it's about two young newlyweds who, young, naive newlyweds from Georgia, Henry and Effie, who go to Cape May for their honeymoon. The town is a place that really looms large for Effie because it's where she spent her summers as a child. And so in her memory, the town is bright and exciting and teaming with people. But when Henry and Effie arrive there for their honeymoon, it's the off season and they find a place that's almost completely deserted. And most of the businesses are shut down for the season. And so that quickly becomes depressing and awkward and they're still shy of each other. So they decide to cut their honeymoon short and go back home. But before they leave, they run into a group of sophisticated, glamorous, disillute socialites who sort of sweep them up into their antics and all their drama. And suddenly this town becomes very, very exciting. They gallivant around the town. They sneak into the abandoned houses. They drink a lot of gin. They go skinny dipping and inevitably lines are crossed, trouble is had. So that's the book. And that's, so the town is very much a character in the book. And so a little later, I'll show, you know, I'll share some pictures and a couple fun facts about the town. But first, the novel, when I was looking through my files recently trying to like figure out what would be an interesting thing to show for this event, I sort of discovered that I've been misremembering how this book came into being and how I started writing it. And this is really relevant to me now because, you know, as someone who's like struggling in a productive good way to get into my second novel, because this, even though no matter how much I've read about this process and how much I've successfully done it in the sense of actually finished sort of a book and published it, it's still the process is still such a mystery to me. I'm just speaking for myself. I have a lot of smart friends who seem to be able to do this repeatedly and well, but not me. So I thought I'd kind of nerd out and talk about process a little bit and maybe actually show a bit of the first draft and just read a couple small passages, because it was kind of a, you know, discovery for me, you know, just to be, oh, yeah, that's how it was, you know, you can kind of sort of, you know, psych yourself out with this process. So, but first, just a little background about where the novel came from. The novel grew out of a different book I'd been working on set in Georgia in the 20s and 30s. And it was in the first person that there was a young narrator named Henry. And I decided that he needed to be married to this, at that time, minor character Effie. And so I sent them off on a honeymoon to Cape May. And I picked Cape May because I have a friend who owns a, whose family used to own a beach house in Cape May. So I was, I've spent some time there and was familiar with it and thought it was a lovely town. And so I just kind of wanted to shake up the novel. I wanted to get the novel out of its setting and kind of get some fresh air into it. And so the way I've always described it is that as soon as I brought Henry and Effie into Cape May, the novel just took off. Like I just became obsessed with it. And I dropped the previous novel I'd been working on. I just, you know, was carried along by the, by the thrill. And I wrote this book, I wrote the first draft and a fever in like two months. And just, you know, carried by the thrill and excitement of all that. And that is like partially true, but it, it misstates like what made the novel come to life. And so I kind of, I wanted to, to share that with you guys, if you think that, that might be interesting. So I'm going to share my screen here. So this is the first draft. And, you know, I don't expect, obviously I don't expect anyone to be able to actually read this, you know, this is just a kind of a visual aid, but this is an actual scan of my first draft. And it, you know, it looks like it looks like the opening of a novel. But at the time, when I was, when I wrote this, when I was writing these, when I was writing these words, they were just like the continuation of that previous novel I was, I was working on. And it was in the first person. And so, and so it begins with the wedding. You know, Henry and Effie getting married. They are, you know, they do their vows, they go to the reception. And by the end of the second page, they are on a train to Atlanta, which is the first leg of the trip up to Cape May. They're still on the train. They're alone together. It's kind of awkward and cute. They make it to Atlanta. There's the Atlanta train station. They are still on the train. Now they board the next leg of the journey to Cape May. There's a little sexual tension. This is an overnight trip. And so are we going to consummate our marriage on this in here on the train? Effie's like, absolutely not. You've got to be joking. And so they're still on this damn train. They wake up the next morning. They take the last leg. But in here on page six, still on the train, but they arrive in Cape May. It's Henry's first glimpse of the ocean. There's the beautiful houses and they arrive at the house where Effie used to stay as a child. And she's