Safe & Sound blog

Hanni and I head to the Arkansas Literary Festival this weekend – we’re doing one session for children, then sitting on a panel called Dogs and Their People.

With us on the panel? None other than Sonny Brewer.

I first met Sonny Brewer at an Arkansas Literary Festival years ago. I was in Little Rock with Mike and Hanni for the 2004 festival to promote Long Time, No See.
. The Saturday night gala that year was at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, and festival organizers were kind enough to arrange for a volunteer to drive Mike, Hanni and me to the event. An author named Sonny Brewer was supposed to come with us, too. But he was late getting to the car. It was hot in Little Rock, and Hanni, Mike and I were squished in the back seat. I was very eager to get to the Clinton Library – it was relatively new at the time. I wanted to spend as much time there as possible. But we had to wait. For some guy named Sonny Brewer. We waited. I was wearing pantyhose. It was hot. Nuff said? I was ready to blow my stack when Sonny finally showed up. The minute he opened his mouth, all was forgiven.

“Sorry, y’all,” he said with a whimsical southern drawl. “I lost track of the time.  My name is Sonny, glad to meet you.” He shook our hands. Hanni even gave him her paw.
We got stuck in traffic – of course – but I didn’t mind. It gave Sonny time to tell us his story.
Sonny had opened an independent bookstore in his hometown of Fairhope, Alabama, in 1997. “I was nearing 50 back then,” he said. “Owning a bookstore had been a lifelong dream of mine.”
After seven years in business, Over the Transom Books was still in the red.

Enter Jill Connor Brown with some queenly advice. The author of The Sweet Potato Queens Book of Love met her husband Kyle Jennings in Sonny Brewer’s bookstore, and she and Sonny have been friends ever since.

“Jill told me I oughta try selling my book,” Sonny told us, explaining he had already started writing a novel back then, pounding the keyboard late at night when his wife and two young boys were asleep. “She said I had nothing to lose by sending it out, and who knows, if I got a book deal, the money might help prop up the bookstore.”

After mailing 20 pages of his manuscript to a New York agent, Sonny set up an appointment with a bankruptcy lawyer for the next Thursday. “The agent called on Wednesday,” he said with that lovely southern drawl of his. Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, wanted his book. They were offering an advance. “I cancelled the appointment with the bankruptcy lawyer.”

Poet of Tolstoy Park came out in 2006. And Over the Transom Books? It’s still up and running. In order to have more time to devote to writing, though, Sunny turned over most of the day-to-day bookstore operations to an employee.

“It has just been a magical, kind of crazy, enchanted trajectory,” Sonny told me a year later, when he picked Hanni and me up at the airport for a trip to Alabama. His second novel, also based in Fairhope, had been published by Ballantine already. He’d just returned from LA. Talking with Billy Bob Thornton. About the screenplay for Poet of Tolstoy Park. “I’m black and blue all over from pinching myself so much!” he laughed.
The book he’ll be touting on our dogs and Their People panel is his latest: Cormac, the Tale of a Dog Gone Missing. Like his first two novels, this book is also set in Fairhope, Alabama. But this one is inspired by Sonny’s dog – the book is based on a true story of how Cormac went missing for almost a month, and was found more than a thousand miles away.

I’m looking forward to sitting on a panel with Sonny this Saturday–I just hope he shows up on time!

This month two of my essays aired on WBEZ-FM. If you missed hearing them on the radio, both are available online – one is about the new governor in New York, and the other is about cab drivers refusing to pick me up with my Seeing Eye dog.

Both of these essays were inspired by blog posts I wrote, and for that I must thank friends from my Chicago writers group. I was very skeptical about starting this blog last year – I thought blogs were self-indulgent wastes of time. Au contraire, said my fellow writers. A blog can encourage a writer to keep at her craft, they told me. “Kinda like a journal, but since it’s out there in public, there’s a chance people might read it,” they explained. “So you work at it a bit harder.” Who knows, my writer friends said, maybe some blog posts could become story ideas.

I may never have written a word about the NY governor or those cab drivers if I wasn’t keeping a blog. So my writer’s group pals were right: keeping a blog isn’t necessarily a waste of time. I’m convinced I’m right about my other claim, though: It’s pretty dang self-indulgent!

After posting a blog about using “the visual versus the visualized” when writing stories, I decided to expand the idea and submit it as a radio essay. The essay aired today, on Chicago Public Radio’s “848”show.

Usually the radio essays I do for NPR and Chicago Public Radio go like this: I email them an essay; they say they like the topic. Well, actually, usually they say they don’t like the topic, or they can’t use my essay right now, thanks but no thanks.

When they do* like my essay, though, they email me back with edits and suggestions. I change the wording, we go back and forth a few times, and when everyone is happy I set up a time to cab over to the station to record.

In the studio, a producer sits me in front of a microphone and asks what I had for breakfast that morning. I have no idea why, but when it comes to testing sound levels, public radio producers always ask about breakfast. Even when I did a Story Corps thing with one of the senior citizens in the memoir-writing class I teach, the guy there tested our sound levels by asking us what we had for breakfast. Must be in a public radio guidebook or something.

Breakfast covered, sound levels checked, the producer whips out a written copy of my essay. He reads a few sentences at a time, and I repeat what he’s said. Note: most people read their public radio essays. But that wouldn’t work for me. Although I can indeed read Braille, I’m very slow at it.

Once I’ve repeated all my lines, a producer splices the sentences together, sometimes adding sound effects or music. Voila! When my essay airs on the radio, It sounds like I just sat down and read the whole essay all at once.

The essay that aired today, however, was recorded a little differently. When I sat down in front of the microphone, the producer asked me to tell him what the essay was about.

“You mean you don’t want to know what I had for breakfast?” I asked.

No answer.

So I just started talking. You know, so he could get the sound levels. I went on and on and on about the essay, waiting for him to stop me. He never did.

Finally I stopped myself. “Are you recording all this?” I asked. He was. He did have a printed copy of the essay in front of him, but he didn’t want me to repeat it verbatim. He looked it over as I talked, but only interrupted if he found something I’d forgotten to mention. “Tell me about describing the brigadier general,” he’d say. Or, “What about your interview with Miss America?”

When all was said and done, I said just about everything that had been in the written essay. We got done very, very quickly. I knew the producer would have a lot of work ahead of him –he’d have to take all those pieces I’d said and splice them together into something that made sense, plus add music and sound effects. He assured me he’d enjoy the task.

“Do you always record contributor essays this way?” I asked as he helped Hanni and me outside to catch a cab.

“No,” he said with a laugh. “This is the first time I’ve ever tried anything like this.”

I was extremely pleased to hear the finished product on the radio this morning. It was one of the best essays I’ve ever done for public radio. Or I should say, I sounded wayyyyy more natural in this essay than in any other I’ve recorded. If you’d like, please listen to my essay yourself – I’m interested in hearing what you think of our new method!