A mature writer finds an agent, gets a publisher and goes on tour: The pre-reading jitters

In my last post, I was in Boston, heading back from a great visit at the Gather.com headquarters to the Inn at Harvard to prepare for my reading that night at the Harvard Coop.

Almost 50 years ago, I graduated from an all-girls Catholic boarding school. I was one of 13 students in the class of 1957, only one of whom has remained a close friend during the ensuing years. Actually, Mary 'has become' a very close friend. When we were in high school, we hardly knew one another. While this might be common in other schools where classes have hundreds, and even thousands of students, it seems strange that I should have had no close friends in such a small school even though I was a student council leader and president of the sodality (an organization of Catholic teens dedicated to Mary). It seems stranger yet, that it was only when I left the cloistered order (where close friendships were discouraged), which I'd entered right after high school that I developed a habit of friendship. It was as if I suddenly realized that I not only wanted to have friends -- I needed to have friends.

Well, to get back to my story. My long-time friend Mary drove down from Dunstable (a small town northwest of Boston), and my cousin Lenore came in from another Boston suburb, and we had supper together at The Grafton Street Restaurant – one of those pub-style places with lots of ambiance and plenty of great food. Meeting with two great friends (my, how I've changed) before an event that had my nerves all-a-quiver, talking about things other than me and The Scent of God, was simply the best preparation for a reading.

We arrived early and found the third floor section of the bookstore already prepared. Six or seven rows of six or seven chairs each and a podium and microphone. God, did they really expect that many to show? I wondered.

By 7 o'clock, a good-sized crowd including Gather staff that I'd met that morning and some wonderful Gatherers that I had grown close to through Gather but had never met, filled all the chairs save those in the very front row, where I sat as Richard (we are not friends, I just don't know his last name) introduced me with a literary exposition worthy of the New Yorker. After such an introduction it was no wonder that I felt poised and articulate as well. I couldn't even remember having had those pre-reading jitters, like the ones that had me fretfully pacing and trying to breathe  this morning as I waited for a syndicated radio program to interview me. Or like the jitters that confronted me at the Chicago reading I did the following night, where the chairs remained mostly empty and where the five listeners included two sales clerks.

Actually, my Chicago reading at Women & Children First, was lovely in its own way (once those women showed up to listen). It was intimate and the women asked the most wonderful insightful questions. Getting to know the clerks was a definite plus as well, because they got revved-up enough to want to read the book and that's how books get sold: Readers who love the book telling other readers about the book.