very excited. She shows them around the house and all is looking forward to all the things they're going to do together. And then they go for a walk. And Effie realizes that it's kind of strange here now because it's the off season and everything is empty. And at the time that I was writing this, again, I don't know why I chose to make it desolate and empty. I don't know. I just thought it was kind of cool. But here we go. They go to a diner. There's a young waiter there who says, if you're coming from Georgia, why didn't you go to Florida? It's a really good question. So they walk around town. They go back to the house. They don't know what they're doing with each other. The night ahead is looming. It's like their first night together. Everything's kind of weird. Effie decides she's going to take a nap. She sleeps pretty late, wakes up in the evening. And then I want to read just a little bit where this is an important part. So they go out and decide to take another walk into the town in the evening. And here I'll start here. Nothing whatsoever was open in town. The wind had picked up considerably in the trees, roared overhead, an echo of the sea, and shutters banged and something metal was crying out. Effie had a thin shawl over her shoulders, but it wasn't enough. She huddled close to me as we walked. The dark spires and widow's walks of the Victorian cottages stood out against the rising sliver of moon. We saw a brightly lit corner ahead and approached it eagerly and saw that it was the same diner where we had had lunch. We'd approached it from a different direction. We went inside. Two men sat at the counter, a couple of seats between them, and they turned around to look at us and then turned back to their plates. We sat at the corner. The young waiter wasn't there. A middle-aged woman was behind the counter and took our order pleasantly enough. We ate in silence and drank a cup of coffee, paid our bill, and left. On the way back, I noticed Effie wipe her eyes. And when I asked if anything was a matter, she burst into tears. I stopped her in the middle of the road. Effie, I said, what's wrong? It's terrible here, she said. It's not the same. It doesn't feel right. I took her shoulders. What do you mean? But I knew what she meant. We just got here, Effie. We have a whole four weeks ahead of us. I know she cried desperately. Baby, I said, wrapped my arms around her. She was so small. Her head fit under my chin. Don't cry. Please don't cry. It'll be all right. It's terrible and lonely here. She pushed away and looked at me. That waiter was right. We should have gone to Florida. But I love it here. How can you? It's so terrible. So this page, page 12, this is where the novel was born to me. And when I reread this recently, I kind of remembered that this bit of completely mediocre writing, this is where the light came on. And it's like, I had characters that were vivid to me. I had a situation that was evocative and interesting. But it was the moment that Effie started crying that it turned into a story. And it wasn't that there was a thrill or it was like a sexy fever that was kind of compelling this very, you know, this book. It was that the words disappeared or like I was able to see through them. And it's like, this is the spot right here where I stopped thinking. And I knew at this moment, I remember writing this page. And I knew at this moment that I had a book. And I finished that first draft really quickly. It was a train wreck, but I finished it. And then I spent the next two, two and a half years thinking a lot about it, thinking a great about the words. And this is the first of many, many, many, many pages of notes reading and rereading and just tearing up that draft and kind of creating an outline out of what I had already made. I made lists of things. This is a list of motifs. You know, again, you can't read it, but there's like the sea, the desolation, sex. I actually diagram the sexual tension at one point. I rewrote the book two times. And then I'd like now to read you just the very opening of the book as in its final form. The beaches were empty. The stores were closed. And after sunset, all the houses on New Hampshire Avenue stood dark. For months, Effie had been telling him about this place and the many things they would do here. But she had only known it in the summer. And this was the end of September. She had not understood what offseason meant. They had come up from Georgia on the overnight train. They were supposed to spend two weeks here for their honeymoon. I love it, Henry said their first evening. It's like we got the whole place to ourselves. Effie laughed at that. A minute later, she began to cry. It's nothing, she said. It's nothing really. Don't coo over me. I'm just tired. That's all. She smiled at him. I'm glad you like it. We're going to have a wonderful time. So you can see that compression of 12 pages into that moment. Now, it goes on from there. And they go through the desolate town. I kind of keep a version of the scene in the diner because I love the line. It's like, why didn't you go to Florida? And it's a few days later that Effie kind of says, I'm over it. This is too depressing. We have to go. It's just the miracle of revision. But the point I'm making is that there was something very specific that the book was born with. It was born with that first real turn in the story. It was an action. And I didn't know where the story was going to go from there. But I knew I was going to see it to the end. And I'm hoping, I'm looking for that feeling again. So that's the book. And I want just to, if I have a couple more minutes, I just want to show a couple, you know, just town pictures. This is Aunt Lizzie's house. This is my friend Lizzie's house. And this is where I imagine Henry and Effie stay when they're in Cape May. This is a residential neighborhood in Cape May. Nondescript. But these are just kind of, this is kind of a layout of the house and stuff. This is the backyard where some naughty things happen in the book. Here's the neighborhood. Again, kind of nondescript. But you walk a few minutes from here. And it looks like this. And this is what Cape May is famous for. Is this really beautifully well preserved Victorian architecture. It was actually the first seaside resort in the U.S. And vacationers were coming, started coming there as early as the mid 18th century. And it really became increasingly popular over the course of the 19th century. In 1878, there was an enormous fire that destroyed 30 blocks of the town center. And the reconstruction afterwards was almost entirely in this Victorian fashion. And so because of that, and later preservation, the town just has this beautifully preserved and plentiful Victorian architecture. You can see the cute, you know, quaint little houses and stuff. It's still a popular beach town. Very wonderful place to be. And here's the scene of the beach. These are hotels and BNBs on Beach Avenue, which features pretty prominently in the book. That center building is, that's in the, what's called the steamboat style. And I found a quote, there's a New York Times critic called it the architectural equivalent of a John Philip Sousa march, which seems exactly right to me. But yeah, that's it. That is, that's the book. And that's Cape May. So thank you guys so much. This is really fun. Thank you, Chip. That was great. And oh my gosh, those pictures are gorgeous. I love how these small town photos are speaking to one another throughout the presentation. I'm bringing all of our authors back on screen now. And you have to imagine the audience cheering at this point because they would be. And one of the hardest things about these Zoom readings is the fact that you can't read the crowd and you can't see the applause. The chat is lively, which is fantastic, but not the same as a room full of people clapping. So I have to do it for them. Thank you so, so much. I'm going to move into the Q&A and we're going to keep all of our authors on screen for the Q&A. And the first question we're going to start with is from audience member Shelley, and it's directed to Calvin. Calvin, what prompted the trip and what did you tell Nile the reason was? So I very early in the book talk about what the upshot of the trip is for me, which is that my son, who's biracial, was about to enter kindergarten. And I kind of was having this existential panic attack about sending him out into the world. And the protective bubble that I've been able to place over him his entire life, beginning to pop and burst for the first time. And so I talk in the book about how, you know, I didn't grow up with strong male role models. I've never been a black man in America and have nothing to teach my son about that. And then I just sort of also said that definitions of manhood, masculinity are kind of changing in ways that I don't feel like we're talking a lot about yet. So I was just like getting the car and figured out on the road kind of was the idea. And, you know, Nile at five, what I told him was that we were out to have the most fun ever. That was the goal for the road trip. But now it's sort of become like a photo album to him. I read parts of it to him while I was working on it. And he knows about the book exists. He hasn't read it himself. He's only 10 still. But he, you know, he remembers the trip sort of partly because, you know, my process of working on the book and talking to him about it. So I'm not sure how much of it he remembers, like fully remembers, and how much of it he remembers kind of the memory of it. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. This question, this next question is for everyone, but it was inspired by Jen's reading. You all have such great details in your books and seem to spend a lot of time thinking and researching and photographing real things that were then incorporated into your books. What advice do you have for other writers who want to do research on real places and incorporate that research into their fiction or nonfiction? And I'll start with directing that question to Jen, since it was inspired by Jen's reading, but it'll be nice to hear from all of you, Jen. You know, so I think, I think, you know, using real places and sort of real history for inspiration for your work can be incredibly rich and meaningful. But I think you also have to make sure to choose things that have resonance in your work. So there's the sort of two sides to kind of the same coin, right? You need to hone in on the details that will serve your narrative, right? So you don't want to just kind of include extra in these details that unless they add color and kind of setting to the work. So there's that side of it where you want to pick and choose things that will really infuse the narrative with the residents and kind of give meaning. And then the flip side is I think you don't want to be also constrained too much by real places, right? And so, you know, in the writing of my book, for instance, I knew very early on that I would base it on something like Beverly Farms, but I didn't want it to be Beverly Farms exactly. I didn't want to be constrained by just Beverly Farms. And so I did give it a fictional name so that freed me up to kind of invent things and not have people saying, well, you know, but the gas station isn't exactly there. And you know, that kind of thing. So that's my starting advice. I'm sure there's a lot more that Chip and Calvin will have to offer. Over to you, Chip. Yeah, well, I was going to I was going to jump in just because I think there's a closer correspondence with the novelist. And, you know, that's a different question with memoir. You can hear me, right? Yes. So yeah, with me, like, I have not been back to Kate May since I started writing this book. Like, last time I was in Kate May, it was like, well before I started writing this book. And I always intended to go back, you know, I was like, ah, I got one of these drafts, like last draft is going to be like a research draft, you know, I'm just going to like fix the stuff that's wrong. But then we found out we were going to have a baby and I was just like, I'm just going to finish this book, screw it, send it out. And I feel like, and I just made it okay that this is a fictional version of Kate May. And I wanted to be like respectful of the the the big things, obviously, the things that are important in like have no significant error. But like, for example, the street that they're staying on is a fictionalized street in a real neighborhood. So there's a neighborhood in Kate May in which all the streets are have state names. And I so I put them on New Hampshire Avenue. There is no New Hampshire Avenue. The town is that the street is actually based on Maryland Avenue. And I did that because I didn't want to be constrained kind of like Jennifer was saying by the actual arrangement of houses in this neighborhood, there isn't one of those beautiful Victorian houses, but I needed there to be a Victorian house like a few houses down. And so I was like, I'm going to put it there. The Marina is a very fanciful version of the Kate May Marina. I have no idea how the Marina is laid out. But it's in my novels laid out a certain way. I found out after the book was published that in 1957, only a little dinky regional rail line would have connected Kate May to any other place. So they really wouldn't have been able to get there in the way that I have it in the novel. And I remember before it published, it was after it was sold before it published. And the fact checkers were like, do you care about this? And I was like, I don't care about it's like, because it's not it doesn't have a material difference on the story. So yeah, so I'm kind of glad I wasn't able to make that research trip because that might have bugged me too much. And I might have worried about those details more than I needed to. The only thing that I would add would just be to get everything down and then sort it out later. You never know what is going to end up serving as a meaningful detail. Ideally, you want in a memoir or in a novel, I think you want most of your details to be pulling at least double duty. So they're not just like the carpet was red or the person's hair was brown or whatever. You want the carpet to characterize your character in some way. The items in the museum only really have two purposes. One is here's what I'm seeing and two is, Hey, isn't this pretty weird? Like those are the, you know, the purposes behind all those details. But by, you know, getting it down every single thing in that museum and photographs or notes, I was able to later on decide, you know, what do I think is good enough to put in? I'll have a question for you, Calvin from Theo. What memories and questions does Nile have about your road trip now that he's older? And has he seen the images or the images in the book? I don't have the physical book in front of me. So I don't know. They're not. I kind of mentioned before that the memories are kind of hazy and an amalgamation of actual memories and then, you know, him me talking about it. But can I answer a different question? I saw one about what am I working on now? And I just wanted to, I brought it up to share my screen because I'm working on a novel, but I'm also working on a comic book with Nile and he's 10 years old now. And I just have to show people his art because I absolutely can't pass up an opportunity to brag about him. So this is Niles. Can you guys see it? Awesome. Yeah, this is the comic book that he and I are working on. We're sending out little five, five page mini issues via email, but he does absolutely all the art. Wow. I don't do anything. And he just turned 10 in May. So this is called bad cop versus good cop. You know, for now you can get it via email. I'll put the email address in the chat if people want to join the email list for it. Wow. That would be amazing. Please do. I cannot believe he's 10. Yeah, crazy. It's amazing. All right. We've got another question for everyone inspired by Chip. It's hard to follow up a debut. How are you going about finding that spark that Chip mentions finding for, that you mentioned finding for Kate May as you work on your second book? Yeah, I think for me it's just, it's a matter of process. I'm very much, you know, said this before, but it's just like, you know, for me it's not kind of waiting around for the idea to strike. My, since publishing Kate May, you know, we had a baby and we moved out to the West Coast and so my life has been totally destroyed, like uprooted and turned upside down. It's now getting back to place. We're sort of beginning to put down roots. And that's where the, weirdly, that's like the work of my writing has been just like getting things rooted because, you know, as I like, one of my favorite things is like the flow bear maximum about like, keep my life orderly so that my mind can go wild. And so I need my life to be orderly. It's getting there. And so I'm beginning to work a lot more. And so what I've got are a bunch of like, a bunch of like things I'm spinning, they're like plates that are spinning kind of, they're almost like diffuse nebulas that haven't yet sort of, I'm waiting for that critical mass for them to like, for nuclear fusion to start and stars, you know, like I'm waiting for that moment. So I'm kind of waiting for that, you know, moment of Effie breaking down, crying when I'm like, I see this there, there's the road, there's the road, you know. And so I've got a few, I've got a few things going. I've got one that I keep coming back to again and again. And again, it's like closely guarded secret. And it's like, that helps me like he's like, ah, this is gonna be, you know, it's gonna be great. But it's difficult. I mean, I think it's difficult, especially when your work has become a source of income, because that puts a pressure on it that is suffocating, absolutely suffocating. And so I've had to distance myself from that. And I think I'm maybe starting a new job later this fall. And that's actually going to take away a lot of writing time. But I think help me as a writer to be like, I don't need to write another book. And then I'm going to write another book. Thank you, Chip. And Jen, can you add your comments there? Yeah, no, I'd love to. So I, you know, you mentioned earlier in my bio that I have, I have two projects going at the moment. You know, one is one that I'm really actively working on. And one's really just stating kind of in the way Chip was describing. And so the one thing I'm actively working on, I have a really strong sense of where it's going. And in fact, it actually was a novel I had written really many drafts of before I sold my debut novel. And I've reworked it entirely. And I know where it's going. And so, you know, as Chip kind of mentioned, with that one, with both of them actually, it's just a matter of putting, you know, my butt in the chair and working on it. And in some days are good days. In some days, the kind of epiphany arrives and the flow arrives. And I am moving forward at a faster pace. And other days, I'm really just familiarizing myself with it and, you know, kind of combing through it, kind of looking at it. And there's not a lot of actual writing that happens. But I think just sitting with it every day, you know, I remember when Anne Patchett came and spoke at the Muse in the Marketplace Grub Streets conference several, quite a few years ago now. She was sort of adamant about putting your butt in the chair. And I read a really interesting Jane Friedman puts out a really great newsletter, a blog every week. And there was one by a writer who I looked it up. Her name is Donna Ward. She's an Australian writer. And she was writing a memoir. And she mentioned that she, during the writing of this memoir, she had reread Herman Hess, Siddhartha. And at the end of Siddhartha, you know, sort of lots of philosophical lessons to learn. At the end, there's a moment where Siddhartha is sort of sitting by the river. And when she was much younger and she read it, she sort of thought, it meant you've got to like follow the flow of the river. But when she was older and she read it, she said, no, you know what it means is you've got to sit beside the river until the story flows through you. And for me, that's absolutely true. You've got to sit, you know, devotedly by the river, you know, actively work on it, as Chip said, but wait until you kind of get the gears going, you find the thing, the plates, you know, the nebula arrives, right? And you are there in that moment. And so for the next piece, I'll sort of be waiting for that more. But yeah, those are my thoughts. Thanks, Chen. And Calvin, do you have Nile, like telling you every day you need to work harder on your joint project? I mean, we were working on it tonight before this started. I've been obsessed lately with the idea of shipping work, which is a phrase that comes from marketing guru Seth Godin's one of his recent books called The Practice. But the idea is just that, you know, you need to not only get your butt in the chair, but you need to get your stuff in front of even like the smallest possible audience. And so what we're doing with this, these mini comics is every month, we're sending out five pages. And it gives us a deadline that says, all right, we need to figure out how to make our panel lines straight on the app that we're using, you know what I mean? We need to figure out how to get the blacks blacker, you know, like just to make it a little bit better each time. And then in the novel that I'm trying to work on, which I called a novel like substance for about a year, because I finally am calling it a novel, but I still kind of really don't know what that book is. But I've been shipping three pages a week to four different people recently. And it's just sort of, I've taken a couple weeks off that because I kind of the well ran dry and I needed to refill it, but, but it's just this idea like, okay, I'm going to have something to you on Tuesday, you know, afternoon, and it might be terrible and it might not go in the book, but then at least it's done. I'm done with those three pages. And now I can write three different pages. And if those are good, great. And if they're not great, but, but it gives you an opportunity to kind of surprise yourself and come up with something that you might not have come up with. It's the whole, you know, you can, you can edit a bad page, but you can't edit a blank page, that idea. So it's just, it is about, you know, sitting down and doing the work. But for me, I think there's also something magical about saying, I'm going to show this to someone. Well, that is a perfect lead into actually the question that you basically just answered this question, but the best piece of writing advice that you received and still using your own writing. Calvin, do you want to add anything to in terms of the Chipp and Jen can answer. Well, I'll leave it at that. Thanks. Okay. Sure. Jen. I mean, that's the advice for me, you know, familiarizing yourself with the work every day. You know, I don't do this every day, by the way. I want to do this every day. I strive, I strive to do this every day. You know, but I actually love Calvin's advice about sharing your work. I don't do that enough. And I should. And, you know, I should say also that I have an immensely supportive writing group. And I'm indebted to them for their, their support and their cheerleading. And, you know, I'm so grateful that I can turn to them when I'm feeling stuck and lost and I need a little bolstering. So yeah, I think I'll leave it as that as well and turn to Chipp. Yeah. I mean, I echo that. I mean, I'm also in an amazingly wonderful writing group that has saved my life that my book wouldn't exist without it. Calvin's in it. But, but, but also, I mean, I think for me, the most important thing has been a devotion to the process. That's what you, you know, I don't really like think of a project so much as like, like cultivating the practice. I read someone say a long time ago, like writing is a terrible way to make a living, but a good way to make a life. And it's kind of, that's kind of cheesy. But, but what I, what I read from that is you just like, like, for example, like, I love writer's retreats, I love, you know, I love residencies and stuff. But if I had to depend on them, I feel like I'm not ordering my life correctly. Like I need to organize my life so that writing because there's a practice there, because out of the practice, the work is going to come. I mean, just like Jennifer, like, I don't write like I wish I don't write every day, either. I can't wait to get to a place where I can. But to the extent to as long as there's kind of some kind of practice there, that's, that's what I'm devoted to. And the work's going to come out of it. It's like I said, kind of, you know, like in my talk, you know, it's like when I think, I think when I can get myself to stop, it's so weird. And I don't even know, smarter people can articulate this better than I can. But like, it's, I have to keep myself from thinking, like, stop thinking. And that's when the good stuff comes. I don't know, it's like, I had a teacher that said, if you want to get to this stuff, you got to do this stuff, just like get down to this stuff, you know? And I was like, I know exactly what she's thinking, you know, like, I don't know how to articulate what that means. But it's true. I mean, those gestures make perfect sense to me. Okay. One last question this evening, and it's one about, so any unique, odd or clever ways that you're getting or got publicity for the book? And we'll start with you, Calvin. I mean, I'll tell you how it got published, I guess, which is, so I initially had an agent and we went out to all these big houses. And actually, I went out on submission with the book the same week that Chip went out and then our friend, Whitney, who's also in a writing group. And they both immediately got like, just fantastic book deals in mind, just like nothing happened. Like no one not even really nibbles. And my agent to kind of keep me, you know, on the right side of the bridge sort of told me that like, you know, we have this one editor is really interested and she sent it forwarded the email and the editor, you know, gushed over the book, but ultimately didn't buy it because she couldn't get the marketing people on board and all that. So months passed, I was in a big depression. I didn't see how I was ever going to write again, yada, yada. And I eventually we were at our writing group. And someone says something, I was like, okay, let me try sending it out to small presses. And I hadn't considered that before not because I thought I was above small presses, but I just thought like they were more like literary or poetic or something than my writing is. And so I tried it out and I looked up some contests and stuff. And one that I found was the push car press editors book award, which the book ultimately was selected for and hit to apply for this, you have to be nominated by an editor who loved your book, but wasn't able to buy it. And so I emailed that editor and said, you know, you have no idea what it's costing me and personal pride to ask you this, but would you nominate me for this award? And she wrote me back, I think like 11 minutes later and said that she would be thrilled to and she sent it off to push car press and I got a call from them, they were excited to publish it and you know, and so the book came out. So that's not marketing exactly, but it's a decent story. I think about how the book went from, you know, living only on my computer to living in the world. Thank you. And Jen, I mean, there's those people at the end who you requested wallpaper from, they definitely read that book. Yeah, no, I actually sent the innkeeper some of the chapters early on, just as a thanks for, you know, because she's, you know, she was an avid reader and she said, I got to hear this book. Unique, odd or clever ways that I got it got publicity for it. You know, I'm drawing a blank here, you know, and also to be fair, my debut just came out in March. So I'm still, you know, building some of that publicity. I will say there was a fun event I did in June, May, I think it was May, it's a it's a friend of a friend who runs a business called, I'm not going to pronounce this correctly, but it's Hugh House, it's Scandinavian, it's H-Y-G-G-E, and she does a thing called a book tasting. Well, honestly, saying Jen's book was a monthly pick for good housing. That's true, but that was my publicist who did that. So I don't feel like I did anything unique and clever. I just was lucky, I think. But thank you. So Hugh House, she does this thing called a book tasting, which I thought was pretty cool, where she has a select, she's an authorized bookseller. Think of like a food truck for books, right? She literally has like a car full of books, and she will bring it to your backyard for an event. So in this case, she partnered with a vineyard out near Worcester, out in Shrewsbury, and she had a bunch of books that people could sample, meaning that they were out on the table, just sort of usually single copies. And some of them were authors that I suggested, some of whom are here tonight, Marjan Kamali and, well, Kathy Shorbrook, other grub street writers. And then she had multiple copies of my book. So people could buy a real-time copy of my book, which I signed, but then they could order all these other books. And I did an idea reading, and I chatted with people about the book. And it was the first in-person event that I did, and it was great, actually. It was really fun. So her name is Beth Orsini, Hugahouse Books, but it's H-Y-G-G-E. A book tasting. I love it. I mean, that happens in the children's room of my library every day, but it means something very different. Chip, how about you? Odd publicity? Gambits? I did nothing. No, I think my only, my feeling about the subject was that I was so, so, so naive about how all this works. And I just learned so much. And I just, you know, I've always just been focused on the writing. I've never, I don't, I really don't know a lot about, I still don't know a lot about publishing and marketing and publicity. And, and I just feel like my publisher was, they were amazing. But like, I did not know what was going on, kind of, you know? And, and I feel like any advice I would give to writers whose debuts are coming out is like, definitely ask lots of questions and don't be afraid to ask questions and kind of get a sense of what the roadmap's going to be. Because with, with my situation, it was just like, they didn't, like, I had a lot of expectations about, like, you know, I guess I'm going to have to do lots of readings or it's going to be a book tour, all this stuff. And that was just not a part of their plan. They were like, no, we literally do not need you to be involved. Like, it's going to be a huge, we're just going to put out, it's going to be ads and, you know, you're going to do a reading or two. And, and, and it left me feeling like, like the book obviously it did, I mean, it did fine. I mean, it's like, everything is, everything is fine. And yet I'm sort of wracked with guilt about like, should I have done more? And I'm still thinking, but I'm thinking like, but I was never asked to do more. And I suck at this, like, you know what I mean? And so I like, it's taken, I'm now coming to terms with like, no, like, I did my part. I wrote the book. And if someone wants to like, like, like, tell me what I need to do, like, I will do anything for this book to make it successful. But like, I don't know what to do. And so I just, you know, I kind of feel like, I guess my odd or unique experience was just that I was mostly like, the experience of this book coming out has been very strange. It's been me sitting in my house raising our daughter, or sitting at bars and like, looking at tweets and like, it's been this weird disconnect, you know, and it's done fine. But it's like, no, I mean, only a once in a blue, like, moon is a book going to be a runaway success, you know, so the fact that it's not like, you know, you know, a best huge bestseller is like, I feel like, did I fail it? You know, and, and it's so weird. It's like, I did a thing that I should have been so proud of. And yet I feel like my feeling now is that I'm, I'm still proud of it, but I've the feelings are fraught and I'm, and I'm eager just to like, stop thinking about it and just get back to writing. I've been thinking about publishing too long. I'm eager to kind of forget. Does Kate May have bookstores? It does. Well, no, there's one, there's a, there's, there's a bookstore kind of on the bay on the other side of the bay from it. Like my dream would be to have like, Kate May and all the little Airbnb's and stuff like, you know, in the, in the town, but there was an article written about it somewhere and the actual mayor of Kate May, like commented like, it's a little dark for us, but I don't know, whatever. It's totally just like, because like, I mean, I think this is another point about it. Like, what I thought I was writing was a, what I was writing, I fucking wrote it and I did it well. It was a gloomy literary novel that's kind of sexy, you know, it's very sexy, but it's, but it's serious. The publisher, God bless them and I love them. I love them so much. They bought a beach read and it's between those two, it fell in the crack between those two, because I think like, it's a beach read that gives very complicated feelings, you know, at the end of the day, you know, and I think that's a marketing thing where like, thank God my publisher did that, you know, it gave it, it had this sort of huge reach, right? But at the same time, I think a lot of readers didn't know how to, it was marketed to them in one way and what they read was a different book. Can I say, I just so relate to that. You know, the original title of my book was not the little French bridal shop. In fact, the shop in the book was named French bridals after French bridals that existed in Beverly Farms. And, you know, right, what Chip said is so true. It turns out the marketing of a book is completely different than the writing of a book. And their stance is literary fiction is really hard to sell. And we need to get this cover on it that's going to attract buyers and it's going to sell. And you know, in my case, actually, you know, I have this huge wedding dress on the back of the book, which, you know, and it's a lovely cover, but the book, it connotes sort of like you were saying, sort of a beach read, a lighter read. And to me, it has a lot, you know, it has some depth to it. And so that's, that's, you know, objectively, it's kind of fascinating, but from an artist standpoint, it's challenging. You know, Jennifer, if I want to follow up with that, because I want to show like this is the hardcover. Right. That's how they marketed it. Yeah. This is the paperback and this is like more the book that I wrote. Do you know what I mean? Yes, totally. That's it. You know, it's not a, it's not, it's not a nice book, you know, like, it's, it's devious in, yeah. That was an education, definitely. Yeah. I'm curious to know whether Calvin has anything to say about what happened with his, his baby through the production process and whether everything came out the way you envisioned or if things kind of shifted around. I mean, the first cover was looked like it had been done in like Hyper Studio in 1993 or something. So I was very happy with what eventually came out with the cover, but I was at the small press and so there it's, you know, it's a little bit more of a different experience. But I know it was happy overall and we'll see how things go next time. All right. All right. Well, it's about time we wrap this evening up. Thank you so much to our audience members for being here. And thanks again to our authors, Calvin Hinnick, Jennifer Dupie and Chip, Chip, Chip, excuse me, Chip. And I want to say that the next salon is on October 7th. You can sign up for notices about future salons through the salon webpage or the library's monthly newsletter at robbinslibrary.org. And again, round of applause for all of our amazing authors this evening. And thank you all so much for being here. And authors, see you at the after party. Awesome. Thank you all so much. This is wonderful. Thank you for tuning in.